A journey into cultural sociology

I once heard at a conference that a true classic is characterized by three things: students and readers who continue their work; students and readers who apply their theories to empirical settings they have never explored; and students and readers who are highly critical of their theories. The final point, referencing Pierre Bourdieu in a text written for Jeffrey C. Alexander, is important because it highlights that theories exist within an academic field. This field is defined by struggles over theories and the ‘right’ way to investigate and interpret societal processes. To be transparent: who am I in relation to this? I would say that the first two points relate well to my relationship with Alexander's work. I use it and bring it to analytical levels of situations, interactions and emotions, and into empirical fields that Alexander himself has not yet visited.

When I was asked to write on a topic connected to Jeffrey C. Alexander, I found the task quite challenging. Where should I begin? The first idea that came to mind was my own sociological journey. It all started with my interest in understanding the role and meaning of professional theatre for young audiences. I was educated within a sociology of culture tradition and often viewed the world through the lenses of field, habitus and different forms of capital. However, as a doctoral student using an ethnographic approach, I found that my theoretical stepping stones proved insufficient to produce an analysis that did justice to my field notes and interactions. Spending a year gathering data through observations, spontaneous conversations and interviews with directors, actors, theatre managers, technicians and administrative staff at the theatre, as well as talking to teachers and many young people experiencing theatre from different socioeconomic backgrounds, created a need for sociological perspectives that take meaning seriously as an analytical dimension.

While I was writing up my empirical work, the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University was established. I visited during its early years and discovered not only a lively intellectual community in the Friday workshops but also a way to analyse my data in ways that acknowledged how meaning is created in stage–audience encounters that transcend conventions and distinctions. Emotional identification and symbolic extension were observed among the audience as active interpreters of plays, connecting performances to background representations and their own lived experiences. This led me to value cultural sociological perspectives, where culture can act as an independent variable, as outlined by Alexander and Philip Smith in the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology (Alexander and Smith, 2003).

Since my early years as a sociologist, I have been inspired by cultural sociological perspectives, increasingly in relation to civil sphere theory (Alexander, 2006). However, I remain an ethnographer who studies how situations, interactions and emotions are shaped by broader cultural structures and, in turn, contribute to their reproduction, contestation and transformation through ongoing social processes. Sometimes these cultural structures even help create local civil spheres during times of societal backlash, demonstrating how civil solidarity can be enacted within everyday interactions (Lund, forthcoming, 2027).

Being an ethnographer brings certain aspects of the civil sphere into closer view. Situations, interactions and emotions are always present. The civil sphere is not just a discursive phenomenon within legislative and communicative institutions; it also exists in our everyday lives. It plays a role in how uncivil othering processes are reproduced, but it also has the potential to uphold or even expand a societal we-ness. For solidarity to really matter in individuals’ and groups’ lives, and on an institutional level, civil repair is necessary. How this civil repair is carried out in practice is something ethnography, or what I call civil sphere ethnography (Lund, forthcoming, 2026), can shed light on.

But before I provide a concrete example of how civil repair can work, I want to highlight the international endeavour that civil sphere theory is part of (see for example Alexander and Horgan, 2025; Alexander and Tognato, 2018; Alexander and Waghmore, 2025), which explores its significance beyond United States contexts, including in a Nordic context (Alexander et al., 2019). In Sweden, despite its social democratic history, there has been a backlash with increasing residential and educational segregation, leading to greater injustices. The country has also become a super-diverse society, with about a fifth of the population having an immigrant background (born abroad). Against this backdrop, I am interested in the role of incorporation processes (assimilation, hyphenation and multicultural incorporation) in theatre and in educational settings, where local initiatives have been taken to counter the negative effects of segregation and to reduce the barriers that symbolically and socially create divides between individuals and groups (Lund, 2015, 2024; Lund et al., 2025; Lund et al., 2026b).

In the educational setting I have been researching over the last couple of years, I have been able to bring Alexander's work into conversation with Paulo Freire while analysing local school desegregation initiatives (Lund et al., 2026a; Lund et al., 2026b). For Alexander, education is not inherently a civil sphere institution, but it can serve as one through organizational, communicative and pedagogical interventions that strengthen democratic processes (Alexander, 2015; Alexander, 2026 ). In such cases, education is viewed as an interstitial institution (Tognato, 2018; Egholm, 2023). Alexander's work on how processes of civil inclusion can occur through a mode of multicultural incorporation − in its ideal−typical sense − means that social cohesion is achieved by agency that respects differences, which also goes beyond immediate interactions (Alexander, 2006). Freire challenged any form of pedagogical oppression and its role in creating symbolic dominance, and argued for the importance of critical awareness of structures as a key to avoiding the trap of seeing oneself through the eyes of those who hold power in a society (Freire, 2000). Education can, instead of reproducing uncivil conditions that uphold injustices, work to create awareness of the structures that sustain relations of dominance, whether through gender, race, ethnicity, or class. And as the civil sphere resides in our bodies (Alexander et al., 2020), this represents a living possibility − not only for those on the lower rungs of society, but also for privileged individuals and groups to become aware of it. Sometimes, a sense of contributing to a society one does not believe in can be expressed in contexts exemplifying local civil spheres or through engagement in artistic or educational processes where inequalities are not only visible but felt in meaningful ways (Lund, 2013, 2024).

In successful local desegregation initiatives, a way of working that I call the critical pedagogy of multicultural incorporation is present, consisting of four pedagogical strategies (Lund et al., 2026a; Lund et al., 2026b). The first one is the interactional ritual of recognition. In practice, this can, for example, be done by valuing students’ first languages as self-evident resources. This supports a goal in the pedagogical work of cultivating a sense of pride among students in their cultural background. The second strategy is what I call the I see effect, which involves learning processes in which problems perceived as individual dilemmas are brought into light as structural issues, such as racism and misogyny (see also Lund, 2013). The third strategy involves decolonizing the curriculum, where textbooks that reproduce a Western narrative without acknowledging the tensions and consequences for the Global South are deconstructed, and where knowledge and ideas from diverse continents are introduced into the classroom. Lastly, meaningful representation is an important strategy where role models, decorations, the school library and holidays serve as examples that demonstrate diversity as a self-evident norm.

Such pedagogical work, rooted in the belief in lived multicultural incorporation and with a critical awareness of societal power dynamics, produces socially productive outcomes for students, including those who have previously struggled academically and faced racism through low expectations (Lund et al., 2026a). Through a critical pedagogy of multicultural incorporation, a diverse student body feels secure and engages in cross-cultural socialization. The potential to succeed in school increases as the risk of negative stereotyping decreases. At the same time, students become critically aware of social inequalities while their sense of belonging to the school strengthens. Being a student in such a school also has the positive outcome of experiencing a reduction of shame, creating a form of existential repair where students who belong to marginalized groups come to see themselves as individuals in their own right (Lund et al., 2026b). Such processes of shame reduction are important, as they can be a counterweight to what Stuart Hall theorizes in his reading of Frantz Fanon: that oppression can lead to ‘the internalization of the self-as-other’ (Hall, 1996: 446). Existential repair can also carry the potential for civil repair, as symbolic recognition becomes translated into more inclusive forms of social participation (Lund, 2024). Society becomes more inclusive when minority groups are empowered to take centre stage on their own terms, rather than adjusting to the majority group's conditions that often presume assimilation.

A critical pedagogy of multicultural incorporation carries seeds of hope. And that is needed. I am writing this amid a sense of despair. It is early spring 2026. Violence continues across the world, Islamophobia and antisemitism are prevalent, the climate is in crisis and democracy needs revitalization. In times of backlash, civil repair is crucial, so we as cultural sociologists have a lot of work to do. Cultural sociology is useful for producing knowledge that improves our understanding of the symbolic and institutional dynamics of uncivil forces, as well as the potential for civil processes to shine through. The perhaps overly famous line from Leonard Cohen's song ‘Anthem’ reminds us of what might never have been more of an existential and political hope than now, while I sit safely on my sofa in Stockholm with my yellow Labrador, Argos, thinking of unnecessary deaths and destruction: