Asia Della Rosa

Asia Della Rosa is a doctoral student with a multidisciplinary background at the Department of Language, Aesthetic Learning and Literature, in the School of Education and Communication at Jönköping University, and part of the Culturally Empowering Education through Language and Literature (CuEEd-LL) national research school.

She is also an active member in the CCD - Communication Culture and Diversity research group. Asia's project is in line with the multiple research objectives of CCD, including the desire to investigate social practices that engender processes of inclusion and exclusion.

In her role as a doctoral student, she investigates the ways in which whiteness is articulated and discussed in relation to other identity positions such as gender, race, disability, and class, within adult education in Sweden. Her interest is to further explore possible implications in the field of education generally, and teacher education specifically, when the issue of whiteness is addressed and discussed, prompting an urgent call for reflection on the power structures that frame, organize, and define education in theory and practice. 

The interest in reflecting on the broad field of education needs to be found in the perspective this place offers to observe and identify the structures that coloniality is contributing to maintain in our everyday lives. In the developing project called Decolonial explorations of Whiteness in Swedish Education. A case-study of identity-positionalities in teacher education through an intersectional lens, Asia plans to investigate the influences of whiteness – understood here as a concept as well as a phenomenon – in the field of Swedish education, with the aim to counter its silencing, support efforts in dismantling structures of inequity, and challenge the dominant status quo. 

Asia has taught Italian language and culture for a national educational association in Sweden for several years, a formative experience that she pursued while attending a master’s degree in Ethnic and Migration Studies at Linköping University (Sweden). Before these experiences, she studied Political Science, International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Padua (Italy), and she was involved in several research and activist groups - part of civil society - focused on issues such as migration, race and gender in Italy.