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.

Research 

In the developing project Addressing Whiteness in Swedish Higher Education: A Collection of Essays on Policies, Spaces, Experiences and Practices, Asia is interested in investigating the influences of whiteness – understood here as a concept as well as a phenomenon – in Swedish Higher Education (HE), with the aim to counter its erasure and support efforts in dismantling structures of inequity. Asia's interest is to further explore possible implications in the field of education generally, and teacher education specifically, when 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 Swedish context offers an interesting case to investigate the articulations of whiteness in education, mainly for three reasons: the notable absence of the term “race” not only in everyday discourse but also legal frameworks, the prevalent belief in a Swedish colour-blind ideology (Lundström and Hübinette 2023), and “the [national] emergence of a mythical mantra”, understood here as a performative attitude which has made Sweden internationally famous as one of the most equal countries in the world (Martinsson, Griffin and Nygren 2016).

The dissertation project aims to explore the influences of whiteness in Swedish HE, by investigating its presence and impact across four distinct physical/conceptual spaces: institutional policies, current academic research, students’ experiences, and teachers’ pedagogical practices. Each of these spaces is addressed in one of the project’s studies, providing a comprehensive examination of how whiteness shapes the educational landscape in Sweden. 

Biography

Asia has taught Italian language and culture for a national educational association in Sweden for several years, a formative experience she pursued while completing her master’s degree in Ethnic and Migration Studies at Linköping University. Prior to this, she earned a degree in Political Science, International Relations, and Human Rights from the University of Padua in Italy. During her time there, she actively participated in various research and activist groups, focusing on migration, race, and gender issues within Italian civil society.