Facts

Contact person:
Paula Mulinari
Financer:
  • VR
Responsible at MaU:
Paula Mulinari
Time frame:
28 October 2026 - 31 December 2030
Faculty/department:
Research subject:

About the project

The aim of the project is to explore the nexus between labour and love and how it is practised, experienced, and imagined by working-class women and men in Sweden. It examines how gendered and classed temporal regimes structure everyday practices of labour as well as cultural transformations in the meanings of love.

Drawing on qualitative methodologies – interviews, love-and-labour diaries, document analysis, and future labs – the project investigates how working-class women and men navigate the demands, constraints, and aspirations linked to love and labour and what other worlds they envision.

A new analytical framework

Theoretically, the study is grounded in social reproduction as well as gender labour and love studies. By bridging two research fields that are often treated as separate – and by centring working-class experiences of both love and labour, the project introduces a novel analytical framework for understanding contemporary gender relations. In a country long framed as a model of gender equality, widening social, economic, and political gaps between women and men call for renewed analysis of how, why and through which cultural narratives labour intersects with intimate life.