To ‘patch up’ or to ‘meet the needs’: navigating the politics and visions of ‘open school’ collaboration and equity work in urban areas in Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores how school community collaboration is given meaning by municipally employed coordinators whose task is to organise collaboration between schools and other actors in urban areas in Sweden. Inspired by Carol Bacchi’s theorisation of the constitutive aspect of discerning problems, it examines how coordinators give meaning to the problems and challenges to which the initiative is intended to respond. The focus is on how coordinators rationalised the initiative and how they navigated and created directions within collaboration as practice across different areas of responsibility, such as school, leisure, and safeguarding work. Building on observations of coordinator meetings, interviews, and policy texts, the analysis shows how different rationalities and tensions permeated the collaboration, which, on the one hand, can be understood as something that added value and, on the other, as reinforcing a reduced or broken welfare system, while an overall rationality concerned making efforts for children and young people here and now.