Wageningen Geography Lecture 2023

In The Begging Question Erik Hansson argues that the material configurations of capitalism and class society are not only racialized but also unconsciously invested with collective anxieties and desires. By focusing on Swedish society’s response to the begging question, Hansson provides insight into the dialectics of racism. Drawing on text and media analysis, in-depth interviews, auto-ethnography, and historicising, hedeploys Marxian economics and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain how it became possible to do what once was thought impossible: criminalize begging and make fascism politically mainstream, in Sweden.

Erik Hansson is a postdoc at Department of Human Geography, Uppsala University. He wrote this book during his postdoctoral fellowship at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has also been stationed at University of Gothenburg and Mid Sweden University.