CFD Team Spotlight: Selma Hedlund, Postdoctoral Associate
The Newsletter Team sat down for an interview with one of our postdoctoral associates, Selma Hedlund, for an interview about her work, passions, hobbies, and special CFD projects. The transcript of our interview is below.
CFD Team: Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m from a small Swedish town called Mullsjö. I’m a sociologist who studies people’s lived experiences with displacement and migration, often comparatively across groups and countries.
CFD Team: What is your role within the Center?
I’m a postdoctoral associate. I’m lucky enough to both be able to continue working on my own research projects and join exciting projects in which I can collaborate with my amazing colleagues and others.
CFD Team: What experiences most directly led you to your role with the Center?
Both my career outside and inside of academia have led me to this role. Consciously or subconsciously, displacement has always been at the heart of what I do. During my BA in Human Rights Studies in Sweden, I was able to travel to the US for a research project on how Indigenous peoples are erased and misrepresented in mainstream culture as a result of colonialism and displacement. After this experience, I knew I needed to return to the US and continue this work somehow.
I decided to pursue graduate school in the US because I wanted to study belonging, citizenship, and immigration. Moving to NYC for my MA program was an incredible experience for someone who grew up in a more remote area of the world. I met people from all over and conducted a research project on immigrants’ motivations to naturalize and their relationship to American citizenship. After graduating and before starting my PhD in Boston, I worked in rural Sweden as a project manager in refugee resettlement during the height of the Syrian civil war. This was a very formative year that gave me a lot of grassroots experience with immigrant incorporation, and an important contrast to the urban setting. I also made close friends and my family started hosting asylum seekers from different countries in need of a home, which we still do.
During my PhD, I undertook different research projects, but displacement remained the common denominator. I did research in collaboration with Indigenous water protectors from the Standing Rock movement and studied the experiences of immigrant physicians (often with refugee backgrounds) who work in underserved and rural areas in the US and Sweden. It’s important to me to conduct research that feels relevant and important to the people involved and the connection between displacement and health is one that I look forward to exploring more while at CFD.
CFD Team: What inspires you about this work?
I’ve always been interested in how people perceive belonging. What are the makings of this sensation, what grows it, and what deters it? Migration and immigrant incorporation are eternally relevant subjects and a big part of the human experience historically. How we grapple with it says a lot about who we are as people.
CFD Team: Tell us about some of your passions and hobbies outside of academia. What makes you you?
I’m a creative person who loves art, design, and movies. As a foreigner myself, I seek to create spaces that feel like home when far away from it, so I spend a lot of time decorating my home and searching for interesting pieces in thrift stores and on eBay. When you are an immigrant, putting down roots can be hard, but I’ve found that it’s important to create that nest for yourself. Since my job is so intellectually challenging, I also try to find time and spaces where I don’t have to think so much. I love being in nature and by the beach and spending time with animals.
CFD Team: Where do you see yourself in five years?
This is always such a difficult question! In five years, I hope to be in a position in which I still get to keep one leg in the world of research and the other in civil society or a community. Purely academic spaces make me restless – I enjoy bridging the gap and I hope that I have found my footing in it.
CFD Team: Where do you see yourself much farther from now – thirty, forty, fifty years down the road? What do you want to look back on?
I hope that I will be able to say that my work has been meaningful in some way. I firmly believe that the most impactful work is done in collaboration with others and with stakeholders, so I hope that I can look back and see that I have continued to work in dedicated teams such as the one I have at CFD and with communities.
CFD Team: What is your current passion project with the Center you would like to highlight? Why does this project resonate with you?
There are so many great projects going on! Some are also in the early stages and I’m excited to see where they will go. I’m a co-organizer of a methods seminar series in which we will discuss the practical and ethical challenges of doing international research, especially as junior scholars with limited resources. I think some really important conversations and exchanges will take part there. I’m also part of an international team that is looking to explore how trust is built between migrants and healthcare centers in rural areas, which is a topic that is especially close to my heart.
CFD Team: Do you have any tips or advice for people starting in your field?
Be curious and seek out mentorship. Be brave enough to critically examine your personal experience (or lack thereof) with displacement, but don’t stop there. Think of tangible ways in which you can contribute to knowledge production or awareness around displacement or be of service to people who are displaced. This is a great way to learn. Migrants are often reduced to their circumstances and denied complex humanity as individuals, which makes them vulnerable to racialization and otherization. Uphold complex humanity, always.
CFD Team: Can you tell us a fun fact about yourself/can you tell us about something you’re proud of?
I’m a rather introverted person who can be quite the homebody, and so I’m proud that I have continued to seek out spaces and positions that are challenging or uncomfortable. Since my early 20’s, I have moved alone to places I have never been to and built new homes and lives for myself many times over, both in Sweden and in America. I have often been apprehensive or anxious and not sure how it’s going to work out, but I have done it anyway. Looking back now ten years later, I must say I’m proud of that.