For more than two years we were involved in a collaborative process with the aim of finding out how sharing life stories could ensure “the right to the city” in Malmö, Sweden. This process led to the formation of the Gathered Voices of Malmö, an association for social justice oral history that strives to become a community archive. This article is about how sharing authority was interpreted collectively in the collaborative process when it could not be directly translated into Swedish, and how those interpretations reflect back on sharing authority as an intellectual development. Drawing upon documents created during the collaborative process and interviews with our coparticipants, we revisit what we learned, including our rereading of sharing authority’s genealogy through project-based research. As participants in, and then analysts of, that process, we learned that our trouble with translating sharing authority was not only linguistic, but also had to do with how the approach might conceal community-embedded ways of working, instead normalizing participatory practices which center research rather than community as the primary sphere in which important learnings are made. We suggest that a deeper consideration of the differences between “a shared authority” and “sharing authority” could help us avoid making participation the best practice.

The vital role that cities play in the governance of migration is increasingly recognized, yet migration scholars still perceive this ‘local turn’ as a recent phenomenon. This article presents a cross-country and cross-city comparative analysis of three mid-size European cities during the post-war period: Bristol, Dortmund and Malmö. It analyses administrative cultures and local policy arenas, exposing the complexity of local migration policy-making and the crucial importance of historical perspectives. It reveals the inherent local variation in policies and practices, and argues that traditional national-level studies do not fully capture how urban actors responded to migration.

This article describes and analyses by whom, in what ways and with what consequences migrant reception was performed in Malmö during the period 1945–1970 and how this changed over time. Inspired by Carol Bacchi’s ‘what’s the problem represented to be’ (wpr) approach, the article analyses the shifting problematisations of migrant reception in Malmö, and argues that there were two decisive shifts in Malmö’s migrant reception policy. With the help of Robert Miles’ concept of racialisation, the article shows that different migrant groups were racialised in different ways, depending on how they were depicted by the Swedish society. We also identify a gendered racialisation as women and men were racialised differently.