Education acts as the glue of society. As early sociologist Émile Durkheim (1977) noted, schools reflect societal dynamics. If schools fail to foster solidarity, social cohesion is at risk. Thus, education creates a moral environment where individuals learn about collective life through experience—not just in minds and imaginations, as Durkheim taught us, but in reality. This means that educational policy and everyday school experience extend beyond academic achievement and encompass the collective coexistence of society. This paper highlights how municipalities and schools in Sweden's marketized school-segregated landscape engage in various civil repair processes. Thus, we will provide analyses of beliefs and practices regarding local desegregation policies and their enactment of different modes of incorporation (Alexander, 2006). Assimilation is a form of incorporation based on a one-sided form of adjustment and learning. The starting point in such policy articulates that in order to be part of ‘us’, you need to learn to be like us. In hyphenation, ethnically divided cultural identities are united through the process of learning to know the other, and through the development of a more general willingness to accept a broader spectrum of values, norms and social characteristics. Multicultural incorporation implies an inter-subjective learning process: “This idea of a more symmetrical bargain implies mutual learning. It is not only the incoming group that changes, but the morals and manners of core groups” (Alexander 2013: 532). Our data consists of three sub-studies highlighting various desegregation initiatives. (i) school closing means that policy actors are closing low-performing schools in territorial stigmatized areas and distribute their students to other schools. (ii) school merging means that policy actors re-organize the student body in existing municipality schools. (iii) school opening means that policy actors decide to open a new school in a stigmatized residential area to improve ethnic minority groups´ school performance by adapting the school's culture and educational activities to the life experiences and living conditions of children with an immigrant background. We interviewed local politicians, public officials, and school principals to understand why and how they initiated desegregation policies. Additionally, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with teachers and students. Our analysis of desegregation processes illuminates how modes of incorporation can range from non-incorporation and assimilation to multicultural incorporation. The study shows the policies and practices of desegregation and the existence of civil or non-civil actions that enable one form of incorporation to occur before the others.

Alexander, J. C. (2006). The civil sphere. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, J. (2013). Struggling Over the Mode ofIncorporation: Backlash Against Multiculturalism in Europe. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (4), 531–556. Durkheim, E. (1977). The Evolution of Educational Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd