Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. & Mia Liinason. Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe: Critical Essays on Knowledge, Inequality and Belonging (1st ed.). 2023. Routledge.
Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around ‘identity politics’ in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operate to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction Transforming identities in contemporary Europe By Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Mia Liinason
“Welcome to the most privileged, most xenophobic country in the world”. Affective figurations of white Danishness in the making of a Danish citizen By Linda Lapiņa
Educational challenges for Nordic exceptionalism Epistemic injustice in the absence of antiracist education By Kris Clarke, Manté Vertelyté
Autobiographical flesh Understanding Western notions of humanity through the life and selected writings of Una Marson (1905–1965) By Jéssica Nogueira Varela
‘It’s our bodies, we are the experts!’ Countering pathologisation, gate-keeping and Danish exceptionalism through collective trans knowledges, coalition-building and insistence By Nico Miskow Friborg
Gayness between nation builders and money makers From ideology to new essentialism By Anna-Maria Sörberg
(Not) in the name of gender equality Migrant women, empowerment, employment, and minority women’s organizations By Christel Stormhøj
‘Home is where the cat is’ The here-there of queer (un)belonging By Ramona Dima, Simona Dumitriu
The poetics of climate change and politics of pain Sámi social media activist critique of the Swedish state By Akvilė Buitvydaitė, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen
Varieties of exceptionalism A conversation By Selin Çağatay, Mia Liinason, Olga Sasunkevich