Rasmussen, Kim Su, and Eli Park Sorensen. ‘Minor Subjects/Minor Literature: Maja Lee Langvads Find Holger Danske and the Search for Danishness’. (2011) [PDF]

Rasmussen, Kim Su, and Eli Park Sorensen. ‘Minor Subjects/Minor Literature: Maja Lee Langvads Find Holger Danske and the Search for Danishness’. 비교문학 Journal of Korean Adoption Studies, vol. 54, 한국비교문학회, 2011, pp. 225–249.

PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339570857_Minor_Subjects_Minor_Literature_Maja_Lee_Langvad%27s_Find_Holger_Danske_and_the_Search_for_Danishness. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339570857_Minor_Subjects_Minor_Literature_Maja_Lee_Langvad%27s_Find_Holger_Danske_and_the_Search_for_Danishness.

Kim-Larsen, Mette A. E. ‘Danish Milk’. (2018) [PDF]

Kim-Larsen, Mette A. E. ‘Danish Milk’. Adoption & Culture, vol. 6, no. 2, Ohio State University Press, 2018, pp. 353–363.

Drinking milk cites white and Danish and thus frames the lactose-tolerant subject with firstness. This is grounded in a discourse of unilinear evolutionary progression that constructs the lactose-tolerant body as a metaphor for the Danish nation-state and makes lactose-intolerant adoptee bodies an external threat.

doi:10.26818/adoptionculture.6.2.0353.

PDF: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.26818/adoptionculture.6.2.0353.

Ivenäs, Sabina. ‘White Like Me: Whiteness in Scandinavian Transnational Adoption Literature’. (2017) [PDF]

Ivenäs, Sabina. ‘White Like Me: Whiteness in Scandinavian Transnational Adoption Literature’. Scandinavian Studies, vol. 89, no. 2, [Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, University of Illinois Press], 2017, pp. 240–265.

From introduction:  This paper problematizes the concept of whiteness by applying it in the context of the Scandinavian transnational/transracial adoptee. What is unique about the Scandinavian transracial adoptee is that theyalmost exclusively grow up and live in white segregated middle- class environments  (Hübinette  2007).  Nevertheless,  Scandinavian  trans-racial  adoptees  blend  in  seamlessly  with  white  Scandinavian  society  in  terms  of  language,  culture,  and  behavior.  at  the  same  time,  in  contrast to transracial adoptees in more diverse countries such as the such as the United  States,  Canada,  France,  Australia,  and  the  Netherlands,  the  Scandinavian transracial adoptee non-white body becomes extremely concrete (Hübinette 2007, 117). In this paper, which conducts a critical reading of Scandinavian transnational adoption autofiction, I consider how Scandinavian transracial adoptees negotiate the fact that they, as non-white  individuals  are  raised  in,  and  thereby  indoctrinated  into,  the whiteness norm. In line with Dyer’s perspective on how whiteness is studied within white Western culture, this paper sets out to explore how self-representation of whiteness is depicted in Scandinavian trans-national adoptee autofiction. How do the Scandinavian transnational/transracial adoptees represent themselves as white in literary texts?

doi:10.5406/scanstud.89.2.0240.

PDF: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.89.2.0240.

Enstad, Johannes Due. Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015. Exposure and Perpetrators in France, UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Russia. (2017) [PDF]

Enstad, Johannes Due. Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015. Exposure and Perpetrators in France, UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Russia. Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities and Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo, 2017.

How often do incidents of antisemitic violence occur in contemporary Europe, and what trends are showing? How exposed are Jewish populations in different countries? Who commits these crimes? We need to answer such questions as precisely as possible in order to effectively combat and prevent antisemitism in general and violent antisemitism in particular, but we lack the knowledge to do so because systematic studies of the subject are few and far between. As a step towards filling this research gap, the current report presents some tentative findings about violent antisemitism in a sample of European countries and proposes directions for further research.  Combining incident data based on police reporting with a 2012 survey on antisemitism carried out by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), this report tentatively compares the levels of antisemitic violence in different countries. The seven-country sample contains comparable data for France, UK, Germany and Sweden only. Among these countries, Jews’ exposure to antisemitic violence appears to have been highest in France, lower in Sweden and Germany, and lowest in the United Kingdom.  Figures for Norway, Denmark and Russia are not directly comparable because of differing data sources. However, Russia clearly stands out with a very low number of incidents considering Russia’s relatively large Jewish population. Russia is also the only case in which there is little to indicate that Jews avoid displaying their identity in public.  Available data on perpetrators suggest that individuals of Muslim background stand out among perpetrators of antisemitic violence in Western Europe, but not in Russia, where right-wing extremist offenders dominate. Attitude surveys corroborate this picture in so far as antisemitic attitudes are far more widespread among Muslims than among the general population in Western Europe.  The findings presented here are tentative. More and better data as well as more research are needed in order to form a more accurate picture of the nature and causes of antisemitic violence, a prerequisite for determining relevant countermeasures.

PDF: https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/55776.

Buckser, Andrew. After the Rescue : Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark. (2003)

Buckser, Andrew. After the Rescue : Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

In October of 1943, the Danish resistance rescued almost all of the Jews in Copenhagen from roundups by the occupying Nazis. In the years since, Jews have become deeply engaged in a Danish culture that presents very few barriers of antisemitism or prejudice. This book explores the questions that such inclusion raises for the Danish Jews, and what their answers can tell us about the meaning of religion, ethnicity and community in modern society. Social scientists have long argued that modernity poses challenges for traditional ethnic communities, by breaking down the networks of locality, kinship, religion and occupation that have held such communities together. For the Danish Jews, inclusion into the larger society has led to increasing fragmentation, as the community has split into a bewildering array of religious, social, and political factions. Yet it remains one of Scandinavia’s most vital religious organizations, and Jewishness remains central to self-understanding for thousands of its members. How this has happened – how the Jewish world has maintained its significance while losing any sense of coherence or unity – suggests a new understanding of the meaning of ethnic community in contemporary society.

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780312239459

Winsnes, Selena Axelrod. A Danish Jew in West Africa. Wulf Joseph Wulff Biography And Letters 1836-1842. (2013)

Winsnes, Selena Axelrod. A Danish Jew in West Africa. Wulf Joseph Wulff Biography And Letters 1836-1842. Legon-Accra, Ghana: African Books Collective, 2013.

Wulff’s life history is of considerable interest in itself. In her biographical essay (Part I) Selena Axelrod Winsnes portrays him as a ‘marginal man’: being a Jew in Denmark at the beginning of the 19th century was to some extent an uphill struggle for those who sought public recognition, and Wulff did not escape discrimination in his administrative career at Christiansborg either, although special circumstances allowed him to hold important positions, and yet, only for the short term. Paradoxically, on his arrival to the Gold Coast Wulff – as a Jew – was placed in a middle position in the racial hierarchy dominating the mind-set of his superiors in Copenhagen in-between Africans and Europeans. In many respects he shared the fate of Euro-Africans, straddling two worlds and being ‘sealed off’ from the top echelons of the European establishments on the Coast. This book comprises two parts. The first is a biographical presentation of Wulff Joseph Wulff  a Danish Jew. It is an essay concerning the last six years of his life, spent on the Gold Coast of West Africa, based on letters he wrote to his family in Denmark. Those letters were published in 1917 as Da Guinea var Dansk [When Guinea was Danish], by Carl Behrens, a member of his family in Denmark. The second part of the book is an edited translation of the letters from Danish into English.

https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/a-danish-jew-in-west-africa

Weiss, Holger. ‘The European and Eurafrican Population of the Danish Forts on the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast’. (2018)

Weiss, Holger. ‘The European and Eurafrican Population of the Danish Forts on the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast’. African Economic History, vol. 46, no. 1, University of Wisconsin Press, 2018, pp. 36–68,

This essay focuses on the demographic consequences of entanglement in the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast in West Africa. Two sets of data will be analyzed, one on the European composition of the Danish enclaves and discusses demographic trends and ruptures, the other on the Eurafrican population in the Danish enclaves. The first part of the study focusses on the survival of the European personnel in the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast. Similar to the experience of other European trading nations in West Africa, the Guinea Coast was a ‘White Man’s Grave’ for the Danish personnel as about half of the newly arrived staff members died within the first year on the coast. The second part deals with the employment and careers of the Eurafricans, i.e., the children of Danish fathers and local African or Eurafrican women. While the Danish authorities enlisted some of the Eurafrican boys as military staff members, the fate of the Eurafrican girls was unclear. In contrast to the Europeans, the Eurafrican population seldom succumbed to the coastal climate. Instead, demographic data suggests that their life expectancy was relatively high, at least compared to that of the European personnel.

doi:10.1353/aeh.2018.0001.

Weiss, Holger. ‘The Danish Gold Coast as a Multinational and Entangled Space, c. 1700–1850’. (2013) [PDF]

Weiss, Holger. ‘The Danish Gold Coast as a Multinational and Entangled Space, c. 1700–1850’. Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity, 2013, 243–260,

This chapter gives an outline of the intertwined multiple cultural and social dynamics in the Danish enclaves and their hinterlands on the Gold Coast (Ghana) during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Similar to the other European ports of exchange, the Danish forts had been built next to African settlements. The interaction between the Europeans and the Africans had created a multicultural and transnational space where expressions of early modern proto-globalisation intermingled with local cultures of particular societies. Apart from discussing the multinational composition of the Danish personnel, the chapter highlights the African and Euro-African spaces at Danish Accra, focusing on how foreign cultural artefacts and ideas were combined with local ones.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6202-6_14.

PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288985106_The_Danish_Gold_Coast_as_a_Multinational_and_Entangled_Space_c_1700-1850.

Lunde, Arne, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport. ‘Helga Crane’s Copenhagen: Denmark, Colonialism, and Transnational Identity in Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand”’. (2008) [PDF]

Lunde, Arne, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport. ‘Helga Crane’s Copenhagen: Denmark, Colonialism, and Transnational Identity in Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand”’. Comparative Literature, vol. 60, no. 3, [Duke University Press, University of Oregon], 2008, pp. 228–243.

PDF: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40279414.

Ipsen, Pernille. ‘“The Christened Mulatresses”: Euro-African Families in a Slave-Trading Town’. (2013) [PDF]

Ipsen, Pernille. ‘“The Christened Mulatresses”: Euro-African Families in a Slave-Trading Town’. The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013, pp. 371–398.

In the 1760s “Mulatresse Lene” was cassaret (married) to Danish interim governor and slave trader Frantz Joachim Kühberg in Osu on the Gold Coast. The local history of Ga-Danish families such as hers in Osu illustrates how Euro-African women on the West African coast could benefit from marrying European slave traders and could use these marriages to expand their room for maneuver in the coastal society. By marrying European men, christening their children, and sending them to the church school at the Danish fort, Euro-African women claimed a powerful intermediary position in the racialized social hierarchy of the Atlantic slave trade, and as they did so they helped reproduce this same racial hierarchy. Yet Euro-African families were not just taking advantage of their position to widen their opportunities; they were also using it as a means of protection in a violent and stressful slave-trading environment. At the height of the slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century, Africans participating in the slave trade—even elite Euro-Africans such as Kühberg and her family—were under pressure to protect themselves and their families from being sold across the Atlantic.

doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.70.2.0371.

PDF: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.70.2.0371.

Ipsen, Pernille. ‘Sexualizing the Other: From Ethnopornography to Interracial Pornography in European Travel Writing about West African Women’. (2020)

Ipsen, Pernille. ‘Sexualizing the Other: From Ethnopornography to Interracial Pornography in European Travel Writing about West African Women’. Ethno-Pornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge, Eds. Peter Herman Sigal, Zeb Tortorici, and Neil L Whitehead, 2020.

https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=6133845.

Ipsen, Pernille. ‘“Plant Ikke Upas-Træet Om Vor Bolig”: Colonial Haunting, Race, and Interracial Marriage in Hans Christian Andersen’s Mulatten (1840)’. (2016) [PDF]

Ipsen, Pernille. ‘“Plant Ikke Upas-Træet Om Vor Bolig”: Colonial Haunting, Race, and Interracial Marriage in Hans Christian Andersen’s Mulatten (1840)’. Scandinavian Studies, vol. 88, no. 2, Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, University of Illinois Press, 2016, pp. 129–158.

doi:10.5406/scanstud.88.2.0129.

PDF: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.88.2.0129.

Ipsen, Pernille. Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. (2015)

Ipsen, Pernille. Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Severine Brock’s first language was Ga, yet it was not surprising when, in 1842, she married Edward Carstensen. He was the last governor of Christiansborg, the fort that, in the eighteenth century, had been the center of Danish slave trading in West Africa. She was the descendant of Ga-speaking women who had married Danish merchants and traders. Their marriage would have been familiar to Gold Coast traders going back nearly 150 years. In Daughters of the Trade, Pernille Ipsen follows five generations of marriages between African women and Danish men, revealing how interracial marriage created a Euro-African hybrid culture specifically adapted to the Atlantic slave trade. 

Although interracial marriage was prohibited in European colonies throughout the Atlantic world, in Gold Coast slave-trading towns it became a recognized and respected custom. Cassare, or ‘keeping house,’ gave European men the support of African women and their kin, which was essential for their survival and success, while African families made alliances with European traders and secured the legitimacy of their offspring by making the unions official. 

For many years, Euro-African families lived in close proximity to the violence of the slave trade. Sheltered by their Danish names and connections, they grew wealthy and influential. But their powerful position on the Gold Coast did not extend to the broader Atlantic world, where the link between blackness and slavery grew stronger, and where Euro-African descent did not guarantee privilege. By the time Severine Brock married Edward Carstensen, their world had changed. Daughters of the Trade uncovers the vital role interracial marriage played in the coastal slave trade, the production of racial difference, and the increasing stratification of the early modern Atlantic world.

https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15367.html

McEachrane, Michael, editor. Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe. (2014)

McEachrane, Michael, editor. Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe challenges a view of Nordic societies as homogenously white, and as human rights champions that are so progressive that even the concept of race is deemed irrelevant to their societies. The book places African Diasporas, race and legacies of imperialism squarely in a Nordic context. How has a nation as peripheral as Iceland been shaped by an identity of being white? How do Black Norwegians challenge racially conscribed views of Norwegian nationhood? What does the history of jazz in Denmark say about the relation between its national identity and race? What is it like to be a mixed-race black Swedish woman? How have African Diasporans in Finland navigated issues of race and belonging? And what does the widespread denial of everyday racism in Nordic societies mean to Afro-Nordics?  This text is a must read for anyone interested in issues of race in the Nordic region and Europe writ large. As Paul Gilroy writes in his foreword, it is a book that ‘should be studied with care and profit inside the Nordic countries and also outside them by the broader international readership that has been established around the study of racism and “critical race theory”.’ 

Contents

Foreword—Paul Gilroy.  A

Introduction —Michael McEachrane 

Part I: The Nation 

1. Imagining Blackness at the Margins: Race and Difference in Iceland —Kristín Loftsdóttir 

2. ‘Struggling to Be Recognized as Belonging to the Fauna of Norway’: On Being Black Norwegian Women—Madeleine Kennedy-Macfoy 

3. The Midnight Sun Never Sets: An Email Conversation About Jazz, Race and National Identity in Denmark, Norway and Sweden—Cecil Brown, Anne Dvinge, Petter Frost Fadnes, Johan Fornäs, Ole Izard Høyer, Marilyn Mazur, Michael McEachrane and John Tchicai 

Part II: Racism 

4. There’s a White Elephant in the Room: Equality and Race in (Northern) Europe—Michael McEachrane 

5. Racism Is No Joke: A Swedish Minister and a Hottentot Venus Cake—An Email Conversation—Beth Maina Ahlberg, Claudette Carr, Madubuko Diakité, Fatima El-Tayeb, Tobias Hübinette, Momodou Jallow, Victoria Kawesa, Michael McEachrane, Utz McKnight, Anders Neergaard, Shailja Patel, Kitimbwa Sabuni and Minna Salami 

6. Being and Becoming Mixed Race, Black, Swedish and a Nomadic Subject—Anna Adeniji 

7. Bertrand Besigye’s Civilization Critique: An Aesthetics of Blackness in Norway—Helena Karlsson 

8. Two Poems by Bertrand Besigye: (i) How A Black African Orders Black Coffee (To Barack Hussein Obama); (ii) You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down. Or Black Hail Over All of West Side (Translated by John Irons)—Bertrand Besigye 

Part III: Diaspora 

9. Talking Back: Voices from the African Diaspora in Finland—Anna Rastas 

10. Den Sorte: Nella Larsen and Denmark—Martyn Bone 

11. A Horn of Africa in Northern Europe—An Email Conversation—Abdalla Duh, Mohamed Husein Gaas, Abdalla Gasimelseed, Amel Gorani, Nauja Kleist, Anne Kubai, Michael McEachrane, Saifalyazal Omar, Tsegaye Tegenu and Marja Tiilikain.

https://www.routledge.com/Afro-Nordic-Landscapes-Equality-and-Race-in-Northern-Europe/McEachrane/p/book/9781138207110

Duncker, Dorthe, Bettina Perregaard, and Martha Sif Karrebæk, editors. ‘”I Am Lucky I Can Speak Arabic”: Linguistic Hegemony and Minority Language Use in Copenhagen’. (2017)

Duncker, Dorthe, Bettina Perregaard, and Martha Sif Karrebæk, editors. ‘”I Am Lucky I Can Speak Arabic”: Linguistic Hegemony and Minority Language Use in Copenhagen’. Creativity and Continuity: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation, U Press, 2017.

http://upress.dk/boger/dorthe-duncker-bettina-perregaard-eds-creativity-and-continuity-perspectives-on-the-dynamics-of-language-conventionalisation/

Martha S. Karrebæk. ‘Pigs and Pork in Denmark: Meaning Change, Morality and Traditional Foods.’ (2017) [PDF]

Martha S. Karrebæk.. Pigs and Pork in Denmark: Meaning Change, Morality and Traditional Foods. WP230, Literacies, Working Papers in Urban Language. 2017.

This paper engages with meanings of pork and pigs, as they are revealed in Denmark today. The main objective is to discuss the relation between use and understandings as revealed in interaction in different settings, on the one hand, and how such situational uses relate to nation-wide mass-mediated discourses, on the other. The porcine area lends itself to such an analysis, as pork carries a range of important indexicalities in contemporary Denmark. It signifies tradition, industrialization, and an anti-immigration stance. Interactional data come from three field-studies, from a school, a fine-dining restaurant and a fast food restaurant. The media data come from three recent debates on Denmark, Danish values, and immigrants versus Danes.

https://nors.ku.dk/english/staff/?pure=en%2Fpublications%2Fpigs-and-pork-in-denmark-meaning-change-ideology-and-traditional-foods(898a1c38-42a0-4476-9a6c-c840b60ab94b).html.

PDF: https://www.academia.edu/35100320/WP230_Karreb%C3%A6k_2017_Pigs_and_pork_in_Denmark_Meaning_change_morality_and_traditional_foods.

Karrebæk, Martha Sif. ‘“What’s in Your Lunch Box Today?”: Health, Respectability, and Ethnicity in the Primary Classroom’. (2012)

Karrebæk, Martha Sif. ‘“What’s in Your Lunch Box Today?”: Health, Respectability, and Ethnicity in the Primary Classroom’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–22.

Much socialization of children into healthy food practices takes place in the educational system. However, teachers’ understandings of healthy food may differ from those of students and parents. Furthermore, health is connected to respectability. Thus, food socialization concerns more than nutritional values. This study examines lunchtime interactions between minority students and majority teachers in a Danish classroom. I show that certain traditional food items (rye bread) are treated as superior to certain others that minority children regularly bring. Children are accountable for lunch boxes, and cultural and personal preferences are disregarded if at odds with dominant understandings of healthy food. [

doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2012.01129.x.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2012.01129.x.

Keskinen, Suvi. ‘Antiracist Feminism and the Politics of Solidarity in Neoliberal Times’. (2021) [PDF]

Keskinen, Suvi. ‘Antiracist Feminism and the Politics of Solidarity in Neoliberal Times’. Feminisms in the Nordic Region: Neoliberalism, Nationalism and Decolonial Critique, Eds. Suvi Keskinen, Pauline Stoltz, and Diana Mulinari, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021, 201–221.

This chapter analyses the establishment and expansion of antiracist feminism in the last decade throughout the Nordic region, with new groups, media sites, and public events organised, especially in the large cities. I examine antiracist feminist and queer of colour activism in which the main or sole actors belong to groups racialised as non-white or “others” in Nordic societies. A fundamental argument developed in the chapter is the central role and potential of these emerging social movements to reconfigure political agendas and tackling of pressing societal issues, due to their capacity to overlap and connect the borders of antiracist, feminist, and (to some extent) class-based politics. The chapter further argues for the usefulness of theorising the neoliberal turn of racial capitalism as the societal condition in which feminist activism takes place. 

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-53464-6_10.

PDF: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-53464-6_10

Thomsen, Jens Peter, Bolette Moldenhawer, and Tine Kallehave. Ethnic Differences in Education in Denmark: Survey Report. (2010) [PDF]

Thomsen, Jens Peter, Bolette Moldenhawer, and Tine Kallehave. Ethnic Differences in Education in Denmark: Survey Report. EDUMIGROM, 2010.

The primary purpose of this report is to give a descriptive and analytical account of the lives of minority urban youth at the end of their primary schooling by looking at their school experiences and achievements, plans for future education and work life, attitudes towards school, and relations to peers, as well as the shaping of identity among minority students. Focusing on youth in the 8th and 9th grades in primary school in Copenhagen, Denmark, the report not only differentiates among ethnic groups in order to identify significant social patterns among groups, but also explores how ethnic differentiations intersect with other variables relating to the students’ background (gender, parents’ socio-economic status and educational level, and so on), and characteristics of everyday social life (social interaction, peer relations, etc). The report aims to contribute to a growing body of research on early identity formation and interethnic relations among young people in primary schools as a way of understanding how and why social positions of young people are structured the way they are. 

PDF: https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/?action=media.download&uuid=29EB1415-BE22-3ABB-578DDD71283F13E4

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær, and Bart Bonikowski. ‘Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive? Conceptions of Nationhood and Anti-Muslim Attitudes in Europe’. (2020)

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær, and Bart Bonikowski. ‘Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive? Conceptions of Nationhood and Anti-Muslim Attitudes in Europe’. European Journal of Political Research, vol. 59, no. 1, 2020, pp. 114–136.

Despite the centrality of national identity in the exclusionary discourse of the European radical right, scholars have not investigated how popular definitions of nationhood are connected to dispositions toward Muslims. Moreover, survey-based studies tend to conflate anti-Muslim attitudes with general anti-immigrant sentiments. This article contributes to research on nationalism and out-group attitudes by demonstrating that varieties of national self-understanding are predictive of anti-Muslim attitudes, above and beyond dispositions toward immigrants. Using latent class analysis and regression models of survey data from 41 European countries, it demonstrates that conceptions of nationhood are heterogeneous within countries and that their relationship with anti-Muslim attitudes is contextually variable. Consistent with expectations, in most countries, anti-Muslim attitudes are positively associated with ascriptive – and negatively associated with elective (including civic) – conceptions of nationhood. Northwestern Europe, however, is an exception to this pattern: in this region, civic nationalism is linked to greater antipathy toward Muslims. It is suggested that in this region, elective criteria of belonging have become fused with exclusionary notions of national culture that portray Muslims as incompatible with European liberal values, effectively legitimating anti-Muslim sentiments in mainstream political culture. This may heighten the appeal of anti-Muslim sentiments not only on the radical right, but also among mainstream segments of the Northwestern European public, with important implications for social exclusion and political behaviour.

doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12337.

https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1475-6765.12337.

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær. ‘The Democratic Consequences of Anti-Immigrant Political Rhetoric: A Mixed Methods Study of Immigrants’ Political Belonging’. (2019) [PDF]

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær. ‘The Democratic Consequences of Anti-Immigrant Political Rhetoric: A Mixed Methods Study of Immigrants’ Political Belonging’. Political Behavior, May 2019.

Anti-immigrant political rhetoric is proliferating in Europe, inspiring research to examine the potential effects on public opinion. However, studies of the reactions of first- and second-generation immigrants—the objects of this rhetoric—remain scarce. This article argues that political rhetoric should be treated as a context of integration affecting political outcomes, in particular political belonging. To that end, the article combines qualitative evidence from focus group discussions conducted in Denmark, a high-salience context, and quantitative evidence from cross-national survey and party manifesto data from 18 Western European countries over a 12-year period. In addition to demonstrating a negative mean effect, the analyses show that those most in focus of contemporary political messages (Muslims and immigrants with shorter educations) are most affected, suggesting a sophisticated processing of political rhetoric. In contrast, traditional explanations concerning structural incorporation, generational integration, and exposure to rhetoric are not supported. The article discusses the implications of the results for democratic inclusion in contemporary Europe.

doi:10.1007/s11109-019-09549-6.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09549-6.

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær. ‘Ripple Effects: An Exclusive Host National Context Produces More Perceived Discrimination among Immigrants’. (2016)

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær. ‘Ripple Effects: An Exclusive Host National Context Produces More Perceived Discrimination among Immigrants’. European Journal of Political Research, vol. 55, no. 2, 2016, pp. 374–390.

This article examines the perceived discrimination of immigrants – a group for whom experiences of discrimination can be damaging for their long-term commitment and identification with the national core group. Taking its point of departure in the literature on national identity, the article argues that perceived discrimination should be strongest among immigrants in host national societies with an exclusive self-image. This hypothesis is examined by use of multilevel regressions on cross-national survey data from 18 Western European countries. It is found that where exclusive attitudes are widespread in the host population, the percentage of immigrants who perceive themselves to be part of a group discriminated against is significantly greater, all else being equal. In addition, there is a cross-level interaction effect of host national inclusivity and ethnic minority identity which suggests that individual-level determinants of perceived discrimination do not ‘work’ in the same way in normatively different contexts. In terms of the implications of these findings, the article points to the importance of contextualising individual-level accounts of perceived discrimination, with particular focus on the power of a society’s attitudinal milieu to affect individual feelings of inclusion and exclusion.

doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12131.

https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1475-6765.12131.