Kategori: English

Saarikkomäki, Elsa, Randi Solhjell, and David Wästerfors, Dealing with Police Stops: How Young People with Ethnic Minority Backgrounds Narrate Their Ways of Managing over-Policing in the Nordic Countries. (2023)

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Saarikkomäki, Elsa, Randi Solhjell, and David Wästerfors, Dealing with Police Stops: How Young People with Ethnic Minority Backgrounds Narrate Their Ways of Managing over-Policing in the Nordic Countries, Policing and Society, 0.0 (2023), 1–16

Research shows that young people within ethnic minorities are subjected to police control more often than others, which seems to have a damaging effect on their trust in the police as well as on their wider sense of belonging. What is less often researched is how these young people deal with being over-policed. This article explores narratives of over-policing from those targeted by the police in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. By highlighting the patterns in these narratives in cross-national interview data, we seek to understand how young people manage interactions with the police and being stigmatised and ethnically profiled. The article distinguishes between three categories of narratives, (a) practical (b) emotional and (c) analytical, which the young people invoke and employ when they discuss their experiences and assessments of the police. The article concludes that we need a more dynamic perspective to understand and analyse how targeted groups constitute agency, resistance and active responses to ethnic profiling or labelling. Being young and belonging to an ethnic minority in the Nordic countries means developing and employing everyday tactics to both manage and account for the risk of police encounters.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2023.2216838

Schierup, Carl‐Ulrich, The Right to Be Different: Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Scandinavian Welfare Politics; The Case of Denmark. (1994)

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Schierup, Carl‐Ulrich, The Right to Be Different: Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Scandinavian Welfare Politics; The Case of Denmark, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 7.3 (1994), 277–88

‘Multiculturalism’ as an influential ideology for structuring ethnic relations has become exposed to increasing critique also in the Scandinavian context. The paper discusses a racialized political debate, legislation, and institutional practices, taking Denmark as the prime example. An increasingly ‘dual welfare’ is becoming legitimized through a hegemonic culturalized language, consistently interpreting ‘the right to be different’ as ‘being different’, and ‘being different’ as being ‘non‐integrated’. In a society where public debate on ethnic and racial discrimination is less than rudimentary, tolerant claims of multiculturalist relativism are effectively turned upside down in the service of neo‐racism, the preachings of which are imperceptibly becoming adopted as the conventional wisdom. This calls for a discussion on ‘politics of recognition’ which brings the debate on the universalism and particularity out of the abstract, while focusing on the vicissitudes of contemporary democracy in a changing welfare state.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.1994.9968409

Schmidt, Cecilie Ullerup, No Count! BIPoC Artists Counteracting ‘Fair’ Representation and Systemic Racial Loneliness in Higher Education in the Arts. (2022) [PDF]

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Schmidt, Cecilie Ullerup, No Count! BIPoC Artists Counteracting ‘Fair’ Representation and Systemic Racial Loneliness in Higher Education in the Arts, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 14.1 (2022), 2046956

Art in public space is fundamentally determined by who has access to the artworld. At the entrance to the artworld of today—the art academy—resides an ideal of global mobility that relates to cognitive capitalism and competitiveness but also to the repeating of rationales of white privilege and a hidden structural racism. By analysing how Higher Education in the Arts in Denmark awards “free” mobility and encourages internationalization, following the neoliberal European policies of the Bologna Process in their aim of competitiveness while at the same time having no official strategies in relation to racial diversity and recruitment, I find biopolitical lines of demarcation and structural racism within the foundational infrastructures of the Danish artworld. Based on the findings of my analysis of both educational policy documents and understandings of “fair” representation of BIPoCs in the arts in Denmark, I demonstrate how racial loneliness resides as an affective response to experiences of structural racism in the infrastructures of the arts. I suggest that racial loneliness is an interdependent affect and a product of educational documents, reforms and policies. This assumption is accompanied by the example of the artists’ collective FCNN, stressing how BIPoC student Eliyah Mesayer is isolated and subjected to tokenism in the classroom of the art academy. Informed by the increasing number of separatist BIPoC collectives offering an ongoing infrastructural performance of being “too many”, the article ends with a speculation on how to organize bodies otherwise in the infrastructures of the artworld by exceeding rationales of reasonable and adequate representability.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2022.2046956

Skadegård, M. C., Slipping and Sliding: Wielding Power with Slippery Constructions of Danishness. (2022) [PDF]

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Skadegård, M. C., Slipping and Sliding: Wielding Power with Slippery Constructions of Danishness, Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, 1.2 (2022), 158–80.

This article addresses implicit and underlying discrimination in public and private interactions in Denmark. In particular, it examines racial structural discrimination in regard to citizenship and belonging in Danish contexts. Two cases are presented in this analysis, both from the fall of 2015, in which mixed race figures either directly or indirectly. The first case is a public debate concerning Danish citizenship as presented in news coverage and the second is an everyday private interaction at a dinner party in which the author was a participant. The study assesses how (racialized) Danishness, citizenship, and entitlement are constructed in the two cases. Further, it introduces the notion of “slipperiness” as a mechanism in discriminatory interactions (in regard to defining “Danishness”) and discusses how this notion functions to maintain and enforce racial discrimination.

PDF: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m3202b5

Shaheen, Buthaina, Ambivalences of Citizenship: Syrians with Refugee Status Responding to Ambivalences of Citizenship in Denmark. (2021)

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Shaheen, Buthaina, Ambivalences of Citizenship: Syrians with Refugee Status Responding to Ambivalences of Citizenship in Denmark, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34.2 (2021), 2349–75

Upon the arrival of unprecedented number of Syrian refugees to Denmark in 2015, the government exerted its full power in order to put a stop to this flow. It signed the EU-Turkey agreement, imposed border control and enacted numerous restrictions on the Alien Act sending a blatant message: Do not come to Denmark, we need to cope up with the numbers we have received, while, at the same time, the government has demanded its new residents—refugees and migrants—to live up to its ultimate requirements where they should demonstrate and act as full citizens, while they are denizens. This article investigates Syrian refugees’ responses to this ambivalence: act as a citizen while you are not a citizen! It employs theoretical notions of citizenship such as Per Mouritsen’s approach to citizenship by stressing the integration of its three components: equality, membership and participation supplemented by supporting theoretical concepts such as racialized citizenship and cultural citizenship.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fez107

Smedegaard Nielsen, Asta, Saving Racialized Children through Good Schooling: Media Discourses on Racialized Children’s Schooling as a Site for Upholding Danish Whiteness. (2021) [PDF]

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Smedegaard Nielsen, Asta, Saving Racialized Children through Good Schooling: Media Discourses on Racialized Children’s Schooling as a Site for Upholding Danish Whiteness, Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 7.3 (2021), 200–208

This article uses Danish media discourses on racialized children’s schooling as a lens through which to analyse how issues of kinship and family play into nation-building processes through representations of ‘the child’. The article addresses the question of the distribution of racialized children, mostly termed ‘bilingual pupils’, at Danish schools, which is a recurrent theme in the public debate. The media representation of this issue is mostly framed around an ideal of spreading the ‘bilingual pupils’ among different schools to ensure proper mixing with white Danish pupils, which is framed as securing both the educational development of the children and the prosperity of the Danish nation. Through the ideal of mixing, the nation is constituted as able to include the racialized child as an act of saving it from its heritage of racialized and classed disadvantage. A comparison with other kinds of media reporting on racialized children in Danish schooling reveals the constellation of a racialized hierarchy that works to uphold Danish whiteness and non-racism through the ideal of proper mixing. Migrant subjects who have mixed through kinship with Danish whiteness and have actively abandoned their racialized familial background seem more easily constituted as belonging in Denmark.

PDF: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20020317.2021.1980275

Søgaard, Thomas Friis, Torsten Kolind, Mie Birk Haller, Tobias Kammersgaard, and Geoffrey Hunt, ‘Filming Is Our Only Weapon Against the Police’: Ethnic Minorities and Police Encounters in the New Visibility Era. (2022)

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Søgaard, Thomas Friis, Torsten Kolind, Mie Birk Haller, Tobias Kammersgaard, and Geoffrey Hunt, ‘Filming Is Our Only Weapon Against the Police’: Ethnic Minorities and Police Encounters in the New Visibility Era, The British Journal of Criminology, 2022, azac056.

Based on Goldsmith’s (2010, ‘Policing’s New Visibility’, British Journal of Criminology, 50: 914–34) assertion that police work has acquired a ‘new visibility’ with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, recent studies have explored how ‘video activists’ often film the police as means of protecting marginalised ethno-racial communities. However, limited research exists on how non-activist ethno-racial minority young people use cell phone cameras in encounters with the police. Based on 37 interviews conducted in Denmark, this paper explores the multifaceted nature of marginalised ethnic minority young people’s use of cell phone cameras in police encounters. We demonstrate how the filming of officers is interwoven with the young people’s street culture, and how the use of cameras holds the potential to counter traditional power imbalances, while nevertheless, potentially exacerbating their antagonism towards the police.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azac056

Sørensen, Victoria E. Pihl, ‘In Women’s Hands’: Feminism, Eugenics and Race in Interwar Denmark. (2023) [PDF]

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Sørensen, Victoria E. Pihl, ‘In Women’s Hands’: Feminism, Eugenics and Race in Interwar Denmark, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35.2 (2023), 46–62

Eugenics had popular appeal and expressions in early 20th-century Denmark. This article tells two stories of what eugenics looked like ‘in the hands’ of bourgeois Danish women as they promoted ‘racial hygiene’ through cultural production. The first story highlights the eugenic feminism of nationally acclaimed women’s rights advocate Thit Jensen through a reading of her play The Stork (1929). The second tells of the Copenhagen Housewife Association’s engagement with new media technology and race science through their eugenics radio Listener Group (1934). Read through a lens that pays especially close attention to race and class, I argue that this work identifies them as significant proponents of eugenic ideology and as contributors to the targeting of the poor and working class in the name of ‘racial hygiene’ – a decidedly racist project.

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/132611

Spaas, Caroline et al. Mental Health of Refugee and Non-Refugee Migrant Young People in European Secondary Education: The Role of Family Separation, Daily Material Stress and Perceived Discrimination in Resettlement. (2022) [PDF]

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Spaas, Caroline, An Verelst, Ines Devlieger, Sanni Aalto, Arnfinn Andersen, Natalie Durbeej, and others, Mental Health of Refugee and Non-Refugee Migrant Young People in European Secondary Education: The Role of Family Separation, Daily Material Stress and Perceived Discrimination in Resettlement, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 51 (2022), 1–23

While scholarly literature indicates that both refugee and non-refugee migrant young people display increased levels of psychosocial vulnerability, studies comparing the mental health of the two groups remain scarce. This study aims to further the existing evidence by examining refugee and non-refugee migrants’ mental health, in relation to their migration history and resettlement conditions. The mental health of 883 refugee and 483 non-refugee migrants (mean age 15.41, range 11-24, 45.9% girls, average length of stay in the host country 3.75 years) in five European countries was studied in their relation to family separation, daily material stress and perceived discrimination in resettlement. All participants reported high levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms. Family separation predicted post-trauma and internalizing behavioral difficulties only in refugees. Daily material stress related to lower levels of overall well-being in all participants, and higher levels of internalizing and externalizing behavioral difficulties in refugees. Perceived discrimination was associated with increased levels of mental health problems for refugees and non-refugee migrants. The relationship between perceived discrimination and post-traumatic stress symptoms in non-refugee migrants, together with the high levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms in this subsample, raises important questions on the nature of trauma exposure in non-refugee migrants, as well as the ways in which experiences of discrimination may interact with other traumatic stressors in predicting mental health.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-021-01515-y

PDF: https://europepmc.org/article/med/34686949

Spanger, Marlene, Constructing Victims and Criminals through the Racial Figure of ‘The Gypsy’. (2022)

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Spanger, Marlene, Constructing Victims and Criminals through the Racial Figure of ‘The Gypsy’, in White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking, ed. by Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih (Routledge, 2022), pp. 154–69

Danish state anti-trafficking efforts have grown rapidly since 2002. From 2007, the Danish state has not only focused on victims in the sex industry; it has also paid attention to the formal labor market, setting out to identify labor migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The chapter explores how the racialized “Other” male European is established through the intersection of nationality and mobility articulated as “the gypsy.” The chapter argues that the racialized European historical figure of “the gypsy” reflects a strong symbol on who belongs and who does not belong in the European states representing the west. To show how this construction occurs, this chapter analyzes the narratives of Romanian male migrants describing their encounter with the Danish authorities. Focusing on the close entanglement of the empirical categorizations of “the victim” and “the criminal” during the identification process of CEE victims of human trafficking, the chapter analyzes the nexus of human trafficking, racialization and racism by asking: What kind of racialized victim and criminal representations do CEE migrant workers experience within the field of anti-trafficking? And how do these racialized representations stem from institutional racism?

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003162124-13/constructing-victims-criminals-racial-figure-gypsy-marlene-spanger

Sparre, Sara Lei, (In)Visibility and the Muslim Other: Narratives of Flight and Religious Identity among Iraqi Christians in Denmark. (2021)

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Sparre, Sara Lei, (In)Visibility and the Muslim Other: Narratives of Flight and Religious Identity among Iraqi Christians in Denmark, Ethnicities, 21.3 (2021), 589–610

This article investigates identity and belonging among Christians of Iraqi origin in Denmark through an analysis of their narratives of flight and interreligious relations, with a particular focus on the underlying dynamics of a widespread anti-Muslim discourse. Based on qualitative interviews and informal conversations with Chaldean and Assyrian Christians from Iraq, I examine how they presented themselves to me through their stories of flight from Iraq and settlement in Denmark. The analysis draws on perspectives on positionality and belonging among migrants as well as the ambiguous concept of (in)visibility, understood both as something structurally enforced and as how individuals and groups experience their (in)visibility and strive towards mobility and recognition. In addition, the analysis incorporates insights and discussions from literature on racialization and minority?majority relations, while particularly focusing on religious identity and Muslim?Christian relations. Against experiences of racialization and misrecognition as Muslims, I explore how they make sense of, articulate and act on their complex social location as invisible Christians and visible Middle Easterners in a Danish context characterized by ambiguous expectations of religiosity and national belonging. I draw attention to three different, yet simultaneous, narratives put forward by the Iraqi Christians: flight from political oppression, flight from Muslim persecution in the Middle East, and Islam as a threat against Europe. I argue that Iraqi Christians interpret and navigate the experience of being bodily invisible as Christians but visible as immigrants and Middle Eastern Muslims by rewriting narratives of their flight from Iraq to Denmark. Consequently, they also rewrite their relations to both the ?Christian other? in Denmark and the ?Muslim other? in Denmark and Iraq. The article contributes with a perspective on ?invisible? and/or misrecognized non-Muslim minorities in Europe and thus offers insights into the diversity within assumedly homogenous ethnic groups.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796820949279

Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Relinking as Healing. On Crisis, Whiteness and the Existential Dimensions of Decolonization. (2023) [PDF]

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Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Relinking as Healing. On Crisis, Whiteness and the Existential Dimensions of Decolonization, Globalizations, 20.2 (2023), 304–15

In this paper, I present my reading of two paths of existence in texts written by white Danes concerned with crisis. The first obeys the politics of purity and involves an existential commitment to status quo. I call this path whiteness collapsing into itself, inasmuch it remains locked in the confines of the politics of purity, makes impossible both delinking from modernity-coloniality, and relinking, as the process of delving and dwelling in the wider processes of becoming, which I have learnt to know as Mother Earth. The second text attests a decolonizing practice of collapsing whiteness that is creolizing and engages in relinking as healing. I conclude by addressing the importance of deciding to decide to relinking as a radical practice of cultivation of sociality and relationality rooted in specific places which, however, are interconnected precisely because social and relational. Therein, I argue, is the healing.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2021.2025293

PDF: https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/publications/relinking-as-healing-on-crisis-whiteness-and-the-existential-dime

Temizisler, Sevgi, The Mediatisation of Migration Issues During the ‘Refugee Crisis’: A Comparative Case-Study of the UK, Denmark and Germany. (2023) [PDF]

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Temizisler, Sevgi, The Mediatisation of Migration Issues During the ‘Refugee Crisis’: A Comparative Case-Study of the UK, Denmark and Germany, in Anxieties of Migration and Integration in Turbulent Times, ed. by Mari-Liis Jakobson, Russell King, Laura Moroşanu, and Raivo Vetik, IMISCOE Research Series (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023), pp. 207–24

Spurred on by civil war in Iraq, Libya and Syria and by instability in several African countries, more than 1.8 million migrants/refugees arrived in the EU in 2015 (Frontex, 2016). This massive pressure from immigrants and refugees led to a humanitarian crisis on a global scale while threatening the key instruments of border control in the EU and, at the same time, increasing uncertainty about the political, economic and societal implications for member states. The ‘crisis’ was highly politicised in domestic politics owing to the heightened salience in media coverage, the mobilisation of citizens holding exclusive nationalist identities by mostly rightwing populist parties (Wodak & Krzyzanowski, 2017) and exacerbated polarisation in public debates. In such circumstances, popular disapproval of the EU’s management of the crisis grew and provided a suitable platform for the growth of anti-EU and anti-refugee/immigrant discourses, in which the domestic mass media played a major role by reflecting these tendencies and shaping public opinion concerning the ‘crisis’. This chapter investigates how migration issues were mediatised during the ‘refugee crisis’ in different countries and the implications thereof.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23996-0

Tendler, Hannah, Deportation as Rescue: How Danish Society Responds to the Figure of the Migrant Sex Worker. (2022) [PDF]

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Tendler, Hannah, Deportation as Rescue: How Danish Society Responds to the Figure of the Migrant Sex Worker, Culture and History: Student Research Papers, 6.2 (2022), 37–56

This article interrogates the conceptualisation of the figure of the migrant sex worker in Danish society. Reflecting on laws, policies and public attitudes towards sex work in the European context, it considers the tangible impacts on the rights of migrants selling sex. Delving deeper into public political debates on sex work, it finds that within Danish society, the migrant sex worker is rarely conceptualised as a worker. Instead, she is predominantly perceived to be a victim. This keeps the figure of the migrant sex worker in the realm of the exceptional and justifies the use of deportation as ‘rescue’.

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/article/view/134567

Vertelyté, Manté, ‘Why Are They Not Friends?’ (2022) [PDF]

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Vertelyté, Manté, ‘Why Are They Not Friends?’, Nordic Journal of Social Research, 13.1 (2022), 10–22

Young people’s friendships have been central to debates around minority integration in Danish society. Specifically, through schooling, students with diverse racialised-ethnic backgrounds are expected to form bonds and connections as a way to strengthen social cohesion and unity. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with education professionals in Danish schooling contexts (a comprehensive school and extracurricular schooling state institutions), this article deploys the concept of intimate technology of concern to explore how and with what effects concerns over young people’s friendships are implicated in welfare value projects of minority integration. Contributing to the literature on friendship, understood as a regulatory modality of intimacy, the article shows how, racialised figuring of friendship as both a threat and a solution, young people’s social relations are celebrated as achievements of integration and social mixing.

Keywords friendship intimate technology of concern racialisation Denmark education integration.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.18261/njsr.13.1.2

Vertelyté, Manté, and Dorthe Staunæs, From Tolerance Work to Pedagogies of Unease: Affective Investments in Danish Antiracist Education. (2021) [PDF]

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Vertelyté, Manté, and Dorthe Staunæs, From Tolerance Work to Pedagogies of Unease: Affective Investments in Danish Antiracist Education, Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 7.3 (2021), 126–35

Antiracist pedagogies have long been conceptualized and developed by scholars, public intellectuals, teachers and pedagogues in Danish education contexts. By analysing Danish knowledge production on antiracist education from the 1980s to the present, this article traces changing understandings of race and racism in Danish education, as well as accounts for different affective tensions and investments at stake in antiracist pedagogical practice and thinking. We show how the discourse of antiracism as ‘tolerance work’ prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s evolved into an antiracist pedagogy centred on ‘creating good and positive atmospheres’, and how, from the 2000s onward, feelings of unease, embarrassment and anxiety about addressing race have become integrated in antiracist education research and practice. While the first approach towards antiracist education dwells with and use positive and joyous feelings, the second wave addresses a more uncomfortable register of affects. By analysing how different affective intensities have historically been associated with antiracist pedagogies in Denmark, we show how they are inextricable from education policies and politics.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2021.2003006

Vitus, Kathrine, and Frederikke Jarlby, Between Integration and Repatriation – Frontline Experiences of How Conflicting Immigrant Integration Policies Hamper the Integration of Young Refugees in Denmark. (2022)

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Vitus, Kathrine, and Frederikke Jarlby, Between Integration and Repatriation – Frontline Experiences of How Conflicting Immigrant Integration Policies Hamper the Integration of Young Refugees in Denmark, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48.7 (2022), 1496–1514

Confronted with global migration pressures, European countries face the dual challenges of border control and the incorporation of immigrants into society. Danish immigration and integration policies aim to restrict the influx of refugees and to develop newcomers’ sense of civic responsibility. We analyse 2017 policy problematisations and local integration policy workers’ experiences with integrating young, newly arrived refugees under the mandatory municipal integration programme. We find that these policies lead to paradoxical effects when integration goals interact with immigration laws that create precarious temporary living conditions. Moreover, when integration is problematised as an exclusive problem of refugees’ employability and prompt economic self-sufficiency. The policy problematisations neglect the needs of young refugees by overlooking critical aspects of social and cultural integration and obscuring the possibilities for individually tailored services, which, from frontline integration workers’ perspective, are necessary to realise young refugees’ integration.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2021.1873112

White, William A., Remembering Queen Mary: Heritage Conservation, Black People, Denmark, and St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. (2022)

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White, William A., Remembering Queen Mary: Heritage Conservation, Black People, Denmark, and St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, 0.0 (2022), 1–24

On October 1, 1878, Afro-Crucian laborers on the Danish colonial Caribbean island of St. Croix launched a historic protest that resulted in extensive damage to the sugar industry. Known locally as “Fireburn,” this was a formative event in the relationship between Afro-Crucian people and plantation owners, who were mostly of European descent. Histories of Fireburn cite four women, Queen Mary, Queen Agnes, Queen Mathilda, and Susana Abramsen, as the uprising’s leaders. Fireburn, the Queens, and other forms of resistance continue to be sources of pride for Afro-Crucians and are part of Black heritage conservation efforts in St. Croix. Community-based archaeological work conducted by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA) dovetails with the ways Afro-Crucian heritage is created, maintained, and discussed by Afro-Crucian people, but contrasts with prevailing Danish narratives of history. This work has also found a home with anticolonialism scholars in Denmark working to create a more reparatory history.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2022.2034365

ang, Ahrong, Child-Friendly Racism? An Ethnographical Study on Children’s Racialized Becoming in a Race-Blind Context. (2021) [PDF]

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Yang, Ahrong, Child-Friendly Racism? An Ethnographical Study on Children’s Racialized Becoming in a Race-Blind Context, Dissertation, Aalborg University, 2021)

English summary
What makes race and issues concerning racialization primarily
seem a concern for adults? What are the implications of
disconnecting race and children ‒ keeping race and racialization
from children? This dissertation is dedicated to an investigation
of children’s racialized becoming in a Danish context, and in
doing so, by foregrounding the racialized lived experiences
shared by children aged 10-13. The context in which the
children’s racialized lived experiences become, I argue, is
situated in a historically challenged space of denial, evasiveness,
and discomfort towards issues on race. Hence, the racialized
lived experiences shared by the children become within a
context that works against these experiences. It is within this
space of mutual resistance that this research takes its point of
departure.


In getting closer to understanding the racialized becoming of
children, the study is guided by two research interests: 1)
Analytically privileging race as an important social category,
by/and 2) foregrounding the children’s racially lived
experiences. In foregrounding lived experiences as access to
knowledge production, the dissertation finds theoretical
inspiration in postcolonialism, critical race theory, critical
childhood studies, and queer and black feminist perspectives.
What especially draws me towards these insights is how they
offer alternative perspectives on how to understand both
children and race as lived, meaningful categories, however,
socially constructive and performative ones.
The project is based on an ethnographical study with children
attending 4th to 6th grade from spring 2018 to fall 2019. The study
was made up by participant observations, qualitative interviews
with children, informal conversations with teachers at the
schools, and workshops with the children that were designed for
this project. Workshops were based on visual methodologies and
material made by the children.
In particular, the dissertation aims at reflecting on and offering
alternative perspectives into understanding race and childhood
that challenge the idea of children being non-knowledgeable and
in need of protection against issues of race. By queering
children’s racialized becoming, I refer to a non-binary
Child-Friendly Racism? perspective on the child/adult relation, which takes seriously the children’s racialized experiences by also approaching the in-
/outside of the body and emotions non-binarily.
The study shows how the children’s racialized experiences
become within and are expressed through resistance towards
discourses working to suppress these experiences. Manifested
through two article contributions, the research specifically
examines, in the first article, how the racially minoritized
children’s becoming is not only informed by their past
experiences with race and racism. Race is also experienced as
expected futures ‒ what I call racialized forecasting. What the
concept springs from and is trying to grasp is how race becomes
within struggles that the racially minoritized children shared
when trying to make sense of their experiences.
The second article analytically unpacks the notions of ‘child-
friendliness’ through examining the seemingly complex
intertwinement and interconnectedness of race and children,
which I find to be within the concept of innocence. The
dissertation operates with innocence from two different
perspectives: First, in terms of racialized innocence. Second, in
terms of child-ed innocence. Innocence, I argue, is the
intersecting point of children and race: An intersection that
currently works to disconnect children and race. The discourses
of innocence that work to maintain ideas of child(-ed)
innocence, and which furthermore make questioning children’s
innocence seem almost outrageous, I stress, are connected to the
same notions that maintain race-blindness and processes that
discursively have made and sustained the silencing and erasure
of race as a lived category.
It is my hope that this research can give rise to further reflection
on the importance of how race as a social category informs the
lives of children and their feelings of belonging. Both racially
minoritized and white children.


Dansk resume
Hvad gør race og racialiserede problemstillinger til et
anliggende, der ofte kun er forbeholdt voksnes virkelighed?
Hvad er implikationerne ved at afkoble og skærme børn fra race
og racialisering? Denne afhandling undersøger børns
racialiserede tilblivelse (racialized becoming) i en dansk
kontekst med udgangspunkt i racialiserede erfaringer fra børn i
alderen 10-13. Jeg argumenterer for, at den kontekst, hvori
børnenes erfaringer bliver til, er en kontekst, som historisk er
situeret i benægtelse, undvigelser og ubehag omkring
spørgsmål, der involverer race og racialisering. Altså bliver
børnenes racialiserede levede erfaringer til i en kontekst, der
modarbejder og underkender deres oplevelser. Det er en
nysgerrighed for denne modstridende kontekst, som dette
projekt udspringer fra.
For at komme nærmere en forståelse af børns racialiserede
tilblivelse har to forskningsinteresser styret projektet: 1)
Analytisk at privilegere race som en betydningsfuld social
kategori ved at 2) tage analytisk udgangspunkt i børnenes
racialiserede levede erfaringer. Afhandlingen har sit analytiske
fokus på levede erfaringer som adgang til vidensproduktion og
er inspireret af teoretiske perspektiver som postkolonialisme,
critical race theory, kritiske barndomsstudier, queer- og black
feminism. Jeg er særligt inspireret af, hvordan disse perspektiver
tilbyder alternative indsigter til at forstå barn og race som
konstruerede og performative — men alligevel betydningsfulde
— sociale kategorier. Projektet er baseret på et etnografisk studie foretaget fra foråret 2018 til efteråret 2019 med børn i 4. til 6. klasse. Studiet består
af deltagerobservationer, kvalitative interviews med børn,
uformelle samtaler med lærere og workshops med børnene.
Disse workshops var designet til projektet og baseret på visuelle
metoder og materiale lavet af børnene.
I særdeleshed er afhandlingens sigte at reflektere over og tilbyde
alternative perspektiver på race og barndom: Perspektiver, der
udfordrer dikotomiske forestillinger om børn som uvidende,
uskyldige og ufærdige mennesker, der bør beskyttes mod race
indtil de en dag er gamle nok til at erfare ”voksenlivets
realiteter.” Med queering children’s racialized becoming
Child-Friendly Racism? refererer jeg til non-binære perspektiver, som tager børnenes
(racialiserede) erfaringer alvorligt og gør op med binære
forståelser af barn vs. voksen og krop vs. emotionalitet
Studiet demonstrerer, hvordan børnenes racialiserede erfaringer
bliver til igennem modstand mod raceblinde diskurser:
Diskurser, der forsøger at ignorere og undertrykke disse
oplevelser. I afhandlingens to artikler undersøger afhandlingen,
blandt andet, hvordan de racialt minoriserede børns tilblivelse
ikke kun informeres af deres tidligere erfaringer med race og
racisme, men også gennem forventede fremtidige oplevelser.
Dette undersøges i afhandlingens ene artikel gennem begrebet
racialized forecasting, der beskriver hvordan børnene
fremskriver deres levede erfaringer som racialiserede og
forestiller sig fremtidige situationer. Begrebet tager
udgangspunkt i, hvordan race bliver til gennem følelser af
modstand: Følelser, som børnene fortæller om, når de forsøger
at skabe mening ud fra deres erfaringer — levede såvel som
forestillede.
Afhandlingens anden artikel koncentrerer sig om ideen om
’child-friendliness’ [børnevenlighed] — et udtryk, som bringes
op af en gruppe børn i deres interne forhandlinger om race, og
hvad de må tale om som børn. Artiklen fremanalyserer den
komplekse forbundenhed og sammenfiltring mellem race og
børn: En forbundenhed, som jeg vil mene findes i og omkring
uskyldsbegrebet. Afhandlingen opererer med uskyld fra to
forskellige perspektiver: Som racialiseret uskyld (racialized
innocence) og børnegjort uskyld (child-ed innocence).
Uskyldsbegrebet som et skæringspunkt mellem race og barn er
med til at producere diskurser, som frakobler barn fra race – og
race fra barn. De diskursive forestillinger om uskyld, som er med
til at opretholde forestillinger om børns uskyld (eller børnegjort
uskyld), argumenterer jeg for, er direkte forbundet til de
forestillinger, som opretholder raceblindhed: De processer, der
diskursivt har været med til at fortie, nedtone og slette race som
levet kategori.
Mit ønske er, at denne forskning kan være med til at give
anledning til yderligere refleksion over- og dialog om
vigtigheden af, hvordan race som levet kategori er med til at
konstruere og forme børns liv og deres oplevelser af at høre til.
For både racialt minoriserede og hvide børn.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.54337/aau466408959

Yang, Ahrong, Racialized Forecasting. Understanding Race through Children’s (to-Be) Lived Experiences in a Danish School Context. (2021) [PDF]

~ mortenstinus

Yang, Ahrong, Racialized Forecasting. Understanding Race through Children’s (to-Be) Lived Experiences in a Danish School Context, Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 7.3 (2021), 169–78

Is it possible to address racism without mentioning race? Based on two cases from an ethnographical field study conducted in a Danish elementary school, this article investigates how students of colour (aged 10–13) predict future encounters with racism and share their concerns with how to deal with these potential encounters. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion of emotions and concept of past histories of contact and pushes, this article examines how to understand emotions of race when two students share their concerns about for instance, being able to defend themselves and verbalize fear of not belonging. What I am suggesting is that emotions of race are not only shaped by the students’ past experiences but that race also works through emotions of concern about the future as racialized forecasting. These racialized forecastings surface as experiences connected to the children’s black and brown bodies, where their emotions of race intersect with ideas of gender and age. The analysis will show how the children struggle to address their race experiences as they push and are being pushed by race-blind discourses, making it very difficult for the students to make sense of their feelings.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2021.1995141

Sahi̇n, Merve, The Development of the Turkish Minority’s Social Challenges in Denmark from 1970 to 2021, for the Purpose of Integration (2022). [PDF]

~ mortenstinus

Sahi̇n, Merve, The Development of the Turkish Minority’s Social Challenges in Denmark from 1970 to 2021, for the Purpose of Integration, Turkish Journal of Diaspora Studies, 2.1 (2022), 55–72.

Beginning in the 1960’s, Denmark recruited Turkish guest workers. Today, the Turkish minority is Denmark’s largest minority group from non-western countries. This article examines the social challenges of the Turkish minority in Denmark from 1970 to 2021, and their integration during this period. This study uses several methods to obtain insight into the integration process of Turkish immigrants over three generations in Denmark and the challenges they faced and continue to face. In addition to the source criticism and a comprehensive literature review, this study uses qualitative and quantitative methods to understand Turkish immigrants’ immigration processes. Qualitative and quantitative analysis in the field of Danish historical research, specifically the area concerning the Turkish minority are not adequately covered by the existing literature. This study finds that all three generations of the Turkish minority in Denmark experienced social challenges in several areas that are related to each other, and these social challenges have an effect on their integration status. Some social challenges have decreased over generations but specifically discrimination and racism have not.

PDF: https://tjds.org.tr/index.php/tjds/article/view/15

Thijssen, Lex, Frank van Tubergen, Marcel Coenders, Robert Hellpap, and Suzanne Jak, Discrimination of Black and Muslim Minority Groups in Western Societies: Evidence From a Meta-Analysis of Field Experiments. (2022) [PDF]

~ mortenstinus

Thijssen, Lex, Frank van Tubergen, Marcel Coenders, Robert Hellpap, and Suzanne Jak, Discrimination of Black and Muslim Minority Groups in Western Societies: Evidence From a Meta-Analysis of Field Experiments, International Migration Review, 56.3 (2022), 843–80

This article examines discrimination against black and Muslim minority groups in 20 Western labor markets. We analyze the outcomes of 94 field experiments, conducted between 1973 and 2016 and representing ?240,000 fictitious job applications. Using meta-analysis, we find that black minority groups are more strongly discriminated against than non-black minority groups. The degree of discrimination of black minority groups varies cross-nationally, whereas Muslim minority groups are equally discriminated across national contexts. Unexpectedly, discrimination against black minority groups in the United States is mostly lower than in European countries. These findings suggest that racial-ethnic discrimination in hiring can be better understood by taking a multigroup and cross-country perspective.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183211045044

Papadakis, Yiannis, Belonging in a Welfare State: Greek and Greek Cypriot Immigrants in Denmark. (2022)

~ mortenstinus

Papadakis, Yiannis, Belonging in a Welfare State: Greek and Greek Cypriot Immigrants in Denmark, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 0.0 (2022), 1–20

A central question in migration studies concerns how communities of belonging can exist beyond communities of identity. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Greek and Greek Cypriot immigrants in Denmark and theoretical discussions on “translocational belongings”, this article suggests that security, equality and a sense of ownership are key factors that contribute towards an enhanced a sense of belonging premised on solidarity, even in the presence of cultural differences related to identity. Migrant belongings, it is further suggested, should not only be treated as plural but also as comparative vis-à-vis the country of origin. The immigrants’ narratives often focussed on comparisons between Denmark with Greece or Cyprus emphasizing how their interactions with the Danish welfare state contributed to a, comparatively-speaking, more profound sense of belonging in Denmark. Yet, the rise of anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, along with the persistent challenges to the welfare state, have led to rising feelings of alienation.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2085524

Pedersen, Mogens Jin, and Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen, Understanding Discrimination: Outcome-Relevant Information Does Not Mitigate Discrimination. (2022)

~ mortenstinus

Pedersen, Mogens Jin, and Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen, Understanding Discrimination: Outcome-Relevant Information Does Not Mitigate Discrimination, Social Problems, 2022, spac006

People experience discrimination across a variety of domains, including at work and in dealings with public institutions, but what makes some individuals discriminate against others? Two dominant scholarly approaches—“statistical” and “taste-based”—offer different explanations. Statistical discrimination models imply that discrimination occurs because of incomplete information (informational bias), whereas taste-based discrimination models emphasize more elusive and deep-rooted cognitive biases. Adding new insights into whether discrimination is “statistical” or “taste-based,” this article examines how providing information that reduces informational bias affects discrimination. Using a preregistered survey experimental design, a representative sample of Danish residents (n = 2,024) are exposed to three unique vignettes, each involving a choice of service provider (general practitioner, babysitter, and house cleaner). Relating to gender and nativity stereotypes, we manipulate the gender of the general practitioners and the babysitters, and the country of origin of the house cleaners. Moreover, we manipulate exposure to rating cues about the service providers’ task performance, thus mitigating informational bias to some extent. Contrasting the expectations of statistical discrimination models, the performance ratings cues do not mitigate discrimination. Across all three vignettes, the participants exhibit stereotypical preferences, and the performance rating cues do not affect these discriminatory biases.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spac006