Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. & Mia Liinason. Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe: Critical Essays on Knowledge, Inequality and Belonging. (2023). [PDF]

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

PDF: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003245155

Eriksson, Birgit & Anne Mette W. Nielsen. Changing Gellerup Park: Political Interventions and Aesthetic Engagement in an Exposed Social Housing Area in Denmark. (2022) [PDF]

Eriksson, Birgit & Anne Mette W. Nielsen. Changing Gellerup Park: Political Interventions and Aesthetic Engagement in an Exposed Social Housing Area in Denmark. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 31(64), 2022, 76-98.

Some low-income social housing neighborhoods are undergoing radical transformations in Denmark. Classified as “ghettos” and “parallel societies,” and marked by area-specific legislation, we identify a triple exposure in these neighborhoods. The residents are exposed to inequality, stigmatization, and discriminatory interventions. Parallel to this, cultural policies and programs have approached these same neighborhoods based on the assumption that they can be “elevated” through art. Drawing upon a broader research in art project in four social housing areas (Eriksson, Nielsen, Sørensen and Yates, 2022), this article focuses on Gellerup Park in Aarhus and considers how two site-specific art platforms address the site and time-specific conditions of the area, offering alternative relations and forms of engagement.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v31i64.134221

Dunlavy, Andrea, Karl Gauffin, Lisa Berg, Christopher Jamil De Montgomery, Ryan Europa, Ketil Eide, et al. Health outcomes in young adulthood among former child refugees in Denmark, Norway and Sweden: A cross-country comparative study. (2021) [PDF]

Dunlavy, A., Gauffin, K., Berg, L., De Montgomery, C. J., Europa, R., Eide, K., Ascher, H., & Hjern, A. (2021). Health outcomes in young adulthood among former child refugees in Denmark, Norway and Sweden: A cross-country comparative study. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 51(3), 2021, 330-338.

Dunlavy, Andrea, Karl Gauffin, Lisa Berg, Christopher Jamil De Montgomery, Ryan Europa, Ketil Eide, and others, Health Outcomes in Young Adulthood among Former Child Refugees in Denmark, Norway and Sweden: A Cross-Country Comparative Study, Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 2021.

Aims:This study aimed at comparing several health outcomes in young adulthood among child refugees who settled in the different immigration and integration policy contexts of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.Methods:The study population included refugees born between 1972 and 1997 who immigrated before the age of 18 and settled in the three Nordic countries during 1986?2005. This population was followed up in national registers during 2006?2015 at ages 18?43 years and was compared with native-born majority populations in the same birth cohorts using sex-stratified and age-adjusted regression analyses.Results:Refugee men in Denmark stood out with a consistent pattern of higher risks for mortality, disability/illness pension, psychiatric care and substance misuse relative to native-born majority Danish men, with risk estimates being higher than comparable estimates observed among refugee men in Norway and Sweden. Refugee men in Sweden and Norway also demonstrated increased risks relative to native-born majority population men for inpatient psychiatric care, and in Sweden also for disability/illness pension. With the exception of increased risk for psychotic disorders, outcomes among refugee women were largely similar to or better than those of native-born majority women in all countries.Conclusions:The observed cross-country differences in health indicators among refugees, and the poorer health outcomes of refugee men in Denmark in particular, may be understood in terms of marked differences in Nordic integration policies. However, female refugees in all three countries had better relative health outcomes than refugee men did, suggesting possible sex differentials that warrant further investigation.

Aims: This study aimed at comparing several health outcomes in young adulthood among child refugees who settled in the different immigration and integration policy contexts of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Methods:The study population included refugees born between 1972 and 1997 who immigrated before the age of 18 and settled in the three Nordic countries during 1986-2005. This population was followed up in national registers during 2006-2015 at ages 18?43 years and was compared with native-born majority populations in the same birth cohorts using sex-stratified and age-adjusted regression analyses.

Results:Refugee men in Denmark stood out with a consistent pattern of higher risks for mortality, disability/illness pension, psychiatric care and substance misuse relative to native-born majority Danish men, with risk estimates being higher than comparable estimates observed among refugee men in Norway and Sweden. Refugee men in Sweden and Norway also demonstrated increased risks relative to native-born majority population men for inpatient psychiatric care, and in Sweden also for disability/illness pension. With the exception of increased risk for psychotic disorders, outcomes among refugee women were largely similar to or better than those of native-born majority women in all countries.

Conclusions: The observed cross-country differences in health indicators among refugees, and the poorer health outcomes of refugee men in Denmark in particular, may be understood in terms of marked differences in Nordic integration policies. However, female refugees in all three countries had better relative health outcomes than refugee men did, suggesting possible sex differentials that warrant further investigation.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/14034948211031408

Badre-Esfahani, Sara, Lone Kjeld Petersen, Camilla Rahr Tatari, Jan Blaakær, Berit Andersen, and Lene Seibæk. Perceptions of cervical cancer prevention among a group of ethnic minority women in Denmark—A qualitative study. (2021) [PDF]

Badre-Esfahani, Sara, Lone Kjeld Petersen, Camilla Rahr Tatari, Jan Blaakær, Berit Andersen, and Lene Seibæk, Perceptions of Cervical Cancer Prevention among a Group of Ethnic Minority Women in Denmark—A Qualitative Study, PLOS ONE, 16.6 (2021), e0250816 <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250816>

Background Cervical cancer screening (CCS) and human papillomavirus vaccination (HPVV) are effective measures against cervical cancer (CC). Attendance in HPVV and CCS provides the greatest protection, while combined non-attendance in HPVV and CCS provides little to no protection. It is hence concerning that some large ethnic minority groups show considerably lower HPVV and CCS attendance than other women–especially women from Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) countries and Pakistan. Little is, however, known about the reasons for this low combined attendance pattern n. Aim To explore perceptions of and barriers to HPVV and CCS, among MENA and Pakistani women in Denmark. Method Focus group interviews were conducted. Data was transcribed verbatim, and analysed using systematic text condensation. Findings Seventeen long-term resident women originating from six major MENA countries and Pakistan were included. Mean age was 36 years. We found that these women, across different age groups and descent, had sparse knowledge and understanding about CC, and their perceived relevance of disease prevention was low. Compared to HPVV, their barriers to CCS were more fixed and often linked to socio-cultural factors such as taboos related to female genitals and sexuality. Moreover, they presented unmet expectations and signs of mistrust in the healthcare system. However, at the end of the interviews, participants became more attentive toward CC prevention, particularly toward HPVV. Conclusion Elements of insufficient knowledge and understanding of CC and its prevention were found among a group of MENA and Pakistani women. Their socio-cultural background further represents a barrier particularly towards CCS. Additionally, negative experiences and unmet expectations lessen their trust in the healthcare system. All of which underlines the need for new tailored CC preventive strategies for this group. Based on our findings we suggest that future studies develop and evaluate interventions aiming to improve HPVV and CCS, including user-involvement.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250816

Berisha, Tringa. Racialized spatial attachments: Researcher positionality and access in a Danish suburban high school. (2023)

Berisha, Tringa. Racialized spatial attachments: Researcher positionality and access in a Danish suburban high school. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35(2), 2023, 63–79. https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/136438

Danish high school’s rising ethnic/racial diversity and tendencies of segregation call for explorations of students’ educational experiences of racialized differentiation. This article unfolds methodological reflections on this endeavor, by focusing on researcher access. Not only is space a medium through which racial relations materialize – space is also interconnected with access. If researchers depend on relations for access to sites of inquiry, which depends on how researchers are read by actors in the field, it is critical to scrutinize the spatial dimensions to such readings and what knowledge is (allowed to be) produced. Unfolding two ethnographic vignettes, the researcher’s positionality of passing is analyzed to explicate the relationship between racialized bodies and racialized spaces. I propose the notion of spatial attachments as an analytical lens for explaining such body–space conflations to illuminate the interconnectivity between educational spaces and the broader external world, and to expand the language to address racialization in the colorblind context of Danish high schools.

Jacobsen, Gro Hellesdatter, and Anke Piekut, ‘Integrating’ Immigrant Children? School Professionals’ Reflections on the Boundaries between Educational Ideals and Society’s Problematization of Immigrants. (2022) [PDF]

Jacobsen, Gro Hellesdatter, and Anke Piekut, ‘Integrating’ Immigrant Children? School Professionals’ Reflections on the Boundaries between Educational Ideals and Society’s Problematization of Immigrants, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 22.2 (2022), 132–47

In Danish policy and public debates, the concept of integration is often related to a problematization of immigrants, which paradoxically makes their successful integration into Danish society unobtainable. In recent years, Denmark has become known for its increasingly restrictive policies regarding immigration and integration, although an internal ‘exceptionalist’ understanding of the country as a place without discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity still prevails. Drawing on interviews with principals and teachers from 15 Danish schools, the paper analyses these professionals’ reflections on their work of educating immigrant children in a societal context of restrictive immigration and integration policies, focusing specifically on how they construct, cross, and work at the boundaries between school and society. The article contributes to our understanding of professionals’ processes of navigating and demarcating themselves from a highly politicized context of immigration and integration policies, while at the same time illuminating more general societal processes regarding race, integration, and nationalism.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.12369

Jensen, Tina Gudrun, and Rebecka Söderberg, Governing Urban Diversity through Myths of National Sameness – a Comparative Analysis of Denmark and Sweden. (2021) [PDF]

Jensen, Tina Gudrun, and Rebecka Söderberg, Governing Urban Diversity through Myths of National Sameness – a Comparative Analysis of Denmark and Sweden, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 11.1 (2021), 5–19

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore problematisations of urban diversity in urban and integration policies in Denmark and Sweden; the paper aims to show how such policies express social imaginaries about the self and the other and underlying assumptions of sameness that legitimise diverging ways of managing urban diversity and (re)organising the city.

Design/methodology/approach Inspired by anthropology of policy and post-structural approaches to policy analysis, the authors approach urban and integration policies as cultural texts that are central to the organisation of cities and societies. With a comparative approach, the authors explore how visions of diversity take shape and develop over time in Swedish and Danish policies on urban development and integration.

Findings Swedish policy constructs productiveness as crucial to the imagined national sameness, whereas Danish policy constructs cultural sameness as fundamental to the national self-image. By constructing the figure of “the unproductive”/“the non-Western” as the other, diverging from an imagined sameness, policies for organising the city through removing and “improving” urban diverse others are legitimised.

Originality/value The authors add to previous research by focussing on the construction of the self as crucial in processes of othering and by highlighting how both nationalistic and colour-blind policy discourses construct myths of national sameness, which legitimise the governing of urban diversity. The authors highlight and de-naturalise assumptions and categorisations by showing how problem representations differ over time and between two neighbouring countries.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-06-2021-0034

Johansen, Mette-Louise E., Intimate Belonging—Intimate Becoming: How Police Officers and Migrant Gang Defectors Seek to (Re)Shape Ties of Belonging in Denmark. (2022) [PDF]

Johansen, Mette-Louise E., Intimate Belonging—Intimate Becoming: How Police Officers and Migrant Gang Defectors Seek to (Re)Shape Ties of Belonging in Denmark, Genealogy, 6.2 (2022), 40

This article examines the ways that Danish gang exit programs engage police officers and gang defectors in a pervasive work on belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. In urban Denmark, the majority of gang exit candidates are of ethnic-minority background and form part of the street-gang environment in marginalized migrant neighborhoods. This is an intimate social environment constituted by diasporic kinship networks, where gang formations are entangled with kinship formations. Hence, when gang defectors leave their gang, they also often leave their family and childhood home for a life in unfamiliar places and positions. As I show, gang desistance is thus a highly dilemmatic process in which gang defectors find themselves “unhinged” from meaningful social and kinship relationships and in search of new ways of embedding themselves into a social world. Based on an ethnographic study of gang exit processes in Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus, this article shows how police officers and gang defectors seek to (re)shape ties of belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. The process, I argue, illuminates the intimate aspect of the notion of belonging, in which kin and state relatedness is deeply rooted in interpersonal spaces and relationships.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020040

Kende, Judit, Julia Reiter, Canan Coşkan, Bertjan Doosje, and Eva G. T. Green, The Role of Minority Discrimination and Political Participation in Shaping Majority Perceptions of Discrimination: Two Cross-National Studies. (2022) [PDF]

Kende, Judit, Julia Reiter, Canan Coşkan, Bertjan Doosje, and Eva G. T. Green, The Role of Minority Discrimination and Political Participation in Shaping Majority Perceptions of Discrimination: Two Cross-National Studies, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2022

We develop a minority influence approach to multilevel intergroup research and examine whether country-level minority norms shape majority members? perceptions of discrimination. Defining minority norms via actual minority discrimination and political participation, we hypothesized that in national contexts with greater minority experiences of discrimination and greater minority political participation, majority perceptions of discrimination should be higher. We implemented two cross-national multilevel studies drawing on the European Social Survey and Eurobarometer data with 19,392 participants in 22 countries in Study 1, and with 17,651 participants in 19 countries in Study 2. Higher aggregate levels of minority discrimination were not related to greater acknowledgment of discrimination among majority members. However, higher aggregate minority political participation did relate to higher perceptions of discrimination in Studies 1 and 2. We conclude that country-level minority norms are consequential for majority attitudes, but these norms need to be actively communicated through political participation.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302221075711

Khawaja, Iram, Tina Wilchen Christensen, and Line Lerche Mørck, Dehumanization and a Psychology of Deglobalization: Double Binds and Movements beyond Radicalization and Racialized Mis-Interpellation. (2023) [PDF]

Khawaja, Iram, Tina Wilchen Christensen, and Line Lerche Mørck, Dehumanization and a Psychology of Deglobalization: Double Binds and Movements beyond Radicalization and Racialized Mis-Interpellation, Theory & Psychology, 33.2 (2023), 249–65

This article seeks to conceptualize and analyze how processes of deglobalization are interdependently connected with processes of dehumanization, double bind, and racialization in the field of radicalization of ethnic and religious minorities in Denmark. We analyze two sociopolitical cases to show how deglobalization takes form in local practice, enabling or limiting specific subjects’ and groups’ possibilities of being perceived and accepted as Danish citizens. Relations between radicalization and dehumanization are explored across subjective, societal, political, and discursive practices linked to double bind processes and possible movements beyond them. Our aim is to establish a theoretical framework for exploring a psychology of deglobalization that takes into account processes of racialization, mis-interpellation, double bind, and the possibilities for rehumanization.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/09593543221138541

Thisted, Kirsten, Blame, Shame, and Atonement: Greenlandic Responses to Racialized Discourses about Greenlanders and Danes. (2022) [PDF]

Thisted, Kirsten, Blame, Shame, and Atonement: Greenlandic Responses to Racialized Discourses about Greenlanders and Danes, Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, 1.2 (2022)

Outside Greenland, many believe that the Greenlandic name for Greenland means “Land of the People.” However, the Greenlandic word for human being or person is inuk (plural: inuit), and Greenland is called Kalaallit Nunaat not Inuit Nunaat. Kalaallit is the West Greenlandic term for modern-day Greenlanders who trace their ancestry along two lines: to the Inuit in the West and the Scandinavians in the East. During the first half of the twentieth century, this mixed ancestry was an important argument for the Greenlandic claim for recognition and equality. This article examines a literary source, Pavia Petersen’s 1944 novel, Niuvertorutsip pania (The outpost manager’s daughter). The novel’s female protagonist, who is of mixed ancestry, is staged as a national symbol for modern Greenland, a country that appropriates European culture while remaining Greenlandic. After the end of the colonial period, the Inuit legacy and Greenlanders’ status as an Indigenous people became important drivers of the Greenlandic claim for independence. In present-day Greenlandic film and literature, Danes are often left out of the story entirely, delegitimizing much of society’s genetic and cultural legacy. Naturally, this poses a problem for the Greenlanders who not only number Europeans among their remote ancestors but also live with a dual identity, with one Danish and one Greenlandic parent. This article illustrates that the notion of “mixed-breed” or “half” Greenlanders is currently regarded with such ambivalent feelings because it accentuates unresolved tensions among the ethnic groups, including the continued dominance of the outdated (colonial) affective economies in Danish-Greenlandic relations.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.5070/C81258339

Kjærulff, Thora Majlund et al. Geographical Inequalities in Acute Myocardial Infarction beyond Neighbourhood-Level and Individual-Level Sociodemographic Characteristics: A Danish 10-Year Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study. (2019) [PDF]

Kjærulff, Thora Majlund, Kristine Bihrmann, Ingelise Andersen, Gunnar Hilmar Gislason, Mogens Lytken Larsen, and Annette Kjær Ersbøll, Geographical Inequalities in Acute Myocardial Infarction beyond Neighbourhood-Level and Individual-Level Sociodemographic Characteristics: A Danish 10-Year Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study, BMJ Open, 9.2 (2019).

Objective This study examined whether geographical patterns in incident acute myocardial infarction (AMI) were explained by neighbourhood-level and individual-level sociodemographic characteristics.

Design An open cohort study design of AMI-free adults (age ≥30 years) with a residential location in Denmark in 2005–2014 was used based on nationwide administrative population and health register data linked by the unique personal identification number. Poisson regression of AMI incidence rates (IRs) with a geographical random effect component was performed using a Bayesian approach. The analysis included neighbourhood-level variables on income, ethnic composition, population density and population turnover and accounted for individual-level age, sex, calendar year, cohabitation status, income and education. Setting Residents in Denmark (2005–2014).

Participants The study population included 4 128 079 persons (33 907 796 person-years at risk) out of whom 98 265 experienced an incident AMI. Outcome measure Incident AMI registered in the National Patient Register or the Register of Causes of Death. Results Including individual and neighbourhood sociodemographic characteristics in the model decreased the variation in IRs of AMI. However, living in certain areas was associated with up to 40% increased IRs of AMI in the adjusted model and accounting for sociodemographic characteristics only moderately changed the geographical disease patterns.

Conclusions Differences in sociodemographic characteristics of the neighbourhood and individuals explained part, but not all of the geographical inequalities in incident AMI. Prevention strategies should address the confirmed social inequalities in incident AMI, but also target the areas with a heavy disease burden to enable efficient allocation of prevention resources.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-024207

Kristensen, Morten Stinus, ‘We Are Never Allowed to Just Be Ourselves!’: Navigating Hegemonic Danishness in the Online Muslim Counterpublic. (2023) [PDF]

Kristensen, Morten Stinus, ‘We Are Never Allowed to Just Be Ourselves!’: Navigating Hegemonic Danishness in the Online Muslim Counterpublic, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35.2 (2023), 113–29.

For several decades, mainstream media have positioned Muslims as cultural, political, and social outsiders to Denmark. Danish Muslims confront and navigate this exclusionary racial project of hegemonic Danishness in a host of ways, including through online communication and social media practices. This article is a qualitative study of  Danish Muslims who produce discursive interventions on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram in direct and indirect relation to mainstream media discourses on Muslimness. Their social media practices are conceptualized as part of an emerging, online Danish Muslim counterpublic where features that afford interactivity shape the counterpublic to be communal in distinct ways. This digital counterpublic provides direct challenges to hegemonic Danishness’ one-dimensional representation of Muslimness. Particularly when it comes to questions of gender and claims to ordinariness through quotidian posts on life as a Danish person who just happens to be Muslim, these social media practices are racial projects that undercut hegemonic Danishness’ racialization of Muslimness as non-Danish, monolithic, and culturally deficient.

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/132551

Lapiņa, Linda, Rashmi Singla, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Karmen Tornius, and Laura Horn, How Is the Anti/Not/Un-Racist University a Radical Idea? : Experiences from the Solidarity Initiative at Roskilde University. (2023) [PDF]

Lapiņa, Linda, Rashmi Singla, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Karmen Tornius, and Laura Horn, How Is the Anti/Not/Un-Racist University a Radical Idea? : Experiences from the Solidarity Initiative at Roskilde University, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35.2 (2023), 168–77

In this essay, we share our experiences with a university campaign for solidarity with anti-racism struggles at Roskilde University (RUC, Denmark) and around the world. We situate the initiative in the broader context of Danish universities as racialized institutions. We recount previous initiatives of anti-racist and diversity-focused campaigns on campus and then unfold the events around the solidarity campaign of 2020 and the time thereafter. We end with an assessment of where we stand now, insisting on the need to continue to crack walls and push doors open.

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/132553

Li, Jin Hui, The Lived Class and Racialization – Histories of ‘Foreign Workers’ Children’s’ School Experiences in Denmark. (2021) [PDF]

Li, Jin Hui, The Lived Class and Racialization – Histories of ‘Foreign Workers’ Children’s’ School Experiences in Denmark, Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 7.3 (2021), 190–99

In recent years, the Danish education context has seen an increased concern about underperforming students with migratory histories (particularly students perceived as non-Western descendants) in the political and pedagogical discourses. There seem to be some historical tensions between the societal expectation of class mobility through education on one hand and the neglect of issues of class in the curriculum of schooling for migrant students on the other. These groups of students were labelled ‘foreign workers’ children’ in the 1970s’ education policy, with stress on ‘the foreign’ rather than ‘the worker’ part. Based on oral history interviews with former migrant students, this article explores how the class process for migrant students operated through racialized practices in Danish schooling in the 1980s. Contributing to the literature on migrant education and class experiences, the study finds that the migrant students’ lived class experiences are woven into the processes of racialization in such a way that even the migrant students from academic homes had racialized struggles sustaining their middle-classed positionality in the Danish school. The arrangement of the power structures of class is hence strongly interwoven with the power structure of race in the historical context of Danish schooling.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2021.1985413

Li, Jin Hui, and Mette Buchardt, ‘Feeling Strange’ ‒ Oral Histories of Newly Arrived Migrant Children’s Experiences of Schooling in Denmark from the 1970s. (2022)

Li, Jin Hui, and Mette Buchardt, ‘Feeling Strange’ ‒ Oral Histories of Newly Arrived Migrant Children’s Experiences of Schooling in Denmark from the 1970s, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 2022

Based on oral history interviews with adults with a migration history who in their childhood entered into the Danish education system as “newcomers”, the article points out that the practised identity politics of schooling in the 1970s in Denmark for migrant students was operated through affective practices of “feeling strange”. The article explores how the fact that emotions of “feeling strange” have shaped newly arrived migrants’ schooling experience in Denmark since the 1970s connects to processes of racialisation. Rather than being connected only to “feeling new” and “unexpected”, the strangeness appears as connected to the broader affective hierarchies of racialisation in a way that makes it possible for new migrant students to feel strange in a “familiar institution” such as school. The study also displays that racialised emotions of feeling strange for migrants can easily re-emerge, influencing their educational and professional paths when remembered as adults. The effects of affective racialised practice learned in the school institution thus has severe consequences for the students because their access to school is shaped through minoritised positions, something that stays with them after leaving school.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2022.2065641

Li, Jin Hui, and Ahrong Yang, Forhandlinger af tilhørsforhold på tværs af tid: Racialt minoriserede kvinders erindringer og erfaringer med at høre til i den danske folkeskole. (2023) [PDF]

Li, Jin Hui, and Ahrong Yang, Forhandlinger af tilhørsforhold på tværs af tid: Racialt minoriserede kvinders erindringer og erfaringer med at høre til i den danske folkeskole, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35.2 (2023), 80–95

Inspired by spatial education research and queer and critical race theories, this article investigates how experiences of being a racially minoritized girl/woman in a Danish primary school context have shaped over time and influenced their belonging at school and in society. The analytical insights in this article derive from empirical material that spans a longer period of time and are based on, respectively, empirical material in which racially minoritized women share their experiences of attending Danish primary school in the period 1970 to the 1990s and empirical material in which female students share their experiences of attending Danish primary school today. While the students’ experiences are negotiated on different racialized terms, the temporal perspective helps to identify patterns of how racial exclusion cuts across time and how access to being seen as (fully) Danish is a struggle for racially minoritized female students. Overall, the analysis finds that belonging in the Danish primary school and in Danish society is a constant struggle for racially minoritized female students. Demanding continuous negotiation, explanations, and imagined alternatives, belonging is neither neutral nor taken for granted by the racially minoritized female students neither in the 1970s nor today.

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/135625

Liinason, Mia. Homonationalism across Borders. Exploring Cross-Border Exchange and Strategic Homonationalism in the Construction of Progressive Nationalism. (2022) [PDF]

Liinason, Mia, Homonationalism across Borders. Exploring Cross-Border Exchange and Strategic Homonationalism in the Construction of Progressive Nationalism, Sexualities, 2022.

While scholars have shown the significance of transnational exchanges for shaping feminist and LGBTI+ connectivities across borders to challenge national exclusions and global divides, less attention has been directed at exploring the complex and ambiguous ways in which transnational collaborations and cross-border exchanges also may facilitate and support national agendas. That is what this article sets out to explore. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTI+ actors in a Scandinavian context, this article uses the notion of strategic homonationalism to examine the ambiguous ways in which transnational, diasporic, and refugee LGBTI+ politics and locations in the Scandinavian region strategically engage with regulatory notions of liberal-mindedness and with exclusionary discourses of genuine LGBTI+ subjectivity in this context. Rather than being restricted to national contexts, I show, forms of progressive nationalism may be facilitated by crossborder exchange of various kind. Influenced by scholars who argue for the need to bring back a focus on racialization and national belonging in analyses of the making of sexualized and/or gendered difference, the article attends to the complex politics involved in inhabiting the impossible position of not being able to “not want rights.” To this end, this article reworks homonationalism, from a concept that emerges or is rooted in a US context, to a concept that travels and is differently shaped and picked up in various located sites, showing that homonationalism in a Scandinavian context takes shape through a moralistically superior position.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607221112647

Lindberg, Annika, Feeling Difference: Race, Migration, and the Affective Infrastructure of a Danish Detention Camp. (2022) [PDF]

Lindberg, Annika, Feeling Difference: Race, Migration, and the Affective Infrastructure of a Danish Detention Camp, Incarceration, 3.1 (2022).

Migration-related detention, the administrative incarceration of people lacking legal authorisation to remain, has become a standardised technique used by states to violently regulate and discipline undesired mobility. As carceral junctions, migration detention camps serve to identify, confine, symbolically punish and expel people deemed ‘out of place’ in the national order of things. As bordering mechanisms, they are techniques of sorting and controlling populations, and sites where we can observe the enforcement of state racism. These processes of racialisation and expulsion operate corporally and affectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with prison officers working inside Denmark’s migration-related detention camp, and engaging with the literature on race, emotion and border criminology, the article traces the role of racial affect in forging the identities of people interacting inside the camp. It demonstrates how prison officers’ racialised suspicion, compromised compassion, and passionate nationalism partake in making incarcerated migrants into expellable subjects, and in ordering them in accordance with matrices of racial differentiation. The officers’ emotions, I argue, should be understood as part of the camp’s infrastructure, and productive for the border regime.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/26326663221084590

Marvel, Stu, Reproducing the Intersections of Inclusion and Exclusion: Exploring Gender Recognition Laws, Reproductive Technology, and the Children’s Act in Denmark. (2022) [PDF]

Marvel, Stu, Reproducing the Intersections of Inclusion and Exclusion: Exploring Gender Recognition Laws, Reproductive Technology, and the Children’s Act in Denmark, AG About Gender – International Journal of Gender Studies, 11.22 (2022)

This paper explores a November 2017 ruling from a Copenhagen appellate court, which involved a transgender man, his cisgender female partner, and their child conceived through third-party donor conception. In mapping the inclusions and exclusions performed by multiple domains of law, this paper applies an intersectional heuristic to track the state reproduction of reproductive norms. Although the plaintiff, a Korean adoptee, had legally changed his gender identity from female to male by the time the child was born, the case arose when he sought recognition of his fatherhood – not motherhood – for his mixed-race child. Intersectional analysis offers a powerful tool to map the dense cluster of Danish law at work in this case, as an institutional matrix that simultaneously recognized self-elected gender identity; denied socially gendered parenthood; and failed to register claims to inter-generational racial affiliation within cross-cutting legal architectures.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.15167/2279-5057/AG2022.11.22.2018

Milman, Noa, and Nicole Doerr, Activists’ Visibility Acts of Citizenship and Media (Mis)Representation of BLM. (2023) [PDF]

Milman, Noa, and Nicole Doerr, Activists’ Visibility Acts of Citizenship and Media (Mis)Representation of BLM, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 0.0 (2023), 1–27

This paper takes a novel approach to studying the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that emerged in the summer of 2020. Drawing on multimodal qualitative visual analysis methods, we study acts of deliberate altering and erasure of statues that represent heroes of colonialism in Greenland and Denmark. The paper conceptualises these actions as ‘visibility acts of citizenship’ in which racialised minorities claim their symbolic space in the public sphere and criticise racialized and gendered structures of oppression. We then provide a detailed visual and textual analysis of conservative Danish media representations of the protest. This allows us to show how the media (mis)represented protesters’ actions, and its response to accusations of racism and calls for change. Thus, we extend the literature on visual analysis of protest by including not only activists’ visual acts but also the visual responses of mainstream conservative media to the movement.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2023.2187427

PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369313512_Activists%27_visibility_acts_of_citizenship_and_media_misrepresentation_of_BLM

Mylonas, Yiannis, and Matina Noutsou, Interpolations of class, ‘race’, and politics: Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten and its coverage of Greek national elections during the ‘Greek crisis’. (2021) [PDF]

Mylonas, Yiannis, and Matina Noutsou, Interpolations of class, ‘race’, and politics: Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten and its coverage of Greek national elections during the ‘Greek crisis’, Nordicom Review, 42.s3 (2021), 56–70

This article focuses on the ways in which the Danish liberal mainstream press covered events related to the so-called Greek crisis. In particular, we examine the coverage of the different Greek national elections that took place during the Greek crisis years (2010–2019) by Jyllands-Posten (JP), a popular Danish daily newspaper. Qualitative content analysis is deployed to study a corpus of 70 news and editorial articles published by JP on the aforementioned topic. Our analysis highlights the existence of three main interrelated themes in JP’s constructions of the Greek elections: a moralist, a culturalist, and a technocratic/anti-leftist theme. These themes are theorised through the use of relevant theory on class cultures and politics today.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0026

Nebeling, Michael, and Mons Bissenbakker, The White Tent of Grief. Racialized Conditions of Public Mourning in Denmark. (2021) [PDF]

Nebeling, Michael, and Mons Bissenbakker, The White Tent of Grief. Racialized Conditions of Public Mourning in Denmark, Social & Cultural Geography, 22.2 (2021), 170–88

In 2015, Danish-Palestinian Omar El-Hussein shot and killed two men in Copenhagen, before being killed himself by the police. Danish media immediately classified El-Hussein’s actions as ‘a terrorist attack’, and they became the object of extreme concern to the Danish public. In the following days, the two murder sites were momentarily turned into public memorial spaces. When the site of the killing of El-Hussein also became a site of mourning, however, it prompted a negative reaction from politicians and the white majority public. While the mixed reactions to publicly mourning a murderer are understandable, they also reveal something about the racialized conditions of public mourning. Reading the different acts of publicly mourning El-Hussein, the article investigates the ways in which public sites of grief are outlined by racialized economies. This article builds upon Butler’s argument that public mourning forms as indicative of which lives are considered lives at all. However, we argue that such an analysis must consider the racialized logics of the performativity of public mourning: Thus, while non-white grief seems not to be recognized as grief at all, white grief tends to reiterate the racialized processes that outline white lives as grievable at the expense of non-white lives.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1563708

PDF: https://www.academia.edu/42840275/The_white_tent_of_grief_Racialized_conditions_of_public_mourning_in_Denmark

Nygaard, Bertel, Mediating Rock and Roll: Tommy Steele in Denmark. (2022) [PDF]

Nygaard, Bertel, Mediating Rock and Roll: Tommy Steele in Denmark, 1957–8, Cultural History, 11.1 (2022), 27–48

Though rarely acknowledged in later historiography, British singer Tommy Steele was a key figure in the early European negotiations of rock and roll in 1957–58. As an accommodating British working-class youth with an energetic, yet non-sexual mode of performance, he was favourably compared with the image of American rock and roll with its associations of juvenile delinquency, cultural ‘blackness’ and illegitimately sexuality as personified by Elvis Presley in particular. Yet, Tommy Steele’s version of rock and roll provided not simply an alternative to the ‘hard’, more rebellious strands of American youth culture. Rather, it allowed him and his fans to negotiate the dominant adult conceptions of rock and roll and its cultural associations of place, race, gender, class and age, thus inadvertently creating a pattern for a rapid succession of new youth idols, including the relaunching of Presley and other American rock and roll artists to European youth though a complex pattern of locating counterparts to individual celebrities. In that sense, Tommy Steele functioned as a ‘vanishing mediator’ of rock and roll culture in Europe. This article is a particular case study of such developments of celebrity and fan culture as they occurred in 1950s Denmark.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2022.0253

Pedersen, Sofie, Poster Children of Integration and the Question of Being a ‘Good Danish Muslim’. (2017) [PDF]

Pedersen, Sofie, Poster Children of Integration and the Question of Being a ‘Good Danish Muslim’, Scandinavian Journal of Islamic Studies, 11.1 (2017), 30–47

This article explores the intersection of subjectivity construction among Muslim youth with Danish welfare state governmentality. More specifically, it looks at campaigns in which successful professionals and students of non-Western descent, primarily Muslims, are used strategically as role models to target ethnic minorities in general, and Muslims in particular. By communicating their life stories, the role models become real life examples of successful integration meant to inspire others to follow their path. Thus the campaigns are a part of the prevalent discourse that views minorities (i.e. non-Danish and non-Christian) as particularly problematic to integrate and therefore needing special attention for becoming “compatible” with the values of the Danish welfare state. Taking its departure in these campaigns and applying a governmentality-inspired approach, this paper seeks to investigate normative state-prescribed forms of being a “good Danish Muslim.” It analyses how this image is being constructed and negotiated in a matrix combining welfare state policies and individual self-interpretation.

Denne artikel undersøger krydsfeltet mellem subjektivitetskonstruktion blandt unge muslimer og den danske velfærdsstats governmentalitet. Mere specifikt ser artiklen på kampagner, hvor unge studerende og erhvervsaktive med anden etnisk baggrund end dansk, primært muslimer, bruges strategisk som rollemodeller for etniske minoriteter generelt og muslimer i særdeleshed. Ved at fortælle egne livshistorier bliver rollemodellerne levende eksempler på succesfuld integration til inspiration for andre. Således er kampagnerne del af en eksisterende diskurs, inden for hvilken minoriteter (altså ikke-danske og ikke-kristne) anses for at være særligt vanskelige at integrere og dermed en gruppe, der kalder på en særlig indsats for at blive “kompatible” med den danske velfærdsstats værdier. Med afsæt i disse kampagner og en governmentalitetsinspireret analyse undersøger denne artikel sta tens normative bud på, hvordan man kan være “en god dansk muslim”. Analysen viser, hvorledes denne forestilling konstrueres og forhandles i et felt, der forbinder velfærdsstatens forskrifter og individers selvfortolkning.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7146/tifo.v11i1.102871

PDF: https://tifoislam.dk/article/view/102871