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feelings because it accentuates unresolved tensions among the ethnic groups, including the continued dominance of the outdated (colonial) affective economies in Danish-Greenlandic relations.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

Lapiņa, Linda, ‘Diversity Tourists’? Tracing Whiteness through Affective Encounters with Diversity in a Gentrifying District in Copenhagen. (2022)

Lapiņa, Linda, ‘Diversity Tourists’? Tracing Whiteness through Affective Encounters with Diversity in a Gentrifying District in Copenhagen, Social & Cultural Geography, 23.4 (2022), 578–97.

This article develops the diversity tourist as an analytical figure to explore how middle-class whiteness emerges through encounters with racialized diversity in gentrifying urban space. Drawing on interviews with white middle-class Danish residents in Copenhagen’s Nordvest district, I examine how whiteness takes shape through affective ambivalence and negotiations of proximity and distance. My informants live in Nordvest, but see themselves as privileged tourists. They perceive diverse Others as true locals whose presence not only stimulates and entertains them, but also facilitates self-development, increased awareness and inclusive pedagogy. Moreover, the local spaces and people of Nordvest represent a different or superior reality and promise an escape from white, gentrified Copenhagen. I collect these practices in the figure of the diversity tourist to show how a particular brand of Danish middle-class whiteness emerges through embracing diversity and reminiscing over one’s own privileges vis-à-vis racialized, less advantaged people and spaces. I examine how, despite attempts at transcendence, this whiteness feels claustrophobic, finding itself in a limbo, trapped by its own gaze. The figure of diversity tourist contributes to studies of whiteness and gentrification, capturing how whiteness and intersectional privilege are enlaced in space and fueled by affective ambivalence.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2020.1783349

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

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

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, 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

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

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

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

Lundsteen, Martin. Displacing the Other to Unite the Nation: The Parallel Society Legislation in Denmark. (2023)

Lundsteen, Martin, Displacing the Other to Unite the Nation: The Parallel Society Legislation in Denmark, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2023.

In 2018, the then right-wing government in Denmark led by Lars Løkke Rasmussen and supported by the extreme right-wing party Danish People’s Party presented new legislation to end ‘parallel societies’ in Denmark by toughening the criminal law, enforcing Danish knowledge and nursery school assistance to toddlers, and, more importantly for this article, a series of urban interventions in ‘ghetto areas’ considered as such mainly when the proportion of immigrants and descendants from non-Western countries exceeded 50 per cent. Until recently research has focused on either the discursive elements of the ‘ghetto politics’ in Denmark or the urban interventions from an architectural or urban planning point of view. However, newfangled research deal with the entwined economic elements. In this article, I compare the different developmental plans proposed in the affected areas because of the legislation, with an aim to reach further and point at the inherent elements of urban b/ordering, that is, measures taken to attain social order and gain legitimacy by demarcating categories of people to incorporate some and exclude others through urban space. Indeed, through this comparison, I conclude that the ghetto legislation is a compelling example of the urban b/ordering inherent to the politics and dynamics of current liberal capitalist social democracies. It is a social experiment that remodels the geography of Denmark in terms that recall the eugenic and hygienic social and urban policies of the 19th century and form part of a worrying pattern that may have consequences that go beyond the stated ones.

DOI: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09697764231165202

Matwijkiw, Anja, and Bronik Matwijkiw. Illiberal versus Liberal State Branding and Public International Law: Denmark and the Approximation to Human(Itarian) Rightlessness. (2019)

Matwijkiw, Anja, and Bronik Matwijkiw. Illiberal versus Liberal State Branding and Public International Law: Denmark and the Approximation to Human(Itarian) Rightlessness, in Global Community Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence 2018, ed. by Giuliana Ziccardi Capaldo (New York, USA: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 207–35.

https://academic.oup.com/book/35064/chapter-abstract/299006236?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Matwijkiw, Anja, and Bronik Matwijkiw, Denmark’s Blanket Burqa Ban: A National(Ist) Perspective. (2021)

Matwijkiw, Anja, and Bronik Matwijkiw, Denmark’s Blanket Burqa Ban: A National(Ist) Perspective, in Law, Cultural Studies and the “Burqa Ban” Trend: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Anja Matwijkiw and Anna Oriolo (Chicago: Intersentia, 2021), pp. 349–89.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/law-cultural-studies-and-the-burqa-ban-trend/444A643854DD73A214760F2E64E0455A

Doxtater, Amanda, Terror Melodrama, Race and the Nation: Ulaa Salim’s Sons of Denmark. (2022)

Doxtater, Amanda, Terror Melodrama, Race and the Nation: Ulaa Salim’s Sons of Denmark, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 12.1 (2022), 47–56

Ulaa Salim’s 2019 film, Sons of Denmark, employs terror melodrama, an iteration of the melodramatic mode related to 9/11 that represents the nation as innocent and violated. This allows the film to raise questions about masculinity, systemic racism and white innocence in the decades-long rise of far-right political parties in Denmark.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00063_1

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

Padovan-Özdemir, Marta, and Trine Øland, Racism in Danish Welfare Work with Refugees: Troubled by Difference, Docility and Dignity. (2022)

Padovan-Özdemir, Marta, and Trine Øland, Racism in Danish Welfare Work with Refugees: Troubled by Difference, Docility and Dignity (Routledge, 2022)

This book explores contemporary Danish relations of colonial complicity in welfare work with newly arrived refugees (1978-2016) as recursive histories that reveal new shapes and shades of racism.  Focussing on super- and subordination in helping relations of postcoloniality, the book displays the durability of coloniality and the workings of raceless racism in welfare work with refugees. Its main contribution is the excavation of stock stories of colour-blindness, potentialising and compassion, which help welfare workers invest in burying that which keeps haunting welfare work with refugees, i.e., modern ghosts of difference, docility and dignity.  The book dismantles the global myth of the Danish benevolent, universalistic welfare state and it is of interest to every scholar and student, who wants to make inquiries about Danish exceptionalism and the hidden interaction between past and present, the visible and invisible in Danish welfare work with refugees.

https://www.routledge.com/Racism-in-Danish-Welfare-Work-with-Refugees-Troubled-by-Difference-Docility/Padovan-Ozdemir-Oland/p/book/9780367563356

Petersen, Anne Ring, ‘In the First Place, We Don’t Like to Be Called “Refugees”’: Dilemmas of Representation and Transversal Politics in the Participatory Art Project 100% FOREIGN? (2021) [PDF]

Petersen, Anne Ring, ‘In the First Place, We Don’t Like to Be Called “Refugees”’: Dilemmas of Representation and Transversal Politics in the Participatory Art Project 100% FOREIGN?, Humanities, 10.4 (2021), 126

100% FOREIGN? (100% FREMMED?) is an art project consisting of 250 life stories of individuals who were granted asylum in Denmark between 1956 and 2019. Thus, it can be said to form a collective portrait that inserts citizens of refugee backgrounds into the narrative of the nation, thereby expanding the idea of national identity and culture. 100% FOREIGN? allows us to think of participatory art as a privileged site for the exploration of intersubjective relations and the question of how to “represent” citizens with refugee experience as well as the history and practice of asylum. The conflicting aims and perceptions involved in such representations are many, as suggested by the opening sentence of Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay “We, Refugees”: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees’”. Using 100% FOREIGN? as an analytical reference point, this article discusses some of the ethical and political implications of representing former refugees. It briefly considers recent Danish immigration and asylum policies to situate the project in its regional European context and argues that, similarly to its neighbouring countries, Denmark can be described as a “postmigrant society” (Foroutan). To frame 100% FOREIGN? theoretically, this article draws on Arendt’s essay, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of speaking nearby, as well as the feminist concept of transversal politics (Meskimmon, Yuval-Davis). It is hoped that this approach will lead to a deeper understanding of what participatory art can bring to the ethical politics of representing refugee experience.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.3390/h10040126

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, The Aestheticisation of Late Capitalist Fascism: Notes for a Communist Art Theory. (2021) [PDF]

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, The Aestheticisation of Late Capitalist Fascism: Notes for a Communist Art Theory, Third Text, 35.3 (2021), 341–54

Picking up Walter Benjamin’s analysis of German Fascism as an aestheticisation of politics, the article develops the concept of late capitalist fascism for which aesthetics plays an important role. Today fascism is not primarily a political force but a cultural phenomenon that circulates as language, emblems and objects. Because of its history fascism does not dare name itself as such but fascism is fast becoming part of everyday life in a number of countries including Hungary, Italy and the United States, but also France and Denmark where the threat of fascism is used as a pretext for imposing fascist measures especially in relation to immigration and asylum policies.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2021.1916268

Rafiqi, Arzoo, and Jens Peter Frølund Thomsen, Group Discrimination, Intergroup Contact, and Ethnic Minority Members’ Reactions toward the Majority. (2021) [PDF]

Rafiqi, Arzoo, and Jens Peter Frølund Thomsen, Group Discrimination, Intergroup Contact, and Ethnic Minority Members’ Reactions toward the Majority, Ethnicities, 21.1 (2021), 3–22

This study expands research on how intergroup contact makes ethnic minority members less prejudiced toward the majority group. Specifically, we propose that perceived group discrimination may serve as an essential boundary condition of the friendship?prejudice relationship. Accordingly, analyses show that: (a) cross-group friendship predicts less prejudice, (b) perceived group discrimination relates to greater prejudice only among noncontacted ethnic minority members, and (c) greater perceived group discrimination enhances the ability of cross-group friendship to predict reduced prejudice toward majority members. The enhancing effect is inconsistent with previous research. Moreover, we show that perceived personal discrimination does not moderate the friendship-prejudice relationship. Finally, analyses confirm the unique qualities of cross-group friendship, as perceived group discrimination does not predict greater prejudice when this type of contact is most intense. Analyses are performed on an unusually rich, national probability sample of ethnic minority members fielded in 2017 including 1211 respondents from Denmark. We conclude with discussion of the implications of our findings.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796820909493

Rud, Søren, and Søren Ivarsson, eds., Globale og postkoloniale perspektiver på dansk kolonihistorie. (2021)

Rud, Søren, and Søren Ivarsson, eds., Globale og postkoloniale perspektiver på dansk kolonihistorie (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2021)

Danmarks fortid som kolonimagt og slavenation er mere aktuel end nogensinde. Det globale opgør med racisme og kontroversielle symboler fra kolonihistorien har bredt sig til Danmark, hvor politiske aktivister malede ”DECOLONIZE” på statuer af grønlandsmissionæren Hans Egede både i Nuuk og København, og kunstgruppen Anonyme Billedkunstnere smed ”slavekongen” Frederik V’s buste i Københavns havn.  Mens aktivisterne og mange indbyggere i tidligere danske kolonier anser Danmarks fortid som arnestedet for nutidens racediskrimination opfatter andre postyret som en selvpinerisk og proportionsløs dyrkelse af Danmarks fortidssynder. Ikke mindst derfor er det vigtigt, at forskere forholder sig kritisk til dansk kolonihistorie og kvalificerer fortidens rolle i aktuelle diskussioner om Danmarks kolonihistorie.  I Globale og postkoloniale perspektiver på dansk kolonihistorie præsenterer ni forskere udvalgte postkoloniale og globalhistoriske strømninger. Hver især tager de udgangspunkt i konkrete eksempler fra enten Dansk Vestindien, Grønland, Indien, Island, København, Sápmi eller Siam. Bogen åbner nye perspektiver på Danmarks fortidige engagement i verden, som trænger sig på i aktuelle debatter om eksempelvis identitetspolitik, rigsfællesskab og racisme.

Indholdsfortegnelse 

søren rud Introduktion Postkoloniale og globale perspektiver på dansk kolonihistorie 

niels brimnes Offer, subjekt, aktør Refleksioner over de koloniseredes position i nyere analyser af dansk kolonihistorie 

johan heinsen Stemme og flugt Tvangsgeografier i koloni og metropol 

kristoffer edelgaard christensen At sammenligne metropol og koloni Problematiseringen af ’despotisk magt’ i Danmark og Vestindien i 1700-tallets sidste årtier 

simon mølholm olesen Kolonial styring i Sydgrønlands Inspektorat, 1782-95 Institutioner, selvledelse og modstand 

kirsten thisted ’En lille Smule til Gavn for Grønland’ Intime relationer og følelser mellem Danmark og Grønland 

mathias danbolt Grænsen går her Metodisk nationalisme og omfordeling af ansvar i historieskrivningen om koloniseringen af Sápmi 

ann-sofie n. gremaud Festtid, krisetid og kolonitid Fortællinger om islandsk selvstændighed 

gunvor simonsen Racisme, slaveri og marked Afrikanere i 1700-tallets København 

søren ivarsson Gendarmer, dokumenter og papirstaten Danske officerer i semikoloniale Siam

https://unipress.dk/udgivelser/g/globale-og-postkoloniale-perspektiver-p%C3%A5-dansk-kolonihistorie/

Risager, Bjarke Skærlund, Territorial Stigmatization and Housing Commodification under Racial Neoliberalism: The Case of Denmark’s ‘Ghettos’. (2022)

Risager, Bjarke Skærlund, Territorial Stigmatization and Housing Commodification under Racial Neoliberalism: The Case of Denmark’s ‘Ghettos’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2022, 0308518X221141427

The relation between racialization and neoliberalism is relatively unexplored in urban geography, especially in the context of social democratic welfare regimes. This article aims to bridge this gap by applying the concept of racial neoliberalism, here referring to a co-constitutive relation between racialization and neoliberalism, to Denmark. Conceiving the country’s so-called ”ghetto” politics as an expression of racial neoliberalism, the article retraces the development of this politics over the first two decades of the 21st century. I argue that territorial stigmatization and commodification of marginalized non-profit housing areas have been two co-constitutive expressions of racial neoliberalism that have intensified during this historical period. Examining three key policy moments through various grey literature, the article demonstrates how stigmatization has served to justify commodification, while the failure of the latter has been followed by intensified and bureaucratized stigmatization leading to new commodification efforts until culminating in the infamous 2018 ”Ghetto Law”.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221141427