Acharya, Maya & Gabriella Isadora Muasya. Sensible Ruptures: Towards Embodied and Relational Ways of Knowing. (2023) [PDF]

Acharya, Maya & Gabriella Isadora Muasya. Sensible Ruptures: Towards Embodied and Relational Ways of Knowing. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35(2), 2023, 29–45.

This paper explores queer and racialized experiences in Danish academia through what we call ‘sensible ruptures’: affective, embodied and sensory ways of knowing. Taking seriously these modes of knowledge, the article outlines the creation of an online, audio-visual archive. Weaving together text, audio and images to unfold our concept of sensible ruptures, we demonstrate how the audio-visual can meaningfully contribute to capturing the affective and material fabric of racialized and queer experiences with/in Danish higher education. Sensible ruptures underscore the importance of under-standing the complex processes of racialization in an institutional and national context saturated by ambiguity and exceptionalism. We contend that thinking not only against, but beyond, disembodied colonial logics offers a different mode of knowledge creation, reconfi guring the self as permeable: constituted through and with our histories and surroundings. We centre friendship as a vital part of this process, harnessing queer epistolary to perform our pursuit of, and argument for, knowledge as always and inevitably relational.

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/138090

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thisted, Kirsten. (2022). Blame, Shame, and Atonement: Greenlandic Responses to Racialized Discourses about Greenlanders and Danes. Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.5070/C81258339

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://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f23v2bj

Vertelyté, Mantè, & Staunæs, Dorthe. From tolerance work to pedagogies of unease: Affective investments in Danish antiracist education. (2021). [PDF]

Vertelyte, M., & Staunæs, D. (2021). From tolerance work to pedagogies of unease: Affective investments in Danish antiracist education. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 7(3), 126–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2021.2003006

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://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20020317.2021.2003006

Bissenbakker, Mons, and Michael Nebeling. ‘En følelsernes grammatik og politik’. (2020)

Bissenbakker, Mons, and Michael Nebeling. ‘En følelsernes grammatik og politik’. i Et ulydigt arkiv: Udvalgte tekster af Sara Ahmed, Eds. Daniel Nikolaj Madsen, Eva Obelitz Rode, Lea Hee Ja Kramhøft, and Mette A. E. Kim-Larsen, Forlaget Nemo, 2020, 11–22.

Et ulydigt arkiv er syv af Sara Ahmeds artikler fra de sidste 20 år samlet og for første gang udgivet på dansk. Teksterne arbejder med figurer som ’den feministiske glædesdræber’, ’den melankolske immigrant’, ’det egenrådige barn’ og ’den fremmede’ indenfor emner som racisme, feminisme, klagen, m.m. Samlingens tekster skifter kontinuerligt mellem det teoretiske og det hverdagslige; mellem filosofi og popkultur; mellem det strukturelle og personlige erfaringer. 

Et ulydigt arkiv indeholder derudover et helt nyt forord dedikeret til denne udgave samt et introducerende forord af lektor Mons Bissenbakker og lektor Michael Nebeling, som viser Ahmeds tænknings relevans i dansk kontekst.

https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/da/publications/en-f%C3%B8lelsernes-grammatik-og-politik.

https://www.forlagetnemo.dk/butik/ulydigtarkiv

Vallgårda, Karen A. A. ‘Tying Children to God With Love: Danish Mission, Childhood, and Emotions in Colonial South India’. (2015)

Vallgårda, Karen A. A. ‘Tying Children to God With Love: Danish Mission, Childhood, and Emotions in Colonial South India’. Journal of Religious History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2015, pp. 595–613.

The article examines the politics of emotions, conversion, and childhood in the Danish Protestant Christian mission around the turn of the twentieth century in colonial South India. The emotional configuration of childhood that came to prevail in the Danish missionary community at this time was informed by a particular notion of the importance of intimate and tender feelings to the constitution of a rich Christian life. In order to win the children’s hearts for Christ, they had to be treated gently, even lovingly. The article shows how this sentimentalisation of childhood simultaneously served to displace Indian adults and parents and to include Indian children into what one might call the missionaries’ emotional community. And, while the ideal of gentle intimacy rendered corporal punishment less socially acceptable in the education of children, it involved a different kind of power — less tangible and visible, and therefore perhaps also more difficult to contest. As such, the article discloses the highly ambiguous political anatomy of love.

doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12265.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9809.12265

Lapina, Linda. ‘“Cultivating Integration”? Migrant Space-Making in Urban Gardens’. (2017)

Lapina, Linda. ‘“Cultivating Integration”? Migrant Space-Making in Urban Gardens’. Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 38, no. 6, Routledge, Nov. 2017, pp. 621–636.

Organized cultural encounters manage difference, conduct, time and space. Yet, alternative social spaces emerge besides these scripts. This article explores migrant space-making in integration gardens, an urban gardening association in Copenhagen aiming to ‘dismantle social and cultural boundaries’. The space of the gardens is multilayered. Firstly, it operates as an integration grid – a homogenizing-organized cultural encounter evolving around a foreigner–Dane binary. However, the gardens also emerge as a web of gardening, centered around plants and gardening practices, breaching multiple (hi)stories, locations, relationships, and materialities. The article juxtaposes the spatiotemporal logics of the integration grid and the web of gardening, analyzing the possibilities for action and relating they afford. The analysis contributes to theorizations of organized cultural encounters by highlighting the embodied, affective human and non-human agencies in divergent space-making practices. Discussing these multidirectional spaces, the article links conceptualizations of agency, bodies, affectivity, time and space.

doi:10.1080/07256868.2017.1386630.

Lapina, Linda. ‘Recruited into Danishness? Affective Autoethnography of Passing as Danish’. (2018) [PDF]

Lapiņa, Linda. ‘Recruited into Danishness? Affective Autoethnography of Passing as Danish’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, SAGE Publications Ltd, Feb. 2018, pp. 56–70.

This article critically examines emergence of Danishness via an autoethnography of passing as Danish. Drawing on feminist scholarship, the author conceptualizes passing as an embodied, affective and discursive relation; simultaneously spontaneous and laboured, fleeting and solid, emergent and constrained by past becomings. Once positioned as a young female uneducated Eastern European love migrant in Denmark, the author now usually passes as an accomplished migrant. However, conducting fieldwork in Copenhagen, she found herself passing as Danish. These shifting positionings from (un)wanted migrant to un(re)marked majority comprised a unique boundary position for tracing Danishness. Her body and Danishness became aligned, while other bodies were ejected. These fluctuating (dis)alignments highlighted potentialities of proximity to Danishness. Using autoethnography and memory work, the author develops an affective methodology. The encounters’ embodied affective circulations are simultaneously collective capacities illuminating material-discursive-affective contours of Danishness. The article makes a theoretical and methodological contribution to feminist-inspired research on race, whiteness, embodiment and affect in Nordic and European contexts.

doi:10.1177/1350506817722175.

PDF: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1350506817722175

Myong, Lene, and Mons Bissenbakker. ‘Love Without Borders? White Transraciality in Danish Migration Activism’. (2016)

Myong, Lene, and Mons Bissenbakker. ‘Love Without Borders? White Transraciality in Danish Migration Activism’. Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, Jan. 2016, pp. 129–146.

Since 2000, Denmark has imposed some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe. Consequently, family reunification has become increasingly difficult for immigrants as well as for Danish citizens. In the fall of 2010, the Danish family reunification laws became subject to criticism and protest by a citizens’ initiative called ‘Love without Borders’ (LWB). The article investigates how LWB managed to generate political momentum around love: an affect which seems to promise inclusion, liberation and togetherness for those directly affected by the laws as well as those attempting to change the laws. Yet the idealized version of love promoted by LWB happened to take the form of romantic intimacy predominantly consisting of straight, young and white-brown couples oriented towards reproduction. Our main argument is that despite its good intentions of supporting migration the activist campaign ‘Love without Borders’ ends up supporting whiteness as the body through which love must flow. As an indicator of the racialized discourses informing LWB’s activism the article introduces the concept of white transraciality. Thus, to LWB love seems to promise affective ties to the nation, to the future and to the political system in ways that sustain white hegemony. Building mainly on Sara Ahmed’s and Laurent Berlant’s reflections on love as cultural politics the article analyzes posters, viral videos and newspaper debates in its discussion of the promises and pitfalls of love as an affective political tool.

doi:10.1080/09502386.2014.974643.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.974643.

Nielsen, Asta Smedegaard, and Lene Myong. ‘White Danish Love as Affective Intervention: Studying Media Representations of Family Reunification Involving Children’. (2019) [PDF]

Nielsen, Asta Smedegaard, and Lene Myong. ‘White Danish Love as Affective Intervention: Studying Media Representations of Family Reunification Involving Children’. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, vol. 9, no. 4, De Gruyter Open, Dec. 2019, pp. 497–514.

Through a close reading of media reporting from 2017 to 2018 on the case of the Chinese girl Liu Yiming, who was first denied then granted residency in Denmark due to public pressure, this article analyses how regulation of family reunification involving children is negotiated in the Danish public imaginary in the context of strong anti-immigration sentiments. This imaginary projects the white Danish public as eager to love Yiming and as affectively invested in reversing the injustice done to her and her family. The article suggests, however, that the outpouring of white love, which functions as an affective intervention imbued with the promises of reversing Yiming’s deportation, is deeply embedded in exceptionalist notions of the ‘integrated’ migrant and that it works to restore an idealised image of a Danish nation defined by ‘human decency’ as a core value. Thus, the analysis raises critical questions to the politics of white love and its promise of securing social change for the ‘integrated’ migrant through collective acts of white feeling.

doi:10.2478/njmr-2019-0038.

PDF: https://vbn.aau.dk/files/331982664/313_622_1_SM.pdf

Spanger, Marlene. ‘Doing Love in the Borderland of Transnational Sex Work: Female Thai Migrants in Denmark’. (2013)

Spanger, Marlene. ‘Doing Love in the Borderland of Transnational Sex Work: Female Thai Migrants in Denmark’. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 21, no. 2, Routledge, June 2013, pp. 92–107.

By bringing love to the fore as an unfixed category, this article analyses the highly complex lives of female Thai migrants who sell sex in Denmark. In doing so, the article challenges the static and rather normative binary categories of “sex work” versus “prostitution” and “empowered woman” versus “victim of human trafficking” that are produced in the literature on sex work and prostitution. This binary approach is likely to portray the lives and subject positions of female migrants who sell sex in a rather one-sided way. The article argues that the category of love is highly relevant in studies of transnational sex work if we want to grasp the complexity of the lives of female migrants who sell sexual services.

doi:10.1080/08038740.2013.781543.

Vitus, Kathrine. ‘Racial Embodiment and the Affectivity of Racism in Young People’s Film’. (2015) [PDF]

Vitus, Kathrine. ‘Racial Embodiment and the Affectivity of Racism in Young People’s Film’. Palgrave Communications, vol. 1, no. 1, 1, Palgrave, Apr. 2015, pp. 1–9.

. This article uses a bodily and affective perspective to explore racial minority young people’s experiences of racism, as enacted (on film) through disgust and enjoyment. Applying Žižek’s ideology critical psychoanalytical perspective and Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”, the article considers race embodied, that is the racial body both partly Real (in the Lacanian sense) and a mean for the projection of ideological meanings and discursive structures, which are sustained by specific fantasies. From this perspective, the film’s affective racism is “symptomatic” of the discrepancies between, on the one hand, Danish social democratic welfare state ideology and a dominating race discourse of “equality-as-sameness”, on the other, the Real of racial embodiment, which makes the encounter with the Other traumatic and obscene. The analysis exposes the bodily and affective underside of race relations (which lead attempts to discursively undo racism to fail) and instead seeks to undermine the fantasies that sustain racial power relations.

doi:10.1057/palcomms.2015.7.

PDF: https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms20157

Vertelyte, Mante. ‘Not So Ordinary Friendship: An Ethnography of Student Friendships in A Racially Diverse Danish Classroom’. (2019) [PDF]

Vertelyte, Mante. Not So Ordinary Friendship: An Ethnography of Student Friendships in A Racially Diverse Danish Classroom. Dissertation. Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 2019.

“Not So Ordinary Friendship: An Ethnography of Student Friendships in a Racially Diverse Danish Classroom” explores the roles that young people’s friendships play in  the  production  and  reproduction  of  processes  of  racialization.  This  dissertation asks how and when does race come to matter (or not) in young people’s friendship relations? What identities and subject positions do friendship relations produce?And how  are  young  people’s  friendships  across  intersecting  markers  of  difference situated  politically,  discursively  and  socially?  This  dissertation  is  based  on  the premise  that  the  analysis  of  everyday  youth  friendship  formations  practices  can produce  important  knowledge  for  understanding  the  underlying  mechanisms  of processes of racialization. This  dissertation  derives  from  a  one-year  long  ethnographic  study  at  a  racially diverse  secondary  school  in  Copenhagen.  The  study  includes  32interviews  with students  attending  the  7thgrade  classroom  at  the  school  and  12interviews  with professional staff working at the school and municipal youth clubs. Data is analyzed through    the    approaches    of    critical    race    studies,    affect-sensory    theory, intersectionality  and  social practice  theory;  particularly  through  the  concept  of ‘figured worlds’ as delineated by Dorothy Holland et al. (2001).

The  analysis  of  this  dissertation  explores  how  the  figured  world  of  classroom friendships  emerges  through  different  senses  and  intensities,  such  as fitting  in, clicking or clinging, bonding andhumoras well as daily rituals such as eating at the lunch  table.  Following  the  empirically  emergent  questions: Who  is  friends  with whom?; How  (not)  to  be  friends;  and  Why  are  they  (not)  friends?, this  dissertation illustrates  the  ways  in  which  young  people  negotiate  everyday  politics  of  race  and racism and the ways that adolescent friendships are discursively figured into matters of political concern over the issues of ‘immigrant integration’ and ‘social cohesion’. Putting friendship at the center of analysis, this dissertation approaches friendship as a performative boundary object through  which racialized boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’  are  negotiated,  disturbed  and  re-established.  Friendship  is  performative because through the knowledge of who is friends with whom, young people position each  other  across  hierarchical  minority-majority  positions.  This  dissertation  argues that  friendship  is  a  core  social  institution  through  which  processes  of  racialization are  (re)produced,  yet  simultaneously  a  vehicle  through  which  young  people  figure ways to challenge the racialized notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This dissertation engages with interdisciplinary debates in studies of racialization as unfolding  in  the  Nordic  European  countries  and  anthropological  studies  on friendship.  To  that  end,  it  challenges  notions  of  Danish-Nordic  exceptionalism  that figure  racism  as  a  matter  of  the  past,  as  well  as  nuances  notions  of  friendshipcommonly portrayed as a residual socialinstitution free from the power structures of racism.  A  core  contribution  of  this  thesis  is  to  offer  a  sense  and  affect-oriented analysis of friendship and racialization. The  research also articulates the  challenges that educational institutions face due to a lack of anti-racist education.

PDF: https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/files/306278121/PHD_Mante_Vertelyte_E_pdf.pdf. https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/files/306278121/PHD_Mante_Vertelyte_E_pdf.pdf.

Bloch, Katrina Rebecca. ‘“It Is Just SICKENING”: Emotions and Discourse in an Anti-Immigrant Discussion Forum’. (2016)

Bloch, Katrina Rebecca. ‘“It Is Just SICKENING”: Emotions and Discourse in an Anti-Immigrant Discussion Forum’. Sociological Focus, vol. 49, no. 4, Oct. 2016, pp. 257–270.

Following 9/11, organizations advocating for stricter immigration policy grew across the United States. This study examines the Web site and online discussion forum of Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee (ALIPAC), a group identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as nativist extremist. While forum participants are geographically dispersed, social media provide them a space to interact with like-minded people. Results show that ALIPAC members provide shared accounts that construct positive moral identities. Forum participants promise positive emotions of pride and power for joining the group, despite the perception that outsiders perceive them as racists. Drawing from tenets of patriotism, participants construct virtual identities and reject the racist stigma by turning them on immigrants, civil rights organizations, and politicians. Participants claim their emotional responses are rational and morally superior to those of the perceived opposition. Failing to share their anger, sense of injustice, and disgust is framed as irrational.

doi:10.1080/00380237.2016.1169901.

Bissenbakker, Mons, and Lene Myong. ‘Love Will Keep Us Together: Kærlighed og hvid transracialitet i protester mod danske familie- sammenføringsregler’. (2012) [PDF]

Bissenbakker, Mons, and Lene Myong. ‘Love Will Keep Us Together: Kærlighed og hvid transracialitet i protester mod danske familie- sammenføringsregler’. Tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning, vol. 36, no. 03–04, Universitetsforlaget, 2012, pp. 188–202.

De danske familiesammenføringsregler blev i 2010 genstand for kritik fra et borgerinitiativ, som i kærlighedens navn kæmpede for en lempelse af loven. Som politisk mobiliserende affekt lover kærligheden inklusion og frigørelse. Men risikerer den også at gentage racialiserede og seksuelle hierarkier? På hvilke præmisser kan seksualpolitiske kritikker udfordre disse hierarkier? Denne artikel søger at tage affekt alvorligt som politisk og analytisk fænomen, og den introducerer begrebet om hvid transracialitet som betegnelse for de underliggende magtformer, der informerer kærlighed som politisk protestform.

Denmark has imposed some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe since 2000. Consequently, family reunification in the country has become increasingly difficult for both immigrants and Danish nationals. This article looks at a political initiative called «Love without Borders» (LwB) and its attempt to mobilize the Danish public in a push to overturn the laws. LwB has generated momentum around the ideal of transraciality (straight, white subjects oriented towards reproduction and romantic love). At the same time, queer activists have offered  a political rebuke by pointing out how the laws (and in turn LwB’s critique) are built on heteronormative assumptions that ignore homosexuality. In both cases, however, love seems to promise affective ties to the nation, to the future, and to the political system in ways that sustain white hegemony. Building on Sara Ahmed’s reflections on love as cultural politics and Jasbir Puar’s notion of homonationalism, the article analyzes posters, viral videos and newspaper debates in its discussion of the promises and pitfalls of love as an affective political tool.

https://www.idunn.no/tfk/2012/03-04/love_will_keep_us_together_krlighed_og_hvid_transracialit

PDF: https://www.idunn.no/tfk/2012/03-04/love_will_keep_us_together_krlighed_og_hvid_transracialit. https://www.idunn.no/tfk/2012/03-04/love_will_keep_us_together_krlighed_og_hvid_transracialit

Andreassen, Rikke, and Kathrine Vitus. Affectivity and Race: Studies from Nordic Contexts. (2016)

Andreassen, Rikke, and Kathrine Vitus. Affectivity and Race: Studies from Nordic Contexts. Routledge, 2016.

This book presents new empirical studies of social difference in the Nordic welfare states, in order to advance novel theoretical perspectives on the everyday practices and macro-politics of race and gender in multi-ethnic societies. With attention to the specific political and cultural landscapes of the Nordic countries, Affectivity and Race draws on a variety of sources, including television programmes, news media, fictional literature, interviews, ethnographic observations, teaching curricula and policy documents, to explore the ways in which ideas about affectivity and emotion afford new insights into the experience of racial difference and the unfolding of political discourses on race in various social spheres. Organised around the themes of the politicisation of race through affect, the way that race produces affect and the affective experience of race, this interdisciplinary collection sheds light on the role of feelings in the formation of subjectivities, how race and whiteness are affectively circulated in public life and the ways in which emotions contribute to regimes of inclusion and exclusion. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, with interests in sociology, anthropology, media, literary and cultural studies, race and ethnicity, and Nordic studies.

Contents:

Introduction: affectivity as a lens to racial formations in the Nordic countries, Kathrine Vitus and Rikke Andreassen.

Part I How is Race Politicised through Affects?:

Politics of irony as the emerging sensibility of the anti-immigrant debate, Kaarina Nikunen;

If it had been a muslim: affectivity and race in Danish journalists’ reflections on making news on terror, Asta Smedegaard Nielsen;

The racial grammar of Swedish higher education and research policy: the limits and conditions of researching race in a colour-blind context, Tobias Hübinette and Paula Mählck.

Part II How Does Race Produce Affects?

‘And then we do it in Norway’: learning leadership through affective contact zones, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen and Dorthe Staunæs;

Nordic colour-blindness and Nella Larsen, Rikke Andreassen; Disturbance and celebration of Josephine Baker in Copenhagen 1928: emotional constructions of whiteness, Marlene Spanger.

Part III How is Race Affectively Experienced?

Feeling at loss: affect, whiteness and masculinity in the immediate aftermath of Norway’s terror, Stine H. Bang Svendsen;

The affectivity of racism: enjoyment and disgust in young people’s film, Kathrine Vitus; Two journeys into research on difference in a Nordic context: a collaborative auto-ethnography, Henry Mainsah and Lin Prøitz;

Doing ‘feelwork’: reflections on whiteness and methodological challenges in research on queer partner migration, Sara Ahlstedt.

https://www.routledge.com/Affectivity-and-Race-Studies-from-Nordic-Contexts/Andreassen-Vitus/p/book/9780367597870