Brøndum, Tine. “The curse of the refugee”: Narratives of slow violence, marginalization and non-belonging in the Danish welfare state. (2023) [PDF]

Brøndum, Tine. “The curse of the refugee”: Narratives of slow violence, marginalization and non-belonging in the Danish welfare state. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35(2), 2023, 96–112.

Drawing on narrative interviews with people who have recently or in the past fled to Denmark, this article examines experiences of being cast as refugees within the Danish asylum and integration bureaucracy. The analysis is situated within a social context formed simultaneously by Nordic exceptionalism and racial colour-blindness, and by increasing restrictions within Danish asylum and integration policy. Within this context, the article analyses narrative accounts of structural violence and racialization within three central sites of refugee management: namely the reception and asylum camps, encounters with municipal integration workers, and in contexts of schooling and employment. The analysis conveys intersubjective perspectives on how being labelled as a ‘refugee’ involves being racialized, managed and controlled and it argues that such forms of legally-sanctioned control measures can be understood as a slow violence that harms the lives of those seeking protection in Denmark. Finally, the article discusses how people labelled as ‘refugees’ respond to and oppose experiences of racism and control, and how such responses are often silenced in ways that further legitimize racism.

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/141131

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacobsen, Malene H. ‘The Everyday Spaces of Humanitarian Migrants in Denmark.’ (2013) [PDF]

Jacobsen, Malene H. The Everyday Spaces of Humanitarian Migrants in Denmark. MA Thesis. University of Kentucky.

Through an analysis of the Danish Immigration Law and asylum system, this research illustrates how the Danish state through state practices and policies permeates and produces the everyday space of humanitarian migrants. Furthermore, it examines how humanitarian migrants experience their everyday life in the Danish asylum system. An examination of state practices in conjunction with humanitarian migrants’ narratives of space and everyday practices, offers an opportunity to explore what kind of politics and political subjectivities that can emerge in the space of humanitarian migrants. This research contribute to our understanding of first, how the securitization of migration has direct impact on the everyday life of humanitarian migrants, second, second, how the state through practices and space governs and de-politicizes humanitarian migrants, and third, humanitarian migrants are able to act politically. Furthermore, this research problematizes the categorization of humanitarian migrants as “asylum seeker” in order to illustrate how the group of humanitarian migrants is a very diverse group of people from different places with various skills and education-, social-, and economic backgrounds. Even though “asylum seekers” are often portrayed as a homogenous group of vulnerable people we cannot assume that these people understand themselves as vulnerable docile “asylum seekers”.

PDF: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=geography_etds.

Lemberg-Pedersen, Martin. ‘The “Imaginary World” of Nationalistic Ethics: Feasibility Constraints on Nordic Deportation Corridors Targeting Unaccompanied Afghan Minors’. (2018) [PDF]

Lemberg-Pedersen, Martin. ‘The “Imaginary World” of Nationalistic Ethics: Feasibility Constraints on Nordic Deportation Corridors Targeting Unaccompanied Afghan Minors’. Etikk i Praksis – Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics, no. 2, Nov. 2018, pp. 47–68.

This article examines Swedish, Danish and Norwegian governments’ participation in the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors (ERPUM) project and its failed attempts to deport unaccompanied minors (UAMs) to Afghanistan. It argues that ERPUM is an interesting and urgent case of a “deportation corridor” and suggests that this framework can benefit from analysis through normative and applied ethics and in particular discussions of feasibility constraints. It therefore identifies and critically assesses two nationalistic arguments for deportation common in Nordic politics, based on appeals to credibility and humanitarianism. Considering the growth of nationalistic immigration policies in Nordic states, the article turns the usual discussion of feasibility on its head by showing that not only cosmopolitan, but also nationalistic ethics must face up to charges of lacking realism. More specifically, it argues that the case of ERPUM illustrates how nationalistic deportation ethics may rely on inconsistent normative and erroneous empirical assumptions, which can be criticized for their arbitrariness, ideological grounding and lack of feasibility.

doi:10.5324/eip.v12i2.2425.

PDF: https://www.ntnu.no/ojs/index.php/etikk_i_praksis/article/download/2425/2861

Jane Jin Kaisen, ed. Loving Belinda, (2015) [PDF]

Jane Jin Kaisen, ed. Loving Belinda, Forlaget * [asterisk], 2015.

The Loving Belinda project began in 2006 with the video Adopting Belinda in which Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, a supposedly Asian-American couple in Minnesota, are being interviewed by a Danish TV host for a series on Danish heritage because they have just adopted Belinda, a white girl from Denmark. Everything appears ordinary with the exception that the racial and cultural dynamics are reversed.

The Loving Belinda Project employs the mockumentary genre, appropriating documentary features to destabilize reality with subversive effect. By staging and reversing the racial “order” within transnational adoption, the works expose some of the uneven economic, racial, and cultural relations of power that are embedded within the practice but that tend to remain unspoken.

The videos Revisiting the Andersons and Loving Belinda as well as the photograph The Andersons from 2015,portray how the family is coping now whenBelinda is nine years old in the midst of changing discourses around transnational adoption.

In the Loving Belinda publication, the fictional universe is contextualized by conversations between the individuals involved in the project, whom in reality are all engaged in critical discourse around transnational adoption, anti-racism and whiteness in Scandinavia. 

Contents:

LOVING BELINDA

Adopting Belinda

Revisiting the Andersons

Loving Belinda

The Andersons

CONVERSATIONS

Tobias Hübinette & Jane Jin Kaisen: Transnational Adoption in the Context of Colonial Repression, Race Relations, and the Right-wing Turn in Scandinavia,

Morten Goll & Jane Jin Kaisen: Reflections on Art, Asylum Politics, Racism, and Transnational Adoption

Lene Myong & Jane Jin Kaisen: The Emergence of Adoption Critiques among Transnational Adoptees in Denmark

ESSAYS / PRESENTATIONS

Marianne Ping Huang: Artistic Research as Critique in Jane Jin Kaisen’s Loving Belinda

Louise Wolthers: Framing the Migrant Body

Tone Olaf Nielsen: Curating Anti-Racist, Pro-Migration & Decolonial Projects

http://janejinkaisen.com/loving-belinda-200615

PDF: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5539922fe4b03e1f32a65bc3/t/557bf05ee4b00283cf1e1590/1434185822742/Loving+Belinda+publication.pdf

Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Annika Lindberg, and José Arce-Bayona. Stop Killing Us Slowly: A Research Report on the Motivation Enhancement Measures and the Criminalisation of Rejected Asylum Seekers in Denmark. (2018) [PDF]

Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Annika Lindberg, and José Arce-Bayona. Stop Killing Us Slowly: A Research Report on the Motivation Enhancement Measures and the Criminalisation of Rejected Asylum Seekers in Denmark. The Freedom of Movements Research Collective, 2018,

Executive summary:

According to the Danish Minister of Immigration and Integration, the Danish deportation centres Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård are set up to ‘make life intolerable’3 for those rejected asylum-seekers who cannot immediately be detained or deported, thereby pressuring them into leaving Denmark ‘voluntarily’. As part of the motivation enhancement measures introduced into the Danish Aliens Act in 1997 the deportation centres confine asylum seekers in geographically isolated ‘open’ institutions with low living standards and minimum welfare provisions. However, these measures have not fulfilled their official function. Instead of making more people return ‘voluntarily’, they have pushed rejected asylum seekers into illegality, while others remain stuck and de facto confined in deportation centres for a potentially indefinite time period. This report gives an overview of the setup of the deportation centres and analyses how the discrepancy be-tween the intended and real effects may be interpreted. It asks: what are the functions of deporta-tion centres based on their real, rather than politically declared effects? Addressing this question, the report finds the following:

• The deportation centres in particular and the motivation enhancement measures in general, do not fulfil their declared function of increasing ‘voluntary’ returns, nor do they address the issue of migrants who are legally stranded for lengthy periods of time with very circumscribed rights.

• The legal frameworks regulating detention or prisons in Denmark (i.e. time limits, ac-cess to legal advice, rights guarantees) do not apply to deportation centres. Deporta-tion centres can therefore be compared to indefinite detention

.• The deportation centres result in the dras-tic deterioration of the mental and physical health of the men, women, and children ac-commodated there

• The political framework, the juridical setup and the daily rules and practices in depor-tation centres contribute to the criminalisa-tion of migrants and refugees

.• By running these practices in a legal grey zone, the Danish government circumvents – and overtly breaches – human rights reg-ulations at the same time locking residents in a situation with very limited possibilities to contest these conditions and claim their human rights.

• While failing to achieve their own stated goals, the motivation enhancement meas-ures and the deportation centres do achieve making peoples’ lives intolerable: they break people’s spirits and minds and force them to live a life in illegality, outside of the justice- and rights system.~

PDF: http://refugees.dk/media/1757/stop-killing-us_uk.pdf.

Hercowitz-Amir, Adi, and Rebeca Raijman. ‘Restrictive Borders and Rights: Attitudes of the Danish Public to Asylum Seekers’. (2019)

Hercowitz-Amir, Adi, and Rebeca Raijman. ‘Restrictive Borders and Rights: Attitudes of the Danish Public to Asylum Seekers’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, May 2019, pp. 1–20.

Social mechanisms explaining Danes’ attitudes to asylum seekers were analysed on two main dimensions: border control and rights allocation, in a national survey of 500 adult respondents in September 2013. Data show that the respondents supported exclusionary practices against asylum seekers much more than exclusion from rights. Three main mechanisms were simultaneously at play in both exclusionary dimensions: perceptions of threat, social distance (prejudice), and perceiving asylum seekers as not “genuine refugees”. Identifying asylum seekers’ as a security and socio-economic threat, as persons not in “real” fear of persecution, together with prejudicial attitudes to them had a boosting effect on excluding asylum seekers from the Danish collective in terms of entry and rights. Findings are discussed in light of existing theories on exclusionary attitudes to asylum seekers.

doi:10.1080/01419870.2019.1606435.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1606435.

Drud-Jensen, Mads Ted, and Sune Prahl Knudsen. ‘Grænsekontrol – Når Ikke-Heteroseksuelle Søger Asyl i Danmark’. (2008)

Drud-Jensen, Mads Ted, and Sune Prahl Knudsen. ‘Grænsekontrol – Når Ikke-Heteroseksuelle Søger Asyl i Danmark’. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, no. 4, 4, Dec. 2008.

The question of sexuality has not received much attention in migration studies, and (non-hetero)sexuality in relation to asylum has not previously been addressed in a Danish academic context. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s notions of power and governmentality as well as postcolonial theory and its focus on othering and culturalization/racialization, this article explores processes of subjectification of asylumseekers and processes of objectification and regulation of non-heterosexuality through the technologies of what is analytically constructed and signified as the migration apparatus. These processes (re)produce dominant notions of sexuality and culture/ race.

doi:10.7146/kkf.v0i4.27945.

https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/27945.

Arce, José, and Julia Suárez-Krabbe. ‘Racism, Global Apartheid and Disobedient Mobilities: The Politics of Detention and Deportation in Europe and Denmark’ (2018) [PDF]

Arce, José, and Julia Suárez-Krabbe. ‘Racism, Global Apartheid and Disobedient Mobilities: The Politics of Detention and Deportation in Europe and Denmark’. Kult, vol. 15, 2018.

PDF: http://postkolonial.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/11_Julia-og-Jose_We-are-here-because-you-were-there_final.pdf. http://postkolonial.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/11_Julia-og-Jose_We-are-here-because-you-were-there_final.pdf.