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

Lapina, Linda, and Mante Vertelyte. ‘“Eastern European”, Yes, but How? Autoethnographic Accounts of Differentiated Whiteness’. (2020)

Lapiņa, Linda, and Mantė Vertelytė. ‘“Eastern European”, Yes, but How? Autoethnographic Accounts of Differentiated Whiteness’. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 28, no. 3, Routledge, July 2020, pp. 237–250.

This article examines how intersecting markers of difference shape differentiated whiteness. In so doing, it contributes to scholarship on whiteness and racialization. The authors draw on autoethnographic vignettes from fieldwork in Copenhagen to analyse the emergence of similar-yet-divergent researcher and migrant positionalities. Both authors are female researchers from Baltic countries living in Denmark and often perceived as Eastern Europeans—as not-quite-white and as “Europe’s ‘internal others’”. Both of us conducted fieldwork in the same district of Copenhagen. Mantė carried out research on friendships among teenagersn a racially diverse public school and in youth activity clubs. Linda explored social inclusion and exclusion in contested urban spaces. However, our researcher positionalities played out differently. We analyse how ambiguous, contested and relational notions of (Eastern) Europeanness, together with intersecting racialized, classed and gendered tropes of Eastern European migration, made themselves manifest in our positionings and movements. Through an intersectional analysis of Eastern European racialized positionalities, our discussion of differentiated whiteness highlights how whiteness is intersectionally constituted, multiple and mouldable. These findings serve to nuance research on hegemonic whiteness in the Nordic setting.

doi:10.1080/08038740.2020.1762731.

Lykke, Nina. ‘Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality, Socialist Feminism and Epistemologies of Ignorance’. (2020) [PDF]

Lykke, Nina. ‘Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality, Socialist Feminism and Epistemologies of Ignorance’. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 28, no. 3, Routledge, July 2020, pp. 197–210.

Through a personalized story, anchored in historical reflections on the formative years of feminist research in the Nordic context in the early 1970s, the article engages in transversal conversations. The focus is dissonances and resonances between intersectional feminisms and socialist feminisms, and their critiques of monocategorical (neo)liberal feminisms. The method is transversal dialoguing, implying that participants in politically conflicted conversations, shift between “rooting” (situating their own stakes along the lines of feminist epistemologies of situated knowledges) and “shifting” (seriously trying to imagine what it takes to inhabit the situated perspective of interlocutors). A starting point for the article’s transversal conversations is recent critiques of white feminist intersectionality research in Nordic and broader European contexts, claimed to neoliberalize and whitewash intersectionality. Shifting to the perspective of the critics, the author takes responsibility for her stakes in epistemologies of white ignorance. A historical reflection on her becoming a socialist feminist in the context of New Left students’ and feminist movements in Denmark in the aftermath of the students’ revolts of 1968 is used as prism to a discussion of socialist feminisms in the Nordic context in the 1970s, and their paradoxes of being attentive to class, while entangled in classic marxism’s eurocentrism and epistemologies of white ignorance. To dig further into the question of genealogies of leftwing epistemologies of ignorance, characterizing Nordic socialist feminism in the 1970s (and haunting European socialism more generally), the article critically rereads a piece of the authors’ research from the 1970s—an analysis of the work of socialist feminist, Alexandra Kollontaj, and her role in the Russian revolution. Rooting, the author suggests that the epistemologies of white ignorance in Nordic feminist research rather than emerging from monocategoricality and (neo) neoliberalism, as the critics suggest, should be sought after through a critical scrutiny of leftwing versions of eurocentrism.

doi:10.1080/08038740.2019.1708786.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2019.1708786.

Skadegård Thorsen, T. ‘Minoritetsbeskatning – et værktøj til at forstå opretholdelse af strukturelle uligheder i dansk akademia’. (2019) [PDF]

Skadegård Thorsen, T. ‘Minoritetsbeskatning – et værktøj til at forstå opretholdelse af strukturelle uligheder i dansk akademia’. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, no. 1–2, July 2019, pp. 31–43.

Denmark has a strong tradition for doing critical analyses of the gendered inequalities of Danish academia – a critique that is particularly critical of gendered hiring practices. As such, Danish gender research has long grappled with the meta-scientific theories of positionality we recognize from e.g. Donna Haraway and Eve Sedgwick. However studies have yet to be conducted of the implicit and indirect inequalities that occur in the academic day-to-day experiences of researchers who are minoritized in more ways than their gender. Taking its point of departure in autoethnographic vignettes created during 3 years as a research-employee (PhD Fellow) as well as 7 years of teaching and supervising at 3 Danish universities, this article argues that Minority Taxation, a proposed Danish derivative of the US term Cultural Taxation (Padilla 1994), is a useful analytical tool for understanding the everyday experiences of structural inequalities in Danish academia. Minority Taxation covers both the concrete and affective extra-work minoritized academics are ‘taxed with’ performing due to structural inequalities. Deeming this form of work a tax aids in making more palpable the inequalities that can often seem hard to understand, quantify or negotiate.

doi:10.7146/kkf.v28i1-2.116115. ‘

PDF: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/116115.

Andreassen, Rikke, and Lene Myong. ‘Race, Gender, and Reseacher Positionality Analysed through Memory Work’. (2017) [PDF]

Andreassen, Rikke, and Lene Myong. ‘Race, Gender, and Reseacher Positionality Analysed through Memory Work’. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, vol. 7, no. 2, June 2017, p. 97.

Drawing upon feminist standpoint theory and memory work, the authors analyse racial privilege by investigating their own racialized and gendered subjectifications as academic researchers. By looking at their own experiences within academia, they show how authority and agency are contingent upon racialization, and how research within gender, migration, and critical race studies is often met by rejection and threats of physical violence. The article illustrates how race is silenced within academia, and furthermore how questions of race, when pointed out, are often interpreted as a call for censorship. The authors conclude that a lack of reflection around the situatedness of knowledge, as well as the evasion of discussions on racial privilege, contribute to maintaining whiteness as a privileged site for scientific knowledge production.

doi:10.1515/njmr-2017-0011.

PDF: http://archive.sciendo.com/NJMR/njmr.2017.7.issue-2/njmr-2017-0011/njmr-2017-0011.pdf.