Dindler, Camilla & Bolette B. Blaagaard. The colour-line of journalism: Exploring racism as a boundary object in journalistic practice and principles. (2021). [PDF]

Dindler, Camilla & Bolette B. Blaagaard. The colour-line of journalism: Exploring racism as a boundary object in journalistic practice and principles. Journalistica, 15(1), 2021, 90-113.

This article argues that Danish journalistic boundary producing practices and principles uphold a representation of racial disparity. Based on critical theories of race and racism in journalism and a boundary work framework, we conduct a discursive analysis of two collective case studies that encompass 56 articles and 23 Facebook posts. Focusing mainly on 1) the construction of knowledge about potential racism, 2) who are positioned as authorities on the topic of racism, and 3) who are missing among the potential actors in the stories, we identify meta-journalistic discourses and the (re)establishment of journalistic principles and practices. We conclude that journalistic norms and practices, for now, withstand the challenges posed by minority media’s call for the recognition of race as structure by applying discursive strategies of firstly rejecting racism as structure and secondly asserting principles and practices of specific kinds of objectivity, utilising, for instance, elite sources.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.7146/journalistica.v15i1.124927

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

Schierup, Carl‐Ulrich, The Right to Be Different: Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Scandinavian Welfare Politics; The Case of Denmark. (1994)

Schierup, Carl‐Ulrich, The Right to Be Different: Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Scandinavian Welfare Politics; The Case of Denmark, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 7.3 (1994), 277–88

‘Multiculturalism’ as an influential ideology for structuring ethnic relations has become exposed to increasing critique also in the Scandinavian context. The paper discusses a racialized political debate, legislation, and institutional practices, taking Denmark as the prime example. An increasingly ‘dual welfare’ is becoming legitimized through a hegemonic culturalized language, consistently interpreting ‘the right to be different’ as ‘being different’, and ‘being different’ as being ‘non‐integrated’. In a society where public debate on ethnic and racial discrimination is less than rudimentary, tolerant claims of multiculturalist relativism are effectively turned upside down in the service of neo‐racism, the preachings of which are imperceptibly becoming adopted as the conventional wisdom. This calls for a discussion on ‘politics of recognition’ which brings the debate on the universalism and particularity out of the abstract, while focusing on the vicissitudes of contemporary democracy in a changing welfare state.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.1994.9968409

Skadegård, M. C., Slipping and Sliding: Wielding Power with Slippery Constructions of Danishness. (2022) [PDF]

Skadegård, M. C., Slipping and Sliding: Wielding Power with Slippery Constructions of Danishness, Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, 1.2 (2022), 158–80.

This article addresses implicit and underlying discrimination in public and private interactions in Denmark. In particular, it examines racial structural discrimination in regard to citizenship and belonging in Danish contexts. Two cases are presented in this analysis, both from the fall of 2015, in which mixed race figures either directly or indirectly. The first case is a public debate concerning Danish citizenship as presented in news coverage and the second is an everyday private interaction at a dinner party in which the author was a participant. The study assesses how (racialized) Danishness, citizenship, and entitlement are constructed in the two cases. Further, it introduces the notion of “slipperiness” as a mechanism in discriminatory interactions (in regard to defining “Danishness”) and discusses how this notion functions to maintain and enforce racial discrimination.

PDF: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m3202b5

Smedegaard Nielsen, Asta, Saving Racialized Children through Good Schooling: Media Discourses on Racialized Children’s Schooling as a Site for Upholding Danish Whiteness. (2021) [PDF]

Smedegaard Nielsen, Asta, Saving Racialized Children through Good Schooling: Media Discourses on Racialized Children’s Schooling as a Site for Upholding Danish Whiteness, Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 7.3 (2021), 200–208

This article uses Danish media discourses on racialized children’s schooling as a lens through which to analyse how issues of kinship and family play into nation-building processes through representations of ‘the child’. The article addresses the question of the distribution of racialized children, mostly termed ‘bilingual pupils’, at Danish schools, which is a recurrent theme in the public debate. The media representation of this issue is mostly framed around an ideal of spreading the ‘bilingual pupils’ among different schools to ensure proper mixing with white Danish pupils, which is framed as securing both the educational development of the children and the prosperity of the Danish nation. Through the ideal of mixing, the nation is constituted as able to include the racialized child as an act of saving it from its heritage of racialized and classed disadvantage. A comparison with other kinds of media reporting on racialized children in Danish schooling reveals the constellation of a racialized hierarchy that works to uphold Danish whiteness and non-racism through the ideal of proper mixing. Migrant subjects who have mixed through kinship with Danish whiteness and have actively abandoned their racialized familial background seem more easily constituted as belonging in Denmark.

PDF: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20020317.2021.1980275

Spanger, Marlene, Constructing Victims and Criminals through the Racial Figure of ‘The Gypsy’. (2022)

Spanger, Marlene, Constructing Victims and Criminals through the Racial Figure of ‘The Gypsy’, in White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking, ed. by Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih (Routledge, 2022), pp. 154–69

Danish state anti-trafficking efforts have grown rapidly since 2002. From 2007, the Danish state has not only focused on victims in the sex industry; it has also paid attention to the formal labor market, setting out to identify labor migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The chapter explores how the racialized “Other” male European is established through the intersection of nationality and mobility articulated as “the gypsy.” The chapter argues that the racialized European historical figure of “the gypsy” reflects a strong symbol on who belongs and who does not belong in the European states representing the west. To show how this construction occurs, this chapter analyzes the narratives of Romanian male migrants describing their encounter with the Danish authorities. Focusing on the close entanglement of the empirical categorizations of “the victim” and “the criminal” during the identification process of CEE victims of human trafficking, the chapter analyzes the nexus of human trafficking, racialization and racism by asking: What kind of racialized victim and criminal representations do CEE migrant workers experience within the field of anti-trafficking? And how do these racialized representations stem from institutional racism?

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003162124-13/constructing-victims-criminals-racial-figure-gypsy-marlene-spanger

Sparre, Sara Lei, (In)Visibility and the Muslim Other: Narratives of Flight and Religious Identity among Iraqi Christians in Denmark. (2021)

Sparre, Sara Lei, (In)Visibility and the Muslim Other: Narratives of Flight and Religious Identity among Iraqi Christians in Denmark, Ethnicities, 21.3 (2021), 589–610

This article investigates identity and belonging among Christians of Iraqi origin in Denmark through an analysis of their narratives of flight and interreligious relations, with a particular focus on the underlying dynamics of a widespread anti-Muslim discourse. Based on qualitative interviews and informal conversations with Chaldean and Assyrian Christians from Iraq, I examine how they presented themselves to me through their stories of flight from Iraq and settlement in Denmark. The analysis draws on perspectives on positionality and belonging among migrants as well as the ambiguous concept of (in)visibility, understood both as something structurally enforced and as how individuals and groups experience their (in)visibility and strive towards mobility and recognition. In addition, the analysis incorporates insights and discussions from literature on racialization and minority?majority relations, while particularly focusing on religious identity and Muslim?Christian relations. Against experiences of racialization and misrecognition as Muslims, I explore how they make sense of, articulate and act on their complex social location as invisible Christians and visible Middle Easterners in a Danish context characterized by ambiguous expectations of religiosity and national belonging. I draw attention to three different, yet simultaneous, narratives put forward by the Iraqi Christians: flight from political oppression, flight from Muslim persecution in the Middle East, and Islam as a threat against Europe. I argue that Iraqi Christians interpret and navigate the experience of being bodily invisible as Christians but visible as immigrants and Middle Eastern Muslims by rewriting narratives of their flight from Iraq to Denmark. Consequently, they also rewrite their relations to both the ?Christian other? in Denmark and the ?Muslim other? in Denmark and Iraq. The article contributes with a perspective on ?invisible? and/or misrecognized non-Muslim minorities in Europe and thus offers insights into the diversity within assumedly homogenous ethnic groups.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796820949279

Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Relinking as Healing. On Crisis, Whiteness and the Existential Dimensions of Decolonization. (2023) [PDF]

Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Relinking as Healing. On Crisis, Whiteness and the Existential Dimensions of Decolonization, Globalizations, 20.2 (2023), 304–15

In this paper, I present my reading of two paths of existence in texts written by white Danes concerned with crisis. The first obeys the politics of purity and involves an existential commitment to status quo. I call this path whiteness collapsing into itself, inasmuch it remains locked in the confines of the politics of purity, makes impossible both delinking from modernity-coloniality, and relinking, as the process of delving and dwelling in the wider processes of becoming, which I have learnt to know as Mother Earth. The second text attests a decolonizing practice of collapsing whiteness that is creolizing and engages in relinking as healing. I conclude by addressing the importance of deciding to decide to relinking as a radical practice of cultivation of sociality and relationality rooted in specific places which, however, are interconnected precisely because social and relational. Therein, I argue, is the healing.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2021.2025293

PDF: https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/publications/relinking-as-healing-on-crisis-whiteness-and-the-existential-dime

Temizisler, Sevgi, The Mediatisation of Migration Issues During the ‘Refugee Crisis’: A Comparative Case-Study of the UK, Denmark and Germany. (2023) [PDF]

Temizisler, Sevgi, The Mediatisation of Migration Issues During the ‘Refugee Crisis’: A Comparative Case-Study of the UK, Denmark and Germany, in Anxieties of Migration and Integration in Turbulent Times, ed. by Mari-Liis Jakobson, Russell King, Laura Moroşanu, and Raivo Vetik, IMISCOE Research Series (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023), pp. 207–24

Spurred on by civil war in Iraq, Libya and Syria and by instability in several African countries, more than 1.8 million migrants/refugees arrived in the EU in 2015 (Frontex, 2016). This massive pressure from immigrants and refugees led to a humanitarian crisis on a global scale while threatening the key instruments of border control in the EU and, at the same time, increasing uncertainty about the political, economic and societal implications for member states. The ‘crisis’ was highly politicised in domestic politics owing to the heightened salience in media coverage, the mobilisation of citizens holding exclusive nationalist identities by mostly rightwing populist parties (Wodak & Krzyzanowski, 2017) and exacerbated polarisation in public debates. In such circumstances, popular disapproval of the EU’s management of the crisis grew and provided a suitable platform for the growth of anti-EU and anti-refugee/immigrant discourses, in which the domestic mass media played a major role by reflecting these tendencies and shaping public opinion concerning the ‘crisis’. This chapter investigates how migration issues were mediatised during the ‘refugee crisis’ in different countries and the implications thereof.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23996-0

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

Lenneis, Verena, and Sine Agergaard, Enacting and Resisting the Politics of Belonging through Leisure. The Debate about Gender-Segregated Swimming Sessions Targeting Muslim Women in Denmark. (2021) [PDF]

Lenneis, Verena, and Sine Agergaard, Enacting and Resisting the Politics of Belonging through Leisure. The Debate about Gender-Segregated Swimming Sessions Targeting Muslim Women in Denmark, in Leisure, Racism, and National Populist Politics, ed. by Ratna Aarti, Erica Rand, Daniel Burdsey, and Stanley Thangaraj (Routledge, 2021), pp. 59–73

In 2016 women-only swimming sessions targeting Muslims made the headlines in the Danish media, precipitating great discussion about whether such sessions contributed to or impeded social integration. This article focuses on the debate in the city council of Aarhus concerning women-only swimming activities that had existed for 10 years and had been well attended. Yet, after a year of discussion, the city council voted for a municipality-wide ban on women-only swimming during public opening hours. The popularity and longevity of the sessions pose the question: Why and how has women-only swimming become a ‘problem’, in other words a leisure time physical activity that challenges current discourses on immigration and integration? The debate on women-only swimming is an interesting case to study as it testifies not only to an increasing focus on the civic integration of ethnic minorities, including their leisure practices, but also to strong resistance by the general public and the women affected. Drawing on a postcolonial feminist perspective, our analysis shows how perceptions of Danishness, gender equality and non-religious leisure become central arguments in the debate, pointing to various ways in which understandings of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and nation intersect in the current restrictive politics of belonging.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003172390-5

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

Larsen, Troels Schultz. ‘Copenhagen’s West End a “Paradise Lost”: The Political Production of Territorial Stigmatization in Denmark’. (2014) [PDF]

Larsen, Troels Schultz. ‘Copenhagen’s West End a “Paradise Lost”: The Political Production of Territorial Stigmatization in Denmark’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 46, no. 6, SAGE Publications Ltd, June 2014, pp. 1386–1402.

Why have many of the prestige developments in Copenhagen’s West End built during the golden days of the welfare state morphed into neglected and stigmatized territories? This paper seeks to answer this question by deploying a field-analytical approach inspired by Bourdieu and Wacquant. The emergence of advanced marginality and the diffusion of spatial defamation in Copenhagen are products of the historical struggles over space occurring in the field of housing and the bureaucratic field. To grasp social transformations at ground level in neglected urban areas, we need to exit those areas and scrutinize the role of the state in the (re)production of territorial stigma. This paper shows how the processes of spatial concentration of dispossessed households and the defamation of their neighbourhoods are closely linked to the institutionalization of a dualized and asymmetrical housing market and a dualizing urban policy which have converged to privilege private ownership at the cost of nonprofit housing for the past fifty years.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1068/a45640

Jensen, Tina Gudrun. Sameksistens: hverdagsliv og naboskab i et multietnisk boligområde. (2016)

Jensen, Tina Gudrun. Sameksistens: hverdagsliv og naboskab i et multietnisk boligområde. 2016.

I den offentlige debat om indvandring og integration tales der ofte om ghettodannelse og parallelsamfund , og der skelnes tydeligt mellem os og dem . Her fremstilles etniske grupper som segregerede enklaver i samfundet, men virkeligheden er langt mere nuanceret. Mange af de boligområder, der hentydes til, er nemlig multietniske boligområder, og her bor bl.a. mange etniske danskere.  I både den offentlige debat og i forskningen om indvandring og integration i urbane rum i Danmark overser man ofte den interaktion, der foregår mellem mennesker med forskellige etniske baggrunde. Denne bog handler netop om interetniske relationer i sociale boligområder.  Hermed udfylder bogen et hul i dansk forskning om indvandring og integration og lægger sig op ad den fremvoksende internationale antropologiske, sociologiske og humangeografiske litteratur om udfoldelsen af interetniske relationer i hverdagsliv.  Bogen er baseret på et etnografisk feltarbejde i Grønnevang i form af deltagerobservation og interview med beboere og andre personer i området. Grønnevang er et større multietnisk socialt boligområde i København, som er beboet af omkring 50 procent etniske danskere og 50 procent etniske minoriteter. Gennem autentiske historier beskriver bogen de personer, der lever i boligområdet, og deres indbyrdes relationer.  Bogens omdrejningspunkter er naboskabets forskelligartede relationer og hverdagspraksisser samt magtforholdet mellem beboere, som udgør etnisk minoritet og majoritet.

https://samfundslitteratur.dk/bog/sameksistens.

Jensen, Tina Gudrun. Naboskab i multietniske boligområder. (2016) [PDF]

Jensen, Tina Gudrun. Naboskab i multietniske boligområder. København: Boligsocialnet, 2016.

Denne bog stiller skarpt på naboskab blandt beboere med forskellige etniske baggrunde, som lever i et såkaldt ’multietnisk boligområde’. ’Multietnisk’ er en betegnelse, som anvendes om boligområder, hvor andelen af beboere med etnisk minoritetsbaggrund overstiger 40 %.  Bogen henvender sig først og fremmest til forskellige praktikere på området, som for eksempel er beskæftiget inden for det boligsociale område, byplanlægning, arkitektur samt aktører på lokale og nationale politikområder.  Bogen er et resultat af et forskningsprojekt, der omhandler interetniske naboskabsrelationer. Projektet er en del af en forskningsalliance om ”social sammenhængskraft og etnisk diversitet”, som blev gennemført i 2010-2015.  Bogen beskæftiger sig med de sociale hverdagspraksisser, som beboere i multietniske boligområder deler, blandt andet som naboerne. Fokus ligger i den forbindelse især på sted, rum, hverdagsliv og sociale relationer. Hermed bidrager bogen med ny empirisk såvel som teoretisk viden om, hvad det indebærer at leve sammen i et multietnisk boligområde. Emnet fremhæves indledningsvist som et overset emne i nyere forskning og i den offentlige debat om indvandring og integration i byrum i Danmark.  Et af bogens hovedargumenter er, at livet i et multietnisk boligområde indebærer mindre drama end mange fremstillinger ofte peger på.  Bogen peger i stedet på, at denne slags boligområder omfatter en indre styrke og robusthed, fordi der er mange forskellige former for dagligdagskontakt mellem beboerne, hvor det at ’dele steder’ kan medvirke til at fremme relationer.

PDF: https://viden.sl.dk/media/8933/naboskab-i-multietniske-boligomraader.pdf

Jensen, Kristian Kriegbaum. ‘What Can and Cannot Be Willed: How Politicians Talk about National Identity and Immigrants’. (2014) [PDF]

Jensen, Kristian Kriegbaum. ‘What Can and Cannot Be Willed: How Politicians Talk about National Identity and Immigrants’. Nations and Nationalism, vol. 20, no. 3, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.

The ethnic-civic framework remains widely used in nationalism research. However, in the context of European immigrant integration politics, where almost all ‘nation talk’ is occurring in civic and liberal registers, the framework has a hard time identifying how conceptions of national identity brought forth in political debate differ in their exclusionary potential. This leads some to the conclusion that national identity is losing explanatory power. Building on the insights of Oliver Zimmer, I argue that we may find a different picture if we treat cultural content and logic of boundary construction – two parameters conflated in the ethnic-civic framework – as two distinct analytical levels. The framework I propose focuses on an individual and collective dimension of logic of boundary construction that together constitute the inclusionary/exclusionary core of national identity. The framework is tested on the political debate on immigrant integration in Denmark and Norway in selected years. Indeed, the framework enables us to move beyond the widespread idea that Danish politicians subscribe to an ethnic conception of the nation, while Norwegian political thought is somewhere in between an ethnic and civic conception. The true difference is that Danish politicians, unlike their Norwegian counterparts, do not acknowledge the collective self-understanding as an object of political action.

doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12069.

PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264773027_What_can_and_cannot_be_willed_How_politicians_talk_about_national_identity_and_immigrants

Sedgwick, Mark. ‘Something Varied in the State of Denmark: Neo-Nationalism, Anti-Islamic Activism, and Street-Level Thuggery’. (2013)

Sedgwick, Mark. ‘Something Varied in the State of Denmark: Neo-Nationalism, Anti-Islamic Activism, and Street-Level Thuggery’. Politics, Religion & Ideology, vol. 14, no. 2, Routledge, June 2013, pp. 208–233.

The article argues that categories such as ‘Islamophobic’ and ‘Right Wing’ are inadequate and even misleading descriptors of reactions to Islam in Europe, and should be replaced by a distinction between neo-nationalism, anti-Islamic activism, and street-level thuggery. Neo-nationalism is a well-established but underused descriptor; anti-Islamic activism and street-level thuggery are more novel and are explored in the article. The article applies this three-fold distinction to the case of Denmark. It is argued that the neo-nationalist Danish People’s Party can be understood as a response to neo-nationalist views that are widespread among the Danish population. It is then argued that street-level thuggery, of which a small movement called Stop the Islamisation of Denmark is taken as an example, may be eye-catching, but is ultimately unimportant. Anti-Islamism, in contrast, may be important. Two Danish examples are examined: the very Danish Tidehverv movement, which shows how Christianity can still matter even in an apparently secular society, and the Free Press Society, a more influential Danish organization that is shown to be part of an international movement.

doi:10.1080/21567689.2013.792650.

Rydgren, Jens. ‘Explaining the Emergence of Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties: The Case of Denmark’. (2004) [PDF]

Rydgren, Jens. ‘Explaining the Emergence of Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties: The Case of Denmark’. West European Politics, vol. 27, no. 3, Routledge, May 2004, pp. 474–502.

This article aims to explain the emergence of the Danish People’s Party, a radical right-wing populist party, by using a model combining political opportunity structures and the diffusion of new master frames. The article shows that because of dealignment and realignment processes – as well as the politicisation of the immigration issue – niches were created on the electoral arena. The Danish People’s Party was able to mine these niches by adopting a master frame combining ethno-pluralist xenophobia and anti-political establishment populism, which had proved itself successful elsewhere in Western Europe (originally in France in the mid-1980s). In this process of adaptation, a far right circle of intellectuals, the Danish Association, played a key role as mediator. 

doi:10.1080/0140238042000228103.

PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236803141_Radical_Right-wing_Populism_in_Denmark_and_Sweden_Explaining_Party_System_Change_and_Stability.

 

Kim-Larsen, Mette A. E. ‘Danish Milk’. (2018) [PDF]

Kim-Larsen, Mette A. E. ‘Danish Milk’. Adoption & Culture, vol. 6, no. 2, Ohio State University Press, 2018, pp. 353–363.

Drinking milk cites white and Danish and thus frames the lactose-tolerant subject with firstness. This is grounded in a discourse of unilinear evolutionary progression that constructs the lactose-tolerant body as a metaphor for the Danish nation-state and makes lactose-intolerant adoptee bodies an external threat.

doi:10.26818/adoptionculture.6.2.0353.

PDF: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.26818/adoptionculture.6.2.0353.

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær. ‘Ghetto-Society-Problem: A Discourse Analysis of Nationalist Othering: Ghetto-Society-Problem’. (2016) [PDF]

Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær. ‘Ghetto-Society-Problem: A Discourse Analysis of Nationalist Othering: Ghetto-Society-Problem’. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, vol. 16, no. 1, Apr. 2016, pp. 83–99.

This article examines the role of the ghetto in Danish political discourse. While ghetto studies have previously been conducted within the field of urban sociology, the article departs from this tradition in offering a discourse analytical perspective on the former Danish government’s strategy against ghettoization (The Ghetto Plan). Integrating perspectives from the literature on nationalism with Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse analytical framework, the analysis argues that the ghetto marks an antagonistic anti-identity to Danish society. This discursive construction of the ghetto against society has the effect of confirming Danish identity, while at the same time precluding possibilities of the ghetto’s integration in society. Highlighting these implications, the study feeds into societal debates on integration, and suggests a framework for studying nationalist othering in a discourse analytical perspective. 

doi:10.1111/sena.12173.

PDF: https://pure.au.dk/portal/files/124980286/Ghetto_Society_Problem_Accepted_manuscript_2016.pdf .

Nassri, Lamies. ‘Os’ og ‘Dem’ : et studie af de dominerende offentlige diskursers påvirkning på nutidige københavnske unges situationelle konstruktion og forhandling af identitet. (2018) [PDF]

Nassri, Lamies. ‘Os’ og ‘Dem’ : et studie af de dominerende offentlige diskursers påvirkning på nutidige københavnske unges situationelle konstruktion og forhandling af identitet. MA Thesis. Københavns Universitet, Humanistisk Fakultet, 2018.

PDF: https://andetsprogsforskning.ku.dk/forskning/koebenhavnerstudier_i_tosprogethed_/Bind_76_-_Lamies_Nassri.pdf