Groglopo, Adrián & Julia Suárez-Krabbe (Eds.), Coloniality and Decolonisation in the Nordic Region. (2023) [PDF]

A. Groglopo & J. Suárez-Krabbe (Eds.), Coloniality and Decolonisation in the Nordic Region. 2023. Taylor & Francis.

This book advances critical discussions about what coloniality, decoloniality, and decolonisation mean and imply in the Nordic region. It brings together analysis of complex realities from the perspectives of the Nordic peoples, a region that is often overlooked in current research, and explores the processes of decolonisation that are taking place in this region. The book offers a variety of perspectives that engage with issues such as Islamic feminism and the progressive left; racialisation and agency among Muslim youths; indigenising distance language education for Sami; extractivism and resistance among the Sami; the Nordic international development endeavour through education; Swedish TV reporting on Venezuela; creolizing subjectivities across Roma and non-Roma worlds and hierarchies; and the whitewashing and sanitisation of decoloniality in the Nordic region. As such, this book extends much of the productive dialogue that has recently occurred internationally in decolonial thinking but also in the areas of critical race theory, whiteness studies, and postcolonial studies to concrete and critical problems in the Nordic region. This should make the book of considerable interest to scholars of history of ideas, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, international development studies, legal sociology, and (intercultural) philosophy with an interest in coloniality and decolonial social change.

Table of contents

Coloniality and Decolonization in the Nordic Region: An Introduction

Adrián Groglopo and Julia Suárez-Krabbe

Chapter 1.

Surviving like Scheherazade. Veiled Women and Liberalism: the Trap of the Progressive Left

Houria Bouteldja.

Chapter 2. Racialisation in a “Raceless” Nation: Muslims Navigating Islamophobia in Denmark’s Everyday Life

Amani Hassani

Chapter 3. Enriching Sami language distance education

Hanna Helander, Satu-Marjut Pieski, and Pigga Keskitalo

Chapter 4. The Virtue of Extraction and Decolonial Recollection in Gállok, Sápmi

Georgia de Leeuw

Chapter 5. Coloniality of Knowledge and the Responsibility to Teach: Nordic Educational Interventions in the “South”

Jelena Vićentić

Chapter 6. Swedish Television Reporting on Venezuela as Damnation

Juan Velázquez Atehortúa

Chapter 7. Creolizing Subjectivities and Relationalities within Roma-gadje Research Collaborations

Ioana Țîștea and Gabriela Băncuță

Chapter 8. Decoloniality: Between a Travelling Concept and a Relational Onto-Epistemic Political Stance

Madina Tlostanova

DOI: https://www.routledge.com/Coloniality-and-Decolonisation-in-the-Nordic-Region/Groglopo-Suarez-Krabbe/p/book/9781032274867?gclid=Cj0KCQiAgqGrBhDtARIsAM5s0_nUuuv6JLXuU1udbn_3Ri4vIdHV8dPSh0a5jeARmBEk-s-Rp6wYy0UaAmTiEALw_wcB

PDF: https://books.google.dk/books?id=anCpEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=da&pg=PT55#v=onepage&q&f=false

Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. & Mia Liinason. Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe: Critical Essays on Knowledge, Inequality and Belonging. (2023). [PDF]

Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. & Mia Liinason. Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe: Critical Essays on Knowledge, Inequality and Belonging (1st ed.). 2023. Routledge.

Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around ‘identity politics’ in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operate to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Introduction Transforming identities in contemporary Europe By Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Mia Liinason 

“Welcome to the most privileged, most xenophobic country in the world”. Affective figurations of white Danishness in the making of a Danish citizen By Linda Lapiņa 

Educational challenges for Nordic exceptionalism Epistemic injustice in the absence of antiracist education By Kris Clarke, Manté Vertelyté 

Autobiographical flesh Understanding Western notions of humanity through the life and selected writings of Una Marson (1905–1965) By Jéssica Nogueira Varela 

‘It’s our bodies, we are the experts!’ Countering pathologisation, gate-keeping and Danish exceptionalism through collective trans knowledges, coalition-building and insistence By Nico Miskow Friborg 

Gayness between nation builders and money makers From ideology to new essentialism By Anna-Maria Sörberg 

(Not) in the name of gender equality Migrant women, empowerment, employment, and minority women’s organizations By Christel Stormhøj 

‘Home is where the cat is’ The here-there of queer (un)belonging By Ramona Dima, Simona Dumitriu 

The poetics of climate change and politics of pain Sámi social media activist critique of the Swedish state By Akvilė Buitvydaitė, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen 

Varieties of exceptionalism A conversation By Selin Çağatay, Mia Liinason, Olga Sasunkevich

PDF: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003245155

Liinason, Mia. Homonationalism across Borders. Exploring Cross-Border Exchange and Strategic Homonationalism in the Construction of Progressive Nationalism. (2022) [PDF]

Liinason, Mia, Homonationalism across Borders. Exploring Cross-Border Exchange and Strategic Homonationalism in the Construction of Progressive Nationalism, Sexualities, 2022.

While scholars have shown the significance of transnational exchanges for shaping feminist and LGBTI+ connectivities across borders to challenge national exclusions and global divides, less attention has been directed at exploring the complex and ambiguous ways in which transnational collaborations and cross-border exchanges also may facilitate and support national agendas. That is what this article sets out to explore. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTI+ actors in a Scandinavian context, this article uses the notion of strategic homonationalism to examine the ambiguous ways in which transnational, diasporic, and refugee LGBTI+ politics and locations in the Scandinavian region strategically engage with regulatory notions of liberal-mindedness and with exclusionary discourses of genuine LGBTI+ subjectivity in this context. Rather than being restricted to national contexts, I show, forms of progressive nationalism may be facilitated by crossborder exchange of various kind. Influenced by scholars who argue for the need to bring back a focus on racialization and national belonging in analyses of the making of sexualized and/or gendered difference, the article attends to the complex politics involved in inhabiting the impossible position of not being able to “not want rights.” To this end, this article reworks homonationalism, from a concept that emerges or is rooted in a US context, to a concept that travels and is differently shaped and picked up in various located sites, showing that homonationalism in a Scandinavian context takes shape through a moralistically superior position.

PDF: https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607221112647

Fernández, Christian, and Kristian Kriegbaum Jensen. ‘The Civic Integrationist Turn in Danish and Swedish School Politics’. (2017)

Fernández, Christian, and Kristian Kriegbaum Jensen. ‘The Civic Integrationist Turn in Danish and Swedish School Politics’. Comparative Migration Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Physica-Verlag, Dec. 2017,

The civic integrationist turn usually refers to the stricter requirements for residence and citizenship that many states have implemented since the late 1990’s. But what of other policy spheres that are essential for the formation of citizens? Is there a civic turn in school policy? And does it follow the pattern of residence and citizenship? This article addresses these questions through a comparative study of the EU’s allegedly strictest and most liberal immigration regimes, Denmark and Sweden, respectively. The analysis shows a growing concern with citizenship education in both countries, yet with different styles and content. Citizenship education in Denmark concentrates on reproducing a historically derived core of cultural values and knowledge to which minorities are expected to assimilate, while the Swedish model subscribes to a pluralist view that stresses mutual adaptation and intercultural tolerance. Despite claims to the contrary, the analysis shows that Sweden too has experienced a civic turn.

doi:10.1186/s40878-017-0049-z. 10.1186/s40878-017-0049-z.

Coming of Age in Exile: Health and Socio-Economic Inequalities in Young Refugees in the Nordic Welfare Societies. (2020) [PDF]

Coming of Age in Exile: Health and Socio-Economic Inequalities in Young Refugees in the Nordic Welfare Societies. NordForsk, 2020,

Coming of Age in Exile (CAGE) has been a multidisciplinary research project, funded by the Nordic Research Council (NordForsk) during 2015-2020, for more information see https://cage.ku.dk/. CAGE has been led by the Danish Research Centre for Migration, Ethnicity and Health (MESU) at the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen and carried out in collaboration with researchers at the Migration Institute of Finland, Turku; the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies (NKVTS), Oslo; the University of South-Eastern Norway, University of Bergen, University of Gothenburg, and the Centre for Health Equity Studies (CHESS), Stockholm University/Karolinska Institutet. 

During the last fifty years, the number of people moving to the Nordic countries has increased. From the 1970s onwards, a large part of non-Nordic immigration has consisted of refugees and their families. Children below 18 years of age comprise a sizable proportion of refugee immigrants, i.e. 25-35% of the refugees in the Nordic countries, and about twice as many when children born in exile are also included. In welfare typologies, the Nordic countries are often considered as similar in terms of their welfare state policies, but there are also important differences between countries in terms of immigration policy and economic context. The Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), a comparative policy analysis tool used by the European Union, has shown that during the period in which the CAGE study was conducted, Denmark ranked far behind the other Nordic countries, with more restrictive integration policies related to financial support, family reunification, and possibilities for naturalisation. Key economic factors also differ considerably between countries, with Sweden and Finland having had higher rates of youth unemployment during recent decades. The Nordic countries, with their excellent national registers, provide a unique arena for comparative studies of refugee children and youth in order to obtain an understanding of contextual factors in the reception countries for the integration of young refugees. 

The aim of the CAGE project has been to investigate inequalities in education, labour market participation, and health during the formative years in young refugees, and how they relate to national policies and other contextual factors. CAGE has used a mixed methods strategy built around a core of cross-country comparative quantitative register studies in national cohorts of refugees who were granted residency as children (0-17 years) during 1986-2005 in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, with follow-up until 2015. These quantitative register studies have been complimented with policy analyses and qualitative studies of key mechanisms involved in the development of these inequalities.

PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ketil_Eide/publication/348357687_CAGE_Final_Report_2015-2020/links/5ffa113692851c13feffbbe2/CAGE-Final-Report-2015-2020.pdf.

Borevi, Karin, Kristian Kriegbaum Jensen, and Per Mouritsen. ‘The Civic Turn of Immigrant Integration Policies in the Scandinavian Welfare States’. (2017) [PDF]

Borevi, Karin, Kristian Kriegbaum Jensen, and Per Mouritsen. ‘The Civic Turn of Immigrant Integration Policies in the Scandinavian Welfare States’. Comparative Migration Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Physica-Verlag, Dec. 2017.

This special issue addresses the question of how to understand the civic turn within immigrant integration in the West towards programs and instruments, public discourses and political intentions, which aim to condition, incentivize, and shape through socialization immigrants into ‘citizens’. Empirically, it focuses on the less studied Scandinavian cases of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In this introduction, we situate the contributions to this special issue within the overall debate on civic integration and convergence. We introduce the three cases, critically discuss the (liberal) convergence thesis and its descriptive and explanatory claims, and explain why studying the Scandinavian welfare states can further our understanding of the nature of the civic turn and its driving forces. Before concluding, we discuss whether civic integration policies actually work.

doi:10.1186/s40878-017-0052-4.

PDF: https://vbn.aau.dk/da/publications/the-civic-turn-of-immigrant-integration-policies-in-the-scandinav-2.

McEachrane, Michael, editor. Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe. (2014)

McEachrane, Michael, editor. Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe challenges a view of Nordic societies as homogenously white, and as human rights champions that are so progressive that even the concept of race is deemed irrelevant to their societies. The book places African Diasporas, race and legacies of imperialism squarely in a Nordic context. How has a nation as peripheral as Iceland been shaped by an identity of being white? How do Black Norwegians challenge racially conscribed views of Norwegian nationhood? What does the history of jazz in Denmark say about the relation between its national identity and race? What is it like to be a mixed-race black Swedish woman? How have African Diasporans in Finland navigated issues of race and belonging? And what does the widespread denial of everyday racism in Nordic societies mean to Afro-Nordics?  This text is a must read for anyone interested in issues of race in the Nordic region and Europe writ large. As Paul Gilroy writes in his foreword, it is a book that ‘should be studied with care and profit inside the Nordic countries and also outside them by the broader international readership that has been established around the study of racism and “critical race theory”.’ 

Contents

Foreword—Paul Gilroy.  A

Introduction —Michael McEachrane 

Part I: The Nation 

1. Imagining Blackness at the Margins: Race and Difference in Iceland —Kristín Loftsdóttir 

2. ‘Struggling to Be Recognized as Belonging to the Fauna of Norway’: On Being Black Norwegian Women—Madeleine Kennedy-Macfoy 

3. The Midnight Sun Never Sets: An Email Conversation About Jazz, Race and National Identity in Denmark, Norway and Sweden—Cecil Brown, Anne Dvinge, Petter Frost Fadnes, Johan Fornäs, Ole Izard Høyer, Marilyn Mazur, Michael McEachrane and John Tchicai 

Part II: Racism 

4. There’s a White Elephant in the Room: Equality and Race in (Northern) Europe—Michael McEachrane 

5. Racism Is No Joke: A Swedish Minister and a Hottentot Venus Cake—An Email Conversation—Beth Maina Ahlberg, Claudette Carr, Madubuko Diakité, Fatima El-Tayeb, Tobias Hübinette, Momodou Jallow, Victoria Kawesa, Michael McEachrane, Utz McKnight, Anders Neergaard, Shailja Patel, Kitimbwa Sabuni and Minna Salami 

6. Being and Becoming Mixed Race, Black, Swedish and a Nomadic Subject—Anna Adeniji 

7. Bertrand Besigye’s Civilization Critique: An Aesthetics of Blackness in Norway—Helena Karlsson 

8. Two Poems by Bertrand Besigye: (i) How A Black African Orders Black Coffee (To Barack Hussein Obama); (ii) You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down. Or Black Hail Over All of West Side (Translated by John Irons)—Bertrand Besigye 

Part III: Diaspora 

9. Talking Back: Voices from the African Diaspora in Finland—Anna Rastas 

10. Den Sorte: Nella Larsen and Denmark—Martyn Bone 

11. A Horn of Africa in Northern Europe—An Email Conversation—Abdalla Duh, Mohamed Husein Gaas, Abdalla Gasimelseed, Amel Gorani, Nauja Kleist, Anne Kubai, Michael McEachrane, Saifalyazal Omar, Tsegaye Tegenu and Marja Tiilikain.

https://www.routledge.com/Afro-Nordic-Landscapes-Equality-and-Race-in-Northern-Europe/McEachrane/p/book/9781138207110

Keskinen, Suvi. ‘Antiracist Feminism and the Politics of Solidarity in Neoliberal Times’. (2021) [PDF]

Keskinen, Suvi. ‘Antiracist Feminism and the Politics of Solidarity in Neoliberal Times’. Feminisms in the Nordic Region: Neoliberalism, Nationalism and Decolonial Critique, Eds. Suvi Keskinen, Pauline Stoltz, and Diana Mulinari, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021, 201–221.

This chapter analyses the establishment and expansion of antiracist feminism in the last decade throughout the Nordic region, with new groups, media sites, and public events organised, especially in the large cities. I examine antiracist feminist and queer of colour activism in which the main or sole actors belong to groups racialised as non-white or “others” in Nordic societies. A fundamental argument developed in the chapter is the central role and potential of these emerging social movements to reconfigure political agendas and tackling of pressing societal issues, due to their capacity to overlap and connect the borders of antiracist, feminist, and (to some extent) class-based politics. The chapter further argues for the usefulness of theorising the neoliberal turn of racial capitalism as the societal condition in which feminist activism takes place. 

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-53464-6_10.

PDF: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-53464-6_10

Keskinen, Suvi, Salla Tuori, Sara Irni, and Diana Mulinari, editors. Complying With Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. (2009)

Keskinen, Suvi, Salla Tuori, Sara Irni, and Diana Mulinari, editors. Complying With Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. 1st edition, Farnham, England ; Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2009

Complying with Colonialism presents a complex analysis of the habitual weak regard attributed to the colonial ties of Nordic Countries. It introduces the concept of ’colonial complicity’ to explain the diversity through which northern European countries continue to take part in (post)colonial processes. The volume combines a new perspective on the analysis of Europe and colonialism, whilst offering new insights for feminist and postcolonial studies by examining how gender equality is linked to ’European values’, thus often European superiority. With an international team of experts ranging from various disciplinary backgrounds, this volume will appeal not only to academics and scholars within postcolonial sociology, social theory, cultural studies, ethnicity, gender and feminist thought, but also cultural geographers, and those working in the fields of welfare, politics and International Relations. Policy makers and governmental researchers will also find this to be an invaluable source. 

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Postcolonialism and the Nordic Models of Welfare and Gender Diana Mulinari, Sari Irni, Suvi Keskinen and Salla Tuori

PART I: Postcolonial Histories/Postcolonial Presents

CHAPTER 2 Colonial Complicity: The ‘Postcolonial’ in a Nordic Context Ulla Vuorela

CHAPTER 3 The Nordic Colonial Mind Mai Palmberg

CHAPTER 4 The Flipside of My Passport: Myths of Origin and Genealogy of White Supremacy in the Mediated Social Genetic Imaginary Bolette Blaagaard

CHAPTER 5 The Promise of the ‘Nordic’ and Its Reality in the South: The Experiences of Mexican Workers as Members of the ‘Volvo Family’ Diana Mulinari and Nora Räthzel

CHAPTER 6 Stranger or Family Member? Reproducing Postcolonial Power Relations Johanna Latvala

CHAPTER 7 Historical Legacies and Neo-colonial Forms of Power? A Postcolonial Reading of the Bosnian Diaspora Laura Huttunen 

PART II: Welfare State and Its ‘Others’

CHAPTER 8 When Racism Becomes Individualised: Experiences of Racialisation among Adult Adoptees and Adoptive Parents of Sweden Tobias Hübinette and Carina Tigervall

CHAPTER 9 Contradicting the ‘Prostitution Stigma’: Narratives of Russian Migrant Women Living in Norway Jana Sverdljuk

CHAPTER 10 Postcolonial and Queer Readings of ‘Migrant Families’ in the Context of Multicultural Work Salla Tuori

CHAPTER 11 “Experience is a National Asset”: A Postcolonial Reading of Ageing in the Labour Market Sari Irni

CHAPTER 12 Licorice Boys and Female Coffee Beans: Representations of Colonial Complicity in Finnish Visual Culture Leena-Maija Rossi

PART III: Doing Nation and Gender: The Civilising Mission “at Home”

CHAPTER 13 Guiding Migrants to the Realm of Gender Equality Jaana Vuori

CHAPTER 14 Institutional Nationalism and Orientalised Others in Parental Education Nanna Brink Larsen CHAPTER 15 Whose Feminism? Whose Emancipation? Chialing Yang

CHAPTER 16 “Honour”-Related Violence and Nordic Nation-Building  Suvi Keskinen.

https://www.routledge.com/Complying-With-Colonialism-Gender-Race-and-Ethnicity-in-the-Nordic-Region/Keskinen-Tuori-Irni-Mulinari/p/book/9780367603236.

Horsti, Karina. ‘Overview of Nordic Media Research on Immigration and Ethnic Relations’. (2008) [PDF]

Horsti, Karina. ‘Overview of Nordic Media Research on Immigration and Ethnic Relations’. Nordicom Review, vol. 29, no. 2, Nov. 2008, pp. 275–293. Crossref,

Nordic media and communication research had reacted to the ethnically/racially and culturally changing societies since the 1980s, and the multidisciplinary field of migration, ethnic relations and the media has been shaped. This overview draws upon existing body of research, particularly on recent literature since the early 2000s, and aims to sketch out the rough lines of Nordic media research by mapping and comparing developments in this area. In addition, it points out some major outcomes and, finally, suggests future developments. The longest line of research is based on text analysis, mostly quantitative and qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis of majority media’s texts on immigration and ethnic minorities. Later on, the research focus has widened to cover various dimensions of media output as well as production and reception. Although the field is intensively developing, comparative research among the Nordic countries, and between other European countries, is scarce.

doi:10.1515/nor-2017-0191.

PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/48336155_Overview_of_Nordic_Media_Research_on_Immigration_and_Ethnic_Relations/link/58a6089c4585150402e2d8cf/download.

Keskinen, Suvi, Mari Toivanen, and Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir. Undoing homogeneity in the Nordic region: migration, difference and the politics of solidarity. (2019) [PDF]

Keskinen, Suvi, Mari Toivanen, and Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir. Undoing homogeneity in the Nordic region: migration, difference and the politics of solidarity. 2019.

This book critically engages with dominant ideas of cultural homogeneity in the Nordic countries and contests the notion of homogeneity as a crucial determinant of social cohesion and societal security. Showing how national identities in the Nordic region have developed historically around notions of cultural and racial homogeneity, it exposes the varied histories of migration and the longstanding presence of ethnic minorities and indigenous people in the region that are ignored in dominant narratives. With attention to the implications of notions of homogeneity for the everyday lives of migrants and racialised minorities in the region, as well as the increasing securitisation of those perceived not to be part of the homogenous nation, this volume provides detailed analyses of how welfare state policies, media, and authorities seek to manage and govern cultural, religious, and racial differences. With studies of national minorities, indigenous people and migrants in the analysis of homogeneity and difference, it sheds light on the agency of minorities and the intertwining of securitisation policies with notions of culture, race, and religion in the government of difference. As such it will appeal to scholars and students in social sciences and humanities with interests in race and ethnicity, migration, postcolonialism, Nordic studies, multiculturalism, citizenship, and belonging.

Table of contents: 1. Narrations of Homogeneity, Waning Welfare States, and the Politics of Solidarity   Part 1: Histories of Homogeneity and Difference  2. Forgetting Diversity? Norwegian Narratives of Ethnic and Cultural Homogeneity  3. Myths of Ethnic Homogeneity: The Danish Case  4. Finnish Media Representations of the Sámi in the 1960s and 1970s  Part 2: Governing and Negotiating Differences  5. Knowledge about Roma and Travellers in Nordic Schools: Paradoxes, Constraints, and Possibilities  6. Problematising the Urban Periphery: Discourses on Social Exclusion and Suburban Youth in Sweden  7. Welfare Chauvinism at the Margins of Whiteness: Young Unemployed Russian-Speakers’ Negotiations of Worker-Citizenship in Finland  8. Starry Starry Night: Fantasies of Homogeneity in Documentary Films about Kvens and Norwegian-Pakistanis  Part 3: Questioned Homogeneity and Securitisation   9. From Welfare to Warfare: Exploring the Militarisation of the Swedish Suburb  10. “Living in fear”—Bulgarian and Romanian Street Workers’ Experiences With Aggressive Public and Private Policing  11. A ‘Muslim’ Response to the Narrative of the Enemy Within  12. Being Unknown: The Securitisation of Asylum Seekers in Iceland

https://www.routledge.com/Undoing-Homogeneity-in-the-Nordic-Region-Migration-Difference-and-the/Keskinen-Skaptadottir-Toivanen/p/book/9780367727789

PDF: https://helda.helsinki.fi//bitstream/handle/10138/316709/Undoing_Homogeneity_in_the_Nordic_Region.pdf?sequence=1.

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

Loftsdóttir, Kristín, and Lars Jensen, editors. Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities. (2012)

Loftsdóttir, Kristín, and Lars Jensen, editors. Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities. 1st edition, F arnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2012. This book examines the influence of imperialism and colonialism on the formation of national identities in the Nordic countries, exploring the manner in which contemporary discourses in Nordic society are rendered meaningful or obscured by references to past events and tropes related to the practices and ideologies of colonialism. Against the background of Nordic ‘exceptionalism’, it explores the manner in which the interwoven racial, gendered and nationalistic ideologies associated with the colonial project form part of contemporary Nordic identities. An important challenge to national identities that can become increasingly inward looking, Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region sheds light on the ways in which certain notions and structural inequalities, understood as residue from the colonial period, become recreated or projected onto different groups. Presenting a variety of case studies drawn from Sweden, Finland, Norway, Greenland, Denmark and Iceland, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities conducting research in the fields of race and ethnicity, identity and belonging, media representations of ‘the other’ and colonialism and postcolonialism.

Contents: Introduction: Nordic exceptionalism and Nordic ’others’, Kristi­n Loftsdottir and Lars Jensen; Colonial discourse and ambivalence: Norwegian participants on the colonial arena in South Africa, Erlend Eidsvik; Colonialism, racism and exceptionalism, Christina Petterson; ’Words that wound’: Swedish Whiteness and its inability to accommodate minority experiences, Tobias Hubinette; Belonging and the Icelandic others: situating Icelandic identity in a postcolobial context, KristÃin Loftsdottir; Transnational influences, gender equality and violence in Muslim families, Suvi Keskinen; Reading history through Finnish exceptionalism, Anna Rastas; Danishness as Whiteness in crisis: emerging post-imperial and development aid anxieties, Lars Jensen; Bodies and boundaries, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen and Serena Maurer; Intimacy with the Danish nation-state: my partner, the Danish state and I – a case study of family reunification policy in Denmark, Linda Lund Pedersen; Aesthetics and ethnicity: the role of boundaries in contemporary Sami and Tornedalian art, Anne Heith; Index.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/whiteness-postcolonialism-nordic-region-krist%C3%ADn-loftsd%C3%B3ttir-lars-jensen/e/10.4324/9781315547275

Lövheim, Mia, Haakon H. Jernsletten, David Herbert, Knut Lundby, and Stig Hjarvard. ‘Attitudes: Tendencies and Variations’. (2018) [PDF]

Lövheim, Mia, Haakon H. Jernsletten, David Herbert, Knut Lundby, and Stig Hjarvard. ‘Chapter 2 Attitudes: Tendencies and Variations’. Contesting ReligionThe Media Dynamics of Cultural Conflicts in Scandinavia, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. DeGruyter,

This chapter presents an overview of religiosity and attitudes to religious diversity in media and other public spaces based on a cross-Scandinavian survey conducted in 2015. Although Scandinavians in general have a weak personal connection to religion, Christianity still holds a privileged position as an expression of cultural identity. Scandinavians express support for equal rights to practice religion, but also doubtfulness towards public expressions of religion. More than one-fourth of respondents discuss news about religion and religious extremism regularly. There is a widespread sentiment that Islam is a threat to the national culture, even though most respondents state that they oppose an open expression of hostile attitudes towards foreigners. Political orientation and gender are salient aspects that shape diverging opinions regarding tolerance or scepticism towards the public visibility of religious diversity. Furthermore, Danes and Norwegians are more critical of public expressions of Islam than Swedes.

doi:10.1515/9783110502060-007.

PDF: https://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110502060/9783110502060-007/9783110502060-007.xml.

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.

Sandset, Tony. Color That Matters : A Comparative Approach to Mixed Race Identity and Nordic Exceptionalism. (2018)

Sandset, Tony. Color That Matters : A Comparative Approach to Mixed Race Identity and Nordic Exceptionalism. Routledge, 2018.

This book examines the ways in which mixed ethnic identities in Scandinavia are formed along both cultural and embodied lines, arguing that while the official discourses in the region refer to a “post-racial” or “color blind” era, color still matters in the lives of people of mixed ethnic descent. Drawing on research from people of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the author offers insights into how color matters and is made to matter and into the ways in which terms such as “ethnic” and “ethnicity” remain very much indebted to their older, racialized grammar.

Color that Matters moves beyond the conventional Anglo-American focus of scholarship in this field, showing that while similarities exist between the racial and ethnic discourses of the US and UK and those found in the Nordic region, Scandinavia, and Norway in particular, manifests important differences, in part owing to a tendency to view itself as exceptional or outside the colonial heritage of race and imperialism. Presenting both a contextualization of racial discourses since World War II based on documentary analysis and new interview material with people of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the book acts as a corrective to the blind spot within Scandinavian research on ethnic minorities, offering a new reading of race for the Nordic region that engages with the idea that color has been emptied of legitimate cultural content.

doi:10.4324/9781315169040.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/color-matters-tony-sandset/10.4324/9781315169040.

Solhjell, R., E. Saarikkomäki, M. B. Haller, D. Wästerfors, and T. Kolind. ‘“We Are Seen as a Threat”: Police Stops of Young Ethnic Minorities in the Nordic Countries’. (2019) [PDF]

Solhjell, R., E. Saarikkomäki, M. B. Haller, D. Wästerfors, and T. Kolind. ‘“We Are Seen as a Threat”: Police Stops of Young Ethnic Minorities in the Nordic Countries’. Critical Criminology, vol. 27, 2019, pp. 347–361.

This article focuses on the perspectives of young ethnic minorities in the Nordic countries who have experienced various forms of “police stops”, i.e. situations where the police stop them without any reference to a specific event of which the youth are aware. Analytically, the debate is positioned through an intersectionality approach of (un)belonging to majority societies. Across the Nordic countries, we found that the young people described five social markers as reasons for being stopped, namely clothing, hanging out in groups, ethnicity, neighbourhoods and gender. We argue that the police stops explicate how the young men in particular are often forced to think about themselves in terms of “a threat” to the majority and the attributes they have that make them seem like criminals.

doi:10.1007/s10612-018-9408-9.

PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10612-018-9408-9.pdf.

Tydén, Mattias. ‘The Scandinavian States: Reformed Eugenics Applied’. (2012)

Tydén, Mattias. ‘The Scandinavian States: Reformed Eugenics Applied’. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Eds. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2012.

This article deals with Scandinavian eugenics and issues of morality and history, guilt and rehabilitation and it also challenges the conventional conception of Scandinavian contem­porary history. It discusses a number of studies that show links between eugenics and progressive social thought and also throws light on the political implications of this issue. The three Scandinavian countries—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—share experiences that were important for the development of eugenic ideas and policies. This article men­tions that the development of Mendelism and a growing understanding of the complexity of heredity marks different views about the potential of racial hygiene and for tensions within the community of eugenicists. Finally, it presents a discussion on Scandinavian eu­genics that focuses on the way sterilization was used in the framework of the Social De­mocratic welfare states from the 1930s onward.

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.013.0022.

PDF: http://oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195373141-e-22.

Moffat, Katie Louise. Crisis Politics in Contemporary Nordic Film Culture: Representing Race and Ethnicity in a Transforming Europe. (2018) [PDF]

Moffat, Katie Louise. Crisis Politics in Contemporary Nordic Film Culture: Representing Race and Ethnicity in a Transforming Europe. PhD Dissertation. University of Stirling, Nov. 2018,

Identity politics in the Nordic region, that is, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, is in crisis. While these five small nations have garnered a reputation for their perceived exceptionalism, liberal progressiveness and strong welfare-orientated agendas, over the last thirty years, immigration into the Nordic region has increased significantly, and the political and cultural debates over ethnicity and belonging have become more intensely polarised. However, the film cultures of these five small nations have responded to these developments in complex and multifaceted ways giving rise to a broad calibre of film texts that both challenge and reinforce dominant perceptions of national identity. 

This thesis attempts to provide some insight into how wider political and ideological shifts have influenced onscreen representations of ethnicity and race over the last three decades. It does so by exploring a range of genres including comedy, social realism, art-house and documentary cinema using close textual and thematic analysis to unearth a region wrestling with the influences of globalisation. The thesis also situates this analysis in relation to film policies relevant to each respective national Nordic film institute, all of whom play an essential role in dictating the direction of Nordic film and media culture. 

Consequently, this research shows that representations of ethnic identity are shaped by ethnocentric perceptions of Nordic whiteness where ‘ethnic Nordic’ characters typically turn the experiences and perspectives of ethnic minorities into their own. However, it also demonstrates how a diversification of production channels, media policy directives and an emerging generation of filmmakers are challenging fixed perceptions of ethnic and racial identities and their relationships with conventional notions of ‘Nordicness.’ These contributions enhance the current scholarship on Nordic film culture by foregrounding the politics of race and ethnicity and further developing the theoretical argument for locating Nordic cinema in the global, transnational context.

PDF: http://dspace.stir.ac.uk/handle/1893/29975.

Bohman, Andrea. ‘Who’s Welcome and Who’s Not? Opposition towards Immigration in the Nordic Countries, 2002–2014’. (2018)

Bohman, Andrea. ‘Who’s Welcome and Who’s Not? Opposition towards Immigration in the Nordic Countries, 2002–2014’. Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 283–306.

This article demonstrates the analytical advantages of studying not only the degree to which people oppose immigration in a country, but also the character of their opposition. Using Latent Class Analysis and data from the European Social Survey, Nordic patterns and trends are examined with the aim of identifying different kinds of immigration attitudes and how they develop in different national contexts. The Nordic countries are interesting to compare as, while they are similar in many respects, they also diverge significantly from each other in areas theoretically considered important to the formation of attitudes towards immigration. Studying the character of immigration opposition reveals five different types of immigration attitudes. These are differently distributed between the Nordic countries as well as over time, and include nativist opposition (opposition only towards immigrants of ethnic/racial groups other than that of the majority population) and economic opposition (opposition that entails a separation between immigrants considered to be an economic resource and an economic burden). By demonstrating how immigration opposition in the Nordic countries varies not only in degree but also in character, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of immigration opposition as well as of how different attitudinal profiles evolve under different contextual circumstances.

doi:10.1111/1467-9477.12120.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9477.12120

Ben-Zion, Sigalit. Constructing Transnational and Transracial Identity: Adoption and Belonging in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. (2014)

Ben-Zion, Sigalit. Constructing Transnational and Transracial Identity: Adoption and Belonging in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014.

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are home to more than 90,000 transnational adoptees of Scandinavian parents raised in a predominantly white environment. This ethnography provides a unique perspective on how these transracial adoptees conceptualize and construct their sense of identity along the intersection of ethnicity, family, and national lines.

doi:10.1057/9781137472823.

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137480644.

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