Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe

Critical Essays on Knowledge, Inequality and Belonging

Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Mia Liinason, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Mia Liinason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032151113
• eBook ISBN: 9781000907414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: transforming identities in contemporary Europe
• 2 “Welcome to the most privileged, most xenophobic country in the world”. Affective figurations of white Danishness in the making of a Danish citizen
• 3 Educational challenges for Nordic exceptionalism: epistemic injustice in the absence of antiracist education
• 4 Autobiographical flesh: understanding Western notions of humanity through the life and selected writings of Una Marson (1905–1965)
• 5 ‘It’s our bodies, we are the experts!’: countering pathologisation, gate-keeping and Danish exceptionalism through collective trans knowledges, coalition-building and insistence
• 6 Gayness between nation builders and money makers: from ideology to new essentialism
• 7 (Not) in the name of gender equality: migrant women, empowerment, employment, and minority women’s organizations
• 8 ‘Home is where the cat is’: the here-there of queer (un)belonging
• 9 The poetics of climate change and politics of pain: sámi social media activist critique of the Swedish state
• 10 Varieties of exceptionalism: a conversation
• Index