Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region

Suvi Keskinen is Professor and an Academy Research Fellow in the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN) at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the co-editor of Complying with Colonialism. Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region.Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland, Iceland. She is the co-editor of Mobility to the Edges of Europe; The Case of Iceland and Poland.Mari Toivanen is an Academy of Finland Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the co-editor of Methodological Approaches in Kurdish Studies. Theoretical and Practical Insights from the Field.

"Developing the idea famously set out by W. E. B Du Bois, Stuart Hall suggested that living with difference would be the problem of the twenty-first century. Instances all across the world provide evidence of this and this insightful book, centred on the Nordic countries adds powerfully to a body of critical scholarship on race and ethnicity that shows how entangled they are within repressed histories of internal and external colonisation and imagined nationhood. By considering the treatment of indigenous minorities alongside migrant communities the editors and contributors impressively advance understandings of the ways in which difference is imagined and represented. Moreover the essays in this book skilfully analyse the peculiarity of claimed ethnic homogeneity. By linking the role of this myth to the influential model of the social democratic welfare state they show that Hall’s ‘fateful triangle’ of ethnicity-race-nation requires a fourth pillar, namely the state. Here is a book that may seem to be mainly of relevance to Nordic scholars but will I hope be read well beyond there and by all those interested in ethnicity, migration and the state, for its critical, engaged and engaging, unmasking of assumed homogeneity as well as its search for the possibilities of solidarity across difference." - Karim Murji, Co-editor of Current Sociology, University of West London, UK"This collection is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion on politics of difference in Europe. Offering a Nordic perspective, it combines a historical deconstruction of national myths of homogeneity (questioning notions of exceptionality, denials of colonialism/racism and claims of innocence) with policy level analysis (securitization), individual narratives and group negotiation strategies. Particularly insightful is its inclusion of diverse exclusionary discourses in one volume. This strategy highlights the similarities between disc

• 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