Christine M. Jacobsen | University of Bergen (original) (raw)

Papers by Christine M. Jacobsen

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2023

Concerns with 'vulnerability' increasingly proliferate in global and regional pacts, internationa... more Concerns with 'vulnerability' increasingly proliferate in global and regional pacts, international and domestic legislations, and policy discourses and practices regarding migration and international protection. Also in France, vulnerability governance has made its

Norsk Antropologisk tidsskrift, 2022

In November 2018, the collapse of two buildings in Marseille led to the death of 8 people and the... more In November 2018, the collapse of two buildings in Marseille led to the death of 8 people and the emergency evacuation and forced relocation of a number of residents in one of the city's most multi-ethnic central neighbourhoods. In November the following year, the police forcibly evacuated an apartment block in the northern suburbs, which had been occupied by a group of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. In this article I analyse these events as forms of urban 'displacement'. The concept of displacement allows me to examine the relationship between international migration and urban processes related to housing, and how post-colonial border politics and neoliberal urban politics work together in the production of 'displaceability' and 'evictability'. Starting from an ethnographic description of the housing situation of migrants, I examine the spatial and temporal aspects of displaceability, understood as the potential of groups or persons to be physically and socially displaced and removed from their shelter. However, the migrants also strive towards 'emplacement'. In the last part of the article, I discuss, as an example of this, the emergence of a 'contracted squat' or 'self-organized asylum reception centre'. These new forms of housing can be analysed as a physical and social 'emplacement’ in the city, that takes shape in tension between different urban visions.

Contemporary Islam, 2021

In recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based ... more In recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, this article examines local initiatives to care for precarious others whose lives are neither materially supported nor socially recognized within the current French political regime. Engaging with critical French scholarship on humanitarianism as care for others associated with emergency, suffering and the politics of compassion, I show how food-distribution (maraudes) by Muslim-run humanitarian associations also draw from Islamic ethics of care. While social dynamics related to gender, class, race and generation structure the maraudes, the foregrounding of shared precarity, and of religious duty and piety over pity, challenges the 'hierarchies of deservingness' established by humanitarian border regimes. In caring for precarious others, Muslims must navigate both the secular suspicion directed towards Islam and the securitization of migration. Carrying out the religious duty of helping those in need, they are 'laying claim to public space' for both Muslims and precarious migrants.

Queering Knowledge Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern Edited ByPaul Boyce, EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco, 2019

In this chapter we look at one specific investment after Strathern: what has become know as the C... more In this chapter we look at one specific investment after Strathern: what has become know as the Cambridge version of the ontological turn. The aim of the chapter is to highlight both the feminist genealogy of this new direction in anthropology, but also to point to parallels in queer theory. We stage a comparison between Strathern’s analysis of male initiation cults in Papua New Guinea on the one hand and Butler´s analysis of the ‘marriage pour tous’ [marriage for all] debate in France, and end the chapter by calling for a stronger dialogue between queer theory and the ontological turn in anthropology.

Abstract This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious s... more Abstract

This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over ‘veiled nannies’ serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama’s [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a ‘problem-space’, I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a ‘secular suspicion’ at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves.

KEYWORDS: France, hijab, religious freedom, secular suspicion, public and private

In this round table, 1 leading scholars discuss questions about the relationship between religion... more In this round table, 1 leading scholars discuss questions about the relationship between religion and secularism and gender and sexuality, including why and how do discussions about religious freedom and secularism tend to coalesce around questions of gender and sexuality, and how can we conceptualise the relation between sex, gender, religion and secularism differently? What is the relationship between the legal and paralegal regulation of gender and sexuality and the regulation of religion? Christine: Sex and gender are at the heart of much controversy over religion in secular societies, and in general sexual freedom and gender equality are associated with secularism, so that regulating religion is seen as necessary for ensuring gender equality and sexual freedom. Playing on this assumed relationship, Joan Scott (2009) has coined the concept 'sexularism', which points to a particularly salient form of body-politics in today's European secularism, which increasingly plays itself out in the intimate sphere of sexuality and religion. Some of the questions I want to raise in this conversation are: why and how do discussions about religious freedom and secularism tend to coalesce around questions of gender and sexuality, and how can we conceptualise the relation between sex, gender, religion and secularism differently? What is the relationship between the legal and paralegal regulation of gender and sexuality and the regulation of religion? Mayanthi: One of the things I am interested in is what we might call the sexual protocols of secularism, the way in which one needs to approach secularism not so much as a site of emptiness or a kind of space-clearing neutrality but rather as a formation that has a series of norms and protocols about sex and gender. Working in France has helped me see this, because in France sexual and gender protocols are much more explicit than they are in other European or North American societies—although such protocols exist everywhere. I think there is a lot to gain from approaching the secular and secularity as full of sensibilities, affects and embodied practices. There is a tendency to think about embodied practices as a matter for the study of religion, and this approach leaves the secular unexamined as equally a site of bodily norms. What Joan Scott (ibid.) tries to do with the concept of sexularism—and what Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (2003, 2008) do in their work—is to unpack some of the sexual protocols of secularism and to think about the embodied practices of the secular subject.

Feminist Review, 2011

... Drawing on narratives of secular and religious Muslims, Fadil pursues this perspective while ... more ... Drawing on narratives of secular and religious Muslims, Fadil pursues this perspective while shifting the analytical lens to practices of self ... Drawing on the French example, Sarah Dornhof's article highlights such processes of Muslim women's adoption of liberal-secular frames of ...

Gender Studies in Europe: Institutional situations, strengths and flaws, specific research dynami... more Gender Studies in Europe: Institutional situations, strengths and flaws, specific research dynamics, what should be done? Round tables in written form. With perspectives from Francophone contexts, German speaking contexts, UK, Scandinavia...

Irregulære immigranter har på noen områder full tilgang til velferdsytelser, men på mange områder... more Irregulære immigranter har på noen områder full tilgang til velferdsytelser, men på mange områder er tilgangen svært begrenset enten i form av rettsregler eller andre barrierer. Denne antologien undersøker forholdet mellom rettslig rammeverk, institusjonell praksis og hvordan irregulære migranter selv erfarer sin situasjon.

Med en unik kombinasjon av juridisk og antropologisk blikk, går boken regelverket nærmere i sømmene, drøfter gatebyråkraters utfordringer og hverdagslivet til irregulære migranter og deres barn.

Hvilke regelverk får konsekvenser for irregulære migranters levevilkår? Hvordan blir dette regelverket forstått og etterfulgt av gatebyråkrater? Og hvordan blir hverdagslivet til irregulære migranter og deres barn påvirket av regelverket og dets fortolkning?

Denne boken er aktuell for velferdsprofesjoner som møter irregulære migranter som en del av sin yrkesutøvelse. Både leger, sykepleiere, helsesekretærer, lærere, helsesøstre, skolerådgivere, sosialarbeidere, sosionomer og barnevernspedagoger vil ha god nytte av Eksepsjonell velferd? Irregulære migranter i det norske velferdssamfunnet. Boken retter seg også mot frivillige organisasjoner som jobber med ulike aspekter ved migranters situasjon i Norge og andre som er engasjert i temaet.

American Behavioral Scientist

This essay addresses the question of how irregular migration is framed in Western media from the ... more This essay addresses the question of how irregular migration is framed in Western media from the location of the migration researcher. What challenges and dilemmas do media frames and practices of framing create for researchers’ participation in communicating research about irregular migration to the public? The essay is written in dialogue with topics raised by the articles in the special issue and seeks to supplement, and at times interrogate, its scrutiny of how irregular migration is covered in the news and received by the audience.

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and ana... more This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.

In this article, we juxtapose the ways “Muslim women” and “foreign prostitutes” are commonly cons... more In this article, we juxtapose the ways “Muslim women” and “foreign prostitutes” are commonly constituted as victims in media and politics. We analyze the functions of these two prototypical female victims in terms of the role they play in epitomizing “the problems of globalization” and in reinforcing the existing social and political structures. Victim discourse, when tied to the transnational proliferation of the sex industry and of (radical) Islam, has depoliticizing effects because it places nonindividual causes of victimization outside of “our” polity and society and casts the state as protector and neutral arbiter of national and global inequalities, marginalization, and social conflict.

Ethnos, 2010

The article investigates how the concept of victimhood is constructed within debates on transnati... more The article investigates how the concept of victimhood is constructed within debates on transnational prostitution and trafficking, and how representations of victimhood intersect with representations of the person/self, class, ethnicity, gender and nationality. Using research findings based on observation and interviews with women from post-Soviet societies involved in prostitution in Norway, we discuss how the women embrace, resist or rework dominant representations of migrant prostitution and attendant notions of victimhood, as well as how they relate to multiple notions of the person/self, femininity and nation through their handling of the stigma of prostitution

In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against t... more In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Young people of visible minority and Muslim background were central actors in these demonstrations. The public expression of Muslim identities and symbols during the demonstrations along with clashes between some of the young demonstrators and the police fuelled the already polarized debate concerning the integration of immigrant youth and Islamic radicalism existing in the Norwegian public realm. Using data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork and web-ethnography we follow the engagement of youth from a multi-ethnic Oslo mosque both online and offline. In critical dialogue with perspectives on political contention and transnational political activism, we analyse this transnational mobilization in terms of the ‘social imaginaries’ that mediated engagement with the Gaza question: ‘the global Muslim imaginary’, ‘secular leftist internationalism’ and ‘integration nations’.

Nora: Nordic Journal of Women's Studies, 2003

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2023

Concerns with 'vulnerability' increasingly proliferate in global and regional pacts, internationa... more Concerns with 'vulnerability' increasingly proliferate in global and regional pacts, international and domestic legislations, and policy discourses and practices regarding migration and international protection. Also in France, vulnerability governance has made its

Norsk Antropologisk tidsskrift, 2022

In November 2018, the collapse of two buildings in Marseille led to the death of 8 people and the... more In November 2018, the collapse of two buildings in Marseille led to the death of 8 people and the emergency evacuation and forced relocation of a number of residents in one of the city's most multi-ethnic central neighbourhoods. In November the following year, the police forcibly evacuated an apartment block in the northern suburbs, which had been occupied by a group of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. In this article I analyse these events as forms of urban 'displacement'. The concept of displacement allows me to examine the relationship between international migration and urban processes related to housing, and how post-colonial border politics and neoliberal urban politics work together in the production of 'displaceability' and 'evictability'. Starting from an ethnographic description of the housing situation of migrants, I examine the spatial and temporal aspects of displaceability, understood as the potential of groups or persons to be physically and socially displaced and removed from their shelter. However, the migrants also strive towards 'emplacement'. In the last part of the article, I discuss, as an example of this, the emergence of a 'contracted squat' or 'self-organized asylum reception centre'. These new forms of housing can be analysed as a physical and social 'emplacement’ in the city, that takes shape in tension between different urban visions.

Contemporary Islam, 2021

In recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based ... more In recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, this article examines local initiatives to care for precarious others whose lives are neither materially supported nor socially recognized within the current French political regime. Engaging with critical French scholarship on humanitarianism as care for others associated with emergency, suffering and the politics of compassion, I show how food-distribution (maraudes) by Muslim-run humanitarian associations also draw from Islamic ethics of care. While social dynamics related to gender, class, race and generation structure the maraudes, the foregrounding of shared precarity, and of religious duty and piety over pity, challenges the 'hierarchies of deservingness' established by humanitarian border regimes. In caring for precarious others, Muslims must navigate both the secular suspicion directed towards Islam and the securitization of migration. Carrying out the religious duty of helping those in need, they are 'laying claim to public space' for both Muslims and precarious migrants.

Queering Knowledge Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern Edited ByPaul Boyce, EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco, 2019

In this chapter we look at one specific investment after Strathern: what has become know as the C... more In this chapter we look at one specific investment after Strathern: what has become know as the Cambridge version of the ontological turn. The aim of the chapter is to highlight both the feminist genealogy of this new direction in anthropology, but also to point to parallels in queer theory. We stage a comparison between Strathern’s analysis of male initiation cults in Papua New Guinea on the one hand and Butler´s analysis of the ‘marriage pour tous’ [marriage for all] debate in France, and end the chapter by calling for a stronger dialogue between queer theory and the ontological turn in anthropology.

Abstract This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious s... more Abstract

This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over ‘veiled nannies’ serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama’s [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a ‘problem-space’, I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a ‘secular suspicion’ at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves.

KEYWORDS: France, hijab, religious freedom, secular suspicion, public and private

In this round table, 1 leading scholars discuss questions about the relationship between religion... more In this round table, 1 leading scholars discuss questions about the relationship between religion and secularism and gender and sexuality, including why and how do discussions about religious freedom and secularism tend to coalesce around questions of gender and sexuality, and how can we conceptualise the relation between sex, gender, religion and secularism differently? What is the relationship between the legal and paralegal regulation of gender and sexuality and the regulation of religion? Christine: Sex and gender are at the heart of much controversy over religion in secular societies, and in general sexual freedom and gender equality are associated with secularism, so that regulating religion is seen as necessary for ensuring gender equality and sexual freedom. Playing on this assumed relationship, Joan Scott (2009) has coined the concept 'sexularism', which points to a particularly salient form of body-politics in today's European secularism, which increasingly plays itself out in the intimate sphere of sexuality and religion. Some of the questions I want to raise in this conversation are: why and how do discussions about religious freedom and secularism tend to coalesce around questions of gender and sexuality, and how can we conceptualise the relation between sex, gender, religion and secularism differently? What is the relationship between the legal and paralegal regulation of gender and sexuality and the regulation of religion? Mayanthi: One of the things I am interested in is what we might call the sexual protocols of secularism, the way in which one needs to approach secularism not so much as a site of emptiness or a kind of space-clearing neutrality but rather as a formation that has a series of norms and protocols about sex and gender. Working in France has helped me see this, because in France sexual and gender protocols are much more explicit than they are in other European or North American societies—although such protocols exist everywhere. I think there is a lot to gain from approaching the secular and secularity as full of sensibilities, affects and embodied practices. There is a tendency to think about embodied practices as a matter for the study of religion, and this approach leaves the secular unexamined as equally a site of bodily norms. What Joan Scott (ibid.) tries to do with the concept of sexularism—and what Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (2003, 2008) do in their work—is to unpack some of the sexual protocols of secularism and to think about the embodied practices of the secular subject.

Feminist Review, 2011

... Drawing on narratives of secular and religious Muslims, Fadil pursues this perspective while ... more ... Drawing on narratives of secular and religious Muslims, Fadil pursues this perspective while shifting the analytical lens to practices of self ... Drawing on the French example, Sarah Dornhof's article highlights such processes of Muslim women's adoption of liberal-secular frames of ...

Gender Studies in Europe: Institutional situations, strengths and flaws, specific research dynami... more Gender Studies in Europe: Institutional situations, strengths and flaws, specific research dynamics, what should be done? Round tables in written form. With perspectives from Francophone contexts, German speaking contexts, UK, Scandinavia...

Irregulære immigranter har på noen områder full tilgang til velferdsytelser, men på mange områder... more Irregulære immigranter har på noen områder full tilgang til velferdsytelser, men på mange områder er tilgangen svært begrenset enten i form av rettsregler eller andre barrierer. Denne antologien undersøker forholdet mellom rettslig rammeverk, institusjonell praksis og hvordan irregulære migranter selv erfarer sin situasjon.

Med en unik kombinasjon av juridisk og antropologisk blikk, går boken regelverket nærmere i sømmene, drøfter gatebyråkraters utfordringer og hverdagslivet til irregulære migranter og deres barn.

Hvilke regelverk får konsekvenser for irregulære migranters levevilkår? Hvordan blir dette regelverket forstått og etterfulgt av gatebyråkrater? Og hvordan blir hverdagslivet til irregulære migranter og deres barn påvirket av regelverket og dets fortolkning?

Denne boken er aktuell for velferdsprofesjoner som møter irregulære migranter som en del av sin yrkesutøvelse. Både leger, sykepleiere, helsesekretærer, lærere, helsesøstre, skolerådgivere, sosialarbeidere, sosionomer og barnevernspedagoger vil ha god nytte av Eksepsjonell velferd? Irregulære migranter i det norske velferdssamfunnet. Boken retter seg også mot frivillige organisasjoner som jobber med ulike aspekter ved migranters situasjon i Norge og andre som er engasjert i temaet.

American Behavioral Scientist

This essay addresses the question of how irregular migration is framed in Western media from the ... more This essay addresses the question of how irregular migration is framed in Western media from the location of the migration researcher. What challenges and dilemmas do media frames and practices of framing create for researchers’ participation in communicating research about irregular migration to the public? The essay is written in dialogue with topics raised by the articles in the special issue and seeks to supplement, and at times interrogate, its scrutiny of how irregular migration is covered in the news and received by the audience.

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and ana... more This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.

In this article, we juxtapose the ways “Muslim women” and “foreign prostitutes” are commonly cons... more In this article, we juxtapose the ways “Muslim women” and “foreign prostitutes” are commonly constituted as victims in media and politics. We analyze the functions of these two prototypical female victims in terms of the role they play in epitomizing “the problems of globalization” and in reinforcing the existing social and political structures. Victim discourse, when tied to the transnational proliferation of the sex industry and of (radical) Islam, has depoliticizing effects because it places nonindividual causes of victimization outside of “our” polity and society and casts the state as protector and neutral arbiter of national and global inequalities, marginalization, and social conflict.

Ethnos, 2010

The article investigates how the concept of victimhood is constructed within debates on transnati... more The article investigates how the concept of victimhood is constructed within debates on transnational prostitution and trafficking, and how representations of victimhood intersect with representations of the person/self, class, ethnicity, gender and nationality. Using research findings based on observation and interviews with women from post-Soviet societies involved in prostitution in Norway, we discuss how the women embrace, resist or rework dominant representations of migrant prostitution and attendant notions of victimhood, as well as how they relate to multiple notions of the person/self, femininity and nation through their handling of the stigma of prostitution

In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against t... more In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Young people of visible minority and Muslim background were central actors in these demonstrations. The public expression of Muslim identities and symbols during the demonstrations along with clashes between some of the young demonstrators and the police fuelled the already polarized debate concerning the integration of immigrant youth and Islamic radicalism existing in the Norwegian public realm. Using data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork and web-ethnography we follow the engagement of youth from a multi-ethnic Oslo mosque both online and offline. In critical dialogue with perspectives on political contention and transnational political activism, we analyse this transnational mobilization in terms of the ‘social imaginaries’ that mediated engagement with the Gaza question: ‘the global Muslim imaginary’, ‘secular leftist internationalism’ and ‘integration nations’.

Nora: Nordic Journal of Women's Studies, 2003

Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, 2020

This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregulari... more This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures. This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power.

Siden 22/7 har det kommet en rekke bøker som på ulike måter søker å belyse, forstå og forklare t... more Siden 22/7 har det kommet en rekke bøker som på ulike måter søker å belyse, forstå og forklare terroren som rystet Norge. Med boken Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia ønsker Sindre Bangstad å gi et antropologisk bidrag som retter seg mot et inter-nasjonalt så vel som et norsk publikum. Bangstad karakteriserer i forordet sitt eget ståsted som en antropologi som er engasjert og forpliktet på menneskerettigheter og på å fremme et multikulturelt (men ikke multikulturalistisk) samfunn tuftet på lik rett til verdighet for alle borgere, uavhengig av personlig tro eller overbevisning. Denne innledende posisjoneringen sier noe om vanskeligheten ved å skrive antro-pologi om naere og kontroversielle spørsmål. Målet med boken er ifølge forfatteren todelt. Han ønsker for det første å kaste lys over den retningen samfunnsdiskurser om islam og muslimer har tatt i Norge de se-nere tiårene. I og med at de diskursive skiftene det er tale om reflekterer og er relevant for samfunnsutvikling i andre deler av Europa, ønsker forfatteren for det andre å bidra til en bredere faglig diskusjon om innvandring, integrasjon, og islamofobi.

Bangstad, Sindre; Leirvik, Oddbjørn; Plesner, Ingvill Thorson (red.) Sekularisme - med norske br... more Bangstad, Sindre; Leirvik, Oddbjørn; Plesner, Ingvill Thorson (red.)
Sekularisme - med norske briller