Randi Gressgård | University of Bergen (original) (raw)

Papers by Randi Gressgård

Heath-Kelly, C. & B. Gruber (eds.): Vulnerability: Governing the Social through Security Politics, 2023

Taking as our point of departure a prevention initiative involving Arabic-speaking mothers and lo... more Taking as our point of departure a prevention initiative involving Arabic-speaking mothers and local emergency services in a designated ‘vulnerable area’ in Sweden, the chapter aims to show how shifting notions of vulnerability and corresponding ideas of learning and responsibility work to entrench ethnic and gender divides and stereotypes, even as they promote an ethics of attentiveness and awareness. While a conventional understanding of vulnerability, in accordance with established in/equality metrics, conceives of minority-ethnic populations in deprived areas as amongst those most in need of empowerment and capacity building, a more affirming approach views vulnerability as a precondition for mutual learning, not limited to deprived or minoritized people, groups or spaces. As the term vulnerability has dispersed through contemporary prevention discourses, the ‘classical’ us/them or friend/enemy distinction is being increasingly displaced, amounting to a ‘flattening’ and ‘whitewashing’ of differentiations. The disavowal of the structural conditions of those involved in prevention measures is not simply a decoupling of vulnerability from power relations, but is itself a political strategy.

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Døving, C.A. (ed.): Rasisme: Fenomenet, forskningen, erfaringene, 2022

Interseksjonalitet handler om at forskjellige former for sosial ulikhet samspiller på sammensatte... more Interseksjonalitet handler om at forskjellige former for sosial ulikhet samspiller på sammensatte og ofte motstridende måter. I dette kapitlet skal vi se nærmere på forholdet mellom interseksjonalitet og ignoranseproblematikk. Utgangspunktet er at interseksjonalitetsanalyser belyser problemet med usynliggjøring, fortrengning, fornektelse eller glemsel av sammensatte undertrykte grupper. Mye interseksjonalitetsforskning motiveres nettopp av utfordringene med å synliggjøre grupper som utsettes for flere former for sosial undertrykking samtidig. Men interseksjonalitet mer enn et synliggjøringsprosjekt som sikter mot inkludering av tidligere utelatte grupper i eksisterende strukturer. Vi skal se at problemet med «hvit ignoranse» er blitt en del av diskusjonen rundt selve interseksjonalitetsbegrepet. Samtidig skal vi se at diskusjonen av hvit ignoranse i nyere interseksjonalitetsforskning byr på sine egne ignoranseproblemer, med konsekvenser for analyseredskapets kritiske potensial.

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L'ubomír, D. and C.M. Mertel (eds.): Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics. London: Bloomsbury, 2022

If the dialogic attitude is a consciously adopted ethos, akin to Foucault’s ‘critical attitude’, ... more If the dialogic attitude is a consciously adopted ethos, akin to Foucault’s ‘critical attitude’, then a polarized world seems the worst possible starting point for directed and reflective social action. Right-wing populists’ insistence on the immediacy of understanding and their striving for authenticity are, in key respects, the inverse of Hans Herbert Kögler’s critical hermeneutics and what my own work, informed by his The Power of Dialogue, details as the conditions for multicultural dialogue. In the prevailing political culture of intense polarization, we might want to revisit these critical interventions and (re)consider their relevance for today. But to do so, we must take seriously the strong current of criticism against established critical thinking that we have witnessed in the humanities and social sciences more recently: the turn away from epistemological issues shaping ‘critique’, towards affective affirmation of what is in ontological terms. This academic turn includes also non-representational approaches professing the existence of ontologically plural worlds, as opposed to multiple (culturally different) views on this (one) world. Without adhering to the ‘pluriversal’ notion of ontologically separate worlds, I nevertheless propose a strategic-essentialist deployment of the plural-world vocabulary. To challenge entrenched white entitlement – Black Lives Matter (BLM) being a case in point – it is vital to find a ‘way out’ of this particular if universalized world. Our main dialogical concern would then be not so much a polarized world as a ‘one world’ world predicated on racialized death-politics, spectacular and eventual as well as slow and ordinary.

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Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2020

This article attends to the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish politica... more This article attends to the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish political campaigns. Locating current political debates in a cultural-historical context of long-established hierarchical divides, it conceives of gender and sexuality as 'empty signifiers' deployed in political struggles (for hegemony) over notions of civic responsibility, good citizenship and articulations of Europeanness. Similarly, it takes 'Europeanness' as an empty signifier, without any essential meaning, arguing that these signifiers are key to understanding recent mobilizations around moral frontiers in Polish politics. Illustrative examples serve to elaborate how LGBT rights and sex education are instrumentalized among self-proclaimed liberals as well as rightwing nationalists, seeking to guarantee the moral integrity of the nation according to an antagonistic logic. On both sides of the political divide, we witness a self-orientalizing positioning towards the European 'core', whether phrased in terms of sexual modernity or Christian civilization.

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Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2020

Drawing on an empirical study of LGBT politics in Ukraine, this article foregrounds the civilizat... more Drawing on an empirical study of LGBT politics in Ukraine, this article foregrounds the civilizational and yet unspoken racialization characterizing Europeanization projects in the context of EU enlargement. Our starting point is that the boundaries of Europeanness coincide with civilizational boundaries of whiteness. We make the case that Europeanization is a profoundly racialized project, where racial whiteness is unmarked as a 'natural' adjacency of the West. We treat this dual mechanism of marking and unmarking as an instance of racial displacement, arguing that the predicaments of this dual mechanism are particularly forceful in the context of EU enlargement. More specifically, the article interrogates the ways in which subtle racialized power mechanisms intersect with-while at the same time being obscured by-political instrumentalization of LGBT (lesbian-gay-bi-trans) rights and freedoms in 'transitioning' processes involving Ukraine.

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Politics, 2020

Based on a study of prevention politics in Sweden, this article probes the turn to resilience in ... more Based on a study of prevention politics in Sweden, this article probes the turn to resilience in its institutionalized form, cross-sectorial partnerships. It interrogates how resilience proponents strategically deploy the semantics of the shift in policymaking, arguing that they perform the ‘shift’ (in mindset) to criticize a long-established welfare-state governmentality, associated with professional ‘silos’, to create new possibilities for partnership-organized intervention. Part I draws attention to how resilience policy mobilizes partnerships around the indeterminate problem of ‘problem setting’. Based on the idea of limited knowledge and governance in an indeterminate world, failure is considered inevitable and potentially productive, if handled appropriately – which is an issue of problem design or framing. It is considered particularly important to handle problems of coordination and communication internal to partnerships, since failures here risk jeopardizing collaboration and hence the whole enterprise. Part II demonstrates how partnership-organized resilience initiatives bracket-off risky failure by strategically reframing problems and bringing new visions of the future into being – through the semantics of the shift. In characteristically epochal terms, the ‘shift’ casts partnership formation as an improvement of the future, although the strategists’ belief in future visions is apparently shot through with cynicism.

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Social Identities, 2019

In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the contemporary subjugation of life to ... more In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the
contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death –
exceptional violence that exceeds the biopolitical aim of fostering
life – thus alluding to a state of emergency in which law is
suspended and martial rule is brought into force. However, as
several commentators have suggested, exceptional politics does
not need to be legitimized by a declared state of emergency, such
as in cases where governmental and non-governmental actors are
vested with powers to take strong measures against specific urban
sub-populations in the name of security or order maintenance. Still,
even these reworked and expanded approaches to death-politics
revolve around sovereign exceptionality and the accompanying
fabrication of undesirable ‘others’. Somewhat counterintuitively, the
present article advances an analysis of racialized security politics
issuing from the breakdown of representational, topographical
boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘us’ and ‘others’.
Illustrated by a case from Malmö, Sweden, it urges greater
attention to how necropolitics could operate entirely outside the
trope of emergency as exception. The principal argument is that
urban security politics, when operating within the frame of
resilience governance, involves distinctly different configurations of
necropolitics, which require a critical-theoretical vocabulary outside
the traditional framework of securitization.

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This special issue probes into planning for cultural and ethnic pluralism in Nordic cities, focus... more This special issue probes into planning for cultural and ethnic pluralism in Nordic cities, focusing especially on urban diversity politics and practices related to migration.

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Based on a study of policy frames in Malmö, this article discusses the safety–security nexus in u... more Based on a study of policy frames in Malmö, this article discusses the safety–security nexus in urban governance. It argues that perceived safety is constituted as an index of order and that security politics becomes a means to this end. Security forms part and parcel of an expanded cohesion agenda that links criminal justice, immigration control, and integration as a chain. This multi-levelled policy chain, which includes police collaboration with governmental as well as non-governmental actors, opens up for expanded policing – termed welfare policing – in immigrant-dense areas of the city. The expansive security politics conflates welfare provision with crime prevention in specific urban districts, thus rendering entire sub-populations legible as 'dangerous' others against which society, or the city, must be defended. In conclusion, the article argues that the inherited structures and institutions of the welfare state seem to offer favourable conditions for expanded policing in urban space.

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Sexual and cultural diversity is increasingly made an ally of capitalism. As the city has become ... more Sexual and cultural diversity is increasingly made an ally of capitalism. As the city has become a strategic site for economic growth and global competitiveness, tolerance to sexual and cultural diversity is by urban strategists seen as an index of a city’s financial success. However, the instrumentalization of urban diversity, sexual diversity in particular, is not an issue of prosperity in a straightforwardly economic sense. Visible queer subcultures are made into desirable objects not only because of their market value, but also by virtue of being markers of civilizational progress and justice, in opposition to non-progressive ‘others’. When LGTB rights and freedoms are taken as a measure of a country’s successful development and modernization, sexual diversity can be discursively deployed to mark a difference between civilized and non-civilized nations and internal minority. While some sexual minorities are identified with success(ion), others sexual dissidents are deemed as improper and backward; and while some cities and nations are identified as economically and socially progressive, others are constituted as traditional and lagging behind. This temporal binary is, in turn, transversed in spatial imaginations of cosmopolitanism versus parochialism. The central task is to elucidate how these split geo-temporal imaginations are intrinsic to the language of cosmopolitanism and tolerance, and how the link between cosmopolitanism and the economic sphere in urban politics recodes social divisions as an opposition between advanced, desirable and backward, non-desirable urban diversity. This, in turn, raises questions about social justice in queer theory and politics. The discursive splitting urges critical queer theory to focus attention on the level of representation when discussing social justice.

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Forthcoming in Erica Righard, Magnus Johansson & Tapio Salonen (eds.): Social Transformations in Scandinavian Cities. Lund: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2015

The visionary goal of many urban planners is to develop an attractive and sustainable city, socia... more The visionary goal of many urban planners is to develop an attractive and sustainable city, socially, economically, and ecologically. This essay discusses the conceptual assumptions of social sustainability in Swedish urban governance, and the urban strategy of the city of Malmö in particular. Social sustainability programmes in Malmö take as their starting point ‘the whole city’ when identifying structural mechanisms of marginalization and spatial segregation, as opposed to circumscribing the problems to so-called problem areas and marginalized groups. However, when the social sustainability agenda is incorporated into the visionary urban strategy, ‘the whole city’ translates into ‘the city as a whole’, which invokes a unifying notion of one future for the city as a single entity. The overall goal with a social sustainability agenda, in the frame of urban strategy, is to progressively transform immigrant-dense ‘problem areas’ of the city into ‘innovation areas’, according to given criteria of success. I shall argue that unless the social sustainability agenda discards the spatiotemporal coordinates of visionary urban strategy, it risks reproducing the status quo and contributing to further marginalization of targeted populations.

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Environment and Planning A, 2015

Based on a critical examination of Malmö’s new development strategy, this paper discusses the pow... more Based on a critical examination of Malmö’s new development strategy, this paper discusses the power of attachment in urban strategy, with a special focus on the ideological framing of social sustainability. It argues that the social sustainability agenda has less to do with its practical purpose of equalizing living conditions in a segregated city and more to do with its ability to mobilize people under a future vision through attachment to a fantasmatic narrative. The fantasmatic construction of the ‘future city’ helps promote ideological closure, but the fantasmatic vision is not tantamount to a utopian ideal that transcends participants’ self-interests. The paper analyzes urban strategists’ communication of visionary planning ideas, such as the idea of social sustainability, as a ritual practice that generates an abstract uniformity through people’s consensual appropriation of schemes. At the same time, the appropriation of schemes affords the participants a space of resistance which could turn the power of attachment into a politics of reattachment that critically engages with—and politicizes—ideological constructs that relate everything to a single vision.

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As cross-cultural migration increases democratic states face a particular challenge: how to grant... more As cross-cultural migration increases democratic states face a particular challenge: how to grant equal rights and dignity to individuals while recognizing cultural distinctiveness. In response to the greater number of ethnic and religious minority groups, state policies seem to focus on managing cultural differences through planned pluralism. This book explores the dilemmas, paradoxes, and conflicts that emerge when differences are managed within this conceptual framework. After a critical investigation of the perceived logic of identity, indicative of Western nation-states and at the root of their pluralistic intentions, the author takes issue with both universalist notions of equality and cultural relativist notions of distinctiveness. However, without identity is it possible to participate in dialogue and form communities? Is there a way out of this impasse? The book argues in favor of communities based on nonidentitarian difference, developed and maintained through open and critical dialogue.

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Dialogues in Human Geography, 2012

The review essays offer me an opportunity to rethink the topic of my book. In my response, I woul... more The review essays offer me an opportunity to rethink the topic of my book. In my response, I would like to reflect on some of the problems and possibilities pointed out by my critics, especially the relevance of my analysis to discussions in human geography. I will start by giving a brief account of the political context for my further reflections.

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Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift, 2014

Mikroaggresjon viser til hverdagslige ydmykelser som markerer et underordningsforhold. Det handle... more Mikroaggresjon viser til hverdagslige ydmykelser som markerer et underordningsforhold. Det handler om ytringer eller handlinger som utpeker og knytter personer til stereotype oppfatninger om etnisitet, rase, kjønn, seksualitet eller andre etablerte sosiale skillelinjer, vel å merke uten at det handler om overlagte hersketeknikker.

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Uniped, 2014

Når spenninger eller konflikter oppsta° r i klasserommet, oppleves det gjerne som et hinder for l... more Når spenninger eller konflikter oppsta° r i klasserommet, oppleves det gjerne som et hinder for læring. Mange undervisere betrakter konfliktsituasjoner som et problem som må håndteres for å reetablere ro og orden. Vi vil imidlertid hevde at ønsket om kontroll over situasjonen kan forsterke mekanismene som utløste konflikten. En del klasseromskonflikter er ikke situasjonsbetinget i snever forstand, men er resultat av maktmekanismer som knytter seg til den akademiske institusjonen og samfunnsformasjonen generelt. Trangen til å begrense problemet til situasjonen og gjenopprette harmoni kan stenge for muligheten til å problematisere mekanismer som markerer et sosialt hierarki. Vi bruker begrepet mikroaggresjon til å belyse slike uformelle maktmekanismer. For å illustrere hvordan mikroaggresjon kan komme til uttrykk i klasserommet, presenterer vi to caser fra egen undervisning. Vi avrunder med en diskusjon av hva som skjer med læringsbetingelsene når en tar hensyn til såkalte utenomfaglige faktorer i læringssituasjonen.

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Psychology and Sexuality, 2013

This article draws attention to the constitutive mechanisms of asexual identity. It identifies a ... more This article draws attention to the constitutive mechanisms of asexual identity. It identifies a shift in expert discourse: a move away from pathology towards recognition of asexual identity. While this discursive shift, propelled by recent research in psychology and sexology, could pave the way for the inclusion of asexuals in public culture, it also reaffirms dominant terms and formations pertaining to sexuality and intimacy. The article argues that the discursive formation of a new asexual identity takes place through a process of objectification and subjectification/subjection at the interface between expert disciplines and activism. The recognition of identity is constitutive of subjects that are particularly suitable for self-regulation within the parameters of (neo)liberal citizenship. Yet, at the same time, the discursive shift also makes room for critical intervention akin to queer critique of naturalised gender and sexuality norms. The recognition of asexual identity could serve to destabilise the sexual regime (of truth) that privileges sexual relationships against other affiliations and grants sexual-biological relationships a status as primary in the formation of family and kinship relations. The article concludes that asexual identity encourages us to imagine other pathways of affiliation and other concepts of personhood, beyond the tenets of liberal humanism – gesturing instead towards new configurations of the human and new meanings of sexual citizenship.

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KULTURO, 2014

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Sexualities, 2010

The article explores the way in which trans people represent a cultural ‘difference’ that has to ... more The article explores the way in which trans people represent a cultural ‘difference’ that has to be managed in liberal-democratic societies of today. The point of departure is liberal tolerance discourse, as analysed by Wendy Brown, in which the threatening ‘others’ are being regulated in order to prevent the social order from being destroyed from within. In accordance with liberal norms and values, tolerance promotes individual choice and autonomy: the individual’s freedom of identity. It also assumes, however, that identities, such as trans identity, issue from an essence or inner truth to be found in the person. This subjectivity-constituting contradiction lies at the core of liberal tolerance discourse. Trans people bring into question this contradiction, thereby challenging the foundations of normative subjectivity. The key question that emerges is whether liberal humanist tolerance defies horror and hostility or whether tolerance discourse creates its own gendered and sexualized monsters suitable for late-modern, flexible regimes of
governmentality.

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European Journal of Womens Studies, 2006

The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual co... more The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual constitute three different figures that, despite their striking differences, have a common symbolic ground. By focusing on the similarity between the veiled woman and the other two figures, the article sheds a different light on the debate about the Muslim veil in western societies. It is argued that the western notion of woman is based on a structural ambivalence of transcendence and immanence. On the one hand, woman is expected to be liberated, in control and active in public life and in all ways just as free as the man, on the other she represents a deficiency compared to the man; it is expected of her that she takes up a complementary, subordinate position in relation to the man. The subordinate position, however, is seldom pronounced. Officially, the gender hierarchy is not a part of egalitarian societies, that is, the modern configuration that formally rejects a hierarchical worldview. Is this the reason why the three figures are regarded as pathological? Does their way of demonstrating extraordinary transcendence combined with extraordinary immanence make them monstrous?

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Heath-Kelly, C. & B. Gruber (eds.): Vulnerability: Governing the Social through Security Politics, 2023

Taking as our point of departure a prevention initiative involving Arabic-speaking mothers and lo... more Taking as our point of departure a prevention initiative involving Arabic-speaking mothers and local emergency services in a designated ‘vulnerable area’ in Sweden, the chapter aims to show how shifting notions of vulnerability and corresponding ideas of learning and responsibility work to entrench ethnic and gender divides and stereotypes, even as they promote an ethics of attentiveness and awareness. While a conventional understanding of vulnerability, in accordance with established in/equality metrics, conceives of minority-ethnic populations in deprived areas as amongst those most in need of empowerment and capacity building, a more affirming approach views vulnerability as a precondition for mutual learning, not limited to deprived or minoritized people, groups or spaces. As the term vulnerability has dispersed through contemporary prevention discourses, the ‘classical’ us/them or friend/enemy distinction is being increasingly displaced, amounting to a ‘flattening’ and ‘whitewashing’ of differentiations. The disavowal of the structural conditions of those involved in prevention measures is not simply a decoupling of vulnerability from power relations, but is itself a political strategy.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Døving, C.A. (ed.): Rasisme: Fenomenet, forskningen, erfaringene, 2022

Interseksjonalitet handler om at forskjellige former for sosial ulikhet samspiller på sammensatte... more Interseksjonalitet handler om at forskjellige former for sosial ulikhet samspiller på sammensatte og ofte motstridende måter. I dette kapitlet skal vi se nærmere på forholdet mellom interseksjonalitet og ignoranseproblematikk. Utgangspunktet er at interseksjonalitetsanalyser belyser problemet med usynliggjøring, fortrengning, fornektelse eller glemsel av sammensatte undertrykte grupper. Mye interseksjonalitetsforskning motiveres nettopp av utfordringene med å synliggjøre grupper som utsettes for flere former for sosial undertrykking samtidig. Men interseksjonalitet mer enn et synliggjøringsprosjekt som sikter mot inkludering av tidligere utelatte grupper i eksisterende strukturer. Vi skal se at problemet med «hvit ignoranse» er blitt en del av diskusjonen rundt selve interseksjonalitetsbegrepet. Samtidig skal vi se at diskusjonen av hvit ignoranse i nyere interseksjonalitetsforskning byr på sine egne ignoranseproblemer, med konsekvenser for analyseredskapets kritiske potensial.

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L'ubomír, D. and C.M. Mertel (eds.): Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics. London: Bloomsbury, 2022

If the dialogic attitude is a consciously adopted ethos, akin to Foucault’s ‘critical attitude’, ... more If the dialogic attitude is a consciously adopted ethos, akin to Foucault’s ‘critical attitude’, then a polarized world seems the worst possible starting point for directed and reflective social action. Right-wing populists’ insistence on the immediacy of understanding and their striving for authenticity are, in key respects, the inverse of Hans Herbert Kögler’s critical hermeneutics and what my own work, informed by his The Power of Dialogue, details as the conditions for multicultural dialogue. In the prevailing political culture of intense polarization, we might want to revisit these critical interventions and (re)consider their relevance for today. But to do so, we must take seriously the strong current of criticism against established critical thinking that we have witnessed in the humanities and social sciences more recently: the turn away from epistemological issues shaping ‘critique’, towards affective affirmation of what is in ontological terms. This academic turn includes also non-representational approaches professing the existence of ontologically plural worlds, as opposed to multiple (culturally different) views on this (one) world. Without adhering to the ‘pluriversal’ notion of ontologically separate worlds, I nevertheless propose a strategic-essentialist deployment of the plural-world vocabulary. To challenge entrenched white entitlement – Black Lives Matter (BLM) being a case in point – it is vital to find a ‘way out’ of this particular if universalized world. Our main dialogical concern would then be not so much a polarized world as a ‘one world’ world predicated on racialized death-politics, spectacular and eventual as well as slow and ordinary.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2020

This article attends to the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish politica... more This article attends to the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish political campaigns. Locating current political debates in a cultural-historical context of long-established hierarchical divides, it conceives of gender and sexuality as 'empty signifiers' deployed in political struggles (for hegemony) over notions of civic responsibility, good citizenship and articulations of Europeanness. Similarly, it takes 'Europeanness' as an empty signifier, without any essential meaning, arguing that these signifiers are key to understanding recent mobilizations around moral frontiers in Polish politics. Illustrative examples serve to elaborate how LGBT rights and sex education are instrumentalized among self-proclaimed liberals as well as rightwing nationalists, seeking to guarantee the moral integrity of the nation according to an antagonistic logic. On both sides of the political divide, we witness a self-orientalizing positioning towards the European 'core', whether phrased in terms of sexual modernity or Christian civilization.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2020

Drawing on an empirical study of LGBT politics in Ukraine, this article foregrounds the civilizat... more Drawing on an empirical study of LGBT politics in Ukraine, this article foregrounds the civilizational and yet unspoken racialization characterizing Europeanization projects in the context of EU enlargement. Our starting point is that the boundaries of Europeanness coincide with civilizational boundaries of whiteness. We make the case that Europeanization is a profoundly racialized project, where racial whiteness is unmarked as a 'natural' adjacency of the West. We treat this dual mechanism of marking and unmarking as an instance of racial displacement, arguing that the predicaments of this dual mechanism are particularly forceful in the context of EU enlargement. More specifically, the article interrogates the ways in which subtle racialized power mechanisms intersect with-while at the same time being obscured by-political instrumentalization of LGBT (lesbian-gay-bi-trans) rights and freedoms in 'transitioning' processes involving Ukraine.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Politics, 2020

Based on a study of prevention politics in Sweden, this article probes the turn to resilience in ... more Based on a study of prevention politics in Sweden, this article probes the turn to resilience in its institutionalized form, cross-sectorial partnerships. It interrogates how resilience proponents strategically deploy the semantics of the shift in policymaking, arguing that they perform the ‘shift’ (in mindset) to criticize a long-established welfare-state governmentality, associated with professional ‘silos’, to create new possibilities for partnership-organized intervention. Part I draws attention to how resilience policy mobilizes partnerships around the indeterminate problem of ‘problem setting’. Based on the idea of limited knowledge and governance in an indeterminate world, failure is considered inevitable and potentially productive, if handled appropriately – which is an issue of problem design or framing. It is considered particularly important to handle problems of coordination and communication internal to partnerships, since failures here risk jeopardizing collaboration and hence the whole enterprise. Part II demonstrates how partnership-organized resilience initiatives bracket-off risky failure by strategically reframing problems and bringing new visions of the future into being – through the semantics of the shift. In characteristically epochal terms, the ‘shift’ casts partnership formation as an improvement of the future, although the strategists’ belief in future visions is apparently shot through with cynicism.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Social Identities, 2019

In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the contemporary subjugation of life to ... more In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the
contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death –
exceptional violence that exceeds the biopolitical aim of fostering
life – thus alluding to a state of emergency in which law is
suspended and martial rule is brought into force. However, as
several commentators have suggested, exceptional politics does
not need to be legitimized by a declared state of emergency, such
as in cases where governmental and non-governmental actors are
vested with powers to take strong measures against specific urban
sub-populations in the name of security or order maintenance. Still,
even these reworked and expanded approaches to death-politics
revolve around sovereign exceptionality and the accompanying
fabrication of undesirable ‘others’. Somewhat counterintuitively, the
present article advances an analysis of racialized security politics
issuing from the breakdown of representational, topographical
boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘us’ and ‘others’.
Illustrated by a case from Malmö, Sweden, it urges greater
attention to how necropolitics could operate entirely outside the
trope of emergency as exception. The principal argument is that
urban security politics, when operating within the frame of
resilience governance, involves distinctly different configurations of
necropolitics, which require a critical-theoretical vocabulary outside
the traditional framework of securitization.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

This special issue probes into planning for cultural and ethnic pluralism in Nordic cities, focus... more This special issue probes into planning for cultural and ethnic pluralism in Nordic cities, focusing especially on urban diversity politics and practices related to migration.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Based on a study of policy frames in Malmö, this article discusses the safety–security nexus in u... more Based on a study of policy frames in Malmö, this article discusses the safety–security nexus in urban governance. It argues that perceived safety is constituted as an index of order and that security politics becomes a means to this end. Security forms part and parcel of an expanded cohesion agenda that links criminal justice, immigration control, and integration as a chain. This multi-levelled policy chain, which includes police collaboration with governmental as well as non-governmental actors, opens up for expanded policing – termed welfare policing – in immigrant-dense areas of the city. The expansive security politics conflates welfare provision with crime prevention in specific urban districts, thus rendering entire sub-populations legible as 'dangerous' others against which society, or the city, must be defended. In conclusion, the article argues that the inherited structures and institutions of the welfare state seem to offer favourable conditions for expanded policing in urban space.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Sexual and cultural diversity is increasingly made an ally of capitalism. As the city has become ... more Sexual and cultural diversity is increasingly made an ally of capitalism. As the city has become a strategic site for economic growth and global competitiveness, tolerance to sexual and cultural diversity is by urban strategists seen as an index of a city’s financial success. However, the instrumentalization of urban diversity, sexual diversity in particular, is not an issue of prosperity in a straightforwardly economic sense. Visible queer subcultures are made into desirable objects not only because of their market value, but also by virtue of being markers of civilizational progress and justice, in opposition to non-progressive ‘others’. When LGTB rights and freedoms are taken as a measure of a country’s successful development and modernization, sexual diversity can be discursively deployed to mark a difference between civilized and non-civilized nations and internal minority. While some sexual minorities are identified with success(ion), others sexual dissidents are deemed as improper and backward; and while some cities and nations are identified as economically and socially progressive, others are constituted as traditional and lagging behind. This temporal binary is, in turn, transversed in spatial imaginations of cosmopolitanism versus parochialism. The central task is to elucidate how these split geo-temporal imaginations are intrinsic to the language of cosmopolitanism and tolerance, and how the link between cosmopolitanism and the economic sphere in urban politics recodes social divisions as an opposition between advanced, desirable and backward, non-desirable urban diversity. This, in turn, raises questions about social justice in queer theory and politics. The discursive splitting urges critical queer theory to focus attention on the level of representation when discussing social justice.

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Forthcoming in Erica Righard, Magnus Johansson & Tapio Salonen (eds.): Social Transformations in Scandinavian Cities. Lund: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2015

The visionary goal of many urban planners is to develop an attractive and sustainable city, socia... more The visionary goal of many urban planners is to develop an attractive and sustainable city, socially, economically, and ecologically. This essay discusses the conceptual assumptions of social sustainability in Swedish urban governance, and the urban strategy of the city of Malmö in particular. Social sustainability programmes in Malmö take as their starting point ‘the whole city’ when identifying structural mechanisms of marginalization and spatial segregation, as opposed to circumscribing the problems to so-called problem areas and marginalized groups. However, when the social sustainability agenda is incorporated into the visionary urban strategy, ‘the whole city’ translates into ‘the city as a whole’, which invokes a unifying notion of one future for the city as a single entity. The overall goal with a social sustainability agenda, in the frame of urban strategy, is to progressively transform immigrant-dense ‘problem areas’ of the city into ‘innovation areas’, according to given criteria of success. I shall argue that unless the social sustainability agenda discards the spatiotemporal coordinates of visionary urban strategy, it risks reproducing the status quo and contributing to further marginalization of targeted populations.

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Environment and Planning A, 2015

Based on a critical examination of Malmö’s new development strategy, this paper discusses the pow... more Based on a critical examination of Malmö’s new development strategy, this paper discusses the power of attachment in urban strategy, with a special focus on the ideological framing of social sustainability. It argues that the social sustainability agenda has less to do with its practical purpose of equalizing living conditions in a segregated city and more to do with its ability to mobilize people under a future vision through attachment to a fantasmatic narrative. The fantasmatic construction of the ‘future city’ helps promote ideological closure, but the fantasmatic vision is not tantamount to a utopian ideal that transcends participants’ self-interests. The paper analyzes urban strategists’ communication of visionary planning ideas, such as the idea of social sustainability, as a ritual practice that generates an abstract uniformity through people’s consensual appropriation of schemes. At the same time, the appropriation of schemes affords the participants a space of resistance which could turn the power of attachment into a politics of reattachment that critically engages with—and politicizes—ideological constructs that relate everything to a single vision.

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As cross-cultural migration increases democratic states face a particular challenge: how to grant... more As cross-cultural migration increases democratic states face a particular challenge: how to grant equal rights and dignity to individuals while recognizing cultural distinctiveness. In response to the greater number of ethnic and religious minority groups, state policies seem to focus on managing cultural differences through planned pluralism. This book explores the dilemmas, paradoxes, and conflicts that emerge when differences are managed within this conceptual framework. After a critical investigation of the perceived logic of identity, indicative of Western nation-states and at the root of their pluralistic intentions, the author takes issue with both universalist notions of equality and cultural relativist notions of distinctiveness. However, without identity is it possible to participate in dialogue and form communities? Is there a way out of this impasse? The book argues in favor of communities based on nonidentitarian difference, developed and maintained through open and critical dialogue.

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Dialogues in Human Geography, 2012

The review essays offer me an opportunity to rethink the topic of my book. In my response, I woul... more The review essays offer me an opportunity to rethink the topic of my book. In my response, I would like to reflect on some of the problems and possibilities pointed out by my critics, especially the relevance of my analysis to discussions in human geography. I will start by giving a brief account of the political context for my further reflections.

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Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift, 2014

Mikroaggresjon viser til hverdagslige ydmykelser som markerer et underordningsforhold. Det handle... more Mikroaggresjon viser til hverdagslige ydmykelser som markerer et underordningsforhold. Det handler om ytringer eller handlinger som utpeker og knytter personer til stereotype oppfatninger om etnisitet, rase, kjønn, seksualitet eller andre etablerte sosiale skillelinjer, vel å merke uten at det handler om overlagte hersketeknikker.

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Uniped, 2014

Når spenninger eller konflikter oppsta° r i klasserommet, oppleves det gjerne som et hinder for l... more Når spenninger eller konflikter oppsta° r i klasserommet, oppleves det gjerne som et hinder for læring. Mange undervisere betrakter konfliktsituasjoner som et problem som må håndteres for å reetablere ro og orden. Vi vil imidlertid hevde at ønsket om kontroll over situasjonen kan forsterke mekanismene som utløste konflikten. En del klasseromskonflikter er ikke situasjonsbetinget i snever forstand, men er resultat av maktmekanismer som knytter seg til den akademiske institusjonen og samfunnsformasjonen generelt. Trangen til å begrense problemet til situasjonen og gjenopprette harmoni kan stenge for muligheten til å problematisere mekanismer som markerer et sosialt hierarki. Vi bruker begrepet mikroaggresjon til å belyse slike uformelle maktmekanismer. For å illustrere hvordan mikroaggresjon kan komme til uttrykk i klasserommet, presenterer vi to caser fra egen undervisning. Vi avrunder med en diskusjon av hva som skjer med læringsbetingelsene når en tar hensyn til såkalte utenomfaglige faktorer i læringssituasjonen.

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Psychology and Sexuality, 2013

This article draws attention to the constitutive mechanisms of asexual identity. It identifies a ... more This article draws attention to the constitutive mechanisms of asexual identity. It identifies a shift in expert discourse: a move away from pathology towards recognition of asexual identity. While this discursive shift, propelled by recent research in psychology and sexology, could pave the way for the inclusion of asexuals in public culture, it also reaffirms dominant terms and formations pertaining to sexuality and intimacy. The article argues that the discursive formation of a new asexual identity takes place through a process of objectification and subjectification/subjection at the interface between expert disciplines and activism. The recognition of identity is constitutive of subjects that are particularly suitable for self-regulation within the parameters of (neo)liberal citizenship. Yet, at the same time, the discursive shift also makes room for critical intervention akin to queer critique of naturalised gender and sexuality norms. The recognition of asexual identity could serve to destabilise the sexual regime (of truth) that privileges sexual relationships against other affiliations and grants sexual-biological relationships a status as primary in the formation of family and kinship relations. The article concludes that asexual identity encourages us to imagine other pathways of affiliation and other concepts of personhood, beyond the tenets of liberal humanism – gesturing instead towards new configurations of the human and new meanings of sexual citizenship.

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KULTURO, 2014

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Sexualities, 2010

The article explores the way in which trans people represent a cultural ‘difference’ that has to ... more The article explores the way in which trans people represent a cultural ‘difference’ that has to be managed in liberal-democratic societies of today. The point of departure is liberal tolerance discourse, as analysed by Wendy Brown, in which the threatening ‘others’ are being regulated in order to prevent the social order from being destroyed from within. In accordance with liberal norms and values, tolerance promotes individual choice and autonomy: the individual’s freedom of identity. It also assumes, however, that identities, such as trans identity, issue from an essence or inner truth to be found in the person. This subjectivity-constituting contradiction lies at the core of liberal tolerance discourse. Trans people bring into question this contradiction, thereby challenging the foundations of normative subjectivity. The key question that emerges is whether liberal humanist tolerance defies horror and hostility or whether tolerance discourse creates its own gendered and sexualized monsters suitable for late-modern, flexible regimes of
governmentality.

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European Journal of Womens Studies, 2006

The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual co... more The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual constitute three different figures that, despite their striking differences, have a common symbolic ground. By focusing on the similarity between the veiled woman and the other two figures, the article sheds a different light on the debate about the Muslim veil in western societies. It is argued that the western notion of woman is based on a structural ambivalence of transcendence and immanence. On the one hand, woman is expected to be liberated, in control and active in public life and in all ways just as free as the man, on the other she represents a deficiency compared to the man; it is expected of her that she takes up a complementary, subordinate position in relation to the man. The subordinate position, however, is seldom pronounced. Officially, the gender hierarchy is not a part of egalitarian societies, that is, the modern configuration that formally rejects a hierarchical worldview. Is this the reason why the three figures are regarded as pathological? Does their way of demonstrating extraordinary transcendence combined with extraordinary immanence make them monstrous?

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Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning, 2019

I sin bok om kommunikasjon av migrasjonsforskning, Kampen om vitenskapeligheten, nevner Mette And... more I sin bok om kommunikasjon av migrasjonsforskning, Kampen om vitenskapeligheten, nevner Mette Andersson flere likhetstrekk mellom feltene migrasjons- og kjønnsforskning, der den kanskje viktigste likheten er de sterke følelsene forskning om kjønn og migrasjon kan vekke blant andre forskere og ikke-forskere. Siden mine forsknings- og formidlingserfaringer er fra begge disse «magnetiske» feltene, vil jeg belyse et aktuelt tema som knytter dem sammen: den retoriske sammenhengen mellom politisk korrekthet, identitetspolitikk og ytringsfrihet.

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Agora, 2011

Wendy Browns bok handler om separasjons-og sikkerhetsmurer. Søkelyset rettes mot dagens tilbøyeli... more Wendy Browns bok handler om separasjons-og sikkerhetsmurer. Søkelyset rettes mot dagens tilbøyelighet til å bygge fysiske murer for å konsolidere nasjonalstatlige grenser i en globalisert verden. Men selv om de er bygget for å markere nasjonalstatlige grenser, fungerer de ikke som forsvar mot potensielle angrep av andre stater.

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Agora, 2016

Hvordan forstå den globale virkeligheten som kjennetegnes av ekstrem fattig-dom, ekstrem ulikhet ... more Hvordan forstå den globale virkeligheten som kjennetegnes av ekstrem fattig-dom, ekstrem ulikhet og irreversibel ødeleggelse av biosfaeren? Saskia Sassen hevder at vi behøver et nytt vokabular for å beskrive globale ekstremiteter som er lokalisert i det globale økonomiske systemets ytterkanter. Det dreier seg om alt fra produksjonen av ekstreme velstandskløfter mellom rike og fattige til pro-duksjonen av øde(lagte) landområder som følge av ekstrem utnyttelse av naturressurser. Basert på case-studier og analyse av eksisterende datasett fra ulike sektorer, tar Sassen for seg en rekke økologiske, økonomiske og sosiale utstøtingsmekanismer. Ambisjonen med boken er å beskrive og forstå den bru-tale utstøtingen som global kapitalisme fører med seg.

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