Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe

Front matter

a me To ;

TRANSFORMING IDENTITIES IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE

CRITICAL ESSAYS ON KNOWLEDGE, INEQUALITY AND BELONGING

Contents

List of table List of contributors

Introduction: transforming identities in contemporary Europe ELISABETH L. ENGEBRETSEN AND 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

Index

Table

3.1

Grid of terms in university curricula

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Contributors

Akvilé Buitvydaité (she/her) is Copenhagen-based independent researcher with a background in cultural encounters and English from Roskilde University, Denmark. Her work focuses on environmental humanities, art and society, postcolonial and decolonial approaches, affect and embodiment, and post-soviet subjects/spaces in postcolonial worlds. Besides her academic profile, she works with community building and projects on sustainability at a study abroad organization in Copenhagen. She is mostly passionate about creative and artistic approaches to learning, especially through practices that cultivate relationships with nature. She also works with crafts and textiles and regularly offers workshops on natural dyeing and eco-printing techniques on fabrics and paper.

Selin Cagatay is Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC-funded project “ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century” in the Department of Gender Studies and the Department of History, Central European University, Austria. Her research concerns past and present gender politics and equality struggles in Turkey and transnationally, with a focus on activist agendas, organizational forms and political strategies. Selin has recently published a monograph, authored collaboratively with Mia Liinason and Olga Sasunkevich, titled Feminist and LGBTI+ Activism in Russia, Scandinavia, and Turkey. Transnationalizing Spaces of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).

Kris Clarke, PhD, is Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Originally from Fresno, California, she has lived in Finland for over 20 years. Clarke worked in the field of HIV/AIDS policy in the European Union. She has researched issues surrounding harm reduction, addiction and HIV/AIDS. She published Decolonizing Pathways towards Integrative Healing in Social Work (Routledge), written with Michael Yellow Bird in 2020). Clarke has recently co-edited a forthcoming book on decolonizing Nordic futurities. Her research interests center on decolonization, critical social work, and the significance of place and social memory. She is currently working on a project documenting the history of HIV in Fresno, California.

x Contributors

Ramona Dima is the recipient of a Marie Sktodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (October 2021—September 2023) with her project “Queer Herstories of struggle and survival in Romania: From Communist criminalization to contemporary anti-gender movements in SEE spaces”. The project is hosted by the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway. Dr. Dima’s publications and topics of interests include queer literature, sexuality and migration, LGBT+ activism and anti-gender politics in Europe.

Simona Dumitriu holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the National University of Arts (Bucharest, Romania). Between 2009 and 2013, she was lecturer at the same institution. Simona works as independent curator, teacher and organizer. She has been in charge of curatorial programs in Bucharest, Malmö, and Göteborg. Together with Ramona Dima, she forms the artistic and writing duo Simona&Ramona (aka Claude&Dersch). More information here: www.simonaramona.wordpress.com.

Elisabeth L. Engebretsen (she, her/they, them) is Professor of Gender Research at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway. A trained Social Anthropologist, Engebretsen is the author of Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography (Routledge 2014), and co-edited titles Queer/Tongzhi China (2015), Anthropology’s Queer Sensibilities (2018) and Anti-Gender Politics and Queer Theory (2023). Engebretsen is editor-in-chief of the journal lambda nordica (with Erika Alm), co-edits the book series Theorizing Ethnography (Routledge, with Silvia Posecco and E.J. Gonzalez-Polledo) and co-convenes a Norwaybased Queer Research Group (Skeiv Forskningsgruppe). Engebretsen’s current research focuses on anti-gender politics, academic freedom, climate justice, queer history and activism.

Nico Miskow Friborg (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary, mad, trans community and coalition organizer, and PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger. Their PhD project follows queer and trans organizing, coalition-building and worldmaking against, beyond and on the margins of the Danish state and Non-profit Industrial Complex from 1990 until today. Nico’s research is anchored in their commitments and accountability to the queer and trans coalitions from where and with whom they engage in knowledge creation, and in questions around how collaborative, trickle-up research can contribute to ongoing struggles for queer and trans liberation.

Linda Lapina (they/them; she/her) works as Associate Professor of Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University. She is also a migrant and a dancer. Her research focuses on bodies, affectivity and difference, from an intersectional feminist perspective. She has explored differentiated whiteness, Europeanness and Danishness in the context of East to West migration in Europe; encounters with difference in changing urban spaces; and

Contributors xi recently, urban nature-cultures and more-than-human memory. She works with affective methodologies, drawing on auto-, multispecies- and sensory—ethnography, memory work and arts-based methods, including dance, visual methods, performance and poetry.

Mia Liinason is Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Mia has recently finalized a collaborative research project exploring transnational encounters in feminist and LGBTI+ struggles in Scandinavia, Russia and Turkey. She is also director of TechnAct: Research cluster on technocultural assemblages that examines the impact of digital technologies on social movements and civil society engagements. Recently, Mia has published a monograph, co-authored with Selin Cagatay and Olga Sasunkevich, titled Feminist and LGBTI+ Activism in Russia, Scandinavia, and Turkey: Transnationalizing Spaces of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan 2022), Thinking Gender in Transnational Times Series.

Olga Sasunkevich is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies in the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her major research interests include gender relations, and feminist and LGBTI+ politics in Eastern Europe in the transnational perspective. Olga is the author of two monographs — the recently published Feminist and LGBTI+ Activism in Russia, Scandinavia, and Turkey: Transnationalizing Spaces of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), co-authored with Mia Liinason and Selin Cagatay; and Informal Trade, Gender and the Border Experience published by Ashgate in 2015.

Anna-Maria Sörberg is a freelance journalist and writer based in Stockholm who specializes on sexuality, gender and otherness. She has contributed to several anthologies and regularly writes on queer politics in Swedish magazines and newspapers. She is the author of Det Sjuka (The Malaise 2009) where she takes the image of the “HIV Man”, a sexual predator and monstrous “Other” prevalent in Swedish media headlines in the late 2000s, as a starting point for an investigation of the demonizing and racist implications of the Swedish HIV policy. She is the editor of the anthology Over Regnbågen (Over the Rainbow 2010), which highlights new challenges for a movement representing the LGBT community, in Sweden and internationally. Her book Homonationalism (2017) 1s a Swedish introduction to the field, exploring the implications of raised conservatism in gay culture, new alliances between the LGBT community and nationalist and far right movements, and the nominal adaptation of LGBT rights as means of creating a distance to non-Western culture. Her current project is a political and personal memoir that takes its starting point in 1996.

Christel Stormhej is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business and a member of the Center for Gender, Power and Diversity, Roskilde University, Denmark. She holds a PhD in Sociology xii

Contributors from Copenhagen University. Her major fields of research include feminist and queer theory, citizenship and social justice from a gender, sexuality and race perspective, feminist, LGBTQ and migrant activism and politics, social critique and the religion/secularity divide. Currently, she is involved in research projects on feminist activism and changing conditions for identity formation in the Nordic region, threats against democracy and civil rights (minority and women’s rights) in Europe and another European project on LGBTI+ social and economic inequalities.

Jéssica Nogueira Varela is an Afro-Brazilian doctoral candidate in

Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University. Jessica is the current recipient of the Sidgwick-Miller CEU Scholarship at the Cornell Branch of Telluride Association at Cornell University 2022/2023. She graduated with a Master of Arts in 2020 from GEMMA -— Erasmus Mundus + a Master’s degree in Gender and Women’s Studies, graduating from the Central European University (CEU) and the University of Lodz. Jessica has a Teaching and Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Ceara in Brazil. Jessica has presented her work at conferences in Europe and North America and has written about Gender Studies in Hungary and the Brazilian Elections in 2018. Jessica’s main fields of interest are Black feminism, decolonial theory, critical race studies and migration studies.

Manté Vertelyté, PhD, is a postdoctoral student in the Department of

Education Science, Aarhus University Denmark. She is trained in History and Anthropology from Vilnius University and holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Aalborg University. Her research interests include anthropology of friendship, racialization, nation-making and constructions of Eastern Europeanness, with a particular angle on education and youth studies. Her recent work focuses on the ways that affect play in students racial-ethnic exclusions in Danish schools and their teachers’ responses.

Transforming identities in contemporary Europe

This book is emerging at an especially fraught moment in history. The urgency of current crises is important to acknowledge and position this book in relation to at the very start. Beginning from the broader contemporary temporality in which this project has been engaged, it is clear that in the last couple of decades, there has been an increasing fragmentation of the public sphere, growing inequalities, crisis of liberal democracy, and the decline of democracy more broadly, as well as the retreat of a perceived middle — and hence ‘balanced’ — ground in parliamentary politics and societal debate (Kovats 2017, Younge 2019). Disturbing trends globally, including anti-gender mobilisations, anti-science and knowledge disinformation campaigns, reactionary state and extra-state nationalisms, and neocolonial governance, are shown to further destabilise lauded principles of governing authority, what counts as reliable knowledge, and collective political projects for the common good (Giritli et al. 2018). The COVID-19 pandemic emerging just as an escalating climate crisis is finally reaching the policy agendas of the world’s economic and political leaders, is exacerbating pre-existing instabilities and injustices (see Al-Ali 2020, Georgiou and Titley 2022). And, as we are finalising this Introduction chapter in early 2022, the Russian military invasion of Ukraine is further unravelling fraught regional stability and the broader geopolitics of security, resources, and governance. That this historical moment is ‘fraught’ is probably an understatement of sorts; it is nigh-impossible to accurately describe or indeed capture this multiscalar crisis.

Nevertheless, it is at this thematic juncture that this volume engages in discussions and critical analyses of the variegated capacities of identity and its politics, which we understand as practices of theorising with basis in shared experiences of injustice and inequality on the part of people belonging to, or perceived to belong to, particular social groups (Heyes 2020 [2002], Younge 2019). The ‘capacities’ that interest us are to do with the transformative potentials emerging from positionalities of minoritised otherness — ways of existing in this world by way of subjective and collective everyday realities that are framed by dominant structures of exclusion, marginalisation, and violence, but which are also oriented towards change and transformation.

In following this interpretation, we are paying special attention to structural transformations in recent history, particularly the last three decades, and especially the “relentless process of marking and unmarking that has allowed identity to be only located in those who have been actively denied citizenship or subjectivity” (Walters 2018, 476-477). The chapters in this book approach the discursive landscape of identity and its politics comparatively and critically, in emphasising how the discursive and political field of ‘identity’ is constructed in localised, everyday practices and principally analysed from the perspectives of minorised otherness.

The discursive emergences of ‘pressure groups’ and ‘interest groups’ as part of the broad transformations just described have contributed towards destabilising if not transforming hegemonic binary structures that frame political identifications in public discourse (Walters 2018). What was previously ‘far-right’ is no longer fringe or ‘out there’ but quite mainstream and normalised; ideological content and political programmes previously considered unacceptable have been normalised (Eslen-Ziya and Giorgi 2022). Transphobic, homophobic, racist, and Islamophobic statements are routinely passing as free speech and democratic rights to free expression in mainstream media and political discourse (Engebretsen 2021, Pearce et al. 2020). Increasingly, minorities are reduced to ‘topics’ or ‘issues’ to be debated by a toxic and polarised “public rivalry between value systems” (Faye 2021, 14). In turn, attempts at holding such agents accountable are, within this ideologically fractured and politically populist paradigm, considered infringements on perceived rights to free speech and democracy, understood as the majority’s right to decide what constitutes the middle ground.

However, what happens to ‘the middle ground’ if the rules defining conventional parliamentary politics are no longer accurate descriptors of the present? The nation-state level of formal, parliamentary politics is an increasing polarisation with contradistinctions appearing in the ‘traditional’ Left, Progressive, and Conservative politics. Adherent is an increasing politicisation of gender, race, sexuality, and nation connected to citizenship, resources, and identification. A particular point of reference across this book’s contributing chapters, however, is a regional orientation that is attuned to the everyday and bottom-up experiences and articulations of lives in, between, and on the margins of transitional spaces and hybrid identificatory positionalities. Put together, this complex terrain enables new types of disagreements, engagements, and changing alliances between oppositional positions and identifications (Verloo and Paternotte 2018).

Against this themed framework, this volume addresses several questions: What social and political spaces are opened and closed in these movements? What forms of subjective and collective lives and livelihoods are supported by dominant value systems framed by nation-state based geographical, ideological, and political borders? And conversely, what kinds of subject formations and collectivities are labelled dangerous, criminal, and unnatural within said borders? Finally, by centring marginalised everyday lives and their spatial and discursive counter formations that emphasise the generative potentials of coalition, difference, and movement, how may we begin to delineate alternative visions, desires, and politics for meaningful transformation and justice-based sociality? The complex processes and changes alluded to by asking these questions happen on and in relation to the nation-state level of institutions and governance, but also on the levels of intra- and trans-border and regional dynamics on many scales: cultural, ideological, and political, to name but a few.

In the skewed political universe outlined here, minorities and allies who protest practices rooted in injustice and violence are at best portrayed as problematic interest or pressure groups; oftentimes, they are painted as dangerous enemies of liberal democracy and societal values and positioned as dangerous, violent, and ‘out of order’. Sometimes government politicians and police authorities act upon such tense moments in support of the mainstream populist ‘right’, coalescing around a perceived commonly shared commitment to protect certain — vaguely defined — values, such as nationality and cultural tradition. This, however, oversimplifies a reality that in fact is far more layered. Whereas certain discourses or actions might not appear violent at first instance, and in fact are oftentimes characterised as ‘non-violent’ by powerful actors such as governments and police authorities, there is an insidiousness to such attempts to reframe structural violence as somewhat disputable by isolating (non)acts from systemic injustice, alternatively by seeking to justify tactical application of violence (Butler 2020). Deeper questions about national or personal identity are emerging, and the seemingly unified and commonly agreed democratic ideals of inclusion, equality, and diversity have become a battleground. These tense dynamics are not readily understood by referring back to pre-existing liberal democratic principles of equality, inclusion, and diversity. Nor do international covenants such as human rights charters or the EU’s Court of Human Rights easily diffuse these challenges.

This anthology is an effort to address these complicated questions largely from perspectives that foreground everyday experiences and positionalities at a variety of margins and diaspora. In discussing their methodologies, the authors emphasise various forms of lived marginalisations to do with the intersectional experiences of nationality (or citizenship), sexuality, gender identity, education, migration, and race. As we hope the chapters will demonstrate, the Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe project has enabled different forms of scholarly and scholarly activist engagements to come together through a felt need to articulate collectively and critically our responses to these challenges, all the while forging new forms of analysis through these collaborative engagements. As we will delineate in the sections to follow, the project has sought to frame the collective conversation around select central concepts: identity (and its) politics, exceptionalism, and human/ity.

4 Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and Mia Liinason Transforming identities in contemporary Europe

This book brings together ten chapters that explore the changing landscapes of justice struggles in a time of growing nationalisms, exceptionalisms, and right-wing populisms, by analysing a wide range of feminist, LGBTQI+, anti-racist and de-colonial movements, and solidarity politics. The particular focus on modern and contemporary Europe, with the Nordic region as a case in point, offers multifaceted critical readings and analyses of the colonial, racist, and sexist underpinnings of current neoliberal societies and the everyday, bottom-up strategies to survive and carve out lifeways imagined otherwise.

The idea for this book emanates from a three-year collaborative project (2018-2020), funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2017—00022/NOS-HS) and the Nordic Council’s Gender Equality Fund (NIKK). Across three workshops, discussions between scholars and scholar-activists working from a range of locations across Europe, the project sought to articulate and generate dialogue and insights on key questions around humanity, democratic participation, and what it means to live together. As participants were deeply aware of, and devoted to challenging the centrality of whiteness, capitalism, and European expansion for the epistemological foundation for the construction of humanity, and of the threat to interspecies practices and environmental ecosystems raised by human-centrist values of growth and development, the workshops focused on a set of key questions: What does it mean to be(come) human? What does it mean to live together, across differences, in society today? How do we imagine and take part in shaping democratic participation as a route to transform the social and the political? And how do notions of identity reproduce or challenge various forms of exceptionalisms, situated within as well as moving between different local, national, and regional sites?

Taking the problematic lens of ‘identity politics’ as a starting point for critical investigations and collaborations, the discussion revolved around identity politics as a contested concept. While ‘identity politics’ by some actors from the left is used in condescending ways, rooted in a refusal to recognise the historical relationship between capitalism and racism, ‘identity politics’ is simultaneously promoted by right-wing actors and far-right constellations as a marker of exclusionary nationalism (Mulinari and Neergaard 2014). Workshop participants, by contrast, recognised ‘identity politics’ as a concept that can bring strength and a sense of belonging in the turbulent times and contexts of today, acknowledging the inextricable relationship between race and capital. Understanding identity politics as a form of practice, which enable feminists, LGBTI+ people, people of colour, indigenous people, and minoritised populations to exercise a more radical struggle for liveability and change, the approach to identity politics developed in the diversified group of workshop participants found resonances with Paola Bacchetta’s approaches to subaltern theoretical production at the margins, or outside, of the university. In her key note during our second workshop, Decolonial Indigenous and Feminist and Queer of Color Theory and Practices in Turtle Island (The U.S.) (2018), Bacchetta highlighted how these forms of subaltern theoretical production can be expressed through both academic and non-academic genres. Yet, in order for these subaltern theorisations to be intelligible, we need to recognise the political-amnesia around coloniality, racism, globalised capitalism, misogyny, and queerphobia, which characterise relations of power on various scales, from the local to the planetary. Such theorisations take shape through the context in which they are formed, but the insights they bring are often erased or reframed to limit their insurgent potentiality.

From this point of departure, and across the three workshops, several themes emerged that allowed us to focus on different themes: workshop 1. Democratic participation in society — how to live together? (Stavanger 2018), workshop 2. Challenging Nordic exceptionalism: Geopolitical lessons and experiences (Gothenburg 2019), and workshop 3. Be(com)ing human? Thinking across theories and politics of difference and colonial legacies (online 2020). An interdisciplinary framework that emerged through participants’ own backgrounds situated the project discussions and presentations across scholarly, activist, and artistic domains. In this anthology, these ranges of themes and positionalities serve to frame the chapters as they identify and develop a set of central themes. We are inspired by and seek to further build on the insights developed in recent edited collections such as Undoing homogeneity in the Nordic region (Keskinen et al. 2019) and Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality, and Coloniality (Alm et al. 2021). Accordingly, the contributions to this volume offer wide-ranging analyses of how welfare state policies, the media, and other authorities attempt to govern ‘Other’ populations in the Nordic region as well as fine-grained explorations of practices of resistance and agency from national minorities, indigenous peoples, and migrants. Taken together, the volume as a whole exposes the power struggles that emerge when powerful figures and ideologies of authority attempt to manage and control different populations historically and today. Building on the significant insights and contributions of previous scholars to postand de-colonial scholarship in the Nordic region, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe attempts to further contribute to this area of research by broadening the methodological and geopolitical scope of ‘the Nordic’, and utilising the conceptual lens of identity as a nodal point from which experiences and protesting powerful authorities and their governance can be fruitfully examined, contrasted, and challenged.

Epistemologies of colonial knowledge regimes and intersections of power in contexts of neoliberal governance

In offering important critiques of the multileveled colonial, racist, and sexist underpinnings of contemporary neoliberal society, the chapters in this book expose and challenge hegemonic orthodox knowledge regimes that define and contrast identities within an often unacknowledged colonial epistemology of humanity and its sub- and in-human Other. By insisting on making visible the epistemologies of colonial knowledge regimes that operate in neoliberal governance, the contributing authors stress the importance of location, experience, pain, and (story)telling from a position of marginalisation, othering, and exclusion to counter hegemonic and hierarchical structures of differentiation and disenfranchisement. Thus, a principal starting point for producing alternative knowledge focuses on contextualised, critical positionalities, and several chapters in this volume approach such positionalities rooted in the traditions of post- and de-colonial theorisations. To begin with, and based on autoethnographic vignettes and memory work, Linda Lapina explores the affective figurations of Danishness that surface in white Danes’ reactions to Danish citizenship in her chapter ““Welcome to the most privileged, most xenophobic country in the world”: Affective figurations of white Danishness in the making of a Danish citizen’. Examining the role of affect in production of national regimes of inclusion and exclusion, Lapina brings attention to the shifting and complex boundaries that are drawn around Danishness, and highlights how intersections between whiteness and national belonging allow for the emergence of ‘affective figurations of white Danishness’ in which desires for Danish citizenship are seen as something unDanish. Showing how affects outline the contours of white Danishness as simultaneously stable and evasive, Lapina’s chapter brings attention to the ways in which borders and boundaries materialise in everyday life, as embodied histories.

Next, illuminating how the humanity of the West, as well as its alleged superiority, is constructed against colonial fantasies of blackness/otherness, Jéssica Nogueira Varela conducts a reflexive reading of Una Marson’s (1905— 1965) play London Calling in her chapter ‘Autobiographical Flesh: understanding Western notions of humanity through the life and selected writings of Una Marson (1905-1965). Here, Nogueira Varela critically assesses the life of Una Marson and her migration to London as a black woman and colonial subject, the heart of the British Empire. Examining the multifaceted elements in Marson’s play, Nogueira Varela conceptualises wretchedness as a key concept built on the social categories that have been excluded from the Euro-American construction of human and humanity. Nogueira Varela approaches the life and writings of Una Marson as one among many black women writers whose intellectual thought was transformed after travelling to or moving to Europe in the 20th century, to grasp how race and gender are critical for the construction of the category Human. In similarity with several chapters in this volume, Nogueira Varela’s analysis lays bare the foundational hypocrisy and violence of Anthropocentric humanism, such as the co-constituent but oft-unacknowledged relationship between ‘humanity’ and neocolonial modernity (see, Jallo 2020).

Moving from a discussion about imperialism in the early 20th century to more recent expressions of expansionist and neocolonial ambitions of rule sustained through notions of gender and rights, Christel Stormhgj’s chapter ‘(Not) in the name of gender equality: migrant women, empowerment, employment, and minority women’s organisations’ is situated in the context of contemporary neoliberal Nordic welfare states. Offering an analysis of governmental programmes to promote migrant women’s labour market integration and exploring state-funded minority women’s organisations, Stormhgj highlights the ambiguous ways in which women’s organisations both comply with and contest existing state and market logics. Critically intervening into the idea of women’s paid work as the route to gender equality and women’s independence, as one core building stone in the development of gender equality as a national value in the Nordic welfare states, this analysis brings forth the deeply ambiguous dimensions of these projects, as the mutual dependence between state agencies and women’s organisations is highlighted. Problematising the need for a deeper engagement with politics and theories of transformation, several chapters in this volume address the ways in which emerging subjectivities and expanding modes of self-determination may open up for new and other possibilities for transformative critique with potential to unsettle the seeming relevance and rigorousity of majority knowledge production.

Using a trans for trans methodology, Nico Miskow Friborg’s chapter “It’s our bodies, we are the experts!”: countering pathologisation, gatekeeping and Danish exceptionalism through collective trans knowledges, coalition-building and insistence’ follows the multiple ways in which trans activists organise around trans care, drawing on a mixture of diverse methodologies and material sources, such as counter-archiving, collaborative-, and auto-ethnography. Locating transformative practices and critical imagination at the centre stage, the chapter conceptualises struggles for gender self-determination as interwoven with other struggles for liberation and abolitionism. Finding that trans activists refuse co-optation and compromise, Miskow Friborg shows that activists link symbolic political gestures to Danish exceptionalism, homonationalism, and pinkwashing, as they simultaneously engage in work for change, redistribution, and improved life chances for trans people.

In addition, taking their departure in the possibilities offered by digital platforms to oppose and refuse colonial violence and white supremacy, in the chapter ‘The poetics of climate change and politics of pain: Sami social media activist critique of the Swedish state’, Akvilė Buitvydaité and Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen build on the insights of indigenous communities to suggest ways in which transnational bonds of solidarity and sharing of resources enable collective imagining of other kinds of futures. Highlighting the public advocacy and performances of Sami artist Sofia Jannok, Buitvydaité and Engebretsen illuminate the significant ways in which many indigenous activists and artists bring attention to environmental destruction and human rights violations through the use of digital technologies. Recognising the significance of digital technologies for Indigenous activism in various locales, such as Sapmi, Greenland, the United States, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, Buitvydaité and Engebretsen’s chapter contributes to further deepen our understanding the role of digital technologies among Indigenous activists, as the growing access to digital products and networks allows for stronger attention to Indigenous issues as a result of intersecting social, political, environmental, historical, and cultural dynamics, and inspires broader and more far-reaching protests on a translocal, planetary scale.

Confronting methodological regionalism, challenging exceptionalism

In the different projects within Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe, one overlapping interest was to articulate ways to strategise against and move beyond methodological regionalism or nationalism. This concept is typically understood to mean that the region or a country is taken as a self-explanatory or ‘natural’ unit of analysis in research. One way of doing this was to highlight the discursive use of the concept and politics of exceptionalism in a variety of contexts. As a policy concept, exceptionalism is commonly used in the context of Nordic equality and welfare policy, to indicate the ways in which the Nordic model works as a lesson or model for the rest of the world to emulate. As Kris Clarke and Manté Vertelyté describe it so succinctly in their chapter ‘Educational challenges for Nordic exceptionalism: epistemic injustice in the absence of antiracist education’, notions of Nordic exceptionalism indicate the ways that the Nordics are “considered unique and even ‘better than’ other countries in the world due to their distinct social welfare state models and social democratic approach to international affairs”. As many of the chapters discuss, albeit from variegated perspectives, a crucial part of this exceptionalising notion is to ideologically separate the Nordic region’s past and present from the geopolitical genealogies of colonialism and racism. It is a central ambition of this book to challenge this problematic paradigm, through the situated and nuanced case studies and analyses on the orientation of methodological regionalism in Nordic Europe and the geopolitics of its transnational connections and co-constituent factors and agents. As the project proceeded through the three workshops, we became more aware of the ways in which, in relevant Nordic situated research, for example, methodological regionalism is often applied in research about and situated in (one of) the Nordic countries, where one single national context is taken as a reliable representative example of the Nordic region in analyses on themes to do with equality, diversity, welfare, and policy. Sometimes, this regionalist analytic extends to the broader Western European region, and even stretches to encompass the directional concept of the ‘West’, without accounting for the comparative, hence political and ideological strategies involved. Indeed, bringing together critical considerations of location, temporality, and movements was an important dynamic permeating all three workshops. Emphasising the importance of engaging the multiscalarity of locations, broadly defined, we have thus critically applied the concept of exceptionalism to explore the political entanglements between movements, spatialities, and nationalisms in historical and contemporary contexts.