Call for Papers: Racialization and Racism in Denmark
In recent years there has been an increase in calls for critical scholarship on race, racialization, and (anti-)racism in many fields, including those of gender and feminist studies in the Nordics. These calls emerge during a time when intensified attention coalesce around the global Movement for Black Lives, the protests that transpired from the #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) claim, and the manifestations of anti-colonial interventions such as the application of red paint to the statue of colonizer Hans Egede in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat (21 June 2020). Concurrent with – and perhaps as a response to – these challenges to “the coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000) Danish governments continue to invest in policies that make migrants and refugees deportable and expose racial and religious minorities to expansive forms of control and surveillance through welfare state institutions. At the same time, research-based understandings of structural racism are delegitimized and specific areas of research, such as critical race theory, gender studies and migration studies, are being attacked in public political debates with claims of being unscientific and activist.
This Special Issue of Women, Gender & Research (Kvinder, Køn & Forskning) aims to engage with these structural challenges, as well as explore the potential of a continued focus on racialization and racism within Danish gender and feminist studies. A significant body of research on racism and racialization in Denmark has already been conducted over the past decades, and much more is underway. To mention a few examples, scholars have identified how racial logics organize media representations, welfare state practices, educational settings, aesthetic and cultural production, the migration system, the labor market, and the everyday lives of minorities. There has, moreover, been critique of the academic structures in and of themselves being racist and exclusionary towards Black scholars and scholars of color, particularly women, and their knowledge(s).
We invite articles that engage with these and many other issues across disciplines, methods, and theories. We are particularly interested in studies that move our fields of research towards new theorizations and empirical analysis of racialization and racism. In acknowledgement of Denmark's colonial complicity in the past and the present, situating this special issue in the Danish context refers also to the territories and areas which are connected with Denmark through (post)colonial ties. Moreover, we acknowledge the interconnectedness between Denmark and the wider Nordic regions regarding historic and contemporary issues of racism and racialization, wherefore it is possible to submit articles that are situated in the broader context of the Nordics.
The special issue aims to create a space for analytical perspectives, knowledges, and interventions that often are not given access to academic platforms. To quote scholar and poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (2019: 81-82):
“Equal access to unjust systems is not liberation / More people of colour is on pedagogically unchanged reading lists / is not salvation, and no number of black and brown faces in / universities can fundamentally undo the racism. […] Just because they give you a seat at the table / doesn’t mean they’re prepared to change the room.”
We encourage submissions that enable us to understand and radically change, the different rooms, structures, and processes that maintain and uphold racialized and colonial structures of subjugation and oppression.
Articles may engage with some of the following points or discuss the topic from other relevant thematic and analytical perspectives:
- Contextualized expressions of racism(s) such as anti-Blackness, anti-Muslim racism, or anti-Semitism
- Gendered and/or sexualized articulations of racism
- Methodological perspectives and embodied methods for anti-racist research
- Racism and/in the welfare state
- Racial biopolitics in times of global crisis such as pandemics, environmental disaster, war, and displacement
- Racial capitalism, social reproduction and/or racialized hierarchies of labor
- Racializing regulations of kinship and reproduction
- Racialized formations in relation to the Nordic colonial past and present
- Anti-racist activism and political movements
- Anti-gender politics and its relation(s) to racism
- Racism, racialization, and anti-racist strategies in education
- Racialized representations in media and social media
Contributions in English, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are accepted.
Deadline for abstracts (max. 500 words + author bio of ca. 100 words): 15th of May 2022
Notifications by: 1st June 2022
Deadline for articles: 15th of October 2022
Envisaged publication date: 1st of September 2023
Abstracts should be submitted via our webpage. You can submit both your author bio and your abstract here – and later (if necessary), the entire article.
The journal welcomes contributions in the form of research articles, essays, artwork, opinion pieces, book reviews, and further comments thereon in keeping with editorial policy (see Submission).
Special issue editors: Bontu Lucie Guschke (Copenhagen Business School), Iram Khawaja (Aarhus University) and Lene Myong (University of Stavanger)
References
Manzoor-Khan, S. 2019. Postcolonial Banter. Padstow: Verve Poetry Press.
Quijano, A. 2000. The Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America. Naplanta: Views from South. 1(3), 533-80.
