Call for Papers: Nordic Innocence

Innocence is a powerful yet ambivalent concept. It is commonly associated with purity or irreproachability in regard to guilt, knowledge, experience, responsibility, or sin (Ticktin, 2017), yet it also functions as a political, moral, legal, cultural, and emotional category.  Across different contexts, innocence is used to regulate social boundaries, uphold norms, and justify intervention.

In this special issue, we invite contributions that examine how innocence is constructed, circulated, distributed, and challenged in Nordic contexts. We welcome feminist, queer/trans, intersectional, decolonial, childist, posthuman, and legal-critical perspectives, from scholars, artists, and activists alike.

Innocence is often closely tied to childhood, where it operates as a cultural ideal invested with nostalgia and moral urgency, an ideal that demands protection and restoration. Joanne Faulkner (2011) describes this as ”the social function of childhood,” rooted in a desire to return to a lost state of purity. But this innocence is far from universal. Julie Garlen (2019) shows how childhood innocence is constructed through racial and gendered norms, reinforcing dominant power relations under the guise of protection and purity. Robin Bernstein (2011) adds that innocence functions as a performance of 'not-noticing' social categories and the structures of inequality they are bound to. How is innocence attached to particular imaginaries of childhood? And what (or who) must be excluded for this ideal to hold? In what ways does the figure of the innocent child operate as a cultural, political, or affective tool in the Nordics?

In a Nordic context, these dynamics play out through imaginaries of the innocent child tied to whiteness and Nordic exceptionalism. Research shows how such figurations continue to sustain racialized structures, even as they appear apolitical or humanitarian (Smedegaard Nielsen, 2022; Yang, 2023; 2024). Innocence also plays a key role in the construction of whiteness more broadly. Dankertsen (2021) has shown how romanticized ideas of innocence produce infantilizing images of Indigenous peoples, while Gloria Wekker’s (2016) analysis of ”white innocence” shows how dominant white self-perceptions are maintained through disavowal of colonial histories and racial privilege. She traces how narratives of ”being small” (especially in contrast to the US) allow Nordic nations to maintain moral self-images. This work has been taken up by Nordic feminist scholars (Danbolt & Myong, 2019; Keskinen et al., 2021), who have examined how claims to innocence help legitimize racial and colonial violence in the Nordic region. What role does innocence play in sustaining Nordic self-understandings as moral or humanitarian? How is innocence used to shield national identities from critical interrogation, particularly but not only in relation to colonial histories, racialization, or border regimes?

But race is only one lens through which innocence operates. In feminist and queer studies, innocence is central to how gender and sexuality are policed. It is invoked to deny sexual agency, shame non-normative desires, and frame queerness as a threat to the pure and untainted (Edelman, 2004). Narratives of suffering, morality, and victimhood are often gendered and sexualized in ways that reinforce these dynamics. How does innocence function in the regulation of gender and sexuality? What does it mean to be considered ’too knowing,’ ’too sexual,’ or ’not innocent enough’? And how are such judgments distributed across bodies, desires, and identities?

The legal system distributes innocence unevenly, racially, sexually, and economically. For instance, the adultification of Black children has been shown to increase their exposure to policing and reduce legal protection (Sharpe, 2016; Epstein, Blake & González, 2017; Goff et al., 2014). Jules Gill-Peterson (2024) similarly examines how the ”trans panic defense” allows perpetrators to frame themselves as innocent in cases involving violence against trans women. Innocence here becomes a legal resource selectively accessible to some, but not others. How does the law construct and assign innocence and what happens when this category fails to protect? In which cases is innocence a legal fiction, and in which cases does it become a life-determining resource? Can legal innocence coexist with structural harm?

Innocence also plays a role in environmental politics. Greta Thunberg’s public persona simultaneously draws on and disrupts dominant imaginaries of white and youthful innocence, which opponents strategically manipulate to undermine her political legitimacy (Telford, 2023; Broberg, 2024). More broadly, how does innocence function as a claim to ecological justice? In what ways is it mobilized to evoke urgency, moral clarity, or the protection of a future imagined as pure, untouched, or still redeemable? Can appeals to innocence in climate discourse act as rhetorical resources or political strategies, and if so, who can access them, and to what effect? Might such appeals reinforce dominant narratives of responsibility and care, or could they also be used to unsettle them?

Innocence is also closely tied to ideas of embodiment, dependency, and cognitive function. Often, innocence is constructed through ableist norms that value autonomy, purity, and “normality.” Disabled people, neurodivergent individuals, or those with atypical bodies are frequently cast as either especially innocent (passive, pure, without sexual or political agency) or as the opposite: a threat, a burden, a problem to be managed. How do such ableist imaginaries shape the boundaries of innocence in Nordic contexts? How is innocence constructed, negotiated, or denied in relation to disability, neurodivergence, or atypical embodiment? What alternatives or disruptions do crip theory and critical disability perspectives offer in rethinking how innocence is imagined, distributed, and mobilized?

In many of these examples, innocence appears as the opposite of agency. It is imagined as vulnerable, passive, and in need of protection. Yet paradoxically, innocence is a powerful tool, one that legitimizes political agendas, legal claims, and cultural narratives. Its conceptual vagueness allows it to take on different forms depending on context, and it is frequently mobilized to justify everything from humanitarian intervention to surveillance and exclusion. Who benefits from being perceived as innocent and who is systematically denied this status? What kinds of political or cultural work does innocence perform? And what alternatives exist to innocence as a moral or affective norm?

We invite submissions that explore how innocence functions in Nordic contexts, both as a regulatory and normative ideal and as a contested site of political, cultural, legal, and affective investment. We welcome scholarly articles, essays, and book reviews from both emerging and established contributors. Submissions using experimental or radical methodologies are welcome, including work that explores alternative formats, hybrid genres, or unconventional modes of analysis.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Childhood and child figures
• Whiteness and racialization
• Gender and sexuality
• Queer and trans perspectives
• Colonialism and decolonial critique
• Migration, refugees, and humanitarianism
• Victimhood and suffering
• Religion and spirituality
• Law, justice, and legal discourse
• War, conflict, and violence
• Media and cultural representation
• Disability, neurodivergence, and crip/critical disability perspectives
• Political science and social theory
• Psychology and developmental discourse
• Mental health and diagnostic categories
• Nature, animals, and posthuman thought
• Youth activism and generational identities
• Philosophy, ethics, and political theory
• History, memory, and national narratives

Submission guidelines

Please submit an abstract of max. 300 words by August 15 2025 at the electronic submission system on https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF.
Full manuscripts will be due by January 15 2026.
For further information or questions, contact redsek@hum.ku.dk

We look forward to your contributions in English, Danish or Scandinavian languages.

Special issue editorial team:
Ahrong Yang (Aalborg University), hya@ikl.aau.dk
Mira Chandhok Skadegård (Aalborg University), mcsk@ikl.aau.dk
Asta Smedegaard Nielsen (Aalborg University), nielsen@ikl.aau.dk
Frida Hviid Broberg (University of Copenhagen), fhb@hum.ku.dk 
Ida Nilsson (Aalborg University), ian@ikl.aau.dk and
Michael Nebeling Petersen (University of Copenhagen), nebeling@hum.ku.dk

 

References:

Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, New York University Press.

Broberg, F. H. (2025). Hvor vover hun! : Vrede og autisme i mediedækningen af Greta Thunberg. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 37(2), 15. 

Danbolt, M., & Myong, L. (2019). Racial Turns and Returns: Recalibrations of Racial Exceptionalism in Danish Public Debates on Racism. In P. Hervik (Ed.), Racialization, Racism, and Anti-Racism in the Nordic Countries (pp. 39–61). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74630-2_2

Dankertsen, A. (2021). Indigenising Nordic Feminism - A Sami Decolonial Critique. In S. Keskinen et al (eds) Feminisms in the Nordic Region, Palgrave Macmillan, 135-154.

Edelman, Lee (2004). No Future. Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press.

Epstein, R., Blake, Jamila, & González, Thaila. (2017). Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Center on Poverty and Inequality. Georgetown Law.

Faulkner, J. (2011). The Importance of Being Innocent: Why we worry about children. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139010481

Garlen, J. C. (2019). Interrogating innocence: “Childhood” as exclusionary social practice. Childhood, 26(1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218811484

Garlen, J. C., Chang‐Kredl, S., Farley, L., & Sonu, D. (2021). Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice. Children & Society, 35(5), 648–662. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12428

Gill-Peterson, J. 2024. A Short History of Trans Misogyny. Verso.

Goff, P. A., Jackson, M. C., Di Leone, B. A. L., Culotta, C. M., & DiTomasso, N. A. (2014). The essence of innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing Black children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(4), 526–545. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035663

Keskinen, S., Stoltz, P. & Mulinari, D. (eds) (2021). Feminisms in the Nordic Region, Palgrave Macmillan.

Sharpe, C. (2015) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.

Smedegaard Nielsen, A. (2022). What Makes an Innocent Child. In R. Schröder et al (eds) Situating Displacement: Explorations of Global (Im)Mobility, Peter Lang Publishing, 69-80.

Telford, A. (2023). A feminist geopolitics of bullying discourses? White innocence and figure-effects of bullying in climate politics. Gender, Place & Culture, 30(7), 1035–1056. 

Ticktin, M. (2017) A World Without Innocence. American Ethnologist, 44(4), 577-590.

Wekker, Gloria (2016) White Innocence. Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Duke University Press. 

Yang, A. (2022). Child-Friendly Racism? An ethnographical study on children's racialized becoming in a race-blind context. Aalborg Universitetsforlag. 

Yang, A. (2024). Racism suitable for children? Intersections between child innocence and white innocence. Children & Society, 38(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12797