Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

Organised Cultural Encounters: Interculturality and Transformative Practices

ABSTRACT The article introduces the special issue by presenting the concept of organised cultural encounters that are encounters organised to manage and/or transform problems perceived to originate in or include cultural differences. Inspired by Pratt’s conceptualisation of the contact zone, a critical perspective on the particular historical and spatial context of any encounter and how this context frames and mediates what takes place during an encounter is applied. While the articles of the issue present different varieties of organised cultural encounters, it is argued that they are not only of the same kind because of our analytical framework, but also because they share various features. They are scripted events tied to the particular social arena with which the encounter is associated and thus shaped in important ways by the existing norms, discourses, roles and hierarchies that govern these arenas. Furthermore, they also share the idea that the transformative potential of the encounter is inherently risky, since their potentiality is tied in with unpredictability, while risk cannot be left out because it at the same time is a precondition for transformation. The articles of the issue illustrate how script and risk come up in a different way.

Journey to the centre of the ice: narrating ice-core drillings in northern Greenland

On the remote icecap in northwest Greenland, an international team of glaciologists led by scientists from Copenhagen University recently drilled a 2537.36u2005m long ice core, finally reaching bedrock in July 2010. The ice core charts a climate history that reaches back more than 115,000 years to the Eemian period. This time travel ultimately aims at predicting the climate of the future. While the heroic polar expeditions of the past ventured into unknown spaces horizontally, the secrets of the frontier are now vertically stored in the ice cores. In Secrets of the Ice, five videos produced for public dissemination, Greenland is displayed as an empty, frozen space, waiting to be conquered by scientists. Resonating with classical Arctic explorer myths, this conquest has to overcome the difficulties presented by a harsh wilderness landscape. The article situates the glaciological project in Greenland within a network of colonial relations that marks the storylines adopted by both video producers and scientists.

Qullissat: Historicising and Localising the Danish Scramble for the Arctic

The rise and fall of the town and coal mine at Qullissat raises a number of challenging questions about Danish administrative culture in Greenland. Through this historical case study, the authors challenge the assumption that the so-called scramble for the Arctic is solely about our own contemporaneity. The establishment of the coal mine and its labour-force town in 1924 constitutes a much earlier scramble. Importantly, it illustrates how such scrambles represent a continued colonial mindset whose power lines are both deliberately and inadvertently opaque. While the wilful exercising of colonial power has attracted much attention in postcolonial studies, the unintentional, disassembled side of colonial rule creates analytical confusion, not least because of the difficulties involved in tracing decision-making processes even where colonial rule is demonstrably hegemonic.

Feminism in Postcolonial Nordic Spaces

ISSN: 0803-8740 (Print) 1502-394X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/swom20 Feminism in Postcolonial Nordic Spaces Astrid Andersen, Kirsten Hvenegard-Lassen & Ina Knobblock To cite this article: Astrid Andersen, Kirsten Hvenegard-Lassen & Ina Knobblock (2015) Feminism in Postcolonial Nordic Spaces, NORA Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 23:4, 239-245, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2015.1104596 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2015.1104596

Editorial: NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

The concept of “state feminism” is often used in relation to the Nordic states. Usually it means that feminists and feminist movements use state-based policy-making mechanisms and target the state in promoting gender equality. Recently it has been claimed that this notion is out of date, not only in the Nordic countries, but more generally. Johanna Kantola and Judith Squires (2012) suggest that feminist engagements with new forms of governance can be better captured in the concept of “market feminism”. They argue that the context in which state feminism is situated (the state) and the form that it takes (feminism) have changed under the impact of neoliberalism. Nowadays, according to Kantola and Squires, feminists embrace the logic of the market, as can be seen in changes in practices (New Public Management; welfare state retrenchment) and, for example, the policy priorities of women’s policy agencies (diversity policies; gender mainstreaming). Nancy Fraser, in an article in the UK-based newspaper The Guardian, stated in a similar vein that “In a cruel twist of fate, I fear that the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society . . . A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised ‘care’ and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy . . . ” (Fraser 2013a). In her book Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Fraser 2013b), she develops this argument and wonders why political elites today fail to come up with regulatory projects aimed at saving the capitalist economic system, society, and nature from out-of-control markets and asks: why do social movements not unite around a counter-hegemonic project (Fraser 2013b, p. 121)? Her hope is that the current crisis will put the notion of solidarity back on the feminist agenda (Fraser 2013a, 2013b). Agneta Hugemark and Christina Roman, in “Putting Gender and Ethnic Discrimination on the Political Agenda”, take the neoliberal development of the Swedish state further back in time than is suggested by these contemporary debates over feminism and neoliberalism. Indeed they argue that the—controversial— creation of the Equal Opportunities Ombudsman and the Ombudsman against Ethnic Discrimination in the 1980s marks the transformation of the Swedish universal welfare state model into a more liberal one. Based on this, one might ask whether state feminism in its heyday can be associated with the inception of the neoliberal morass we are in today. In their article, Hugemark and Roman follow the (different) politicization processes that led to the establishment of these state agencies. How, they ask, have “the women’s question” and “the ethnic minority question” been articulated in Swedish politics? By what processes were gender and ethnicity politicized, and how did this politicizing result in state initiatives to establish the two ombudsman offices?

NORA 20th Anniversary (1993–2013) Special issue on “Feminist Resistance -Resistance to Feminism”

NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research has turned 20 years of age. Congratulations to us all!!! We are happy to present this special anniversary issue of NORA on the theme of Feminist Resistance—Resistance to Feminism. In 1993, in the first article of the first issue ofNORA, Drude Dahlerup wrote the following: “The newWomen’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s took a negative attitude towards the state, seeing it as capitalist and patriarchal. Today, this attitude has changed, with many former activists now supporting the ‘state feminism’ that has developed in all the Nordic countries” (Dahlerup 1993). Much has happened during the 20 years that have passed since then; the dispute within as well as outside feminist circles over the state as a prime or privileged actor in the struggle for equality is ongoing, as is apparent in the contributions to this special issue of NORA. The political landscapes of the Nordic states have changed, which has had consequences for the public debates about gender equality, and for the diverse expressions of state feminism. At the same time, feminism has been scrutinized from the inside, targeting the presumed universal character of a feminist subjectivity existing outside power relations. Both of these changes influence the conditions under which feminist activism and resistance take place. One common trend in the Nordic countries during recent years has been the loud voices claiming that feminism has won the struggle and is now either outdated or “hysterical”. In addition, the equality agendas of feminisms are projected onto the Nordic nation states as if these are inherently gender-equal in their character. Feminists are hence faced with a complicated situation of both co-option and resistance, which raises questions about what we, as feminists, are resisting as well as whom we resist and in what ways. That there is a vibrant debate over these issues amongst feminist researchers is attested to by the submissions we received in response to the call for papers for this special issue. The majority of these submissions were from Swedish researchers and were about policy measures and feminist debates, specifically public debates about feminism in Sweden. This is in all probability not a coincidence. In Sweden, gender research has been academically institutionalized to a degree that far exceeds the situation in any other Nordic country; in addition (and not completely unrelated), the