Marie Louise Seeberg

No Place Small children in Norwegian asylum-seeker reception centres

Drawing on empirical material from fieldwork among young children living with their families in two Norwegian reception centres for asylum-seekers, this article compares their realities to the norms and realities for other children in Norway. Children’s spatial and social situations within the centres stand out in stark contrast to Norwegian childhood ideology and norms. The authorities explain the divergence in terms of migration management, and the spatiotemporal and social positions of ‘asylum-seekers’ in relation to those of ‘children’ within the nation-state are brought to the fore in the article. The perceived political dilemma between migration control and Norway’s image as a promoter of children’s rights is highlighted, and the authors suggest that the dilemma may be less real than is widely assumed.

Immigrant careworkers and Norwegian gender equality: Institutions, identities, intersections:

This article examines how immigrant careworkers relate dynamically with the Norwegian gender regime. While the importation of careworkers contributes both to the practical maintenance and to the undermining on a more ideological level of the Norwegian gender regime, it also brings in new constellations and possibilities. In this article examples from two studies are discussed in the light of institutional and intersectional perspectives. It describes features of the Norwegian gender regime that are especially relevant to carework, and the highly gendered distribution and sharing of carework across the public and private domains. One central Norwegian form of care institution, the nursing home, then comes into focus. Making use of empirical examples from fieldwork and interviews, the article discusses how, as immigrant careworkers increasingly staff these institutions, new light is thrown on existing power structures, while at the same time these structures may be challenged through the fluidity of situational and relational gendering processes.

Does She Speak Norwegian

Abstract This article highlights implications of two aspects of glocalisation - migration and New Public Management - at different levels in the Norwegian health care sector. They meet in the concept of competence, the central principle of hierarchisation in this sector. ‘Norwegianness’ emerges as an important informal competency, while there is a need for allowing the conceptual alignment of ‘migrancy’ with medical competence. Most immigrants who are not able to align themselves with ‘Norwegianness’ hit what Nirmal Puwar calls the ‘concrete ceiling of race’, while a few manage to find jobs further up through assimilating into pre-existing schemas of ‘Norwegianness’. This may lead to a loss of competencies useful in a diverse society. In the absence of political will to counteract this tendency, it is likely to cause growing inefficiency in the sector.

Child Refugees and National Boundaries

Child refugees embody a dilemma, as national sovereign rights and universal children’s rights appear to demand opposite paths of action: the former to exercise the right to reject asylum seekers , the latter to implement the principle of the best interests of the child. In this light, child refugees expose an Achilles’ heel of democratic states, derived from the combined premises of nationhood and childhood. As social spaces, both nations and childhoods are defined and encompassed by context-specific boundaries. Understanding how these boundaries are (re-)enacted when it comes to specific cases may bring us closer to an understanding of how nationhood and childhood interact. In this chapter, I compare some criteria for refugee children’s crossing of national boundaries at four different socio-temporal sites: the UK and Norway, in the late 1930s and the early 2010s. My comparison is based on a closer look into the cases of four children, one from each of the four sites. Their situations and experiences serve to identify key criteria for the crossing of territorial, social, and symbolic boundaries into the two nation states at these different points in time. The 1930s and 2010s have in common internationally crisis-ridden and ambiguous refugee-producing situations, in contrast to the clear-cut alliances of the intervening periods. Norway and the UK share a close historical affinity as countries of refuge on the north-west margins of Europe, yet there are clear differences between their ideologies and practices of childhood and of nationhood. Furthermore, ideas and practices of childhood and of nationhood have changed considerably in all countries from the 1930s to the 2010s. Finally, I discuss some implications of the patterns revealed through the comparison, especially regarding connections between the practices of national boundary making and the changing ideologies and practices of childhood.

Looking Ahead: Contested Childhoods and Migrancy

At the beginning of this book, we explained how our interest in globalization ’s changing ideas and practices of childhood led us to propose ‘contested childhoods’ and ‘growing up in migrancy’ as twin conceptual tools. The purpose was to understand the migration , governance, and identity processes currently involving children and ideas of childhood. In this final chapter, we return to this conceptual pair and reflect on some of the theoretical and policy implications of the concepts as emergent throughout the book. Whose children are we talking about? This question, raised in our first chapter, pinpoints the link between ‘contested childhoods’ and ‘growing up in migrancy’ . Whose children are trafficked, seeking refuge, taken into custody, active in youth organisations, struggling and juggling in identity work? Which societies can claim them as their own, and build individual and societal futures accordingly? These are questions with far-reaching implications of a theoretical as well as a practical and policy-oriented nature. In the following, we draw out and discuss some of these implications.

Book review: The Politics of Multicultural Encounters: Feminist Postcolonial Perspectives:

This idea, that women are performing extremely high or making extreme sacrifices, is echoed by young PhD candidates and postdoctorates of both genders. Women are reflective and self-aware about the sacrifices they may have to go through in order to survive in academia (such as postponing motherhood, leaving behind a non-supportive boyfriend) for example. Some expressed their willingness to drop their careers to have children, follow their man, or take care of a family member (‘there are other things besides work’, p. 79). In contrast, and depressingly, most of the male postdoctorates interviewed had a steady relationship and children, whereas none of the women had children, and few were in relationships. Women interviewed in the book, are, in Fox Keller’s (2001) terms ‘embodied scientists’. They are reflexive about their situations, not only as scientists, but as partners, mothers, sisters, lovers, friends, gardeners, travellers, sports women, amateur painters, etc. They do not separate their work and their personal lives as disconnected spaces: both spaces are in tension and in constant negotiation. Conversely, that tension is much less evident in the discourse of their male colleagues. In addition, men articulate an explicit separation between their professional careers and their personal lives. That distinction is impossible to find in women’s discourses. It seems that the female astronomers interviewed are ‘embodied scientists’, whereas men are ‘disembodied scientists’. However, both genders, but especially male astronomers, believe that the problem is basically a social problem. Gender relations are changing slowly and that change will, sooner or later, show in astronomy. Within that logic, things will naturally evolve and astronomy will reflect gendered changes in society. This idea, however, reinforces the old belief that science is an activity outside society, in which there are internal aspects (those related to science) and external aspects (those concerning social change). The book, however, leaves untouched some important debates. The authors do not address epistemological issues and the consequences of the absence of women in science. Is there a fundamentally different knowledge that women create? Do women or feminists produce better science? Do we need a science that accepts women and changes women’s lives, or do we need to change the structure of science to allow women equal positions? Science by whom? Science for whom? This book is an urgent reminder that women’s equal incorporation into science is far from achieved and will not be achieved naturally, but require serious interventions.

Book Review: Guilt Trip With Many Engaging Stops Suvi Keskinen, Salla Tuori, Sari Irni and Diana Mulinari, eds Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, 276 pp., ISBN 978-0-7546-7435-1

unpalatable political ideals? These questions, and the question of the end result of the transformations in the new Europe, comprise future political challenges. This comprehensive and thoughtful book will serve as a guide to the politics of citizenship and feminism in Eastern Europe for some years to come. It can also be profitably read for the general account of citizenship that if offers to feminists caught in the processes of marketization and nationalism everywhere.

Book Review: Gender, Ethnicity and Positioning in Processes of Subjectification:

NOVA (Norwegian Institute for Research on Adolescence - Welfare and Ageing)--> - (Seeberg, Marie Louise)