Sarah Scuzzarello

Rebordering France and Denmark Narratives and Practices of Border-Construction in Two European Countries

Abstract This article examines the continued significance of borders and boundary constructions in the allegedly ‘borderless Europe’. It analyses the events in 2011 that led to the temporary closure of borders in France and in Denmark, and aims to show how some European nation-states attempted to reclaim their power of border control by tweaking the Schengen agreement. We argue that these events are not only examples of how countries manage the inflow and outflow of people. By closing or restricting their physical borders, both countries were also trying to reinstate narrative identity boundaries around the French and the Danish people. We advocate that physical borders find legitimacy in boundaries, i.e. narratives that conceptually separate groups and territories, and illustrate this through an analysis of local media in the countries involved.

Caring multiculturalism: Power and transformation in diverse societies

This article offers an alternative approach to multicultural theories, called ‘caring multiculturalism’. It argues that, despite good intentions, multicultural theory reproduces rhetoric that constructs groups as substantive entities, which leaves little room to accommodate changing power relations. Caring multiculturalism, drawing on caring ethics, feminist critiques of multiculturalism and discursive social psychology, advocates instead the contextualisation of groups’ claims to diversity and of governments’ practices of multiculturalism. As a framework rooted in discursive psychology, caring multiculturalism sees individual and collective identities as relational, negotiated and political, and therefore non-totalising and changeable. As a feminist approach to multiculturalism, it analyses and attempts to change gendered power asymmetries embedded in intra- and intergroup relations by advocating an attentive and responsive approach to the needs and claims of minority groups and of the individuals within them. The article outlines the main tenets of caring multiculturalism with illustrations from multicultural practices in three European municipalities.

Dialogical approaches to psychology and ethics

A dialogical conceptualisation of the self was originally developed in psychology by Hermans and colleagues (1992; Hermans, 2001) to provide an understanding of the self as multi-vocal and created in dialogue within the self and between the self and the other. Today, research in disciplines other than psychology has increasingly been influenced by this body of work. In particular, a strand of research analysing the dynamics of contemporary multicultural societies from a dialogical perspective is emerging (e.g. Bhatia and Ram, 2001; Harre and Moghaddam, 2003; Kinnvall and Linden, 2010). Related to this work, a number of scholars are developing an approach to ethics where difference is seen as neither threatening nor abnormal but rather as a normal condition of being (e.g. Arnett, 2001; Nesbitt-Larking, 2009; Scuzzarello, 2009, 2010). Taken together, these studies point at possible linkages between psychology and politics, and they are good examples of what can be achieved within the framework of political psychology.