Synnøve Bendixsen

The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin

The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin offers an in-depth ethnographic account of Muslim youth’s religious identity formation and their everyday life engagement with Islam. It deals with the reconstruction of selfhood and the collective content of identity formation in an urban and transnational setting.

The refugee crisis: destabilizing and restabilizing European borders

ABSTRACT Drawing on fieldwork among irregular migrants in Norway, this article examines how borders are constructed, reproduced and contested by a variety of actors, using techniques, institutions, laws, policies and social interactions at different scales. It indicates the shifts in border regimes following the alleged weakening of national borders after the Cold War. The implementation of European integration, for instance through the Schengen Agreement, has made it increasingly difficult for undocumented travellers to cross the external Schengen borders, and within the nation-states, internal boundary processes facilitate, obstruct and set yardsticks for migrants’ entrance to society. Drawing on scholars who have explored the spatial dimensions of border controls (delocalization), the temporal dimension, and the role of non-state actors in shaping border policies (denationalization), I investigate borders through three critical moments for migrants: the movement to Europe, the waiting in Europe and the (potential) return.

Introduction: Egalitarianism in a Scandinavian Context

This Introduction sets out different ways of engaging with the history of the Scandinavian countries to create a framework of the themes and positions regarding egalitarianism in Scandinavia that is pursued in the following chapters. After briefly discussing egalitarianism as a theoretical possibility, it is explored in relation to the ideological and social construction of Scandinavian welfare states, investigating in particular the role of civil society and politics. Then is shown how, in historical terms, egalitarian popular movements have become institutionalized and tied to state policy. One characteristic of this region appears to be that egalitarian movements in Scandinavia have largely been picked up, co-opted by, and made part of the state and its institutions. Then a further elaboration on what egalitarianism as a cultural and social value in Scandinavia may mean, and an exploration of its institutionalization in this context are given. In the final section, how the political project of egalitarianism has been pursued in an era of migration is discussed.

Can the Irregular Migrant Woman Speak

This chapter provides an anthropological perspective on how public space and political mobilization becomes gendered and racialized. Drawing on fieldwork with a group of Ethiopian irregular migrants who demonstrated in the public sphere against the Norwegian government, it draws attention to how representations, the voices and frames of action, are shaped by the nation-state context in which the migrants mobilize. It asks what are the opportunities and limitations for representing ones’ claims as a noncitizen woman, and for representing oneself as a particular political subject.

Recalibrating Alterity, Difference, Ontology: Anthropological Engagements with Human and Non-Human Worlds

How does one measure and analyze human alterity and difference in an interconnected and ever-globalizing world? This chapter contextualizes and critically assesses the impact of what has often been dubbed ‘the ontological turn’ within anthropology in order to provide some answers to these questions. Mapping the highly variegated and multiplex terrain covered by this turn, we outline three broad domains of its impact (vistas, materialities and politics). Juxtaposing antagonistic positions, the Introduction provides a context for the book’s exploration of the turn’s empirical and theoretical limits, accomplishments and potential for the discipline.

Negotiating, Resisting and (Re)Constructing Othering

The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin offers an in-depth ethnographic account of Muslim youth’s religious identity formation and their everyday life engagement with Islam. It deals with the reconstruction of selfhood and the collective content of identity formation in an urban and transnational setting.