Kristín Loftsdóttir
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 79831 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kristín Loftsdóttir |
| NOMBRES | Kristín |
| APELLIDO | Loftsdóttir |
| FIRMA | LOFTSDÓTTIR K |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Iceland |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3491-724X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 62 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 179 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Into the unknown
White Supremacy in the Nordic Countries
Recent scholarship has called for greater attention to white supremacy. This is closely linked to broader efforts to foreground the structural and institutional dimensions of racism. In the Nordic context, such a perspective challenges longstanding assumptions of exceptionalism by highlighting the historical and contemporary presence of coloniality and racism in the Nordic countries. This article examines the concept of white supremacy in relatio…
I would like to see some changes”
This article focuses on tourism in Gran Canaria as experienced by residents working within or in relation to the tourism industry. We locate the voices of our interlocutors in a geopolitical context, using critical theoretical perspectives that have called for more engagement with inequalities entangled with tourism and produced by tourism mobilities. The COVID-19 crisis was instrumental in changing our research participants’ perspectives on the …
A Sense of Direction
Haukur Ingvarsson and Jenna Grace Sciuto, literary scholars based in Iceland and the US respectively, interview Icelandic anthropologist, Kristín Loftsdóttir, whose research projects have taken place in Iceland, Niger, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. The interview focuses on Loftsdóttir's research and her understanding of space, power, temporalities, and colonial histories in today's global society. Loftsdóttir interrogates the symbolic meaning or val…
Speculating about the migration crisis
In Europe, increased precarity characterises the lives of many people, making crisis-talk especially appealing as a framing mechanism to naturalise anti-migration policies within the EU. In 2020–2021, the EU and the Spanish government proclaimed a migration crisis and immobilised in dehumanising conditions a few thousand African migrants who had just arrived in the Canary Islands. This action was facilitated by narratives of migrant invasion and …
Mobility cause lawyering
This article analyses cause lawyering as a critical form of resistance to uneven European Union (EU) mobility regimes. Grounded in the proclamation of a migration crisis during 2020–21 in the Canary Islands, Spain, when newly arrived racialized migrants in irregular situations faced different types of (im)mobilization during their transits to continental Europe, the article shows that cause lawyering is a significant strategy for disputing exclus…
People need housing to live in
Numerous studies from the twenty first century underscore how housing challenges have increased in Western countries. This article focuses on the dynamics of renting, showing how housing precarity today is increasingly shaped by transnational mobilities, intersecting with localized policymaking. While these studies have mainly centred on Southern Europe, this article focuses on Iceland, representing a Northern European country. Our analysis shows…
Infrapolitical mobilities
Precarious migrants must cope with various restrictions and exceptional policies while challenging anti-migrant images and crisis discourses. Using the concept infrapolitical mobilities, this article draws attention to minor acts that resist and/or navigate the constraints imposed by the racialization and criminalization of migrant (im)mobilities. We emphasize the agency and practices performed by migrants and their allies, that, intentionally or…
Belonging and Digital Technologies
Throughout Iceland's years of economic boom and the financial crisis in 2008, many Lithuanian migrants felt a sense of exclusion and hostility. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these notions were different, and we argue that the use of digital platforms played an essential role in creating sociality among some members of the Lithuanian community and generating a feeling of Lithuanians as a part of Icelandic society. Our article points at th…
Creating Europe from the Margins
This edited volume centres on how the idea of Europe can be explored by focusing on Europe’s margin. It inquires critically into the relations and tensions in the Global South/Global North divide and the internal differentiation within Europe itself (Southern, Eastern, Northern Europe) and across and within the different nation-states. While recent discussions of migration and Europe and of Fortress Europe seem to assume the concept of Europe as …
Creating Europe from the Margins
This edited volume explores the idea of Europe through a focus on its margins. The chapters in the volume inquire critically into the relations and tensions inherent in divisions between the Global North and the Global South as well as internal regional differentiation within Europe itself. In doing so, the volume stresses the need to consider Europe from critical interdisciplinary perspectives, highlighting historical and contemporary issues of …
Regímenes de in/movilidad y crisis migratoria en la ruta canaria
En este artículo analizamos los regímenes de in/movilidad producidos en las Islas Canarias como respuesta a un aumento en la llegada no autorizada de personas migrantes por vía marítima desde África del Oeste entre 2018 y 2023. Categorizada en el año 2020 como "crisis migratoria", el gobierno español, de acuerdo con la Unión Europea, intentó inmovilizar a estas personas en las Canarias, contraviniendo las normas que permiten la libre movilidad en…
Crafting racism, civilization, and margins through plaster busts of Icelanders
In the mid-nineteenth century, Iceland’s small population under Danish rule tried establishing itself as part of Europe's civilized and progressive population. The production of racist texts and images that emphasized Iceland's natural place with ‘progressive’ European nations reflect Iceland's relationship with colonialism and the anxieties of being categorized with colonized others. The paper focuses on plaster casts of Icelandic faces, which w…
Hidden Stories
Mainstream discourses of migration and populist voices tend to be based on assumed distance between European subjects and migrant populations, disfiguring historical connections through time. This makes the excavation of Europe’s racist and imperial history particularly important as an intervention. The essay focuses on a bust collection in El Museo Canario in Gran Canaria, bought from France in the late nineteenth century, positioning the busts …
De color invisible. Paisajes de blanquitud y de identidad racial en el desarrollo internacional
La identidad racializada en relación con el campo del desarrollo internacional es un tema sorprendentemente sin analizar dentro de la antropología, si bien extensamente explorada en vinculación a las sociedades occidentales multiculturales contemporáneas y las relaciones históricas existentes entre diferentes partes del mundo. En este artículo exploro la raza y blanquitud en relación al desarrollo internacional, enfatizando la importancia de anal…
We Are All Africans Here
Europe is often described as "flooded" by migrants or by Muslim "others," with Western African men especially portrayed as a security risk. At the same time the intensified mobility of privileged people in the Global North is celebrated as creating an increasingly cosmopolitan world. This book looks critically at racialization of mobility in Europe, anchoring the discussion in the aspiration of precarious migrants from Niger in Belgium and Italy.…
Becoming Nordic in Brazil
In this article, we focus on whiteness as an historically shifting phenomenon by analysing Brazilian recent emphasis on Icelandic ancestry, demonstrating the intersection of whiteness, class and ethnicity. A small group of Icelanders were among the millions migrating to Brazil around the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Icelandic migrants did not emphasise their Icelandic identity but affiliated themselves with Germans and other favoure…
Nations of bankers and Brexiteers? Nationalism and hidden money
This article examines the relationship between nationalistic mobilisations, hidden funds and undisclosed campaign contributions, commonly known as dark money. Contextualising Brexit alongside the Icelandic economic crash of 2008 shows how nationalist mobilisation and racism can secure economic and political interests for a small minority and thus create space for what Zygmunt Bauman has called ‘evasion’ or ‘slippage’ as a primary technique of pow…
An alternative world
With the rise of populist movements of various kinds, racism has become one of the key issues debated in the present. This piece stresses the need to recognise racism as a part of the wider social and cultural contexts that populist movements operate within in Nordic countries and beyond. Populist movements’ claims of not being racist gain legitimacy through discourses of race and difference that are generally not recognised as racist but seen as…
Dualistic Colonial Experiences and the Ruins of Coloniality
Research Article| July 01 2019 Dualistic Colonial Experiences and the Ruins of Coloniality Kristín Loftsdóttir Kristín Loftsdóttir University of Iceland Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scandinavian Studies (2019) 91 (1-2): 31–52. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kristín Loftsdóttir; Dualistic Colonial Experience…
Dualistic Colonial Experiences and the Ruins of Coloniality
In 1930, Iceland celebrated the anniversary of the establishment of its Parliament at Þingvellir 1,000 years earlier. The aspirations for the festival were ambitious, especially considering that on the eve of the twentieth century, Iceland was populated by less than 100,000 people, and towns had
Messy Europe
Messy Europe
Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection p…
Global citizens, exotic others, and unwanted migrants
This article reflects on Europe’s problematic relationship with its ‘others’, asking in particular how the idea of the ‘exotic’ – constituting one of Europe’s ‘imperial ruins’ – intersects with the figure of the Muslim migrant. The Muslim migrant has in the present become in Europe a potent marker of otherness, which reflects how some cosmopolitan aspirations are perceived negatively in European discourses, revealing how mobility itself is racili…
Finding a place in the world
The economic crash in Iceland created a sense of social and political collapse that extended far beyond the economic realm. Calls for a "New Iceland" were invoked, where the Icelandic political arena would be "cleaned" and reimagined in drastic ways. In this article, I explore how ideas circulating in the wider European region about how Icelanders dealt exceptionally well with the crisis not only failed to reflect the lived effects of the collaps…
Being a desirable migrant
In the aftermath of the financial crisis that hit Iceland in October 2008, increased numbers of Icelanders migrated to Norway to seek employment due to difficult economic circumstances in Iceland. Using critical perspectives from postcolonial studies and critical whiteness studies, the paper explores how these Icelandic migrants in Norway make sense of their new position as economic migrants within a global economy characterised by a growing sens…
Being 'The Damned Foreigner
The discussion draws from recent writing on the meaning of 'whiteness' in the Nordic countries, emphasizing the importance to understand racialization in different localities. Racism is entangled with affective meanings related to discourse of the nation, furthermore, as shaped by global discourses and class. The discussion exemplifies this in the context of migrants from Lithuania in Iceland, demonstrating how they become racialized in Iceland d…
The Exotic North
This discussion stresses that looking at countries on the margins of European colonial rule can be useful when considering the wider dynamics of the present, reflecting the persistence of colonial discourses and how racism “endures”. Iceland’s colonial experience was characterized by duality, in which the country was an object of colonialism, while actively participating in the racist discourses predominant in Europe at that time. This paper demo…
Invisible colour
Racialized identity in relation to international development is a surprisingly unanalyzed theme within anthropology, even though extensively explored in connection with contemporary western multi-cultural societies and historical relations between different parts of the world. In the paper I explore race and whiteness in relation to international development, emphasizing the importance of analyzing how the historical construction of racial identi…
Republishing ‘The Ten Little Negros
The Icelandic version of the book The Ten Little Negros was republished in the autumn of 2007 after its original publication in Iceland in 1922, creating multilayered debate about the meaning of race and racism in Iceland. In this paper, I stress that, within the European context, ‘whiteness’ has to be theorized as emerging from particular histories and realities, being entangled with other identifications such as national identity. I explore the…
Colonialism at the margins
Scholars have for some time emphasised destabilising the boundaries between colonised and colonisers, in addition to calling for more nuanced analyses of colonialism. I focus here on the politics of difference on a global scale and how the internal logic dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘other’ is still significant, using two cases revolving around an Icelandic struggle with ‘otherness’ at different times in history: one in 1905 and the other in …
More than a stopover
Tourism to Iceland has and continues to benefit from its geographic position as a stopover between the North American and Eurasian continents and as an extension of the exoticised Arctic North. In that context, we argue that Iceland as a destination functions as a gateway, which should be used as a way of recognising the wider network responsible for the multiple interpretations of destination image. Accordingly, this article argues that despite …
The loss of innocence
Iceland's increased involvement in global economic markets in the early 2000s came to a sudden halt in 2008, when the economic crisis hit Iceland severely. I focus on how this crisis was understood in Iceland as continuous with romantic nationalist narratives of the past. Nationalism in the early 20th century helped make sense of foreign investments in the boom period, building on a masculine image of the ‘Viking’ and specific characteristics of …
Trapped in clichés
When the Icelandic television series ‘Trapped’ was aired it instantly garnered worldwide attention. The main character, a rugged Icelandic man, is presented as being one with the harsh cold landscape. This article demonstrates how visual materials, like ‘Trapped,’ have become extremely important in the presentation of Iceland to the outside world, as well as working to present Iceland as a tourism destination. Furthermore, we evidence how ‘Trappe…
Building on Iceland's 'Good Reputation
The paper claims that crisis is a fruitful way to analyse the interrelationship of local and global, \nneoliberalism and the nation-state, which scholars have explored for the past few years. During the Icelandic financial crash of 2008, the failed Internet bank Icesave became a source of intense disputes between the British and Icelandic governments. My paper uses Icelandic discussions of the bankrupt bank to explore how individuals negotiate th…
Within a 'white' affective space
Racialization does not always take place through discourses of blackness as emphasized in American research, or exclusively in relation to immigration, as emphasized in the European context. As an affective process, racialization is entangled with particular views of nation-states and a sense of belonging in a wider community of nations where humanitarianism can play a large role. By looking at international development in Iceland, the paper emph…
Puffin love”
This article looks at the creation of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, as an Arctic tourism destination with a focus on souvenir production and consumption. We regard souvenirs to be particularly interesting for investigating the creation and materialization of the Arctic, in the light of how landscapes, in our case the urban landscape of Reykjavík, are constantly performed and narrated through objects. A special attention is given to the Atlantic P…
Negotiating white Icelandic identity
Post-colonial scholars have emphasized the need to explore the ways in which colonial contact shaped both the colonized and colonizers; that is, how European identities were formulated in relation to imperial projects. Colonial Europe itself has to be deconstructed, looking at similarities and variability within different countries. This article explores the construction of 'white' Icelandic identity in historical and contemporary discourses. The…
The 'Jeep-Gangsters' from Iceland
■ The landscape of international development has changed with increased emphasis on security as a key development issue. Peacekeeping - involving a mixture of both civilian and military agencies - is constructed inside discourses of insecurity and 'war on terror' and legitimized as an important contribution to development. We discuss the increased emphasis on 'security' and its meaning in relation to critical questions that anthropologists involv…
Finding a place in the world
The economic crash in Iceland created a sense of social and political collapse that extended far beyond the economic realm. Calls for a "New Iceland" were invoked, where the Icelandic political arena would be "cleaned" and reimagined in drastic ways. In this article, I explore how ideas circulating in the wider European region about how Icelanders dealt exceptionally well with the crisis not only failed to reflect the lived effects of the collaps…
Vikings in Brazil
The Iceland Brazil Association (AISBRA) was established in 1996 by a group of Brazilians of Icelandic descent, more than 100 years after the first generation of immigrants settled in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The association was the first organisation in Brazil to collectively emphasise and celebrate Icelandic heritage. The association caters to a disparate group of people that had, in many cases, little knowledge about their historical l…
Whiteness is from another world
This article focuses on desires, fears and identities as entangled in the past. Emphasizing gendered aspects of mobility, the author takes as examples debates relating to Icelandic Muslims and discussions in regard to Iceland’s increased international involvements in global peacekeeping. She sees them sharing entanglements with the nationalistic ideologies of Europeans as carrier of justice and equality, as well as a collective forgetting of past…
Knowing what to do in the city
International Development and the Globally Concerned European Subject
As a global project of engineering and imagining the world, international development shaped subjectivities and societies, engaging with what Ann Laura Stoler (2008 Stoler, Ann L. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) has referred to as ‘imperial ruins’: what was left after colonialism. Ironically, international development as a project…
Regímenes de in/movilidad y crisis migratoria en la ruta canaria
En este artículo analizamos los regímenes de in/movilidad producidos en las Islas Canarias como respuesta a un aumento en la llegada no autorizada de personas migrantes por vía marítima desde África del Oeste entre 2018 y 2023. Categorizada en el año 2020 como "crisis migratoria", el gobierno español, de acuerdo con la Unión Europea, intentó inmovilizar a estas personas en las Canarias, contraviniendo las normas que permiten la libre movilidad en…
Speculating about the migration crisis
In Europe, increased precarity characterises the lives of many people, making crisis-talk especially appealing as a framing mechanism to naturalise anti-migration policies within the EU. In 2020–2021, the EU and the Spanish government proclaimed a migration crisis and immobilised in dehumanising conditions a few thousand African migrants who had just arrived in the Canary Islands. This action was facilitated by narratives of migrant invasion and …
People need housing to live in
Numerous studies from the twenty first century underscore how housing challenges have increased in Western countries. This article focuses on the dynamics of renting, showing how housing precarity today is increasingly shaped by transnational mobilities, intersecting with localized policymaking. While these studies have mainly centred on Southern Europe, this article focuses on Iceland, representing a Northern European country. Our analysis shows…
Global citizens, exotic others, and unwanted migrants
This article reflects on Europe’s problematic relationship with its ‘others’, asking in particular how the idea of the ‘exotic’ – constituting one of Europe’s ‘imperial ruins’ – intersects with the figure of the Muslim migrant. The Muslim migrant has in the present become in Europe a potent marker of otherness, which reflects how some cosmopolitan aspirations are perceived negatively in European discourses, revealing how mobility itself is racili…
The Danes don't get this’
In the early 2000s, Iceland enjoyed an extensive boom period that ended abruptly with an economic crash in 2008. This paper focuses on how Iceland's past as a Danish dependency was revisited in the economic boom period. The Danes were widely seen as the former colonial rulers who were ‘jealous’ of Icelanders’ success, in turn, giving the Icelandic national identity a stronger coherence. The concept ‘colonialism without colonies’ is applied to the…
Bounded and Multiple Identities
Identités limitées et multiples. Identifications ethniques des WoDaaBe et des FulBe. — Les théories sur le nationalisme ont analysé dans quelle mesure le nationalisme est un phénomène récent, et ont mis l’accent sur le rôle déterminant de l’ethnicité. Cet article s’intéresse à l’ethnicité en utilisant des textes coloniaux et des données ethnographiques concernant les FulBe et les WoDaaBe du Niger. J’insiste sur le fait que les classifications éta…
Never forgetting? Gender and racial-ethnic identity during fieldwork
Dans les dernieres decennies les anthropologues ont discute les differents processus survenant au cours du travail de terrain, analysant et critiquant la production d'une alterite specifique aux contextes anthropologiques. L'A. soutient que cet accent sur l'Autre, aussi important qu'il apparaisse dans certaines situations, doit etre limite et juge inadequat pour transcrire la complexite de ce qui survient au cours du travail de terrain. Prenant p…
The Place of Birth
Two children came out of the water and they made a grass house ( suurel ) and stayed at that place. Later, some cows came out of the water and stayed during the evening with the children. And then the children migrated ( gurgiisi , a short migration movement). The cows followed the children every place they went because the children had made them fire (Loose translation: tape transcript 1997). His voice is difficult to understand; he is an old ma…
Knowing what to do in the city
When nomads lose cattle
Never forgetting? Gender and racial-ethnic identity during fieldwork
Bounded and Multiple Identities
Identités limitées et multiples. Identifications ethniques des WoDaaBe et des FulBe. — Les théories sur le nationalisme ont analysé dans quelle mesure le nationalisme est un phénomène récent, et ont mis l’accent sur le rôle déterminant de l’ethnicité. Cet article s’intéresse à l’ethnicité en utilisant des textes coloniaux et des données ethnographiques concernant les FulBe et les WoDaaBe du Niger. J’insiste sur le fait que les classifications éta…
Shades of otherness
Scholars have emphasised the importance of Africa as a counter-identification in shaping European identity, and stressed the multiplicity of categories of ‘us’ and ‘other’. My discussion focuses on images of Africa in Iceland during the 19th century, when Iceland was seeking independence from Denmark. I suggest that by repeating cliches of European representations of Africa, Icelanders situated themselves within the space civilisation, culture an…
“Pure Manliness”
Iceland did not participate directly in the nineteenth century colonial project, but the interwoven racial, gendered, and nationalistic ideologies associated with the colonial project were very much a part of Icelandic identity as shaped by nationalist and imperialist discourses in Europe. This article focuses on representations of Africa in nineteenth century Iceland, claiming that the Icelandic discussions of Africa were not so much concerned w…
Invisible colour
Racialized identity in relation to international development is a surprisingly unanalyzed theme within anthropology, even though extensively explored in connection with contemporary western multi-cultural societies and historical relations between different parts of the world. In the paper I explore race and whiteness in relation to international development, emphasizing the importance of analyzing how the historical construction of racial identi…
The loss of innocence
Iceland's increased involvement in global economic markets in the early 2000s came to a sudden halt in 2008, when the economic crisis hit Iceland severely. I focus on how this crisis was understood in Iceland as continuous with romantic nationalist narratives of the past. Nationalism in the early 20th century helped make sense of foreign investments in the boom period, building on a masculine image of the ‘Viking’ and specific characteristics of …
The 'Jeep-Gangsters' from Iceland
■ The landscape of international development has changed with increased emphasis on security as a key development issue. Peacekeeping - involving a mixture of both civilian and military agencies - is constructed inside discourses of insecurity and 'war on terror' and legitimized as an important contribution to development. We discuss the increased emphasis on 'security' and its meaning in relation to critical questions that anthropologists involv…
Feminist Theory and that Critical Edge
Negotiating white Icelandic identity
Post-colonial scholars have emphasized the need to explore the ways in which colonial contact shaped both the colonized and colonizers; that is, how European identities were formulated in relation to imperial projects. Colonial Europe itself has to be deconstructed, looking at similarities and variability within different countries. This article explores the construction of 'white' Icelandic identity in historical and contemporary discourses. The…
Teaching "Race" with a Gendered Edge
How to deal with gender, women, gender roles, feminism and gender equality in teaching practices? Following in the footsteps of the ATHENA thematic network, ATGENDER brings together specialists in women’s and gender studies, feminist research, women’s rights, gender equality and diversity. In the book series ‘Teaching with Gender’ the partners in this network have collected articles on a wide range of teaching practices in the field of gender. Th…
Unpolitical Wars
The establishment of the Icelandic peacekeeping unit (ICRU), in 2001, signalled Iceland's increased participation in various UN peacekeeping projects in conflict-ridden areas, and can be seen as a part of an emphasis during its economic boom years on Iceland as an important international player. Engagement in foreign conflicts has, however, never been a part of Icelandic national identity. Iceland had prided itself on its lack of a national army …
Whiteness is from another world
This article focuses on desires, fears and identities as entangled in the past. Emphasizing gendered aspects of mobility, the author takes as examples debates relating to Icelandic Muslims and discussions in regard to Iceland’s increased international involvements in global peacekeeping. She sees them sharing entanglements with the nationalistic ideologies of Europeans as carrier of justice and equality, as well as a collective forgetting of past…
Colonialism at the margins
Scholars have for some time emphasised destabilising the boundaries between colonised and colonisers, in addition to calling for more nuanced analyses of colonialism. I focus here on the politics of difference on a global scale and how the internal logic dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘other’ is still significant, using two cases revolving around an Icelandic struggle with ‘otherness’ at different times in history: one in 1905 and the other in …
Whiteness and postcolonialism in the Nordic Region
This title examines the influence of imperialism and colonialism on the formation of national identities in the Nordic countries, exploring the manner in which discourses in Nordic society are rendered meaningful by references to past events and tropes related to the practices and ideologies of colonialism
Going to Eden
Images and texts referring to Africa and African people have been created in Iceland since earliest time, in spite of Iceland's somewhat marginalized position. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Icelanders were well familiar with the racial stereotypes dominating European discourse, and which often celebrated the colonial project, simultaneously as Icelanders themselves sought independence. My discussion suggests that social discourses…
Republishing ‘The Ten Little Negros
The Icelandic version of the book The Ten Little Negros was republished in the autumn of 2007 after its original publication in Iceland in 1922, creating multilayered debate about the meaning of race and racism in Iceland. In this paper, I stress that, within the European context, ‘whiteness’ has to be theorized as emerging from particular histories and realities, being entangled with other identifications such as national identity. I explore the…
Iceland, rejected by McDonald's
Iceland’s increased involvement in global economic markets in the early 2000s came to a sudden halt in autumn 2008 when Iceland became at the time the worst case of the global financial crisis. The discussion focuses on anxieties in relation to the aftermath and how they reflect internal Icelandic discussions that are entangled with Iceland’s past as a Danish dependency. The closing of McDonald’s restaurants in a year after the crash is a vivid e…
Nordic exceptionalism and gendered peacekeeping
The Nordic countries have been major contributors to peacekeeping, often seen as particularly well suited due to their lack of ties to colonialism and supposedly peaceful nature. The article critically addresses this idea in relation to how gender equality has been conceptualized in peacekeeping taking as an example Icelandic peacekeeping. Iceland’s recent engagement in peacekeeping has strongly emphasized gender issues but has lacked an engageme…
Within a 'white' affective space
Racialization does not always take place through discourses of blackness as emphasized in American research, or exclusively in relation to immigration, as emphasized in the European context. As an affective process, racialization is entangled with particular views of nation-states and a sense of belonging in a wider community of nations where humanitarianism can play a large role. By looking at international development in Iceland, the paper emph…
Not Necessarily the Best in the World
Crisis has become an important scholarly topic with Europe’s recent economic crisis lingering in the present. This paper looks at how global transformations appear from the position of severe economic crisis, and the importance of the past in understanding these transformations. Icelandic subjectivity during the boom period and crisis engaged strongly with Iceland’s past as a Danish dependency until 1944. Nationalistic rhetoric mobilised what Arj…
The Danes don't get this’
In the early 2000s, Iceland enjoyed an extensive boom period that ended abruptly with an economic crash in 2008. This paper focuses on how Iceland's past as a Danish dependency was revisited in the economic boom period. The Danes were widely seen as the former colonial rulers who were ‘jealous’ of Icelanders’ success, in turn, giving the Icelandic national identity a stronger coherence. The concept ‘colonialism without colonies’ is applied to the…
Sociology (43 obras) · Political science (38 obras) · Law (28 obras) · History (23 obras) · Icelandic (23 obras) · Gender Studies (22 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (17 obras) · Art (16 obras)