Book review of Mogstad, Heidi 2023. Humanitarian Shame and Redemption: Norwegian Citizens Helping Refugees in Greece. New York: Berghahn Books, 278 pp.
Nordic Journal of Migration Research
Tag: anthropology
Loopholes
When young people in Danish residential care escape their institutions without permission it is often understood as acts of ‘troubling behaviour’ among social workers. Drawing on one and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork across three re…
Homeland as Echo, Nostalgia as Strategy
This essay rethinks Heimat through the figure of Heidi, not as a sentimental icon of Alpine innocence but as a conceptual prism through which to understand the contemporary weaponization of nostalgia. Drawing on theories of restorative nosta…
Building the Human Economy
The author has always been sceptical about the use of value theory in anthropology. Here he considers its scope in relation to a project linked to the publication of The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide in 2010. This international project, …
ACTRACT. The Ascona Transformation Charter
In this 21st century, the enormous scale and extent of social inequalities and ecological devastation prompt us to revisit the relevance and positionality of anthropology as a discipline and a societal project. how then to address systemic…
The Ascona Charter
How can we not adhere to the values proposed by the Ascona Charter? Has transforming anthropology in order to transform the world never been more urgent?
Interview: An Intergenerational Dialogue on the Politics of Representation within Academia and Beyond
This interview is the edited excerpt of a dialogue recorded in the summer of 2023 between the three editors of this special feature and three experienced researchers: Prof. Susan Ossman, Dr. Eda Elif Tibet, and Dr. Nadine Wanono, who parti…
The Mother of Awashi
In September 2020, a video circulating on social media plunged he country of Mozambique into a deep moral crisis. The video showed five young men, dressed in the uniform of the Mozambican army, cruelly whipping a naked woman along a road and…
Negotiating Consent in African Studies
Informed consent has been increasingly equated with standardized models and legal jargon. At Scandinavian universities, researchers are expected to adhere to European standardized models and institutional forms, necessitating documentable (p…
Form, Formats, and Forms of Informed Consent
This article reflects on the unforeseen dynamics revealed as we presented written consent forms to be signed by our interlocutors during fieldwork in Djibouti and Namibia. Throughout the article we analyse how the consent form (in its legali…
Living with Spirits and Environmental Conservation Efforts in Rural North-eastern Madagascar
Focusing on embodied and material aspects of lived religion in everyday practices, this article points to the need for culturally relevant concepts and practices to understand the everyday relations of the farmers under investigation with sp…
Knowing Digital Governance from Below
This paper considers the question of what it is to ‘know’ digital governance through an experiential, bottom-up lens, and presents some empirical detail from recent fieldwork with feminist movement actors in northern India – both formally or…
On Resisting Global Disposability, Regimes of Death-Making and Accumulation
The British writer Rupinder Parhar gave a talk on feminist acts of resistance at an art exhibition workshop in London in March 2024. While acknowledging the multitude of feminisms that exist today, Parhar in this transcript of the talk asks …
Rebel Attentiveness
Living under Israeli occupation, Palestinians face countless controls over their daily lives and movement. This research focuses on the reflections of cycling group founders and participants in the occupied West Bank, who ride despite effort…
Training as a Rite of Passage
Following the transformative journey of Kenyan geothermal professionals throughout a training programme in Iceland and back to their homes, I argue that such long-term training in foreign countries can function as a rite of passage. The coll…
Differences of Age Without Distinctions of Authority
This contribution begins with the puzzle as to why there are kinship and naming systems that distinguish junior from senior, elaborately and systematically, even though these practices are embedded in substantially egalitarian societies. The…
Water Drops
This article examines how individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds in Norway participate in anti-racist activism via social media. It investigates the nature of digital activism compared to traditional paradigms, highlighting the varied f…
Politics of Race, Belonging and Community in Yeboyah’s music video ‘Elovena’
The Elovena maiden is, for some, one of the most important cultural symbols of the Finnish identity. This character has traditionally been portrayed as a blond, blue-eyed white woman and repeatedly used in artistic and commercial contexts. I…
Afterword
In this Afterword, I use the observations from the special issue ‘Music, Affect and Politics’ to discuss what I see are recurring questions in the studies of music and affect: (1) the tension between new materialism and historical materialis…
Street Rhythms and the Revolution
Cuban street vendors use pregones, high-pitched rhymes and rhythms, to promote their goods and services. This ambulant form of small-scale commerce has been part of the urban soundscape since the early years of Spanish colonization. While of…
Affective Turn, or Return?
The ‘affective turn’ suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities, and shape new forms of politics in the making. It invites us to move beyond established humanities and social science paradigms and …
Music, Phones and Bank Loans
This article explores the making of two branded Spotify playlists to critique the concept of ‘affective labor.’ Over the last few decades, scholars have argued that social media users and creative industries workers alike are engaged in a ne…
Neoliberalism and the Opportunodemic
It would be far too unkind to suggest that academics and journalists have presented the COVID-19 pandemic in isolation from its broader economic context. However, it would be less unkind to suggest that its location in a triptych of major cr…
Zagaku
The majority of this article consists of an unadulterated piece of auto-ethnographic writing depicting a key experience from my anthropological fieldwork. For my PhD research on Japanese policing, I spent two years living in Tokyo and traini…
Debt and Emotional Labour in Present Day Serbia
This article deals with the affective aspects of indebtedness in present-day Serbia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Belgrade and Šabac during the period 2016-19, it analyses gendered aspects of affective states created and trig…