Nordic models: The culture and politics of a region

In our historical present, to engage in the study of culture requires an examination of the cultural contexts and their histories from where we speak, listen, and act. Our research engages the Nordic region, and more specifically the welfare state, as a distinct framework for the positionalities and perspectives whose implicit notions are often taken for granted and remain an un-scrutinized backdrop of the study of art and culture.

Our research revisits the dominant and the marginal, and the residual and the emergent cultural histories of the Nordic now. While we share an interest in what has come to be known in political science as a specific type of nation-state, the Nordic welfare state, and in its genealogies, its promises, and its paradoxes, we are more concerned with the Nordic welfare model not as a state model but as a cultural model. Viewed as a specific cultural structure, the Nordic welfare model is a model of and for the senses, which is to say a model structuring aesthetic regimes, cultures of feeling, and ways of belonging. Just some of the questions we consider include: How best to understand the aesthetic and affective conventions of Scandinavian nationalism? What are the recurring tropes in the staging of “Nordicness” – and what and who is left out of this specific cultural and political framing?

Affiliated participants

Niklas Freisleben Lund (SDU)
Solveig Daugaard (AU)

Steering Committee

Ellen Suneson
Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt
Kristine Ringsager
Devika Sharma