Nordic models: The culture and politics of a region

• Attention will be paid throughout to the colonial encounters that have had and continue to have consequences for how “the Nordic model” is perceived, branded, debated, and lived.
• Staging an encounter between, on the one hand, the aesthetic disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches nurtured at the department and, on the other, the established international field known as Scandinavian studies, a main aim of the Nordic Models research cluster is to remodel the study of art and culture in the Nordic region.
• Strategically, the cluster builds upon the valuable research in the cultural policies and the literary fiction of the Scandinavian welfare states carried out at other research institutions in Denmark. Yet, we also seek to expand these inquiries to include longer historical trajectories, including colonial histories, than the post-war Scandinavian framework most often implied, and to adopt a stronger interdisciplinary scope for analyzing what we think of as the aesthetic-political regimes of the Nordic welfare models.
• In order to support this endeavour, we seek to enter into collaborations with excellent international research centres for Scandinavian studies, as well as with other relevant networks, institutions, museums, and art academies in the Nordic region. One key objective will be to provide a vibrant research training environment in which PhD fellows and early career scholars can participate in the consolidation of a rich, interdisciplinary research area of benefit to the entire department and beyond.

Fields of interest include

• The arts in and of the Nordic region
• Aesthetic-political modalities shaping “nordicness”
• The affective politics of neutrality
• Literary and art histories of the welfare state
• Egalitarian pedagogies and paradoxes
• Analysis of cultural objects representing “nordicness”
• Critique of (neo)colonial cultural practices in the region
• Nordic feminisms and social gender movements
• Border-drawing in cultural policy
• Separatist collectives’ crafting of the idea of community
• Sentimental economies in Scandinavia
• Histories of the idea of a benevolent state
• Cultural histories of “the collective”
• Nordic biopolitics
• Diaspora, racialization and the welfare state
• Nordic exceptionalisms