Nordic models: The culture and politics of a region

Infrastructure and Power

The Nordic welfare states are often associated with equality and social inclusion, yet inequalities continue to shape access to resources, participation, representation and belonging. We examine infrastructures – material, institutional and affective – as the often invisible arrangements that organize cultural and social life in the Nordic region. Cluster members explore how cultural industries, institutions, archives, educational systems and policy frameworks reproduce and/or challenge relations of power. With an ethnographic sensitivity to everyday practices and lived experience, we also attend to artistic, activist, and community-based interventions that make these infrastructures visible and reshape forms of access, participation, and social organization.

Nordic Coloniality

The Danish-Norwegian participation in the transatlantic triangular trade and colonization of Iceland, Faroe Islands, Kalaallit Nunaat, US Virgin Islands, India, and Ghana, as well as settler colonialism in Sàpmi are points of departure for giving accounts of both colonial continuities and decolonial practices in the Nordic region. Across various methodological approaches, artistic practice-based Ph.D scholars, curators, and academic researchers in the cluster discuss artistic practices as participating in (counter)memory work, undoing internalized colonization, and we learn about indigenization in academia and in the cultural sector. We analyze possibilities of repair and truth and reconciliation within a context dominated by frameworks of national border-drawing and rationales of Nordic exceptionalism, hegemonic feminism, and white colonial ignorance.

Cultures of Feeling

While the “Nordic model” of the welfare state has been carefully studied in its economic and political features, its emotional dimensions remain largely unexplored. To remedy this, we develop theoretical and analytical frameworks for understanding collective emotional life in the Nordic countries. Through close readings of cultural objects and processes that shape the social and moral order, the cluster explores ways of feeling that are collectively shared and thus historically significant. Affective structures discussed in the cluster include privilege-guilt, moral goodness, the sense of racial isolation, and communal joy as an utopian impulse.

AfroNordic Studies

The Nordic Models cluster is committed to learning from and supporting the development of AfroNordic studies. We take an interest in the way AfroNordic scholarship advances conversations about African diasporic life, belonging, antiblackness, and coloniality in relation to the Nordic welfare states as white majority contexts dominated by color evasiveness. Cluster members study the arts and culture related to the African diaspora and blackness in the Nordic region, including curating, archiving, community organising, protesting, and institution building. The cluster is interested in the impact of the Nordic welfare states’ cultural and immigration policies on AfroNordic cultural production.

Feminist Methodologies

How do we select and approach our objects of study? By foregrounding experiences connected to everyday life, emotions, bodies, and situated forms of knowledge, feminist research emphasises positioning, intersectionality, and reflexivity as key methodological tools; research within the cluster draws on feminist methodology as a foundation for discussions of how discourses related to, for example, colonialism, capitalism, heteronormativity, extractivism, and sexism continue to shape, the cultural and political construction of the “Nordic.” With particular focus on who produces knowledge, from where, and for whom, the cluster engages questions of methodology while creating space for the development of new scholarly approaches and writing practices.

Art as Forum