NORDHOST: Nordic Hospitalities in a Context of Migration and Refugee Crisis (completed)

NORDHOST included researchers from many disciplines to approach value issues connected to migration and hospitalities in the Nordics.

Nordhost was developed as a research project to explore how practices of hospitality towards and with migrants developed in civil society in the Nordic countries. The background was the increasing tightening of restrictions on refugees that we could observe as a reaction to the "refugee crisis" in 2015.

The researchers in Nordhost came from all the faculties that collaborated at UiO: Nordic: law, theology, social sciences, and humanities. Their methodological and theoretical perspectives were of course different. But the most interesting thing about all the articles, books and doctoral dissertations written within the Nordhost project is the emphasis on migrants' own practices.

The hospitality we aimed to uncover was primarily a practice of sharing and exchange in respect for differences and expectations. Hospitality is a relational practice and when such practices occur, attitudes and solidarity of lasting significance are formed. These experiences also correspond with research on migration in other areas of the world than the Nordic countries.

Researchers and Projects

NORDHOST included researchers from many disciplines to approach such value issues connected to migration and hospitalities in the Nordic context. Both case studies and conceptual studies and spaces where both approaches meet and discuss are employed.

Core Group Projects

Katja Franko, professor in criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo

Within the NORDHOST project, she continued her work on the intersections of migration control and criminal justice, with a special focus on the changing nature of the Norwegian criminal justice system and penal culture. Norway is among European leaders in deportation and has developed a series of penal strategies directed exclusively at non-citizens. The objective of this project was to examine these strategies and present them in a forthcoming monograph "Controlling the Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power".

Arne Johan Vetlesen, professor of philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo

He will publish on why the situation in Europe, and in the Nordic countries today is routinely referred to as one marked by a "refugee crisis". What kind of crisis? And whose? The context has shifted from the people directly affected to the citizens and communities of the nation states willing - or not willing - to receive them. The concerns of would-be helpers - host countries - for their own safety and welfare gained the upper hand over the needs of those seeking refuge. What is exposed about traditions of hospitality in countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark when attempts to counter the shift in question are rejected as "moralistic", "elitist" or paternalistic?

Trygve Wyller, professor in systematic theology, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo

He continued his explorations of a spatial research and interpretation of practices directed toward migrant people with one case study among Ghanaian refugees in Oslo and one church project in Malmø, Sweden. These studies was part of his planned book on A theology of migration to be published in English during the project. The main idea was to discuss the kind of spaces that open for a new migrant agency.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, professor of Social Anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo

He has, based on research carried out by the project, written a short monograph in English about hospitality and the Other, with an emphasis on Nordic discourses, practices and traditions. He also draws on his own work on ethnicity and racism, global acceleration and contestations of boundaries, aiming to reach a wide readership, academic as well as non-academic.

Researchers

Vanessa Barker, docent and associate professor of sociology, Stockholm University

This study focused on the role of civil society in upholding, challenging, and remaking the borders of the Nordic welfare state in response to mass migration. It examined how civil society actors responded to the “refugee crisis”, the ways in which they have been caught up in the criminalization of migration, the ways in which they may be disrupting state monopolies on territorial, political and social membership, but also the ways in which civil society actors may reproduce social exclusions and borders through aid and humanitarianism. An instrumental case study approach was used with multiple sources of data, including field observations, interviews and archival material. Research sites may include Oslo, Göteborg and Malmö.

Rasmus Willig, associate professor, University of Roskilde, Denmark

No Hospitality

Denmark, formerly known as a highly humanistic country, has over the recent years developed a strategic approach to signal to the rest of the world that refugees will not be meet with any form of hospitality. The argument is over and over again that this strategic approach is a national defense - that too many refugees will put the famous Danish welfare state under such pressure that it eventually will lead to a collapse of all welfare benefits and rights. The welfare benefits where however achieved, among other things, through an enormously industrial meat-production, which has dramatically contributed to the climate changes. Looking at the time before the conflict in Syria, the region had a drought that has been linked to the ongoing climate changes. In many ways it would not be wrong to speak of a dialectic backlash. But why is this perspective not part of the public debate? The study will investigate famers in Denmark and their views and ways of justifying their CO² emission and the lack of connection to the consequences. How is hospitality understood by the farmers?

Hans-Joachim Sander, professor in dogmatics, Department for Systematic Theology and Centre for Intercultural Theology and Study of Religion, University of Salzburg

Between All Powers. A Church-Asylum in Saarbrücken – a Heterotopic Case-Study in Occidentalism.

The project had its starting point in the analysis of the mutuality between Orientalism and Occidentalism. In the refugee crisis and in the migrations politics of current European politics Occidentalism seems to be much more virulent than Orientalism. Using spatial concepts from E. Soja, this is interpreted as a secondspace power in the thirdspace experiences of Europe as a major goal of global migration. This case study looked into this secondspace power, interviewing people in a Parish close to France which grant church asylum for migrants who hope to bypass the restrictions of the Dublin-II-agreement. The aim was to explore whether the daily rhythms in a church asylum are confronted with this power or if they are simply unrelated to such an overarching matrix.

Lena Näre, assistant professor in sociology, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki

The project explored the case of hosting asylum seekers as a novel form of hospitality. Hosting migrants in local people’s homes is a new phenomenon in civil activism in Finland. It emerged during the so-called “refugee crisis”, when a large number of migrants arrived to Finland in 2015. The Refugees Welcome network’s member organisations started organising housing for asylum seekers, as reception centres quickly became full and the processing times grew longer. Many have since then found a place to live in the homes of members of the host society.

The project aimed to find out what is specific about hosting as form of hospitality and solidarity. Is hosting a form of solidarity or is it driven by a will to resist the current migration policies in Finland and the anti-immigration atmosphere?

The expectations that the hosts and the “hostees” have about living together may be an interesting point of view into these multicultural encounters. What kind of behaviour and agency is expected from both hosts and hostees? What kind of relationship is formed between them? These encounters may belong to the kind of hospitality that challenges traditional binaries related to migration, one that combines agency with hospitality. The project also explored hosting and hospitality as a gendered phenomenon.

Kaspar Villadsen, Professor MSO, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School

This research was twofold. One follows the Danish Red Cross’ emergency clinic for undocumented migrants in Copenhagen. This clinic, started as a collaboration between the Red Cross, the Danish Medical Association and the Danish Refugee Council, offering fundamental healthcare. The clinic candidly challenges Danish law by referring to universal principles. Their work seems to be founded in the Hippocratic Oath that may be genealogically traced back to Christian values. This study focused on how the universal demand must equilibrate in relations to the State, legislation and the specific conditions.

Furthermore, there are, in Denmark, several Muslim associations that organise different kinds of social work. Some are religiously oriented, while others are directed more towards the specific activities. In 2011 Dansk Islamsk Center established the first Islamic centre for primarily Danish speaking Muslims. Here the Friday sermon is given in Danish, and the goal is to provide a space for Danish speaking Muslim organisations and their different activities. As a main goal is to be a centre for information and knowledge, this research focused on the ‘adaption’ or mediation between Islamic values and principles and ‘Danish’ secular values.

Maartje van der Woude, professor of sociology of law, Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development and associate professor of criminal law and criminal procedure, Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, University of Leiden 

Professor Van der Woude carried out comparative research on migration and border matters in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, the UK and the Nordic countries. In doing so she explicitly focused on the extent to which current border and migration policies and practices as well as the public response to the practices can be explained through the lens of tolerance and hospitality on the one hand and the immigration lens on the other.

Cecilia Nahnfeldt, docent, head of research, and Kristina Helgesson Kjellin, phd., researcher, Svenska kyrkans forskningsenhet

Expressions of Hospitality in Culturally Diverse Churches.

The aim of this research project was to study the role of ”the cultural broker” for how diversity work and expressions of hospitality are being carried out in the context of two culturally diverse churches in Sweden.  A “broker” is a person that can hold a variety of positions, but it is a person that has cultural and/or language competences, and that is anchored both in the Swedish majority culture as well as in another cultural/national group that is part of the church activities.

Some of the underlying questions guiding the project was; How is hospitality understood by various actors involved in the church? What role does the “cultural broker” play in the church activities and in the meeting with people that come to church, that have another cultural/religious/Christian background than that of the “majority Swede”?

The churches that was included in this study is one parish in the Church of Sweden and one neo-Pentecostal church (“World of life”). Anthropological field studies, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, were carried out in these two churches, starting in March 2017.

Cathrine Thorleifsson, researcher, Department of Anthropology, University of Oslo

In pursuit of purity: National populism and the indeterminate Other in an age of displacement.

Across European contexts, national populists have exploited the issue of displacement in their affective politics of fear, framing migrants from Muslim majority lands as unilateral threats to national identity, culture, welfare and even (Judeo-) Christian civilizations as a whole.

This project highlighted the distinctiveness of Norway in the European moment of populism and mass displacement, by comparing it to Brexit England and illiberal Hungary.

The project suggestest that existential insecurities associated with fast-accelerated cultural-economic change, is a driving force for national populism. However, it is not only the moral panic regarding external “strangers at the gate” (Bauman 2016) that inform practices of welcoming and/or populist securitisation of the migrant Other. Moreover, the historical presence of internal others, indeterminate and minoritised bodies, in particular itinerant Roma, has provided a visible, tangible other, through which dystopic imaginaries of chaos and decay that threatened the modern nation-state’s search for purity and order can be projected.

In an integrated Europe, the ambivalent, moving strange that freely crosses borders of the sovereign nation-state, produces anxiety and calls for purification but also new forms of solidarity. While the national populists merely reject the Others as disturbing strangers, concerned individuals contested racialised securitisation and suspicion, reinscribing bios to migrants. Moreover, the contradictory interpretations of the displaced as waste or value, burden or benefit, parallel struggles over statehood and identity in globalising Europe between societies open to the newcomer and those that closes its borders to difference, on a sliding path away from liberal values of human rights and minority protection.

Based on multi-sited fieldwork in Oslo, Doncaster and Ozd, the project examined the reconfiguration of grammars of exclusion and inclusion and how these are tied to particular colonial pasts, historical junctures, cultural-material transformations and global flow of ideas.

Synnøve Bendixsen, associate professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen

This project focused on “Dråpen i havet” (“A drop in the ocean.”), a humanitarian non-profit organisation with a purpose to aid refugees, especially children and their mothers. Initiated in September 2015 on the island of Lesvos (Greece), “A drop in the ocean” had coordinators and teams of volunteers in the islands of Chios, Kos, Samos, Athens and Northern Greece (places varies).

The organisation seeked to “help people help migrants” and facilitates people in Norway to volunteer in specific refugee centres in Greece where they may assist in the everyday life of refugees, including receiving people who come to the Greek shores, food and cloth distribution, and play with children.

The focus of research for this case would be: What motivates people to volunteer in this particular organisation? Does this organisation and its participants represent a new form of social solidarity? How, if at all, does participation shape these people’s awareness of guest/host, ideas of inclusion and equality, and ideas of solidarity? Can we see new forms of alternative identities emerging among the participants? Are there anything specifically Nordic in this form of volunteering and organizing?

NORDHOST phd. and post doctoral fellows

Dorina Damsa, phd. fellow, Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, Faculty of Law University of Oslo

This project explored migrant trajectories in an in/hospitable Scandinavian context. She focused on the migrant perspective in relation to the criminalization of mobility, more specifically precarity, life strategies and tactics, the embodied consequences of othering, identities, notions of equality, justice and rights, and technologies of mobility. She followed migrants as they sought to advance their prospects through a terrain of in/hospitable governance measures.

The project challenged the static ‘guest/host’ binary and the characterizations of migrants as ‘victims’ or ‘passive’ actors, lacking agency or capacity to circumvent, subvert, or affect governance. As such, it bears relevance to theories of mobility, sovereignty, and resistance, while specifically contributing to debates on ‘Nordic exceptionalism’, by examining in/hospitality in the Nordic welfare state.

Helena Schmidt, phd. fellow, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo

Perceived Migrant – Lived Citizen.

The project analysed and discussed whether a post-colonial language of subjectivity can be developed and translated into debates on migrant hospitality in a Nordic context.

The project title suggests that the language through which ‘we’ perceive ‘them’ might simultaneously confine and make potential for subjectivity development. Perceived migrant implies that categories such as refugee, migrant and religion are being connected to the current refugee crisis. The term lived citizenship combines theories on citizenship and political subjectivities with a spatial focus on the embodied practice of eating, and the body as subjective space.

By understanding meals as universal and intimate, traditional and contested, the claim is that they make original grounds for investigations of embodied experiences and collective representations of the oppositions belonging and rejection. Through investigations of three meals taking place in Oslo, all of which represent civil society responses to some sort of dissociation and involve migrant actors, the object was to observe limitations as well as developments of belonging that can contribute to deconstructing the traditional (oriental) guest/host-binary.

Paula Merikoski, phd. fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki

Home accommodation of asylum seekers gained popularity as a civic solidarity practice when an unprecedented number of migrants arrived to Finland in 2015 seeking international protection. Many locals have since then shared their homes with asylum seekers during the long asylum process.

This project aimed to find out what is specific about home accommodation as form of hospitality and solidarity. Are the hosts primarily motivated by a will to respond to the humanitarian crisis and show solidarity, or are they also driven by the will to resist tightening asylum policies in Finland?

Home accommodation blurs the public/private divide and brings forth the idea of a private home as a political site where the right to asylum is being claimed. Furthermore, by sharing their homes with asylum seekers hosts take part in the debate over who is welcome to the country. The focus on home allows for analysing the diverse meanings of home as a space of hospitality, resistance, and diaspora. The project also explores hosting and hospitality as gendered phenomena.

This project was also part of the Struggles over Home and Citizenship - Neighborhood Solidarities as Response to Asylum ‘Crisis’ project that combines social scientific research and visual arts (PI Lena Näre, University of Helsinki) https://blogs.helsinki.fi/naapurisolidaarisuus/en/what/

María Hernández Carretero, Department of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo

Immigration, meeting spaces and everyday inclusion at the local community level

This project was an ethnographic study of refugee reception in Norway in the aftermath of the peak in refugee arrivals in 2015.

The project was concerned, on the one hand, with how ordinary citizens view and relate to the arrival of newcomers to their communities and how they engage with the phenomenon at large and with persons of refugee background in particular.

Furthermore, the project explored how refugees and other immigrants themselves experience being received in their new towns and neighbourhoods. In other words, the aim was to explore attitudes, practices, engagement and experiences related to how refugees and other immigrants are received and how it is to be newly settled at the local community level in Norway.

• How do newly arrived refugees and other migrants become part of their new neighborhoods and cities?
• What do people among the receiving society think about the arrival of new neighbors, new countrymen and -women?
• How is it to be someone on the “receiving” or “welcoming” side and someone who is new in a country and neighborhood?
• Where do new and old residents meet?

Meeting points and encounters therefore constitute a central point of this research project, and an interest in activities organized by civil society groups and organizations with the explicit aim of welcoming/integrating/including newly arrived refugees and other immigrants, as well as activities and festivals organized by the municipality and boroughs.

Who participates in such activities and/or seek out such meeting spaces, and what motivates them to do so? What dynamics take place there? How are they experienced by both parties?

In order to explore these questions I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, which involved being present at informal meeting spaces and participating in structured activities, as well as interviewing participants.

Kaia Schultz Rønsdal, postdoctoral fellow, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo

Magnificent Encounters in Borderlands.

The shift of the borders to become the stage of relations has significance for how we approach the migrant as a concrete and theoretical human being. This was explored through bottom-up insight from Nordic borderlands.

The project followed two lines of thought, one emphasising context and the other philosophical development, both starting in the empirical, ‘from below’ and enacted and lived encounters, leading to a challenge and reconfiguration of the guest and the host.

The contextual line relates to how hospitality is lived and enacted when people encounter in borderland spaces. This direction will follow two further lines of questioning.

One is exploring what people in civil society practices and public space do, what is lived, enacted and expressed, by the “hosts” and by the “guests”, and together, and furthermore how this can be discussed within the framework of epistemological decentring.

The second topic emphasises conceptual and philosophical development, also based in lived encounters. This is that of the Grenzgänger, and the idea of borderlands as a concept thought of as something people are.

When starting from the notion of borderlands as places of recognition and exchange between individuals, what does the concept of Grenzgänger entail when based on encounters in real, lived borderland space. This was done by exploring how border encounters are lived spatially. This direction would mainly follow the phenomenological discussion on others and borders, the guest/host, and other border binaries.

Organisation

ORDHOST had a core group of four senior professors from the University of Oslo to run the project: Katja Franco, Faculty of Law, Arne Johan Vetlesen, Faculty of Humanities, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Faculty of Social Sciences and Trygve Wyller (chair), Faculty of Theology.

The core group holds an excellent competence in relevant research, in their own disciplines as well as extensive experience in interdisciplinary projects. Nonetheless, the four members have their specialised location in four different disciplines, including different methodological approaches.

In addition to the core group, and their individual subprojects, NORDHOST had 15 researchers from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, working on 12 subprojects. This entails that NORDHOST was a highly multidisciplinary project. The challenge was thus to lead the project to fruitful results, using the different disciplines and competences to the advantage of the research.

In order to unite researchers and projects, NORDHOST was run and organised as far as possible through common conferences, workshops, and seminars, precisely to advance and develop the disciplines together. Another measure taken to unify the researchers and projects, was organising common publications, currently titled ‘Nordic (In)hospitalities – Hosts, guests and resistance in a context of forced displacement’.

Context and Theory

The extensive welfare state is traditionally viewed as one of the most salient characteristics of the Nordics – of our societies and our values. How are these values reconfigured in times of forced movement?

The Welfare State

The extensive welfare state is traditionally viewed as one of the most salient characteristics of the Nordics – of our societies and our values. In a welfare state, solidarity is developed as a universal value, built into public welfare and social security systems (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

Previous research on Nordic values (Granlund, 1986; Løfgren, 1987; Gullestad, 1992; Seip, 1991; Christoffersen, 1999; Bexell, 1997) has outlined equality, solidarity, and justice as prominent common values in the Nordic countries. Additionally, historians and political scientists have addressed the common Protestant tradition in the Nordic countries as one important structural and ethical foundation for the welfare states in the region (Knudsen, 2000). A Lutheran tradition of vocation, meaning that all citizens share the ethical demand to care for the neighbour, became an implicit value of the welfare state as well (Christoffersen, 1999; Bexell, 1997). Across the ideological and political differences between the Nordic countries, the welfare system has also played a significant role in the reception and inclusion of migrants and refugees (Olwig, 2011).

Challenging the Welfare State

However, the new migration context challenges these traditions (Hagelund, 2012). Several anthropological and ethnological studies have uncovered how the political ideal of equality in the Scandinavian welfare states is linked to norms of cultural and social conformity (Vike/ Lidén/Lien, 2001;  Löfgren, 1987). Despite social differences and inequalities, people identify themselves and their fellow citizens as ‘the same kind of people’, and feeling superior to others is socially frowned upon. A welfare state built on uniformity and cultural homogeneity may, on the other hand also lead to other forms of exclusion, for instance of immigrants.

One common argument in the migration discourse has been that the protection of the present quality of the welfare state must lead to stricter migration policies. There seem to be an idea that precisely because of the welfare system is so generous the borders of the welfare state must be carefully protected (Carens, 2014).

Migration seems to touch the limits of both traditional hospitality and solidarity within the context of the welfare state. An increase of migrants are feared to reduce the legitimacy of the welfare state, due to the perceived unfairness of giving the same resources to non-nationals, as well as the belief that the welfare state is unable to uphold the level of contributions as more people may claim them.

Consequently, the Nordic welfare state has developed increasingly expansive mechanisms of border control and social exclusion, including deportation systems, policing, restricting and limiting welfare services to undocumented people and so on (Aas, 2015). The tendency to deport migrants sooner rather than later and to deport surprisingly high numbers is an important aspect of the present discourse.

Civil Society Practices

At the same time, Nordic civil society practices and projects that are resisting and challenging restrictive migration policies seem to be founded on alternative values of social inclusion that the current model of belonging and identity that is the nation/welfare state. NGS’s, churches, neighbourhood activities and other establish practices and projects to open spaces of others and to work for a policy of a different kind. The challenge, both theoretically and practically, is how to research and interpret these critical approaches and practices.

Assisting migrants is often analysed through the lens of humanitarianism. According to Didier Fassin’s study (2011), humanitarian reason governs precarious lives in situations of great suffering, inequality, and need. While critical scholarship has described these forms of help and compassion new modes of governance, deployed also by government agents, we know very little about civil society humanitarian initiatives, particularly in the Nordic context.

Theoretical Framework

Following the critical tradition from Foucault there is the fundamental insight that hospitality means nothing but a modern form of governance (Foucault, 1991). Even if there are other practices aiming at less restrictive patterns of inclusion than we see in the nation/welfare states, there is a well-articulated suspicion that also the alternative practices stay in the oppressive host/guest binary (Agamben, 2008). A more generous hospitality does not have to imply that orientalist traditions are left behind. However, the broad initiative coming out of Engin Isin’s research and concept of acts of citizenship (Isin, 2007) and Edward Soja’s focus on  “thirdspace” (Soja, 1996) have opened new waves of research in the theory and practice of  what a non-binary host/guest hospitality might look like. Recent research (Sander/Villadsen/Wyller, 2016) has opened discussions on whether there might be emerging practices that combine agency and hospitality. 

In this way the question of representation (Spivak, 1988; Chakrabrarty, 2007), originally developed in post-colonial studies, also seems to develop in the midst of the Nordic countries, in the context of a complicit colonial trajectory (Vuorela, 2016). There might be new migrant representations emerging (Ahmed, 2000) where agency and hospitality (often supposed to be contradictory) are part of the same trajectory. If there are Nordic practices performing values of this hybrid kind, one might see the emerging of values that so far is most seen in post-colonial contexts. To discuss this ethical shift, both from the perspective of philosophy, protestant theology and critical theory will be one of the important outcomes of the project. Traditional binaries like host/guest, victim/agent and secular/sacred might be challenged.

Local Interpretations of Hospitality?

Empirically one needs to ask; What makes hospitality take place as a lived everyday practice? What are the local interpretations of solidarity and hospitality? Conceptually one needs to focus whether there might be a hospitality that combine agency, subjectivity and generosity. Or whether hospitality has to once and for all be substituted with solidarity (Bauman, 2016). These are approaches that are currently internationally significant. But they are not often applied in the Nordic context of migration.

In the international discussion on hospitality, there are at least two dominant trajectories. One coming from Foucault, who suspected hospitality to be one more form of secularised discipline, and one deriving from the Derrida/Levinas discussion where the critical question whether a host could seriously equalise a guest is the key issue. The NORDHOST idea is, however, first of all connected to empirical and conceptual studies of Nordic practices directed toward migrants. The ambition to develop new theory coming from new practices directed toward migrants in the Nordic countries.

Events

CANCELLED! The Gaze of the Others - When seen from the South

This event has been cancelled to prevent spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19). NORDHOST is marking the end of the project period with a closing conference about hospitality in the affluent Nordics. What do migration and mobility look like – when seen from the South?

Time and place: Mar. 19, 2020 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM, Gamle Festsal

Corona Notice (per 10.03.2020): We follow the regulations from The University of Oslo, building on national recommendations from the Health authorities. As of today, UIO is not recommending cancelling planned events of sizes such as this. We are in close dialogue with the faculty director, Dean and central management, and for the time being we are still planning to have the conference. If there are changes in the situation and if the University changes their recommendation, we will have to cancel. Please pay attention to this event page up until the event.

Conceptions of Nordic Hospitality

The research project Nordhost – Nordic Hospitality in a Context of Migration – opens for conversations and critical dialogue about, and from the location of the gaze of others. For those willing to extend their concern beyond the bounds of politics concerned only with our obligations to those nearest, there are important values at stake. What are these values and who has the right to formulate them?

These are central themes when international migration researchers meet to challenge conceptions of Nordic hospitality. When is it reliable, when is it paternalistic, and when does it merely create ripples in Nordic affluence?

We are excited to publish the program and to invite friends and colleagues and other interested parties. Welcome to a challenging and inspiring day!

Program

10:00: Welcome

• Vice-chancellor, Gro Bjørnerud Moe, UiO
• NORDHOST chair, Trygve Wyller, UiO

10:15: Hospitality vs. Populism – Lived resistance

• Discussion: Imam Basim Ghozlan and Arne Viste, manager of Plog AS
• Chair: Thomas Hylland Eriksen

10:45: Lived Resistance – from the field

• PhD candidate Helena Schmidt: «Eating no-bodies: Reflections on hospitality and citizenship from the perspective of the meal."
• PhD candidate Dorina Damsa: «Between belonging and exclusion: Migrants’ resilience in a Norwegian Welfare prison.»
• Post doc. María Hernández Carretero: «Citizen mobilization to welcome newcomers in Norway: political or apolitical engagement.»

Panel dialogue, respons by:

• Dr. Federico Settler (University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa)
• Chair: Kaia S. Rønsdal

Lunch

13:00: Postcolonial Resistance, Nordic Edition

• Vice President Saami Council Christina Henriksen and Bishop Tor B. Jørgensen
• Chair: Katja Franko

13:30 pm: Postcolonial Resistance – from the field to the page

Cecilia Nahnfeldt and Kaia Rønsdal: «Christian-Cultural Values in Migration Encounters: Troubled Identities in the Nordic Region.»

Panel dialogue, response by:

• Dr. Federico Settler (University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa)
• Dr. Elisabeth Gerle (Lund University, Sweden)
• Dr. Tendayi Bloom (University of Birmingham, UK)
• Chair: Trygve Wyller

15:00 pm: General discussion

15:30 pm: End of seminar

For planning reasons, please let us know if you are planning to come, please fill in your name and e-mail address.

About the Participants

Basim Ghozlan is imam and the head of the Islamic Union. Ghozlan is affiliated with the Rabita Mosque in Oslo

Arne Viste is the manager of Plog AS, a staffing agency. He is a human rights advocate, using civil disobedience by hiring asylum seekers without legal residence.

Christina Henriksen is Vice President and permanent member of the Sami Council. She has experience from international cooperation, as an adviser on indigenous issues in The Norwegian Barents Secretariat.

Tor B. Jørgensen was a bishop in Sør-Hålogaland diocese from 2007 to 2016. He is chairman of the organization Mennesker i Limbo, a group of long-time undocumented asylum seekers who fight for the rights of people in this situation.

Helena Schmidt is a PhD fellow at the Faculty of Theology. Her research project "Lived Citizen - Eating No-Nodies" examines embodied experiences of strangers in Oslo, through a meal lens, and discusses the material through contemporary theories in science of diaconia and citizenship.

Dorina Damsa is a PhD fellow in Criminology at the Faculty of Law. Her research project explores the life of migrants in the in/hospitable Nordic region. She focuses on the perspectives and experiences of irregular migrants, especially life strategies, conceptions of identity, equality, rights and justice, and the embodied consequences of other-making and precariousness.

María Hernández Carretero is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social sciences. Her research project is an ethnographic study of the reception of refugees in Norway and Sweden after the refugee peak of 2015. The project explores how ordinary residents perceive and relate to the arrival of newly arrived refugees and other migrants, and how they engage with the phenomenon and with new arrivals with a refugee background. In addition, she is also interested in how the refugees themselves experience being welcomed in their new cities and neighborhoods.

Dr. Federico Settler is a researcher and teacher at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, at the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics, in South Africa. He is a sociologist of religion who focuses his research on issues of race, migration, agency, and post-colonialism. He is currently working primarily on religion and migration, and on body and ritual performance, race and transnationalism.

Dr. Tendayi Bloom is a researcher in political and legal theory  at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her academic interests include issues of 'non-citizenship', statelessness and human mobility. She is currently working on these issues in the context of global governance with migration.

Elisabeth Gerle is professor emerita in ethics at Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University. She was formerly rector of Pastorlatinsitutet (The Pastoral Institute) in Lund and affiliated with Raoul Wallenberg Institute. She has been guest researcher at Princeton University, Center of International Studies, USA, and at Stellenboch Insitute for Advanced Studies in South Africa.

Cecilia Nahnfeldt is currently head of research at the Swedish Church Research Unit, and is an adjunct at Uppsala University. Her research includes Lutheran theology, migration, gender studies that focus on employment and gender equality, as well as social innovation.

Kaia S. Rønsdal is a post-doctoral fellow at The Faculty of Theology in NORDHOST: Nordic Hospitals and Refugee Crisis. Her research interests include space theory, urbanity, phenomenology and theological ethics. Her research project "Magnificent Encounters in Borderlands" explores the concept of hospitality with Nordic border countries as a starting point.

Contested Humanities: A Dialogue on Ecumenical Spaces of Hospitality in Europe

NORDHOST is collaborating with the Scalabrini International Migration Institute (SIMI) in a roundtable conference at the Pontifical University Urbaniana in Rome in April 2019. We are excited to publish the complete programme.

Time and place: Apr. 1, 2019 8:30 AM – Apr. 3, 2019 12:00 PM, Pontifical University Urbaniana

The conference is hosted by SIMI (Scalabrini International Migration Institute), in cooperation with NORDHOST and The Norwegian Institute in Rome (DNRI)

With the increasing policies of identity and restriction in Europe, a new tension is building up. On the one hand the European tendency is to protect its own borders and identities in order to secure welfare regimes and political stabilities. On the other hand there are practices and positions that represent tendencies opposing the restriction and the securities. The opposing “parties” are alliances of churches, NGO’s, Human Rights organizations and innumerable smaller projects and individuals.

The conference will mirror, dialogue and elaborate on this other, opposing European humanity. How is it profiled, theoretically and empirically – in the North and in the South? What kinds of embodied normativities are at stake? How does it spatially impact? What are the constructive interpretations?

The conference is organized as a roundtable conference with invited participants. The sessions are scheduled with short presentations, including those concerning more empirically oriented projects, followed by general discussions.

Program

Day 1 Opening: Mapping the Challenge

08:30 Greetings

• Prof. Leonardo Sileo, Rector of the Pontifical Urbaniana University
• Prof. Pietro Angelo Muroni, Dean of the Faculty of Theology, Pontifical Urbaniana University
• Director of The Norwegian Institute in Rome Professor Christopher Prescott

09:00 – 10:30 Migration and Hospitality and Religiosity – Challenging right wing populism in the South and in the North (of Europe)

• Professor Trygve Wyller (University of Oslo)
• Father Dr. Aldo Skoda (SIMI-PUU Roma)
• Chair: Dr. Gioacchino Campese (SIMI-PUU Roma)

10:30 Coffee break

10:45 – 12:30 Two Competing Identities. Populist/Samaritanian

• Archbishop Antje Jackelén (Uppsala, Sweden)
• H.E. Mons. Silvano Tomasi (Dicastery for Integral Human Development)
• Chair: Gioacchino Campese 

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 Claiming/Receiving the Migrants

• Dr. Tendayi Bloom, The Open University, UK: Recognition of Noncitizenship
• Professor Em. Dr.  Bernhard Waldenfels, Ruhr University Bochum (Germany): Europe – between globalisation and localisation
• Roundtable Discussion
• Chair: Professor Katja Franko, University of Oslo

15:30 Break

16:00 – 17:30 Diversity, Non-Identity. Is there a Nordic/Southern Perspective?

• Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo (Norway)
• Milena Santerini, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano/Representative in Italian Parliament
• Roundtable Discussion
• Chair: Katja Franko

19:30 Conference dinner

Day 2 Identity Politics and Beyond

09:00 - 10:00 Two cases

Casa Scalabrini 634, Rome

Bergsjön Congregation/Rosengrenska foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden

Chair: Professor Matteo Sanfilipo (CSER/University of Tuscia, Italy)

10:00 – 11:15 Populism and Religion

• Dr. Cathrine Thorleifsson, University of Oslo
• Professor Fabrizio Battistelli, Università La Sapienza
• Roundtable Discussion
• Chair: Professor Matteo Sanfilipo 

11:15 – 11:30 Coffee Break

11:30 – 12:45 Nationalism and Human Rights

• Professor Vanessa Barker, Stockholm University (Sweden)
• Carlotta Sami (PhD), Spokeswoman and head of news and external relations for Southern Europe of the UN Agency for Refugees - UNHCR
• Roundtable Discussion
• Chair: Professor Matteo Sanfilipo 

12:45 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:15 Migrant Contested Citizenship

• Professor Engin Isin, Queen Mary University London/Paris
• Professor Katja Franko, University of Oslo
• Roundtable Discussion
• Chair: Professor Trygve Wyller, University of Oslo

15:15 – 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 – 16:45 The ecumenical as resistance against human rights violation

• President Pastor Luca Maria Negro, Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI)
• Professor Hans-Joachim Sander, Salzburg
• Roundtable Discussion
• Chair: Trygve Wyller

17:30 Reception: The Norwegian Institute in Rome

Day 3 Politics/Religion/Law

09:00 – 12:00 Panel

• Mario Giro, Per l'Italia (PI)
• Professor Maartje van der Woude, Leiden University
• Professor Trygve Wyller, Oslo
• Fr. Fabio Baggio – Undersecretary Section Migrant & Refugees (DIHD)
• Roundtable Discussion
• Panel leader: Dr. Aldo Skoda

The conference is by invitation only.

The conference has been fascilitated by workshop grants from ReNEW (Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World)

Bernhard Waldenfels visiting Nordhost

NORDHOST is very honoured to welcome Professor em. Dr. Bernhard Waldenfels to Oslo as a visiting scholar this spring. We are excited to present the program for his stay.

Time and place Mar. 19, 2019 – Mar. 27, 2019

Prof em Dr. Waldenfels is a highly distinguished German philosopher, who in his scientific work has been concerned with responsive, bodily anchored phenomenology, building on the works of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schütz, as well as more recent French philosophy, especially Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

He has particularly addressed the concept of the stranger. He problematises ordering, as he sees alienness in relations to an order. From this perspective the stranger emerges as extraordinary, on who cannot be perceived or experienced within orders, one who has no place in the order.

Since 1976, Waldenfels has been a professor of philosophy at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, emerited in 1999. He was one of the founders of  the German Society for Phenomenological Research (der Deutschen Gesellschaft für phänomenologische Forschung).

Of his most important works translated to English, we find Phenomenology of the Alien

(2011); The Question of the Other (2007) and Order in the Twilight (1996). He has also contributed to the book Refugees (2016), a collaboration with the photographer Roland Fischer and the sociologist Stephan Lessenich.

Prof em Dr. Waldenfels will stay at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo during his visit, and has generously agreed to participate at events both at the Faculty, at the Goethe Institut Norwegen, as well as with NORDHOST researchers. 

Programme

21 March, 6 PM

Public lecture at the Goethe Institut Norwegen

Contested Hospitality: Reflections on migration, refugees, and ethics

25 March 11:15 AM - 3 PM

Nordhost seminar, by invitation

Lecture by Waldenfels: Refugees as Strangers in One’s Own House 

Followed by short papers by invited Nordhost scholars and a general discussion
 

26 March 10:15 AM - 2 PM

Seminar for the PhD students at the faculty of theology

Indirect and Paradigmatic Description
 

27 March 10:15 AM - 15 PM

10:15-11:00 AM

Open guest lecture and seminar at the Faculty of Theology

Responsive Phenomenology: Thinking and Acting from Elsewhere

Lunch

12:15-3:00 PM

Seminar with short papers from:

• Professors Bente Larsen (Jean-Luc Nancy)
• Werner Jeanrond (Marion)
• Svein Aage Christoffersen (Heidegger and Løgstrup) 
• Trygve Wyller (Ahmed/Waldenfels)

Professor em Dr. Waldenfels's visit has been facilitated by mobility grants from ReNEW (Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World)

Still a Nordic Welfare State? Religion, Migration, Values

NORDHOST has invited a group of distinguished international scholars as keynote speakers to its first open seminar.

Programme

Monday 4th December

09:00 - 09:15 Welcome

09:15 – 10:30 Prof. Lars Trägårdh (Ersta Sköndal Bräcke University College, Stockholm, Sweden): Critical reflections on the Nordic welfare state in the context of migration

Break

10:45 – 12:00 Prof. Karl Ove Moene (University of Oslo, Norway): Does migration challenge or impact the future of the Nordic Welfare state?

Lunch

13:00 – 14:15 Prof. Marie-Bénédicte Dembour (University of Brighton, United Kingdom): Deporting the challenge – political in/justice in relation to migrant issues

Break

14:30 – 15:45 Dr. Deirdre Conlon (University of Leeds, United Kingdom): Reflections on migration, mobility and the state (in traditional welfare contexts)

16:00 – 17:00 Plenary discussions

17:30 Dinner (for NORDHOST members and keynote speakers)

Tuesday 5th December

09:15 – 10:30 Dr. Federico Settler (University of Kwazulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa): Postcolonial Nordics? Race, Theology and the Politics of Reception

Break

10:45 – 12:00 Dr. Erin Wilson (University of Groningen, The Netherlands): Addressing problematic assumptions in debates about religion and migration

12:15 - 13:00 Plenary discussions

Lunch (end of public program)

Registration closes 15. November.