Contested Hospitalities in a Time of Migration: Religious and Secular Counterspaces in the Nordic Region

209 Pages·2019·2.795 MB·English

by  Synnøve Bendixsen (editor), Trygve Wyller (editor)

Contested Hospitalities in a
Time of Migration
This book explores the duality of openness and restriction in approaches to
migrants in the Nordic countries. As borders have become less permeable to non-
Europeans, it presents research on civil society practices that oppose the existing
border regimes and examines the values that they express.
The volume offers case studies from across the region that demonstrate
opposition to increasingly restricted borders and which seek to offer hospitality to
migrants. One topic is whether these practices impact and transform the Nordic
Protestant trajectory. The book considers whether such actions are indicative
of new sensibilities and values in which traditional categories and binaries
are becoming less relevant. It also discusses what these practices of hospitality
indicate about the changing relationship between voluntary organizations and
the Nordic welfare states in the time of migration.
As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and religious
studies with interests in migration, civil society resistance, and social values.
Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at
the University of Bergen, Norway. She is the author of The Religious Identity of
Young Muslim Women in Berlin and the co-editor of Egalitarianism in Scandinavia,
Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference, and Engaged
Anthropology.
Trygve Wyller is Professor of Christian Social Practice at the Faculty of Theology
at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the co-editor of Borderland Religion
and The Spaces of Others – Heterotopic Spaces, and the co-author of Reformation
Theology for a Post-Secular Age.
Religion, Resistance, Hospitalities (RRH)
Interpretation, analysis, and documentation
Civic groups, churches, and ministries are globally among the most willing and active in the assistance
of and advocacy for refugees and migrants. Numerous projects, camps, and activist practices are
often the first line of resistance to increasingly restrictive policies. But there are also parallel
areas of resistance addressing issues regarding citizenship, human rights, democracy, gender, and
others. These resistance practices are located globally and yet they have rarely been researched
and interpreted from an academic standpoint, despite having a significant impact on both local and
international levels.
Resistance practices and their contexts represent the most visible and influential opposition to
the politics of closed borders and deportation. Documenting, analyzing, and interpreting different
kinds of resistance and challenging practices – both historical and contemporary – are the aims of
this new series. The series adopts an interdisciplinary approach and invites scholars from the fields
of religious studies, sociology, criminology, anthropology, philosophy, history, theology, and related
disciplines to participate in the series.
The series introduces a variety of themes including:
• Religion, migration, and politics;
• Religion, resistance, and citizenship in a migration context;
• Methodological issues when working on the margins of civil society;
• Theories of resistance practices;
• How resistance impacts religion itself;
• Intersectionality and gender perspectives.
Series Editor
Trygve Wyller, Oslo ([email protected])
Advisory Board
Daisy L. Machado, New York
Evthymios Papataxiarchis, Lesbos/Athens
Hans-Joachim Sander, Salzburg
Federico Settler, Pietermaritzburg/Durban
Bryan S. Turner, Melbourne/Potsdam
Erin K. Wilson, Groningen
Borderland Religion
Ambiguous practices of difference, hope and beyond
Edited by Daisy L. Machado, Bryan S. Turner, Trygve Wyller
Contested Hospitalities in a Time of Migration
Religious and Secular Counterspaces in the Nordic Region
Edited by Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Trygve Wyller
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.r outle dge.c om/Re ligio n-Res istan ce-Ho spita lities/
boo k-ser ies/R ELRES HOS.
Contested Hospitalities in a
Time of Migration
Religious and Secular Counterspaces
in the Nordic Region
Edited by Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen
and Trygve Wyller
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and
Trygve Wyller; individual
The right of Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Trygve Wyller to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-22210-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27377-3 (ebk)
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Contents
List of contributors vii
1 Introduction: Contextualized hospitalities: Migrants and the
Nordic beyond the religious/secular binary 1
SYNNØVE K. N. BENDIXSEN AND TRYGVE WYLLER
PART I
Exploring the Nordic context 17
2 Religious civil society and the national welfare state:
Secular reciprocity versus Christian charity 19
LARS TRÄGÅRDH
3 Defending the endangered nation: Nordic identitarian
Christianism in the age of migration 38
CATHRINE THORLEIFSSON AND ANDERS RAVIK JUPSKÅS
4 Beacons of tolerance dimmed? Migration, criminalization, and
inhospitality in welfare states 55
KATJA FRANKO, MAARTJE VAN DER WOUDE, AND VANESSA BARKER
5 Emergency care between state and civil society: The open clinic
for irregular migrants 76
KASPAR VILLADSEN
vi Contents
PART II
Reconfiguring migrantscapes in religious and
‘secular’ Nordic civil society 95
6 “We can teach Swedes a lot!”: Experiences of in/hospitality,
space making, and the prospects of altered guest–host relations
among migrant and non-migrant Christians in the Church of Sweden 97
KRISTINA HELGESSON KJELLIN
7 Hospitality, reciprocity, and power relations in the home
accommodation of asylum seekers in Finland 113
PAULA MERIKOSKI
8 What about no-bodies? Embodied belonging, unspecific
strangers, and religious hospitality in Norway 129
HELENA SCHMIDT
9 Intertwined hospitalities in a Danish church 146
LAURA BJØRG SERUP PETERSEN
10 Between belonging and exclusion: Migrants’ resilience in a
Norwegian welfare prison 162
DORINA DAMSA
11 Hospitality in the hands of who? 176
KAIA SCHULTZ RØNSDAL
12 Conclusion: Rethinking hospitality in the Nordic region 189
SYNNØVE K. N. BENDIXSEN AND TRYGVE WYLLER
Index 195
Contributors
Vanessa Barker is Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University, Sweden and
Associate Director of Border Criminologies (www. law.o x.ac. uk/re searc h-sub
ject- group s/cen tre-c rimin ology /cent rebor der-c rimin ologi es) at the University
of Oxford as well as Visiting Professor of Criminology and Sociology of Law
at the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on questions of democracy
and the penal order, the welfare state and immigration, the criminalization of
migrants, and the role of civil society in social reform.
Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway. She holds a PhD from École
de hautes études en sciences sociales/Humboldt University (double diploma).
Bendixsen has published widely on refugees and irregular migrants in Norway,
young Muslims and religiosity in Germany, urban life, and diversity. She is
the co-editor in chief for the Nordic Journal of Migration Research and the series
co-editor for the Palgrave Macmillan series Approaches to Social Inequality and
Difference.
Dorina Damsa is a PhD Research Fellow in the Department of Criminology
and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law, Norway. Her
research focuses on migrant perspectives and experiences in Norway and
Denmark, with a focus on the intertwined punitive and humanitarian aspects
of the governance of migrants.
Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo, Norway.
She has published widely on migration, borders, security, and globalization.
She is, among other things, author of The Borders of Punishment: Migration,
Citizenship, and Social Exclusion (co-edited with M. Bosworth, OUP, 2013),
Globalization and Crime (Sage, 2019), and The Crimmigrant Other: Migration
and Penal Power (Routledge, forthcoming).
Anders Ravik Jupskås is a Senior Researcher and Deputy Director at the
Centre for Research on Extremism: Right-Wing Extremism, Hate Crime,
and Political Violence at the University of Oslo, Norway. He holds a PhD
in Political Science (2015) from the same university for which he wrote
viii Contributors
Persistence of Populism: The Norwegian Progress Party 1973–2009. His research
focuses on political parties, populism, ideologies, and party organizations. He
has published in Scandinavian Political Studies, the Swiss Political Science Review,
and authored several book chapters in recently published edited volumes on
populist parties in Europe.
Kristina Helgesson Kjellin is a Researcher at the Church of Sweden Research
Department as well as at Uppsala University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in
Cultural Anthropology. Her research interests include migration, integration,
church belonging, identity, and cultural and religious diversity. She has pre-
viously done research in South Africa on church relations, Pentecostalism,
gender relations, and the post-Apartheid situation as well as on the material
culture in Swedish museums. In 2016, she published a monograph on diversity
work in the Church of Sweden: En bra plats att vara på. En antropologisk studie
av mångfaldsarbete och identitetsskapande inom Svenska kyrkan (A Good Place to
Be At) (published by Artos Academic). The starting point for her research lies
in the interdisciplinary interface between anthropology, mission studies, and
theology as well as the research field entitled Anthropology of Christianity.
Paula Merikoski is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Helsinki,
Finland, with a Master’s in Social Science. In her PhD project, she is inves-
tigating the hospitable social movement of home accommodation of asy-
lum seekers in Finland. She is part of the NORDHOST group (University
of Oslo) and of the research project Struggles over Home and Citizenship:
Neighbourhood Solidarities as a response to the asylum ‘crisis’ (University of
Helsinki).
Laura Petersen is a PhD candidate at the School for Culture and Society, Aarhus
University, Denmark. Her research interests lie in the field of practical theol-
ogy: the role of empirical research in theology, interreligious and ecumenical
relations, and migrants and refugees encountering Danes in the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in Denmark.
Kaia S. Rønsdal is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University
of Oslo, Norway, and a member of the research group NORDHOST: Nordic
Hospitalities and Refugee Crisis. Her main research intests include spatial
theory, urbanity, phenomenology, and theological ethics. Her current work
is dedicated to exploring the concept of hospitality, especially in the Nordic
borderlands.
Helena Schmidt is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology,
University of Oslo, Norway, and part of the NORDHOST research group. She
has a Master’s in Philosophy of Professional Ethics and Science of Diaconia.
Her professional background is in health and social work, specifically working
with different kinds of marginalization in Oslo.
Contributors ix
Cathrine Thorleifsson is a Researcher at the Centre for Research on Extremism
at the University of Oslo, Norway, specializing in anthropological approaches
to the study of nationalism, migration, borders, and xenophobia. She holds a
PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political
Science (2012). Her latest monograph, Nationalist Responses to the Crisis
in Europe: Old and New Hatreds, appeared in Routledge’s 2018 Research in
Migration and Ethnic Relations Series.
Lars Trägårdh is Professor of History and Civil Society Studies at Ersta Sköndal
Bräcke University College in Stockholm, Sweden. He received his PhD in
history from UC Berkeley. He has published widely on Swedish history. His
publications concerning civil society include the volumes State and Civil
Society in Northern Europe (Berghahn Books, 2007) and Civil Society in the Age
of Monitory Democracy (Berghahn Books, 2013).
Maartje van der Woude is Professor of Law & Society at the Van Vollenhoven
Institute for Law, Governance & Society at Leiden Law School, the
Netherlands. Her research examines the politics and dialectics of terrorism/
crime control, immigration control, and border control in the European
Union, and the growing merger of all three, also referred to as the process
of crimmigration. She is currently working on a five-year research pro-
ject – ‘Getting to the Core of Crimmigration’ – that was funded by the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) by means of one
of the competitive VIDI grants. She is also a part-time criminal trial judge at
the District Court Noord-Nederland and one of the Associate Directors of the
Oxford-based Border Criminologies research platform.
Kaspar Villadsen is Professor at the Department of Management, Politics, and
Philosophy of the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He published
the book Statephobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault
(Stanford University Press, 2016, with Mitchell Dean). He is also the author
of Power and Welfare: Understanding Citizens’ Encounters with State Welfare
(Routledge, 2013, with Nanna Mik-Meyer). His work has appeared in journals
including Economy and Society; The American Sociologist, Theory, Culture and
Society, and Human Relations.
Trygve Wyller is Professor of Contemporary Theology and the Study of Christian
Social Practice at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Norway. He has
published widely on the relationship between Christianity and late modernity,
both from a dogmatic, post-colonial, ethical, spatial, and phenomenological
perspective. His latest book is Borderland Religion (Routledge, 2018, with Daisy
Machado and Bryan S. Turner).