Challenging Nordic Innocence – UiS podkast

Episode transcription

What happens when we think of the Nordic welfare state not only as a protector of rights and social welfare, but also as a site of dispossession? In this episode of Challenging Nordic Innocence, we talk with Sarah Philipson Isaac about her PhD dissertation Temporal dispossession: the politics of asylum and the remaking of racial capitalism in and beyond the borders of the Swedish welfare state from 2024. Sarah unpacks how Sweden’s migration bureaucracy weaponizes time—accelerating, freezing, and fragmenting asylum seekers’ lives—and in doing so exposes the racialized logics underpinning  the welfare state. From the shift to temporary residence permits to the production of hyper-exploitable labor, this conversation explores the temporal violence of the asylum system in Sweden and asks what futures are foreclosed when rights become conditional?

Sarah Philipson Isaac holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Gothenburg. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics, working on a project that investigates labour exploitation in the Swedish construction industry, with a particular focus on how an increasingly restrictive migration regime shapes work conditions.

Links to some of Sarah’s publications:

Philipson Isaac, S. (2025). The Expanding Carceral Geography of Sweden and Counter-politics of Care. South Atlantic Quarterly, 124(1), 214–221. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557881

Philipson Isaac, S. (2025). Unpacking State Production of Temporal Dispossession: The Intersections of Labour, Asylum and Informalization in Sweden. Critical Sociology, 51(1), 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241242098

Philipson Isaac, S. (2022). Temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy: On waiting within the asylum process in Sweden. European Journal of Social Work, 25(6), 945–956. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691457.2022.2077317

Philipson Isaac, S. (2024). Temporal dispossession: The politics of asylum and the remaking of racial capitalism in and beyond the borders of the Swedish welfare state. University of Gothenburg. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/80383

Links to literature mentioned in the interview:

Anderson, B. (2019). New directions in migration studies: Towards methodological de-nationalism. Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/ s40878-019-0140-8

Ansems de Vries, L., & Welander, M. (2016). Refugees, displacement, and the European ‘politics of exhaustion’. openDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/mediterranean-journeys-in-hope/leonie-ansems-de-vries-marta-welander/refugees-displacement-and-europ

Cabot, H., & Ramsay, G. (2021). Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction. Humanity, 12(3), 14.

Castles, S. (2004). Why migration policies fail. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27(2), 205227. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141987042000177306

Danewid, I. (2023). Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009127707

Fanon, F. (1966). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press. 

Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. Grove Press.

Gilmore, R. W. (2022). Abolition geography: essays towards liberation. Verso.

Khosravi, S. (2019). What do we see if we look at the border from the other side? Social Anthropology, 27(3), 409–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12685

Lindberg, A. (2020). Minimum rights policies targeting people seeking protection in Denmark and Sweden. In D. Abdelhady, N. Gren, & M. Joormann (Eds.), Refugees and the violence of welfare bureaucracies in Northern Europe. Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526146847.00012

Paris, W. M. (2025). Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (1st ed). Oxford University Press, Incorporated.

Ramsay, G. (2020). Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object. Anthropological Theory, 20(4), 385–413. https://doi. org/10.1177/1463499619840464

Sager, M., & Öberg, K. (2017). Articulations of deportability: Changing migration policies in Sweden 2015/2016. Refugee Review, 3(1), 2–14.

Episode transcription

Afro Nordic Feminism is an emerging Black feminist project that centers on the experiences, knowledge, communities, and social justice organizing of people of African descent living in the Nordic Region. In this episode we discuss the approach with Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo, a Fulani, Norwegian and Danish postdoctoral researcher and facilitator of ‘black study’—a non-disciplinary, collaborative, embodied mode of knowledge creation among Black diaspora Europeans. Drawing on her co-written book chapter with Rahwa Yohaness ‘Theorising from our lives: A Black Nordic feminist approach,’ the conversation explores how Afro Nordic feminism engages with activism, collective organization and academia. We also discuss the politics and ethics of knowledge production, as well as issues with US cultural imperialism in a Nordic context.

CONTENT NOTE: During the episode, host Sebastian introduces a discussion on the politics of abolishing whiteness as a racial category within anti-fascist movements. This represents the host’s independent theoretical engagement and is not derived from Diallo’s work or the book chapter under discussion.

Links:

Join Oda-Kange and her colleagues in black study in Amsterdam at the Black Feminist Summer School 2026: @black_feminist_summer on Instagram or website: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1z2lwP7g9_B4hJv2lBpmaTEwtMFXEjiyd6FQjtP7plWo/edit

Visit the open source Toward Refusal Archive: https://towardrefusal.com/

Literature for further reading: 

Acharya, Maya, & Muasya, Gabriella I. (2023). Sensible Ruptures: Towards Embodied and Relational Ways of Knowing. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 36(2), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v36i2.138090

DCN x Marronage (2020). Vil vil mere end at overleve: Opgør med en antisort verden. Egen udgivelse.

Diallo, Oda-Kange Midtvåge. (2023). Joining in black study. Knowledge creation and black feminist critique alongside African-Norwegian youth. Doctoral dissertation. Norwegian University of Science and Technology. https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/handle/11250/3104885

Diallo, Oda-Kange Midtvåge; Friborg, Nico Miskow. (2021) Subverting the white cis gaze: Toward a pedagogy of discomfort, accountability and care in the anthropology classroom. Teaching Anthropology, 10(4): 17-35. https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v10i4.622

Hunter, Elizabeth. (2021). Diasporiske perspektiver på racialiseringens kolonialitet i Danmark. Periskop 25 (2021): Sorthed.
https://doi.org/10.7146/periskop.v2021i25.128472

Kollektiv Omsorg: Kelekay, Jasmine; Diallo, Oda-Kange Midtvåge; Sawyer, Lena. (2025). Notes on collective care as black feminist praxis within, outside, and against the academic industrial machine. Social Sciences & Humanities Open. Volume 12, 2025, 101873 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.101873

Kollektiv Omsorg: Diallo, Oda-Kange Midtvåge; Kelekay, Jasmine; Sawyer, Lena; Abdullahi, Maimuna. (2023) Writing Letters as Counter-Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 22(1):180–203. https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10220546

The River & Fire Collective; Barnett-Naghshineh, Olivia; Pattathu, Antony; Diallo, Oda-Kange Midtvåge; Friborg, Nico Miskow; Hammana, Zouhair; van den Berg, Lisette; Camufingo, Angelo; Klinkert, Victoria; Judge, Andrew (Mkomose); Chaudhuri-Brill, Shukti; Fukuzawa, Sherry; Abrahams, Nasihaa; Ferrier, Jonathan. (2021) The Fires Within Us and the Rivers We Form. Teaching Anthropology, 10(4): 92-109. https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v10i4.627

Episode transcription coming soon.

Over the period 1764–84, King Frederik V established a sculpture park at Fredensborg Palace North of Copenhagen, with 70 statues of Norwegian, Sámi and Faroese people. In this episode, we speak with Professor Mathias Danbolt, art historian and lead researcher of the research project Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era and Co-curator of the exhibition Nordmandsdalen: Art, Power and Materials in 18th Century Denmark, to examine how 18th-century sculptural representations of “ordinary people” from Norway, Sápmi, and the Faroe Islands were mobilized within Danish-Norwegian absolutist monarchical ideology. Far from innocent ethnographic portraits or “authentic” representations of the “common” people, the figures of Normandsdalen reveal complex entanglements of extractivism, colonialism, and aesthetic power. Through Danbolt’s critical lens, we explore how these sculptures functioned as tools of imperial representation, and what their legacy means for contemporary debates on art, cultural memory and Nordic exceptionalism.

Links:
Mathias Danbolt research profile: https://researchprofiles.ku.dk/en/persons/mathias-danbolt

Links to research projects:

Link to book (In Norwegian): https://fagbokforlaget.no/produkt/9788245059342-nordmandsdalen

Link to KODE Bergen art exhibition: https://www.kodebergen.no/hva-skjer/utstillinger/nordmandsdalen

Transkripsjon av episoden (pdf, åpnes i nytt vindu)

In this episode we are joined by Anne Nørkjær Bang –  a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. This summer, Bang defended her dissertation titled “Dissolving the Pill: Imagining the Birth Control Pill in Contemporary Denmark” which interrogate the social, cultural, political, and scientific contexts surrounding the birth control pill. Through a Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience approach, Bang convincingly challenges otherwise settled narratives of the birth control pill as the symbol of feminist emancipation, an isolated entity free from relations, or a pharmaceutical achievement by displaying historical and contemporary controversies of the pill. The episode has a bit technical issues in the beginning, but does not disrupt the general conversation.

 Anne Nørkjær Bang is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Southern Denmark, Department of Culture and Language. She is part of the research project Endocrine Economies : The Cultural Politics of Sex Hormones, which inquires into how hormones emerge as troubling technologies and societal solutions in the context of the Danish welfare state. While Anne’s dissertation engages specifically with the birth control pill, she has also published on birth control injections in the context of 1980’s-90’s Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark and on endocrine disrupting chemicals and their problematization in Danish politics. Anne’s work is broadly situated within feminist cultural studies of technoscience, drawing connections between the medical and environmental humanities and various strands of justice thinking.

Research profile: https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/en/persons/annenb

Episode transcript

In this episode we talk to Dr. Tone Huse about her article “Temporal displacement: colonial architecture and its contestation” where she explores and analyses the Danish state’s attempt to ‘modernize’ Kalaallit Nunaat (a.k.a. Greenland). She focuses on the technologies of urban planning and development as they merged with the colonial state. She explores how they attempted to assimilate the Indigenous population into a form of Danish welfare modernity through forced relocation into designated populations centres and the development of new forms of housing, but also how these attempts became subject to resistance and contestation. The article develops the concept of temporal displacement as a form of ‘a material politics of time’.  We also had the chance to hear more about the wider project Urban Transformation in a Warming Arctic – The continued effects of Nordic colonialism in urban planning and development (UrbTrans) of which the article is a product of and the broader debate about the particularities of Nordic colonialism and their linkages to the welfare state.

Tone Huse is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She currently leads the UrbTrans research project, bringing together artists, practitioners and academics to explore the geographies and materialities of Nordic colonialism. Much of her research looks to place-making politics, economizations, and planning in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat (a.k.a. Greenland). Her work spans historical as well as contemporary research, is radically interdisciplinary, and committed to experimenting with new means for interacting with broad publics. Huse is the author of three books, including Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City: Displacement, Ethnic Privileging and the Right to Stay Put (Ashgate 2014), and the most recent co-authored Nature Made Economy, co-authored with economic historian and professor in science and technology studies, Kristin Asdal.

Link to transcript.

This episode is a conversation between Anders Riel Müller 송연준, Signe Skjoldborg Breighel and Sebastian Lundsteen, departing from Lundsteen’s article “Shadow Places, Environmental Justice, and the Submergence of Pollution.”  The episode unpacks the several aspects and complexities of Shadow Places, a concept developed by feminist philosopher Val Plumwood that stress the spatial relationships as a key driver of injustice. By situating the concept within a Nordic welfare state and contextualizing it with Cheminova – a Danish pesticide producer and exporter – the podcast revolves around the role of Danish agro-chemical corporations in a global context. Moreover, it discusses environmental justice as a field, a concept, and a movement by situating it in a Nordic supposedly green and welfare state.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/729382   

https://www.sebastianlundsteen.com

https://sustainablefutures.ku.dk/

https://www.shadowplaces.net/

Link to English transcript.

In this episode we talk to Georgia De Leeuw about her research on mining, green steel and the comfort alignment with extractivism in in the Swedish north, or indigenous Sápmi. Her PhD dissertation deals with Swedish extractivism in Sápmi through the examples of a planned iron ore mine in Gállok/Kallak and the hydrogen-based steel transition. The main aim is to understand the trust that is placed in extraction as a means to arrive at a happy, prosperous, green future. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Sara Ahmed’s notion of the promise of happiness, she suggests that extraction constitutes an object of desire toward which people tend in an affective investment, an anticipation of happiness in the future. Despite the hopes that come with green steel to onboard processing, diversify local economies, and break with resource colony tendencies of North-South dynamics, this results in a rearticulation of the North as a resource frontier and a re-inscription of colonial relations and indigenous injustice. While the allure of the fantasy disguises alternative trajectories, she shows that the misaligned interject productive ruptures in extractive desires. The alternatives they outline echo academic calls for dematerialization, a dismantling of the growth paradigm for the sake of reciprocity, care, and regeneration. These ruptures of the extractive allure may serve as entry points into anti-extractive futures that hold real potential to dismantle the North as a treasure trove for extraction. The dissertation builds on fieldwork data consisting of 65 interviews, twelve observations, and secondary material that is read as performative expressions through narrative analysis.  

Georgia de Leeuw holds a PhD in Political Science at Lund university. She is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Human Rights Studies, Department of History at Lund University focusing on grievances in green transition designs in Swedish municipalities. 

Link to English transcript.

Link to Georgia de Leeuw’s profile at the University of Lund. https://www.svet.lu.se/en/georgia-de-leeuw 

Link to dissertation: The comfort of alignment: Mining, green steel, and killjoy desires in Sweden/Sápmi. https://www.svet.lu.se/en/georgia-de-leeuw/publication/ac6ef315-bddd-43a6-a475-b01511bb09c7  

Dansk Beskrivelse

I denne episode har vi besøg af forskerne Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Josefine Lee Stage og Victoria Pihl Sørensen, som i skrivende stund er i gang med en artikkel om den spiralprogrammeti Kalaallit Nunaat (Grønland) fra 1960erne og 1970erne . Det er ikke uden grund, at man i Kalaallit Nunaat omtaler dette som et folkemord begået af den danske kolonimagt. I episoden diskuterer Naja, Josefine og Victoria den danske kolonimagts motivation og ideologi som lå til grund for programmet og hvorfor programmet, som først blev bredt offentlig kendt i 2022 er blevet modtaget med så stor overraskelse, for programmet var velkendt og på ingen måde hemmeligholdt. Hvad siger det om dansk selvforståelse, om den danske stats syn på Kalaallit Nunaats oprindelige befolkning, om velfærdsstaten og ikke mindst om behovet for en ny dekolonial historieskrivning baseret på kalaallit erfaringer og viden?

English Summary

In this episode, we are joined by researchers Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Josefine Lee Stage and Victoria Pihl Sørensen, who are currently writing an article about the so-called IUD program in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) from the 1960s and 1970s. It is not without reason that Kalaallit Nunaat refers to this as a genocide committed by the Danish colonial power. In the episode, Naja, Josefine and Victoria discuss the Danish colonial power’s motivation and ideology behind the program and why the program, which only became widely publicised in 2022, was received with so much surprise, as the campaign was well known and in no way secretive. What does it say about Danish self-understanding, the Danish state’s view of Kalaallit Nunaat’s indigenous population, the welfare state and, not least, the need for a new decolonial history based on Kalaallit experiences and knowledge?

Link til Dansk transkribering

Link to English transcript

Link to Naja Dyrendom Graugaard profile: https://najagraugaard.academia.edu/
Link to Josephine Lee Stage profile: https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/jlstage%40edu.au.dk
Link to Victoria Pihl Sørensen profile: https://pma.cornell.edu/victoria-sorensen

Articles (Open Access):

Graugaard, N. D., & Ambrosius Høgfeldt, A. (2023). The silenced genocide : Why the Danish intrauterine device (IUD) enforcement in Kalaallit Nunaat calls for an intersectional decolonial analysis. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 36(2), 162–167. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v36i2.137309

Graugaard, N. D., Pihl, V. S., Stage, J. L. (forthcoming). Colonial Reproductive Coercion and Control in Kalaallit Nunaat – The Overlooked Role of Racism in Denmark’s IUD Program. Special issue on ‘Race, racialization, and reproduction in the Nordic context, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

Sørensen, V. E. P. (2023). “In Women’s Hands”: Feminism, Eugenics and Race in Interwar Denmark. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 36(2), 46–62. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v36i2.132611