1st Edition
Contested Hospitalities in a Time of Migration Religious and Secular Counterspaces in the Nordic Region
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 examine 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 migrant. 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.
1. Introduction: Contextualized Hospitalities: Migrants and the Nordic Beyond the Religious/Secular Binary
Synnøve Bendixsen and Trygve Wyller
Part 1: Exploring the Nordic Context
2. Religious Civil Society and the National Welfare State: Secular Reciprocity versus Christian Charity
Lars Trägårdh
Part 2: Religious Traditions, Values and New Restrictions
3. Defending the Endangered Nation: Nordic Identitarian Christianism in the Age of Migration
Cathrine Thorleifsson and Anders Ravik Jupskås
4. Beacons of Tolerance Dimmed? Migration, Criminalization and Inhospitality in Welfare States
Maartje van der Woude, Katja Franko and Vanessa Barker
5. Emergency Care Between State and Civil Society: The Open Clinic for Irregular Migrants
Kaspar Villadsen
Part 3: Reconfiguring Migrantscapes in Religious and "Secular" Nordic Civil Society
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
Kristina Helgesson Kjellin
7. Hospitality, Reciprocity, and Power Relations in the Home Accommodation of Asylum Seekers in Finland
Paula Marikoski
8. What about No-bodies? Embodied Belonging, Unspecific Strangers, and Religious Hospitality in Norway
Helena Schmidt
9. Intertwined Hospitalities in a Danish Church
Laura Bjørg Serup Petersen
10. Between Belonging and Exclusion: Migrants’ Resilience in a Norwegian Welfare Prison
Dorina Damsa
11. The Significance of the Individual Vocation: Encountering Living Civil Society Agents in Northern Norway and Southern Sweden
Kaia Schultz Rønsdal
Conclusion
Synnøve Bendixsen and Trygve Wyller
Biography
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 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.
