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Research
1. Research and Book project The Annoying Difference. The Co-development of Neo-nationalism, Neo-racism, and Populism in Denmark, 1989-2008
The Problem
Since 1989 Denmark has experienced a drastic development. The Danish Prime Minister has described it as a movement from the world’s most liberal integration policy to the toughest. Others have written that Denmark have changed from being a role model in following international organizations and conventions to being a country where reports and research about racism is met with strategies of denial and trivialization. Sociologists, anthropologists and refugee experts have called for making higher demands on refugees and immigrants. Now, Muslims in Denmark must be prepared to be “insulted, ridiculed and mocked” according to the largest national newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30 2005. Danish People’s Party and tabloid paper Extra Bladet described Denmark as changing status from a peaceful country to a multicultural. Denmark has moved from a positive image of anti-authoritarianism and inclusive social interaction to a country known abroad for xenophobia and islamophobia, where 80 % of the native Danes see the relationship between themselves and Muslims as antagonistic. Finally, “The Danish Democracy and Power Study” (Magtudredningen) came about in the late 1990s because of the emerging multiculturalism that had to be analyzed for its potential challenge to the Danish democracy. In spite of these different ways of describing the tremendous changes, there hasn’t been any research-based attempt to give a coherent description of this development from an IMER perspective with concepts such as ethnicity, multiculturalism, nationalism, populism and the media as guiding parameters.
Research questions
The overall idea with this project is to document and analyze the historical emergence of a certain rigid dichotomization that has arisen between a national “us” and “them” in the media and in popular consciousness. In the media there is a clear Danish nationalist “we” and “them”, who are the country’s visible immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Not surprisingly the media has been dominating the popular consciousness as well with Danes being talked about as the hosts, who should have certain rights that the “guests” should not have even if born in Denmark. The project therefore also focus on the nature of the relationship between publicly celebrated narratives of diversity, such as “we are not racists” and the shared social experience that “to be equal you have to be the same,” which has strong implications for the process of being incorporated into the Danish society.
To guide the material, I ask more specifically what conditions and circumstances enable and constraint migrants and their descendants from access to the public Danish sphere?
A working assumption of the project is that the media’s construction and the popular consciousness is a crucial context in the lives of ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees in Denmark. Therefore I look closer at both the mass media discourses and at how mainstream Danes perceive migrants more basically perceive foreigners. The latter is done through ethnographic interviews.
The project uses a multi- and inter-disciplinary IMER approach that draws on anthropology, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, and conflict studies, the research and book is organized around three historically critical media events that each to a significant degree have contributed to (but is not itself constituting) the unfolding drastic changes in Denmark. Research on each of the three media events have been carried out through previous research projects that each has lead to clusters of publications, reports, and lectures.
Research design and prior work
The three events are crucial for the ethnic and religious minorities and exposing an increasing politicalization of Danish news journalism. The first event is the symbiotic campaign of newly formed Danish People’s Party and the tabloid paper Ekstra Bladet in 1997, which in turn cannot be understood without including the “banal nationalism” of two Maastricht referenda 1992 and 1993; the European Soccer Championship in Sweden in 1992; and debates on Bosnian refugees 1994 and 1995. I followed this event through a 3 year long full-time research project (1996-1999) that included a print media study of major newspapers January – April of 1997; a broader study of the media coverage 6 month prior and 6 months after the core period; and in-depth interviewing with 55 people 1-3 hours open questions about their concerns and reflections about the emerging multicultural presence. From here comes the first cluster of publications that will to different degrees be part of the new book “The Annoying difference.”
The second event is the case of the “Mona Sheikh story” in the summer of 2001 about how young Muslims born in Denmark with Pakistani roots were forced to leave Danish politics due to a Danish news media that through a moral panic stricken coverage “demonized” the Islam and the young Muslims. Jyllands-Posten, Berlingske Tidende, and Denmark’s Radio (public service television) played a crucial role in a shift from a nationalism that had ethnic difference (particularly Somali refugees) as the contested group to Muslims in Denmark and abroad. Cartoonists Kurt Westergaard, who was later to draw the bomb-in-the-turban cartoon in Jyllands-Posten, was active in this period also, and so were other key Danish political players and journalists. Immediately following the Mona Sheikh story came the September 11 suicide attack on the World Trade Center. Then, in November a national election took place in Denmark with the Liberals and Conservatives forming a strong coalition government based on radical right winged, populist Danish People’s Party. I analyzed this period through a two year long research project for the Danish Board for Ethnic Equality. The study included 800 articles on religion and ethnic minorities May - August 2001; a more extensive news media study of the period August – December 2001. From this project I will draw on another cluster of publications and papers primarily a book in Danish but also for instance my docent lecture and some conference papers.
The third event is the publication of the Muhammad cartoons beginning in September 2005 and peaking with globally reaching violent reactions in February 2006. This media event, I have studied through my involvement in two international projects on the cartoon coverage in addition to my own research. Besides studying the media coverage since September 2005, the projects have a framing analysis of the media coverage of the period January 15 to March 15, 2006. Some publications have come out already, while some are conference papers being turned into separate articles that are being finalized during June and July of 2007
The basic research I have done in these three media events forms a unique opportunity for working out the Danish historical development that has made it difficult for non-Western newcomers in particular to have access to the public sphere, particularly the mass media and national politics, which seriously questions how these new citizens can be make informed choices. I will however need to do a little updating of my research to create a better continuity. Thus I plan to do some individual and focus group interview to update the “host” and “guest” scenario working out through the interviews carried out in 1997 and 1998. Likewise, I need some updates in the shape of focus group interviews on the young Muslims reactions and perception of the Muhammad cartoon crisis.
2. Research and book project: “Cartoon Violence? Media, Muslims and the Making of a Global controversy.” Berghahn Books, Oxford and New York. Co-authored and co-edited with Mark Allen Peterson, Miami University, Ohio (2007-2009).
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten published a set of political cartoons representing the Prophet Muhammad as part of an ongoing debate about the representation of Muslims in Danish society. Two months later, copies of these cartoons circulated among members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. From here, selected images and stories about the images circulated widely throughout the world, through both small interpersonal media (cell phones, faxes, instant messaging, e-mail) and subsequently mass media (newspapers, television, radio).
These images, and stories about them, sparked sometimes violent protests and fueled pre-existing conflicts from Africa to the Gulf States to Asia, as well as among groups in Muslim minority countries in Europe and North America. These protests led to the burning of Scandinavian diplomatic representations in several Middle Eastern countries, the looting of Christian businesses in Nigeria, the deaths of protesters in several countries, assaults on American embassies, the abrupt discontinuation of Danish exports of especially dairy products to the Middle East (which led to the sacking of workers in Denmark as well as significant economic losses for individual dairy farmers), and so forth. These events were seen by some as a confirmation of Samuel Huntington's thesis of "the clash of civilizations,” a position often reinforced by media coverage both in North America and Europe, and in the countries in which protests were taking place.
Even a cursory look behind the headlines reveals problems with this way of understanding these events. In some countries, the cartoons sparked anti-Danish protests, but in others anti-Americanism and in others anti-Christian violence. In some places, the protests were resisted by local governments; in others, they were orchestrated by the government. Another problem with a “clash of civilizations” approach is that similar images have been published in the past without generating such controversy, and in fact an Egyptian tabloid ran a story on the Danish cartoons, including several of the cartoons in early October, to little or no public attention. In fact, the strong reactions to the cartoons and to stories about the cartoons seems to have had a great deal to do with local politics and social circumstances in the places these reactions occurred, and very little to do with the cartoons in their own right, or with general principles such as freedom of expression or the Islamic ban on images of the prophet. In many places, the publication of the cartoons seems to have become an idiom through which members of communities express many levels of political frustration and anger.
At the same, these events could not take place without the technological, economic, political and social institutions that enable circulation of these images, and stories about them, to move from place to place. Technologies of reproduction and distribution—from photocopiers to fax machines to scanners to computers and cell phones—played crucial roles in replicating and circulating images and stories. The social and political organization of international media networks also played a crucial role, simultaneously being the story, in that the cartoons arose in a newspaper and were reprinted in newspapers throughout the world, and in commenting on the events in such a way that they become a single story, a single event taking place in multiple locations, whose occurrence needs to be explained.
This book thus explores the Muhammad cartoon controversy as a case study in globalization. The authors in this volume look at the series of events as both globally connected and locally adapted. By examining how the cartoons and stories about them were reproduced, circulated and appropriated in a series of different and to some extent sequential cultural contexts for very different purposes, the authors will draw lessons on how processes of global circulation and local appropriation actually happen.
The questions raised by this book include: What is the relation between the global flow of images and local contexts of protest and violence? To what extent is it meaningful to call these transnational flows of images and stories “global”? What roles do the media in various contexts play in local and transnational representations of Islam, Muslims, [Denmark], the West and other global constructs? What roles, if any, can anthropology play in addressing media representations of people and events like these?
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