Rase, identitet, ekskludering og tilhørighet i høyere utdanning: Prosjektmål og bakgrunn

Beskrivelsen er tatt fra den opprinnelige søknaden til EU, og er derfor på engelsk.

Project objectives:

• To understand how the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘racialization’ are constituted in classroom talk (discourse) and personal stories (narratives) in the university sphere, using Norway as a case example. 
• To compare classroom discourse about race and racialization in lectures  (expert knowledge) and seminars/discussions (constructed knowledge). 
• To explore the positions that the professor, as the person with a formal role of power and authority in the university classroom, takes in relation to discourse about race and racialization in the two types of learning situation. 
• To explore the implications of race and racialization discourse on experiences of inclusion, exclusion, identity and belonging through the personal narratives of members of the academic community (racialized students, educators, administrative and service staff).
• To generate a ‘conversation’ between the university classroom race and racialization discourse and the personal narratives of racialized academic community members, in order to explore the workings of ideology, agency and resistance.

Project purpose and justification

This project is positioned at the forefront of research on how issues of race and racialization are talked about – openly or, more often, implicitly – and experienced in everyday life in Europe.

The shape of the project Individually and together, the two studies in this project inform our understanding of how issues related to race and racialization are constructed through the use of language in higher education settings in Norway. The first study investigates how race and racialization play out in classroom talk, by comparing the classroom talk from 5 university courses, in both traditional lectures and more active, dialogue-based learning situations. The second study explores the personal stories of students, professors, and administrative and service staff from racialized (non-white, racial minority) groups, and by doing so creates new spaces for often-silenced voices. Finally, the researchers will place the two studies in ‘conversation’ with each other, to understand how race and racialization discourse and personal narratives can ‘talk’ to each other to reveal the workings of ideology, agency and resistance. Based on previous research in this field, the researchers expects that talk about race and racialization will be hidden under more explicit talk about immigration, religion and nation. However, what is unknown, and the overarching question driving this project, is how this talk varies in different classroom situations (expert vs. constructed academic knowledge), and how it shapes and is shaped by the personal stories of racialized university community members in varying roles shaped by class and power differences.

Situating the research activities

Defining race The concept of race is a strong example of the power of language to constitute the social and material world. Although race is not a meaningful biological concept, there is no denying that as an idea manifest in language, ‘race’ has shaped the world we live in, from justifications for genocide and exploitation, to persistent material inequalities in housing, jobs and education, to generative solidarity, agency and creative expression. For this reason, it is important to develop critical understandings of how race is thought about, talked about, acted on, and experienced. What makes those understandings critical is that they bring us closer to emancipation, that they work “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer, 1982, p.244).

Defining racialization Racialization is the process by which groups and individuals come to be identified with a racial category (such as Black, Asian, white, etc.). In a society which is ideologically and materially organized by race thinking, everyone is racialized, whether into a ‘marked’ category (seen as being a member of a racial group ‘other’ than the norm) or into the unmarked category (seen as ‘normal,’ without a racial group or identity – in other words, in Europe, white). However, the term ‘racialized people’ has been brought into use in Canada to replace terms that turn race into a fixed, essential quality (such as ‘People of Colour,’ the current popular term in the United States) as a corrective, to remind the speaker and listener that race is something placed upon, from the outside, by the viewer. In this study, the researcher will use the term ‘racialized people’ in this way, without forgetting that white people are also racialized, into positions of relative power where their race can conveniently be ignored or forgotten.

Race and racialization in Europe In many European countries, at least in part as a reaction to Nazism and World War II history, people reject the term ‘race’ and use the word ‘racism’ to refer only to explicit, intentional and interpersonal acts of racial hatred (Essed, 1991, 2002) or to the ideology of extreme right-wing groups. For example, several scholars have investigated racism and racist discourse in right-wing political parties in Europe (Klandermans & Mayer, 2006;; Mudde, 2005; Rydgren, 2007; Eatwell & Mudd, 2004). However, an underlying preference for whiteness and covert ideology of white superiority in public discourse makes evident that although the idea of ‘race’ has become highly contested, embarrassing and uncomfortable, race thinking is alive and well. Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad (2006, p.9) described race thinking as “a horizon of thinking and feeling within which ‘race’ is in some way implicitly or explicitly considered significant.”

Covert ways to talk about race In interviews with white French adults, Jugé (2009) found that racism was understood as an individual problem and that participants dismissed their whiteness as simply a set of physical attributes with no social meaning. At the same time, the French participants used many terms with no surface racial meaning but that in social, historical and legal context revealed that being French was equated with being white. A detailed analysis of cultural and structural racism in Swedish society (Pred, 2010) provided a provocative reflection of how everyday racisms – typically unnamed and unspoken – affect real-life experiences. In sum, there are many ways to talk about race in Europe, drawing on race thinking, without talking about race. More broadly, Western Europe has experienced a shift from ‘old’ racist paradigms based on biological assumptions to new assumptions of ‘cultural’ differences as the essential and unchangeable foundation of identity and belonging (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991; Barker, 1981; Cole, 1997; Silverstein, 2005). In particular, the category of ‘immigrant,’ and more specifically, of ‘Muslim immigrant’ has become racialized (Triandafyllidou, 2001).

The case of Norway Norway is an interesting case within Western Europe, because it was one of the last nation states to open to contemporary immigration (Brochmann & Kjeldstadli, 2008), in the late 1960s, and though population demographics are rapidly changing, Norway has lagged behind in its transition to a ‘multicultural’ state, especially outside of Oslo. In addition, as a relatively new nation-state, having achieved independence from union with first Denmark and then Sweden only in 1905, nationalism has a positive association in Norway (Gullestad, 2006). Norway is also an interesting site for studying race because, as a result of the strong welfare state and extreme national wealth, material inequalities on the basis of race, while they exist, are not as pronounced as in many other contexts. Finally, Norway, in contrast to many European countries such as France or the United Kingdom, has taken an official stance of integration rather than assimilation towards immigration. That is to say, immigrants to Norway are officially encouraged to maintain a strong relationship to their home language and culture, even as they are expected to learn to speak Norwegian and to navigate comfortably in Norwegian society.

Colorblind ideology in Norway Discourse relating to race in Norway is coded; Norwegians ascribe to a ‘colorblind’ ideology in which the solution to racism and racial inequality is to not ‘see’ race (Gullestad, 2006). In a Norwegian language course at the University of Bergen, one of the researchers – a white Jewish Canadian woman – watched the very competent, thoughtful white Norwegian teacher stumble and stutter in great discomfort – and ultimately fail to answer – when a classmate from Poland asked what alternative word she could use when the elderly white women she cared for in a nursing home used racial slurs. “What is the proper Norwegian word for people with dark skin?” In Norway, there is no way to refer to race and racialization in polite conversation.

How Norwegians (do not) talk about race This does not mean, however, that Norwegians do not engage in discourse about race, much as the French participants in Jugé’s (2009) study were able to make quite clear racial presumptions about what it means to be French, without using explicitly race-based language. Language about immigration (Phelps et al., 2011) and ‘integration’ of immigrants (Hageland, 2002) is strongly racially coded, and the term ‘immigrant’ (innvandrer) has tended to be reserved only for racialized people (Hernes & Knudsen, 1990). The public and political discourse about race has been highly gendered; Norway holds gender equality as a manifestation of the national ideal of likhet, which means both equality and sameness (Gullestad, 2006). Thus the loudest public debates pit race and gender against each other, in such topics as Muslim women’s use of burqa, and forced vs. arranged marriage among immigrant communities, particularly from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq (Hageland, 2002). In the 2000s, researchers started exploring how race, and race-related issues like immigration and nationalism, are constructed by white Norwegians (Berg, 2008; Bergan, 2010; Fougner & Horntvedt, 2012; Fuglerud, 2005; Gullestad, 2003, 2006; Hagelund, 2002, 2003; Howell & Melhuus, 2007), while a few researchers have studied the lived experiences of racialized people in Norway (Holm, 2011; Mainsah, 2011; Massao & Fasting, 2010; Valenta, 2008, 2009).