Norwegian National Identity Research Articles

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

COVID-19 vaccination coverage by immigrant background.

High vaccination coverage against COVID-19 limits COVID-19-related infections, hospitalisations and deaths. Studies have shown varying vaccine willingness and vaccine coverage in different minority groups. This study investigates the vaccination coverage among persons with various immigration and country backgrounds in Norway. The study includes all persons over 18 years of age resident in Norway with a Norwegian national identity number. We used data from Beredt C19, the Norwegian emergency preparedness register for COVID-19, and investigated the association between vaccine status and immigrant and country background using logistic regression models, adjusted for income, education, sex, age, medical risk group and place of residence. Foreign- and Norwegian-born persons with foreign-born parents had a lower COVID-19 vaccine coverage than those who were Norwegian-born with Norwegian-born parents. Vaccination coverage for different country backgrounds varied from around 45% for persons from Latvia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Lithuania to 92% for persons from Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Those in the former group had from 15 to 18 times (unadjusted) and from 8 to 11 times (adjusted) higher odds of not having been vaccinated as persons with a country background from Norway. There is considerable variation in COVID-19 vaccine coverage between different immigrant groups in Norway. The differences can be explained to some extent by income and education, but this does not explain the bulk of the observed differences. We cannot rule out the possibility that some differences are attributable to weaknesses in the registers.

Climate Change in Literature, Television and Film from Norway

Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually is characteristic for the genre of Nordic noir).

Landscape, Geopolitics, and National Identity in the Norwegian Thrillers Occupied and Nobel

Abstract Focusing on the use of landscape in the Norwegian series Occupied (2015–2020) and Nobel (2016), this article examines the ways in which cityscapes and panoramas of the natural environment are employed as affective, as well as aesthetic tools for storytelling within a geopolitically inflected framework. Drawing on literature from popular geopolitics, geocriticism, and visual politics, my analysis interrogates the ways in which geopolitical codes and visions manifest via televisual fiction, reflecting a variety of insecurities associated with Norway's current position in world affairs, as well as contemporary challenges to Norwegian national identity. This article also discusses how these two series have adapted key geovisual elements of the what I deem the “near Nordic Noir” style to focus more explicitly on geopolitical questions, linking Occupied and Nobel to other geopolitically inflected series from Nordic Europe.

Championing human rights close to home and far away: human rights education in light of national identity construction and foreign policy in Norway

Human rights education (HRE) has been recognised in international educational discourses as a sustainable practice to develop active citizenship and protect human dignity. However, such education has not been fully explored in a broader political context. In addition to contributing to empowering citizens to resist human rights violations, HRE plays several roles in society, contributing to both national identity and international image-building. The article explores possible relations between national identity construction, foreign policy and HRE in Norway through the following research question: What interplay occurs between Norwegian foreign policy and national identity in relation to human rights, and, within this context, what is the role of HRE? The article presents a qualitative analysis of Norwegian policy documents and reports, arguing that HRE is a component of Norwegian national identity as well as political currency in foreign relations.

The indigenous Sami citizen and Norwegian national identity: tensions in curriculum discourses

The paper explores citizenship positions for the Sami as citizen in the overarching policy document for the Norwegian school. Informed by the perspective that policy documents hold discursive productivity in the Foucauldian sense, this document is regarded as vital for locating normative cultural ideals. The analysis points to three discourses: indigeneity, multiculturalism and the common Norwegian cultural heritage perspective. Although the analysis suggests that there is a variety of possible citizenship identity positions, tensions are located in their ontological and epistemological claims regarding what it means to be Sami. The paper argues that indigenous perspectives might both challenge and complement current ideas of citizenship and human rights education. Notably, indigeneity accentuates the tension between universalism and recognition in human rights education. The paper also points to how the curriculum has great ambitions about the possibilities of inclusive practice within an educational system that lacks sufficient competence on Sami culture.

Tożsamość narodowa i nacjonalizm w Norwegii. Podróż w czasie

In contrast to the prevailing in the 70s, 80s and 90s concepts on nation-building and national consciousness, the author develops the idea of the Norwegian national identity being present in the Middle Ages, modified and strengthened in the period of the union with Denmark (16th–18th centuries), and during the union with Sweden in the 19th century. In this time, the national identity grew into a political programme of regaining independence and building a national culture.

Norwegian national day oratory: constructing and reconstructing a national we

AbstractNational day speeches play an explicit part in defining national identities. In this article, we examine how mayors in Norwegian municipalities reflect on Norway's increased diversity in their 17 May speeches. National day speeches in Norway are supposed to focus on unity, not conflict. Yet, what have they become in the context of diversity? In applying theoretical perspectives on nations, rituals and language to data consisting of a selection of speeches, our analysis identifies themes that structure a typical 17 May speech. We explore the use of plural pronouns in the speeches and how they make Norwegian national identity more or less accessible for people with minority backgrounds. By including ethnic minorities in national day rhetoric, the speakers negotiate who belongs in the Norwegian community in a less directly political way than in everyday life. Yet, whilst the genre is celebratory, the national day speeches also echo different political attitudes towards diversity and integration.

Skiing and divergent ethnic identities in the multiethnic Northern Norway

This article examines first whether the skiing as the Norwegian national sport was used by the state in its assimilation strategy towards the indigenous Sámi people. One would think that skiing's central role in building a Norwegian national identity would mean that it would have a vital place in government policy towards its indigenous population. Second, the article explores how skiing became integral in the creation of a modern Sámi identity from the 1970s. The article explores how the Sámi over the last 30 years have tried to incorporate skiing and sport in the ongoing revitalizing of a Sámi identity.

Arctic state, Arctic nation? Arctic national identity among the post-Cold War generation in Norway

In Norway, the Arctic has taken centre stage as a primary political priority. Claiming status as an ‘Arctic state’ may not be controversial based on formal geographical and legal definitions; however, the way in which the Arctic has thus been incorporated in the public's sense of Norwegian national identity is less clear. Against the background of the Norwegian government's discursive construction of a national Arctic identity in its High North strategy, this study assesses the reception this official identity has received. Over 200 young Norwegians, having largely grown up in a post-Cold War world marked by rapidly changing Arctic climate and geopolitics, were asked about their sense of Arctic identity. Contrary to governmental efforts to frame the Arctic as a fundamentally national matter, the respondents' insights highlight the multifaceted nature of identities, as a sense of Arctic identity contextually shifts between sub-national, national and supranational scales. This study thus suggests a balancing act faced by states across the region as they seek to legitimize state-level primacy and national unity in the circumpolar North.

Strong State Policies on Gender and Aid: Threats and Opportunities for Norwegian Faith-Based Organisations

This article presents a case study of how Bistandsnemnda (BN)/Digni, an umbrella organisation for Norwegian mission organisations and churches, responded to increased pressure from the Norwegian state to focus on gender equality and women's rights as part of their development aid work. BN initiated a special programme called Women Empowerment and Gender Equality in which the organisation displayed an unusually strong involvement. The level of involvement implied that BN exceeded its given mandate as an umbrella organisation, creating tensions and reactions among the members. We discuss this level of involvement, looking at both external and internal factors. We argue that BN's involvement in this programme should be understood in the light of BN's and the member organisations' considerable economic dependence on the Norwegian state and the symbolic importance of gender equality in the production of Norwegian national identity. These two factors led to strong pressure to comply with state policies on gender and aid. This was reinforced by political ambivalence about faith-based organisations receiving state funding; a scepticism that has been fuelled by some rather conservative gender policies in a number of BN's member organisations. A one-sided focus on external political pressure does not, however, provide sufficient explanation for what happened in this particular case. We argue that BN's strong involvement was simultaneously driven by individuals who were committed to gender equality. The pressure from the Norwegian state gave these actors an opportunity to push for more gender-sensitive policies among the member organisations.

Omdefinerer En Norsk Norge 1: The Influence of Changing Demographics on Norwegian Schooling for Social Democracy

This article describes how Norwegian compulsory education, both philosophically and practically, reflects the institutionalized democratic values of the larger social and political community of Norway. It examines, through the application of collective and structural lenses of analysis, how shifting demographics in this social and political community are challenging institutionalized values and changing schools. The article draws upon the author's professional and personal experiences as an American Fulbright Scholar in Norway to consider how Norwegian attempts at democratic schooling are becoming increasingly complicated with the arrival of significant numbers of recent immigrants who bring cultural values and norms that do not mirror the beliefs and systems that define the traditional Norwegian national identity.

Norwegian Euroscepticism: Values, Identity or Interest*

AbstractThis article presents a new theory – the VCR (Values, political Culture and Rural society) model – to clarify what Norwegian Euroscepticism is really about and explain why so many Norwegians do not want their country to be a member of the European Union. It argues that at the centre of Norwegian Euroscepticism is a concern for post‐materialist values, political culture and rural society, and that values (the desire to make Norway and the world a better place) is a much more potent explanation for Norwegian Euroscepticism than economic interest (the desire to make Norway a richer place) or perceived threat to Norwegian national identity. The VCR theory finds support in the empirical study conducted: a thematic analysis of newspaper debates in a major Norwegian newspaper from the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s. The findings also indicate that the Euroscepticism found in Norway in the 1990s is extremely similar to that which was formed during the first membership debates in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to contributing towards the literature on Norway and the EU, the article makes a contribution to the general study of Euroscepticism by putting forward a new approach to studying and comparing the subject across time and across countries.

Population by the Numbers

Abstract The article examines main features and legal regulation of the Norwegian national identity number. Main provisions regarding collection of and access to information from the national population register and the 2001 census is explained and discussed, for instance in relation to citizens´ trust in processing of personal data by government agencies.

Domesticated Wilderness in Two Norwegian Children's Classics

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES two literary works that were key in die marketing of Norwegian cultural identity at home and abroad in the early twentieth century, Hans Aanrud's Sidsel Sidserk (1903; Sidsel Longskirt) and Marie Hamsun's Bygdeborn hjemme ogpaa Soteren (1924; Village Children at Home and at the Shieling). Both texts express socially conservative values that die authors link explicidy to a sense of place identity, and both can be read as implicit commentary on Norwegian national identity construction in die face of modernity. The works are written for children and have a clear didactic purpose, which is to illustrate the superiority of a hierarchical agrarian society for the personal development of children. It is not difficult to identity the conservative and even reactionary ideological positions taken by Aanrud and Hamsun. The aim of this analysis is to map out the ways in which the topographies of the novels function in the imaginative construction of Norway as a nation during a period of dramatic domestic and international political change. Using Homi K. Bhabha's notions of national and counter- narratives, I demonstrate how these two writers use the same setting, namely the seter or high mountain dairy, to construct visions of a metaphorical home for the children of Norway. Written while Norway was still the lesser party in a political union with Sweden, Aanrud's novel can be read as a counter-narrative that depicts the Norwegian peasant population as only pardy subjugated by Swedish authority and that opens up possibilities for covert nationalist and anti-Swedish sentiment. Hamsun's novel, on the other hand, uses the same tropes two decades later as a reactionary response to increasing modernization and democratization. Aanrud thus uses the seter location performatively while Hamsun employs it pedagogically. Aanrud's novel appeared just two years before die union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved. It was quickly translated into many languages and printed in several editions. Jarle Bondevik and Olav Solberg comment that Den vesle jenten fra plassen hoyt oppe i Ha er blitt en representam for Norge, hva enten hun na heter Langsierk, Longskirt eller Langrockchen. Mange er de barn i fremmede land og fjerne verdensdeler som her har fatt sitt forste imitrykk av Norge (58) [The little girl from up in die meadow has become a representative of Norway, whether she is named Langsxrk, Longskirt, or Langrochen. There are many children in foreign countries and far away parts of the world who received their first impression of Norway here]. The novel is set in the 1870s (Svendsen 33), and tiiough written during a time of dramatic modernization, Aanrud depicts an idealized pre-industrial rural community with almost no reference to the societal changes that were underway in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hamsun's novel is the first in a series of five books1 about the bygdeborn [village children], a family of two boys and two girls who live with their parents on a small farm called Langerud, and it too is only loosely historically anchored. The series appears to be set in the 1920s though some aspects of die books reflect die author's childhood in the 1880s. The series was translated into German beginning in 1928 with Julius Sandmeier and Sophie Angermann's Die Langerudkinder.2 The entire Hamsun Family had close ties not only to Germany, but also to the highest circles within die German National Socialist regime starting in 1936 (Kolloen 198). Hamsun went on a five-week speaking tour through Germany in November and December of 1939 where she combined readings of her own and Knut Hamsun's literary texts along with pro-Nazi propaganda: Naziideologene, som haddc vxrt beskjeftiget med a gi turneen et riktig politisk innhold, hadde all grunn til viere fornoyd med Marie Hamsuns innsats (Kolloen 203) [The Nazi ideologues, who had been concerned about giving the tour the proper political substance, had every reason to be satisfied with Marie Hamsun's contribution]. …

Witnesses of Wealth.Development Workers, Intercultural Communication and Norwegian National Identity

In this article the broader topic of communication and identity is addressed through a discussion of intercultural involvement and national identity in the case of Norway. The main research question is how Norwegian expatriate development workers discursively sustain, challenge and (re)construct Norwegian national identity. Discussing this I draw on material from a recent study where I interviewed twenty-three development workers (). In the analysis I identify three main types of contributions development workers make to the construction of a Norwegian national identity and label them according to three priestly roles: the prophet who criticises the powerful, the counsellor who comforts and strengthens his flock, or the priest as a unifying symbol of the group.

Nordic Models of Citizenship: Lessons from Social History for Theorising Policy Change in the ‘Age of Globalisation’

Nordic Models of Citizenship: Lessons from Social History for Theorising Policy Change in the ‘Age of Globalisation’

Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object.

Introduction Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Fog OlwigPart I: Finding a key debate place for cultureCultural Sites: Sustaining a home in a deteritorialized world Karen Fog Olwig Imaginging a place in the Andes: In the borderland of lived, invented and analyzed cultures Karsten Paerregaard Which world? On diffusion of Algerian Rai to the West March Schade-Poulsen Seeking place: Capsized identities and contracted belonging among Sri lankan Tamil refugees Ann-Belinda Steen PreisPart II: The Culture and Politics of PlaceThe nation as a human being: A metaphor in a mid-life crisis? Notes on the imminent collapse of Norwegian national identity Thomas Hylland Eriksen Paradoxes of sovereignty and independence: 'real' and 'pseudo' nation-states and depoliticization of poverty James Ferguson The experience of displacement: reconstructing places and identities in Sri Lanka Brigitte Refslund Sorensen Localizing the American Dream: constructing Hawaiian homelands Ulla Hasager Picturing and placing Constable country Judith OkelyPart III: Topical Metaphors in Anthropological ThinkingSpeechless emissaries: refugees, humanitarianism and dehistoricization Liisa H. Malkki 'Roots' and 'Mosaic' in a Balkan border village: locating cultural production Jonathan Schwartz Simplifying Complexity: assimilating the global in a small paradise Jonathan Friedman There are no Indians in the Dominican Republic: the cultural construction of Dominican identities

Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory

There has been an explosion of interest in the concept of citizenship among political theorists. In 1978, it could be confidently stated that "the concept of citizenship has gone out of fashion among political thinkers" (van Gunsteren 1978, p. 9). Fifteen years later, citizenship has become the "buzz word" among thinkers on all points of the political spectrum (Heater 1990, p. 293; Vogel and Moran 1991, p. x). There are a number of reasons for this renewed interest in citizenship in the 1990s. At the level of theory, it is a natural evolution in political discourse because the concept of citizenship seems to integrate the demands ofjustice and community membership-the central concepts of political philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Citizenship is intimately linked to ideas of individual entitlement on the one hand and of attachment to a particular community on the other. Thus it may help clarify what is really at stake in the debate between liberals and communitarians. Interest in citizenship has also been sparked by a number of recent political events and trends throughout the world-increasing voter apathy and long-term welfare dependency in the United States, the resurgence of nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, the stresses created by an increasingly multicultural and multiracial population in Western Europe, the backlash against the welfare state in Thatcher's England, the failure of environmental policies that rely on voluntary citizen cooperation, and so forth. These events have made clear that the health and stability of a modern democracy depends, not only on the justice of its 'basic structure' but also on the qualities and attitudes of its citizens:' for example,