Professor McIntosh will speak about her current book manuscript "Living Together in Uncertainty: Difference and Ambivalence in the ‘New’ Norway." In this book, McIntosh considers the years before and after the brutal 2011 massacre of 77 people by a far-right extremist. She examines the ways forty years of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and mainstreaming of nationalist ideologies have come to frame current debates about the failure of multiculturalism, race, gender, and the erosion of Nordic social solidarity. As the citizens of this ‘good society’ struggle to make sense of what it means to live together in increasingly diverse communities, McIntosh illustrates the ways the ideological commitments of everyday citizens shape encounters that are mundane, often well intended, and yet productive of the asymmetries plaguing the nation-state. These encounters call into question the pluralistic ambitions believed to be fundamental to Norwegian, and more broadly, European, modes of being.
Sarah Bracke is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Ghent University and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Gender and Diversity (RHEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium. Her main areas of research focus on questions of agency and subjectivity, as well as gender, racialization, and sexuality as they relate to religion and the secular. Her current work is an exploration of how the understanding of gender, sexual difference, and sexuality in liberal democratic nations of Western Europe is impacted by the rise of “the Muslim Question” in Europe.
