a blog by Peter Leonard
I'm giving a paper at the Nordic Migration Researchers' Conference in Bergen, Norway on November 14th, as part of a session called Europe vs. the Illegals. This particular conference has a focus on social science/anthropology, with a strong practical bent. Most of the other presenters are active in the fields of sociology, criminology, or psychology. So far I haven't seen any other presentations on literature, but my thought was that the conference could be interesting on two axes: 1) much of the research about state power and individual identity in Europe nowadays is indeed sociological, so it makes sense for me to be caught up on it, and 2) I'm not sure to what degree the social-science fields are aware of recent Danish and Swedish fiction about this exact topic, so perhaps the other researchers will be interested in my presentation for that reason. And certainly "Europe vs. the Illegals" is a great shorthand for some of the themes that Beck-Nielsen and Khemiri address in their works: Claus Beck-Nielsen and Invasion! each trace out the limit cases of citizenship and national belonging in Scandinavia today, as the two authors consider both the practical methods and tools nation-states use to define political life as well as the consequences of those policing actions.
There's an online copy of an earlier draft of this presentation here, which started life as a SASS paper and then was revised for a class at Copenhagen University last spring.