Crisis in the Nordic Nations and Beyond: At the Intersection of Environment, Finance and Multiculturalism

Kristín Loftsdóttir · Lars Jensen

Apr 2016 · Routledge

About this eBook

With discourses of ’crisis’ and ’disaster’ featuring strongly in contemporary discourses on contemporary society, this book brings together critical perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to explore the idea of ’crisis’ as inherently related to power dynamics and the formation of different subjectivities and identities within the Nordic countries and globally. This volume emphasizes the importance of investigating the interrelationship of three crises - social, economic and environmental - as these address the interlinked surfaces of the same reality, and it examines the negative connotations of the notion of crisis, whilst also raising the question of when and why something becomes identified as crisis, and for whom. With chapters on media representations of crisis and the global context of crisis discourses, the crisis of national identities and their mobilization in response, and environmental crisis, as well as the interrelationship between the social and the environmental and the different positioning of individuals in relation to power, this volume offers an understanding of crisis as a multivocal symbol of the present. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, literature and political science.

About the author

Kristín Loftsdóttir is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Iceland. She is co-editor of Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region and Topographies of Globalization: Politics, Culture and Language, and author of The Bush is Sweet: Identity, Power and Development among WoDaaBe Fulani in Niger. Lars Jensen is Associate Professor of Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University. He is author of Unsettling Australia: Readings in Australian Cultural History, co-editor of Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region and co-editor of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires.