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

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.

Table of Contents:
Crisis in the Nordic Nations and Beyond

About the Author :
Kristin Loftsdottir 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.

Review :
'The Euro crisis and the bankruptcy of Iceland have sent repercussions throughout the Nordic region, but not always of an economic kind. This exciting and diverse book discusses a broad range of crises currently affecting the region, from the double bind of the Norwegian oil economy coupled with the country's self-promotion as a champion of sustainability, to the contradictions of Swedish anti-racism and the crisis seen as a window of opportunity for Greenlanders in search of full independence. It critically interrogates neoliberalism, broadens the theoretical perspectives on the concept of crisis and deepens the ethnographic understanding of the Nordic region.' Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo, Norway 'This wide-ranging volume furthers Loftsdottir and Jensen's valuable critique of enduring forms of Nordic exceptionalism, and by re-inserting the Nordic countries in a field of global flows of finance, people, risks and ideologies, it also provides a critical reinvigoration as to what is at stake in the idea and invocation of "crisis".' Gavan Titley, NUI Maynooth, Ireland