Fall Newsletter 2016  

The sign reads: 'The solution is: Community and diversity. Join us'. From a demonstration against terrorism on Karl-Johan street in central Oslo, August 25, 2014. Photo: GGAADD (Flickr)

Welcome to the fall edition of the ACT Newsletter. This year has seen continued accomplishments by the ACT-researchers as the project is approaching its last year. In this edition, we highlight upcoming events as well as recent publications and activities. The research reflection focuses on religion and active citizenship in light of the forthcoming Norwegian White Paper on religion and belief. Please subscribe to the newsletter by following this link. We hope you enjoy reading it!

Update from the ACT-team

The ACT project is entering its last year and work on analysing the extensive and very rich data collected is in full swing. A wide range of publications is currently under development. Great progress was made in this respect at a recent writing retreat where the whole team was present and exchanged publication ideas and reflections on data. A number of the papers we work on developed from the inspiring Active Citizenship Today conference hosted by the University of Tromsø (UiT), including a paper by the UiT team on the ethics of citizenship and the use of religious reasons.

The analysis is based on the collection of empirical data on local, national and transnational active citizenship in neighbourhoods in Oslo and Copenhagen. To trace the motivations and locations of active citizenship in these cities today, the PRIO team has conducted life history and in-depth semi-structured interviews with residents of Oslo and Copenhagen as well as participant observation in both cities. Furthermore, Focus Group Discussions were held to explore perceptions of and contestations around active citizenship. Final data collection in Copenhagen will be completed by the team at Aarhus University (AU) over the next couple of months. 

Besides the general data collection amongst residents of selected neighbourhoods, the PRIO team has focused on three further cases, namely a Christian parish, a Muslim youth initiative, and residents with a refugee background. AU will add a study on conceptions of good citizenship amongst teachers and students in Danish high schools, on social media and on a Danish social movement to provide refugees with support.

Reflections along the way... 
Opportunities in a religiously plural Norway

The active citizenship we explore in the ACT-project takes place against a backdrop of policies, regulations, and public funding, including in the field of religion and belief. Norway’s funding model for religious and life stance communities is generous. According to the Council for religious and life stance communities, this could be seen as an acknowledgement of these communities as a common good, something worthwhile for society to invest in.

Contestations in culturally and religiously diverse societies may be related to religion, or perceived to be.  Among my ACT research participants, Catholics and Muslims, immigrants and born in Norway, there was unease about others’ perceptions of their voluntary efforts in religious arenas. For instance, research participants explained that they would refrain from mentioning voluntary efforts in religious arenas at lunch conversations at work. Some questioned whether these could be seen as societal contributions, as ‘active citizenship’. Others argued assertively that their activities with children and youth in a church or a mosque setting were contributions made as active citizens, where faith was one among several motivations.

In Norway, a new White paper on religion and belief is under development. With ACT research in mind, I hope the new White paper will focus on religion and belief policies, not on migrants or the perceived effects of migration on society. Although there are issues of freedom of religion and belief that strongly intersect with the presence of migrants and post-migration diversity. By focusing on religion and belief, the government has a unique opportunity to develop policies that deal with difference, beyond an immigrant – native perspective. The ‘we’ which these policies are developed for must include, on equal terms, all those who are part of society. This necessitates moving away from defining minorities against an unquestioned, static majority.

That the new policy would focus on visions for the implementation of the principle of freedom of religion or belief might seems obvious, yet the temptation for quick-fix and instrumental interventions may be high, particularly  when societal contestations related to, or are ascribed to, religion abound. Whilst religion is often narrated in a problem-oriented way, in public and private spheres in Norway, such narratives might be challenged, and policy can be important in setting the tone. Recognizing the contributions of religious and life stance actors as a common good in a plural society may be one step in the right direction. The approach taken in the book ‘Muslim Spaces of Hope: Geographies of possibility in Britain and the West’ is instructive. As the editor writes – there is a choice – we can choose to focus on and work with ‘spaces of hope’. In an agenda-setting policy document on religion and belief in a plural Norway, the government can seize the opportunity to do just that.

- Marta Bivand Erdal                                    

Upcoming activities

On 6 December, Per Mouritsen is giving a public lecture at Malmö University’s Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare, titled: “The Dialectics of Modern Citizenship – (De)contesting Rights and Belonging”. He has also accepted an invitation to give one of the keynotes, again on active citizenship, to this year’s New Year’s meeting of the Danish Social Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre).

On 15 February 2017, Cindy Horst in cooperation with Miriam Latif Sandbæk will host an exploratory workshop at PRIO, entitled A different story. There is increasing attention to the power of story; the stories we live and tell in our individual lives and the collective stories that frame our understanding of the world. Our stories inform our actions and impact where we are moving, individually and as a society. In this workshop - bringing together artists, academics, decision makers and practitioners – we explore some of the elements of the dominant discourse on active participation and civic contributions in diverse societies, as well as the participants’ own visions and everyday realities. We aim to bring awareness to the power of story and explore tools by which to introduce alternative stories more effectively. The insights from the workshop will furthermore inform a round-table conference taking place in Oslo 11 May 2017.

From 7-9 June 2017, an academic workshop will be hosted at PRIO, entitled Asserting and Contesting ‘the good citizen’. During those three days, a group of 15-20 scholars with different disciplinary, methodological, geographical and thematic expertise will debate perceptions and lived realities of ‘good citizens’. Which tensions and contestations arise in debates on what it means to participate as an active citizen in society? How do lived experiences of citizens today challenge existing models of democracy? To what extent do these experiences contrast with official policies and public discourse, and in what ways are experiences and discourses informing or influencing one another? For more information and expressions of interest, see our website: Call for Abstracts: Asserting and Contesting ‘the good citizen’ Workshop.

Related Projects

Per Mouritsen, together with a younger colleague, has commenced a small project, which attempts to compare the conceptions of good citizenship of government politicians (e.g. when they talk about citizenship education) with those of teachers and students in Danish high schools. The project involves an online survey with all Danish high school teachers and a survey and vignette experiment administered to highs school classes in selected Danish high schools. One of the purposes of the project is to see if dominant conceptions of civic service, e.g. in terms of volunteering, democratic loyalty and working-to-pay-taxes for the welfare state are ‘taken up’ by students – or not.

Tore Vincents Olsen and Per Mouritsen are involved in two projects, both of them concerned with contested conception of active and ‘good’ citizenship. One projects is an investigation of social media strategies and tactics of Danish public intellectuals with a Muslim background in terms of navigating their identity and speaking position vis-a-vis controversies concerning ‘religion in politics’. The project will also involve a number of elite interviews. The other project is an investigation of the project of the new Danish social movement helping recently arrived refugees, Venligboerne [The friendly people who live here]. This project seeks to place the self-identity of this new movement – which is internally divided over strategy and projects – between a rights-oriented political struggle oriented cosmopolitism and a less adversarial, communitarian nationalism, which seeks to project a more conception of Denmark.
 

Recent publications

Bivand Erdal, Marta. “ Innenfra, utenfra og tredjeposisjoner? Refleksiv posisjonalitet i forskning blant katolikker i Norge”. In Anders Aschim, Helje Kringlebotn Sødal and Olav Hovdelien (eds.), Kristne Migranter i Norden [Christian Migrants in Norden], Oslo: Portal Forlag, 2016.


Mouritsen, Per “The Educative Formation for Democratic Participation”, in Rasmus Kolby Rahbek (ed.), Demokratisk dannelse – Højskolen til debat [Democratic Citizenship Formation – Debating the Folk High School], Aarhus: KLIM, 2016. 

Recent activities

Senior researcher Marta Bivand Erdal participated in a panel at the forum: “Politicisation of Freedom of Religion and Belief” (October 28, Oslo). The panel discussed expectations of the Norwegian Government’s coming White Paper on policies for religion and belief. The forum was supported by the Norwegian MFA and Fritt Ord Foundation.

Research professor Cindy Horst held a keynote speech titled “Refugees, Peacebuilding and the Anthropology of the Good” at the SIEF Working Group “Migration and Mobility” Conference: Current Approaches to Migration and Mobility in Ethnology, Folklore and Anthropology, (September 11-13, Basel). She also held an invited lecture at the Amsterdam Anthropology Lecture Series at the Free University, entitled “Understanding refugees as political subjects”.

Throughout the year Research Professor Per Mouritsen has given a number of public talks on active citizenship, citizenship education and other ACT-related matters, including “Creating citizens – who have ownership of the state” (Copenhagen, Copenhagen University’s public dissemination society The Green Dome, 20 April 2016); “Good Citizenship and Governance” (a keynote to the Danish Association of High School Principals, Nyborg Strand 3 March 2016); “Democracy Education for Active Citizenship” (a talk to the Annual Conference of the Danish Folk High Schools, DGI-Byen 28 September 2016). He organized and participated in a panel on “What does it mean to be a good citizen” at the annual Danish People’s Political Festival on the island of Bornholm, 17 June 2016.

Per Mouritsen has also given a number of interviews on active citizenship and citizenship education to sectorial professional journals, including “We are getting an increasing number of non-citizens” (to the magazine of Danish Social Workers, Socialrådgiveren, January 2016); “Towards a good citizenship” (to Danske Gymnasier, 12 February 2016), “A Democratic Perspective – on Membership Democracy” (LærerPension, January 2016).