Nordic state education in between racialization and the possibilities of anti-racist strategy: introduction

Abstract

Faced with accumulated migratory histories as well as the racialization of minoritized migrant and indigenous populations, educational institutions are facing the challenge to find ways to respond. In particular, the recalibration of forms of racialization has become inextricable from educational policymaking and everyday school life in Nordic educational institutions. Education researchers in Nordic countries have pointed to racialized exclusion being a formative experience of minoritized, racialized and indigenous students, in spite of their experiences still being neglected in educational systems, personal encounters and academic knowledge production. The task for the education researchers then is to keep examining and scrutinizing these educational moments through which racialized inequalities appear and come to matter. With this urgency and necessity at stake, the special issue State Education in between Racialization and the Possibilities of Anti-Racist Strategy addresses the processes of racial formation in Nordic education. Specifically, this special issue asks in what ways the processes of racialization play out in compulsory public (primary and lower secondary) stateeducation practices in the Nordic states, and in what ways these processes are being contested, challenged and responded to, both historically and contemporarily. The articles in this special issue predominantly use the concept of racialization, in order to document and analyse the ongoing processes through which phenotypical/cultural, visible or audible differences are figured into frameworks of explanation, action and affect (Andreassen & Vitus, 2015; Essed, 1991; Lentin, 2020; Zembylas, 2015). Using racialization in this special issue, we highlight that categories such as race are not fixed. We aim to emphasize the processual formation in which race is made, unmade, marked or unmarked as well as through which it comes to matter and to whom in relation to different identity categories, be it gender, class, language, religion or sexuality as they form in educational practices. Over the past decades, there has been a growing scholarly interest in exploring the processes of racialization, formations of whiteness and anti-racism in the Nordic countries (Danbolt & Myong, 2018; Hervik, 2018; Keskinen & Andreassen, 2017; Loftsdóttir et al., 2016; Lundström & Teitelbaum, 2017). Contrary to the dominating discourse of Nordic countries being culturally, religiously and racially homogeneous national communities, Nordic states have a long history of racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, not least embedded in the contested and complicit legacies of colonialism (Loftsdóttir et al., 2016). Scholars have pointed to ‘always-there’ indigenous communities (Fur, 2016; Keskinen et al., 2009) and immigrations to the regions that date back way further than the contemporary waves of immigration (Schmidt, 2015) and postcolonial formations of racialized exclusions (Buchardt & Ydesen, 2018). Although forms of racialized exclusions have a long history in Nordic states, scholars have also pointed to emerging new forms of racializations, particularly related to migrations from the Middle East and Asia (e.g. guest migration movements in the 1960s and 1970s), refugee migrations and migrations from Eastern European post-socialist states after the 1990s, as well as after the expansion of the EU in the 2000s. In these migratory contexts, the more subtle forms of racism and racialization have been emerging. These forms have been explored under the notions of ‘cultural racism’ or ‘new racism’, in which categories such as ‘cultural difference’, ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘Muslims’ came to point to ways of life deemed incompatible with Nordic state values. Due to the waves of labour migration approximately since the late 1960s, the inclusion of migrants became the centre of political strategies for integration and public discourse. It is since then, also, that migration and perceived ideas of cultural difference became figured as an ‘educational problem’ (Buchardt, 2017, p. 68) as policies for education directed towards migrant children were formulated across the Nordic countries (Borevi, 2014; Stokke, 2019). In this context, the research in education in NORDIC JOURNAL OF STUDIES IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY 2021, VOL. 7, NO. 3, 107–112 https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2021.2017217 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. the Nordic states has approached educational institutions as part of the formation of the national welfare states, through which racialized subjectivities, identities and visions of belonging to the nation are being produced (Anis, 2005; Buchardt & Ydesen, 2018; Hänninen et al., 2019; Harlap & Riese, 2014; Heino & Kvijärvi, 2013; Kokkinen et al., 2015; Kuronen et al., 2021; Li & Buchardt, 2021 f.c.; Moldenhawer & Øland, 2013). Particularly, the emphasis has been on racialized student subjectivities (Chinga-Ramirez, 2017; Fylkesnes, 2018; Hummelstedt et al., 2021; Khawaja, 2017; Lagermann, 2013; Li, 2021 f.c.; Staunæs, 2004) and the appearance of racialized categories such as ‘foreign language student’, ‘bilingual students’ (Gilliam, 2018), ‘multilingual students’ or the increasingly used and overlapping term ‘Muslim students’ (Buchardt, 2016). In parallel, researchers have examined how the processes of racialization and structural inequalities can be dismantled through education. Critical pedagogies have been approached through the lens of ‘multicultural education’, ‘intercultural education’ or ‘migration pedagogies’ (Bjørnæs et al., 1993; Buchardt & Fabrin, 2012); as well as anti-racist education (Alemanji, 2017; Børhaug & Helleve, 2016). Recently, there has been more emphasis on particularly anti-racist education, which calls for decolonial (Eriksen & Svendsen, 2020), intersectional (Røthing & Svendsen, 2011) and affective approaches (Vertelytė & Staunæs, , this special issue) in order to recognize race as a crucial marker in Nordic state-education systems at large. These studies show how racialization is produced but also resisted through one of the central welfarestate institutions, namely education. Contributions in the special issue This special issue draws on the existing state of the art on race, racism and anti-racism in Nordic education, adding on new perspectives and contributions. In continuation with the state of the art discussed above, the articles in this special issue show how race and racialization are central and formative experiences in students’ lived school lives. Yet, our special issue offers new angles in the ways that it cuts across different analytical boundaries, levels of analysis and disciplinary frameworks. First, it specifically addresses racialization and anti-racist educational strategies in the ways they appear in Nordic stateeducational institutions as simultaneously evolving processes. We suggest that we cannot understand the processes of racialization without understanding the strategies and practices through which these processes are being contested and challenged, as it is through schooling the processes of racialization occur, and it is also through schooling and education that racialized inequality structures are potentially challenged. This happens when for instance, racialized students resist their racialization by developing their own everyday anti-racist strategies, or when teachers are caught in dilemmas of addressing racism in the classroom. Many articles in this special issue deal with this dualism: while documenting the complex processes of racialization, they at the same time show how these racialized experiences also inform anti-racist action and resistance. Second, this special issue shows how lived racialized experience is inextricably related to educational policies in relation to migrants and their integration into the Nordic welfare states. The articles in the special issue address processes of racialization through the ways educational policy comes to matter in lived life and through migratory histories. In other words, referring to and expanding on Bernstein’s concept of recontextualization, it is through education that nation-state discourses and policies for minority ‘integration/assimilation’ are recontextualized and pedagogized (Bernstein, 1990; Buchardt, 2018) and are lived through everyday schooling experience. Articles in this special issue show how state policies such as mother tongue language provision, reception classes for migrant children, urban regeneration policies, integration policies, among others, are lived through the everyday lives of students and teachers in educational contexts. Third, the articles in this special issue draw on different disciplinary knowledge and methodologies in exploring processes of racialization and antiracism across Nordic educational settings and contexts. We consider this a strength. The diversity of disciplinary and methodological perspectives allows us to grasp racialization processes from different angles. Moreover, the plurality in the theoretical frames built to understand the particularities of Nordic educational settings and contexts allows us to comprehend how racialization is reconfigured through different locations and spaces in the Nordic states. For example, the articles in this special issue draw on methodologies such as oral history interviews, ethnographic interviews and observations, media discourse analysis, state-of-the-art literature analysis, as well as auto-ethnographic enactments of ‘ethnodrama’. The articles in this special issue enable discussions of the topic racialization and a