Editorial

Abstract

We in the Icelandic editorial team are proud and excited to present our first NORA issue, which is the first issue of 2023. We are grateful to the members of the previous editorial team in Denmark for their help and advice during a smooth transition process. The current issue presents a variety of topics highlighting the intersection of race and gender in culture as well as workplace inequalities. The topic of Linnéa Bruno’s and Tanja Joelsson’s paper is violence prevention in which the American MVP program is evaluated at selected Swedish compulsory schools (students aged 13–19 years) by using the ethnographic approach. The aim of the paper is to explore how the female participants perceived their classroom environment and which strategies were used to create a “transformative space” of learning about sexual/sexualized violence. The paper gives rich empirical (ethnographic) examples of how conversation around sexual/sexualized violence is conducted within classroom settings, adding to the overall knowledge within the prevention/intervention literature, particularly with the focus on young people. The authors conclude that in prevention work at school level, it is important to attend well to competence and commitment as well as being aware of precarious nature of such work and how it might affect the endeavour of transforming the classroom into a non-oppressive space. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of balancing critical feminist views of violence and seeing boys and men as allies in any prevention education/ work with regard to sexual/sexualized violence. Mika Hagerlid focuses on the racial construction of women who have experienced racial hate crime in the paper “Discursive Constructions of Race and Gender in Racial Hate Crime Targeting Women in Sweden”. She uses intersectional theory along with discourse analysis in interpreting nine interviews with women who have experienced racial hate crime. In so doing, the study contributes to the knowledge of how racial hate crimes are understood and interpreted by female victims from diverse ethnic/racial background. The results show that women experience racial hate crimes differently than men. Furthermore, as Mika demonstrates well in the paper, female victims often become entangled in racial power struggles between men. In fact, their bodies, as argued by Mika, are often used as a “tool in racial status conflicts”. Thus, Mika’s paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender within the Nordic context in which the myth of the Nordic gender equality paradise is repudiated, at least in terms of what it means to be a woman with a diverse racial or ethnic background. In “Feminist Academics Strategically Playing Offense/Defense in Pursue of Academic and Societal Change”, Thamar Melanie Heijstra and Gyða Margrét Pétursdóttir consider the status of feminist activists in Icelandic academia, in an environment characterized by the masculinized neoliberal academic game. They interviewed 20 senior feminist academics in Iceland about various aspects of their working conditions. Building on a theoretical concept of the precarious precondition for change, they found that these academics were building small-scale communities with potential for growth and for serving as an antidote to neoliberalism. Workplace inequality in a neoliberal world is also the focus of Britt-Inger Keisu and Helene Brodin‘s paper “Postfeminism as Coping Strategy: Understandings of Gender and Intragroup Conflict among Swedish Welfare Workers”. Even though Sweden tends to be ranked near the top for gender equality, it has a high rate of occupational gender segregation. Keisu and Brodin investigated how welfare workers in three women-dominated workplaces—a school, a geriatric care ward and a social-work office—speak about gender and intragroup conflict in relation to their field of work. They found that the workers tended to ignore or push aside gender inequalities in NORA—NORDIC JOURNAL OF FEMINIST AND GENDER RESEARCH 2023, VOL. 31, NO. 1, 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2171728