Nordic Geography Meeting Tallinn, Estonia 15th to 19th June 2015
Session NGM 2015
Cities and Ethnicities: Encounters, conflicts and imaginations
During the latest decades interactions between cities and ethnicities have gained increasing
significance in Nordic countries. Immigrants, refugees, indigenous people and native-born ethnic
minorities have become an integrated part of urban life. Cities have been framing experiences of
ethnicity in at least two ways. First, in line with Western thought, cities have been implicated in
symbolic attempts to racialize and place modernity. During different periods, cities (or parts of
cities) have been seen as markers of (white) civilization, civic improvement and cultural progress,
as sites of cultural depravity and cosmopolitan degeneracy, or as places overrun by ‘dark’ and
‘dangerous’ foreigners. Symbolic racialization has been an integrated part of urban life and politics.
Secondly, the multiplicity of encounters constituting urban sites of contact frame the everyday
experiences of ethnicity; the prosaic moments and daily rhythms of social life that have decisive
impact on racial and ethnic practices. The everyday city provides prosaic negotiations that drive
interethnic and intercultural relations in different directions – oscillating between ‘cosmopolitan
hope’ believing in hybrid cultures, bursting with creative potential, and ‘postcolonial melancholia’
emphasizing cultural racism and stigmatization of ‘foreigners’. These processes and paradoxes have
in recent years put banal everyday (individual or group) encounters and their emotional registers on
the academic agenda. Fascination, excitement, hope, anger, fear, security and atmosphere are all
emotions being connected to urban life.
This session invites papers on both of these frames, apart or combined. It might (amongst others)
include theoretical, empirical and methodological engagements with:
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Historical traces or contemporary ethnic and racial marking of cities
Conflicts over symbols or geographical imaginations
Resistance, community and everyday politics
Experiences of discrimination and exclusion
Temporal, spatial and material mediations of encounters
Emotionality of encounters with alterity
Fear, violence and security in cross-cultural urban life
Theoretical considerations/interventions with the notion of encounter
Methodological insights into undertaking research with encounters
Lasse Koefoed, Tatiana Matejskova og Kirsten Simonsen
lmartin@ruc.dk tatianam@ruc.dk
kis@ruc.dk
Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial change
Roskilde University
Denmark
Deadline for abstracts November 15th . Please send them to us as well as to the conference
organizers – see homepage http://www.tlu.ee/en/ngm2015
Kirsten Simonsen
Professor in Social and Cultural Geography
Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC)
Roskilde University
DK, 4000 Roskilde
Denmark
Phone: +45 46742154