Challenging Nordic Innocence – UiS podkast

Oil is everywhere in Stavanger—highly visible, and yet also out of sight. In this episode of Challenging Nordic Innocence, we’re joined by Bjørk Tørnqvist to talk about “mental oil spills” and the petro-hegemonies shaping Norway’s oil capital. Drawing on participatory mapping, the conversation explores how petroleum is not just an industry or export, but something that structures everyday life—org...

In this episode, we speak with anthropologist Cody Skahan about carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Iceland and the Nordic region. Drawing on fieldwork with environmental activists, scientists, and local communities, Cody explores how climate technologies like CCS are reshaping landscapes, economies, and political relationships. From geothermal power plants and volcanic rock formations to conteste...

What happens when we think of the Nordic welfare state not only as a protector of rights and social welfare, but also as a site of dispossession? In this episode of Challenging Nordic Innocence, we talk with Sarah Philipson Isaac about her PhD dissertation Temporal dispossession: the politics of asylum and the remaking of racial capitalism in and beyond the borders of the Swedish welfare state  fr...

Afro Nordic Feminism is an emerging Black feminist project that centers on the experiences, knowledge, communities, and social justice organizing of people of African descent living in the Nordic Region. In this episode we discuss the approach with Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo, a Fulani, Norwegian and Danish postdoctoral researcher and facilitator of ‘black study’—a non-disciplinary, coll...

Over the period 1764–84, King Frederik V established a sculpture park at Fredensborg Palace North of Copenhagen, with 70 statues of Norwegian, Sámi and Faroese people. In this episode, we speak with Professor Mathias Danbolt, art historian and lead researcher of the research project Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era and Co-curator of the exhibition Nordm...

In this episode we are joined by Anne Nørkjær Bang –  a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. This summer, Bang defended her dissertation titled “Dissolving the Pill: Imagining the Birth Control Pill in Contemporary Denmark” which interrogate the social, cultural, political, and scientific contexts surrounding the birth control pill. Through a Feminist Cultural Studi...

In this episode we talk to Dr. Tone Huse about her article “ Temporal displacement: colonial architecture and its contestation ” where she explores and analyses the Danish state’s attempt to ‘modernize’ Kalaallit Nunaat (a.k.a. Greenland). She focuses on the technologies of urban planning and development as they merged with the colonial state. She explores how they attempted to assimilate the Indi...

This episode is a conversation between Anders Riel Müller 송연준, Signe Skjoldborg Breighel and Sebastian Lundsteen, departing from Lundsteen’s article “Shadow Places, Environmental Justice, and the Submergence of Pollution.”  The episode unpacks the several aspects and complexities of Shadow Places, a concept developed by feminist philosopher Val Plumwood that stress the spatial relationships as...

In this episode we talk to Georgia De Leeuw about her research on mining, green steel and the comfort alignment with extractivism in in the Swedish north, or indigenous Sápmi. Her PhD dissertation deals with Swedish extractivism in Sápmi through the examples of a planned iron ore mine in Gállok/Kallak and the hydrogen-based steel transition. The main aim is to understand the trust that is placed i...

Dansk Beskrivelse I denne episode har vi besøg af forskerne Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Josefine Lee Stage og Victoria Pihl Sørensen, som i skrivende stund er i gang med en artikkel om den spiralprogrammeti Kalaallit Nunaat (Grønland) fra 1960erne og 1970erne . Det er ikke uden grund, at man i Kalaallit Nunaat omtaler dette som et folkemord begået af den danske kolonimagt. I episoden diskuterer Naja,...

In this episode we have with us Jean Thierry and Tobias Gregory from the organisation “Almen Modstand” which was formed in response to the 2018 so-called ghetto law that put strict requirements on the Danish General Housing sector. There are about half a million general housing homes in Denmark (app. 20% of total housing stock). What characterizes this sector is that it is open to all,...

In this episode, we are joined by Aili Keskitalo from Amnesty International and former president of the Sámì Parliament in Norway and PhD fellow at the University of Stavanger Cecilie Larsen to talk about green colonialism and the South Sámì struggles against the Norwegian government’s wind farm concessions around Fosen in central Norway. In 2010 the Norwegian state granted permission to build sev...

This episode introduces several themes surrounding justice. In this first attempt, we have gathered the brilliant scholars Liv Sunnercrantz and Andy Lautrup to discuss environmental justice, social justice, and spatial justice in the Nordic Region. We think about the relationship between the practical and the theoretical, positionality, and the multiple and complex ways that justice can be conceiv...