Call for abstracts: Race, racialization, and reproduction in the Nordic context
Race is a salient category of everyday life that plays a key role in understanding social and biological reproduction. The racist realities of our present include, for example, the premature births and deaths of racialized men, women, and non-binary people; the racializing practices embedded in the architectures of reproductive technologies, adoption, foster care, and the transnational reproductive tissue industry; the international surveillance and control of Black, brown, and Indigenous reproduction; and the unequal ways migration, economic deprivation, and toxic exposures affect people’s ability to produce children, make kin, and sustain family relationships.
While race has been taken up as an analytic to explore reproduction elsewhere, much remains to be examined concerning the reproduction of both race and racism in the Nordic context, including the Faroe Islands, Greenland, the Sápmi Nation, and the Aaland Islands. There is a strong historical idea of Nordic white homogeneity and egalitarianism that has resulted in denial of the unequal practices that exist. In a Nordic region that is persistently described as egalitarian and exceptional, the white majoritarian population in particular, expresses persistent unease in talking about race, and prefers to maintain the strong belief that structural racism does not exist here. Whilst the most explicit racial references and eugenic agendas in law and policy are now, for the most part, gone, race and racism are very much alive, sometimes perhaps in less discernible ways in practices and conceptions. Race maintains an (absent) presence, and Nordic racist and colonial pasts haunt our welfarist presents.
This special issue will explore the interconnections of race, nation, and reproduction in the context of Nordic countries and welfare systems. We invite empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions from a wide range of disciplines, and encourage an intersectional approach considering equally race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, disability and socio-political histories. Topics may include but are not limited to the following themes around reproduction:
- Body politics and fertility
- Family practices, intimacies and kinship
- Reproductive imagination(s) and speculation(s)
- Reproductive justice, care and stratification
- More-than-human relations and toxic environments
- Technological pasts, presents and futures
- Biopolitics, markets and industry
