Browsing by Subject "racism"
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(2020)This Master’s thesis is a pilot study that seeks to make a novel contribution to the existing academic literature on how whiteness operates in Denmark. This study is guided by two research questions: How do white Danish university students narrate growing up white in Denmark, and what meanings do they attach to being racially aware, and to being white? Through semi structured interviews with 5 white Danes age 23 to 28, this study reveals how the internalized whiteness and racial exceptionalism of these five white Danes is rooted in their socialisation and how it manifests itself in their lives, both personally, academically and politically. A thematic analysis of the data is carried out in order to uncover underlying meanings of how the interview participants narrate their whiteness. As in Denmark (and globally), whiteness marks itself as being the unmarked norm, the analysis will be theoretically underpinned by the critical whiteness approach. Five themes are identified, and the interview data is used to critically reflect on and explore the aspects and dynamics of Danish society that, both implicitly and explicitly, contributes to whiteness remaining normative and unmarked at the same time. This study ends by concluding that in order to truly uncover the nuances of how whiteness manifests itself in Danish society, more research is needed. It also concludes that the participants narrate their whiteness as something deeply rooted and ingrained in the socialisation they have gone through and the national narratives that Denmark brands itself on, such as the idea of (racial) exceptionalism, hygge and colonial innocence.
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(2022)Finnish society is increasingly pluralistic regarding religion, and especially Muslims are rapidly growing in numbers. The population structure of Muslims in Finland is increasingly young, yet young Muslims’ experiences are currently under-studied. Muslims have been present in Finland since the early 19th century, along with other ethnic and religious minorities. Still, ever since then, Finland has been viewed as culturally homogeneous. This is connected to the view of Lutheranism as an intrinsic part of the Finnish national identity. This has led to an exclusion of people who do not belong to the category of Finnishness, and thus resulted in anti-Muslim racism. The objective of this master’s thesis is three-fold. The first aim is to contribute to the currently scarce research on social media representations of Islam and Muslims. Secondly, the existing media research on Islam and Muslims is heavily concentrated on media produced by non-Muslims, rather than media produced by Muslims themselves. Especially, research on media representations produced by young Finnish Muslims themselves are next to none. Thirdly, previous research shows that young Muslims in Europe are mostly studied in relation to issues of extremism, radicalization and violence. The manifolded nature of Muslim identities is not considered enough in the academia, and thus it is important to adopt an intersectional research approach that considers Muslims’ different identity categories, such as religion, ethnicity and age. This is done through qualitatively examining young Finnish Muslims in a previously unstudied social media environment: podcasts. The thesis answers two research questions: 1. ‘How do young Muslims negotiate their identities, especially in relation to Finnishness?’ and 2. ‘How are experiences of racism discussed in podcasts produced by young Muslims in Finland?’ The data of the thesis consists of four episodes from three different podcasts produced by young Finnish Muslims, ‘Ramadan Radio: Limitless Talks’, ‘Kahden kulttuurin väkeä’ and ‘Kh4nVision Podcast’. The thesis adopts a social constructionist approach to studying identity, based on the assumption that knowledge is produced in interaction with others. The chosen analytical methodology is critical discourse analysis (CDA). Six dominant discourses emerged from the data in the analysis: 1) intersectional identities as problematic; 2) code-switching between different identities; 3) Islam as an identity marker; 4) agency in change; 5) assigning responsibility of racism to the structures; and 6) internalized racism. The results reflect a complicated reality of being a young Muslim in Finland. In the podcasts, young Muslims negotiate their intersectional identities in relation to Finnishness from a problem-based perspective. Experiences of racism are manifested in the podcasts in numerous ways, from code-switching to reproducing racist language. The results of the study indicate that young Finnish Muslims’ identity is socially constructed and religious and ethnic identities are interconnected. The results of the thesis also show that discourse of identities is tightly connected to the context of production and the assumed audience of the content. The results support previous research findings, demonstrating that Muslims choose to emphasize different parts of their identity in contexts where Islam is not at center stage.
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