Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe: Critical Essays on Knowledge, Inequality and Belonging

Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around ’identity politics’ in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operate to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Elisabeth L. Engebretsen is a Professor in the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway. She is the author of Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography (2014).

Mia Liinason is Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Cultural Sciences, Lund, Sweden. She is the author of Feminist and LGBTI+ Activism across Russia, Turkey and Scandinavia. Transnationalizing Spaces of Resistance (with Selin Cagatay and Olga Sasunkevich, 2022) and Equality Struggles: Women’s Movements, Neoliberal Markets and State Political Agendas in Scandinavia (2018).