Professor McIntosh will speak about her current book manuscript "Living Together in Uncertainty: Difference and Ambivalence in the ‘New’ Norway." In this book, McIntosh considers the years before and after the brutal 2011 massacre of 77 people by a far-right extremist. She examines the ways forty years of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and mainstreaming of nationalist ideologies have come to frame current debates about the failure of multiculturalism, race, gender, and the erosion of Nordic social solidarity. As the citizens of this ‘good society’ struggle to make sense of what it means to live together in increasingly diverse communities, McIntosh illustrates the ways the ideological commitments of everyday citizens shape encounters that are mundane, often well intended, and yet productive of the asymmetries plaguing the nation-state. These encounters call into question the pluralistic ambitions believed to be fundamental to Norwegian, and more broadly, European, modes of being.

Laurie McIntosh Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University; Visiting Scholar, CES

Sponsors: Seminar on Social Exclusion and Inclusion; Harvard University Workshop on Migration and Immigrant Incorporation

Contact: Jonathan Mijs, mijs@fas.harvard.edu