Crisis in the Nordic Nations and Beyond. At the Intersection of Environment, Finance and Multiculturalism

With discourses of ‘crisis’ and ‘disaster’ featuring strongly in contemporary discourses on contemporary society, this book brings together critical perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to explore the idea of ‘crisis’ as inherently related to power dynamics and the formation of different subjectivities and identities within the Nordic countries and globally.

This volume emphasizes the importance of investigating the interrelationship of three crises - social, economic and environmental - as these address the interlinked surfaces of the same reality, and it examines the negative connotations of the notion of crisis, whilst also raising the question of when and why something becomes identified as crisis, and for whom.

With chapters on media representations of crisis and the global context of crisis discourses, the crisis of national identities and their mobilization in response, and environmental crisis, as well as the interrelationship between the social and the environmental and the different positioning of individuals in relation to power, this volume offers an understanding of crisis as a multivocal symbol of the present. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, literature and political science.

Contents:
+ Media witnessing on YouTube - rethinking crisis in a mediatized condition, Minttu Tikka and Johanna Sumiala
+ Scandinavia and ‘the land of unSwedish freedom’: Jonathan Franzen, Susanne Bier and self-conceptions of exceptionalism in crisis, Ebbe Volquardsen
+ ‘Now is necessity’: Icelandic charity during the crisis years, James G. Rice
+ Racial stereotypes and Swedish antiracism: a Swedish crisis of multiculturalism?, Tobias Hübinette
+ Dancing on the fissures: alternative senses of crisis in the Faroe Islands, Kimberly Cannady
+ Out of sight, out of mind? The mining industry in the peripheral regions of Finland and Odisha, Eastern India, Satu Ranta-Tyrkkö
+ Saving Guatemala’s ‘Mayan forest’: the environmental crisis and contested development, Margit Ystanes
+ Crisis as opportunity - opportunity as crisis: Greenlandic independence and sustainability, Lars Jensen
+ ‘The enemy outside and within’: the crisis and imagining the global in Iceland, Kristín Loftsdóttir