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ICSRU research workshop

With Darin Stephanov and Mette-Louise Johansen

Info about event

Time

Wednesday 10 April 2019,  at 14:15 - 16:00

Location

1451-516

Organizer

ICSRU

Darin Stephanov, "Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire, 1808-1908."

What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethnonational mindset and where shall we search for its roots? This is the central question of a presentation arguing that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching, and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements, and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies.

Mette-Louise Johansen, "Epidemic policing: reconfigurations of the Muslim ‘other’ as a figure of fear."

This presentation makes a critical intervention into the debate about ‘othering’ and the governing of Muslim communities in Denmark and Europe. Focusing on the way in which Muslims have been constructed as security threat in Danish policies and policing practices on countering violent extremism, the presentation examines recent security developments that tend to (and this is up for discussion) dispose of encoded risk categories and their reference to race, gender and social status. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among a group of police officers and social workers in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, the presentation discusses recent security logics developed in relation to CVE, accounting particularly for the perspective of the police and how the police’s approaches to and perceptions of the Muslim ‘other’ are affected..