Understanding Constructions Of Danish-ness Using Heterogeneous Types Of Sources Across Historical Settings

Author(s):

Christian Ydesen(presenting / submitting)Trine Oeland(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

17. Histories of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

17 SES 10 A, The Look and Sound of Belonging

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

15:30-17:00

Room:

427.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Helena Ribeiro de Castro

Contribution

This paper contributes knowledge creation on two different, but intimately linked, levels. The first is an analytical level and the second is a methodological level.

At the analytical level the paper addresses the issue of understanding how Danish-ness is constructed in two historical settings characterized by great upheavals in popular moral codes, culture and national self-imagery. The first setting is the first decade after World War II and the second setting is the post-9/11 era. The empirical focus is on the way police officers and adjoining professionals of the Danish welfare nation-state construct ‘disturbing/disquieting behavior’, delinquency, and misbehavior and how these constructions are made into a category that activates educational and other interventions (Moldenhawer & Øland 2013). Using a comparative outlook between the two historical settings the purpose is to understand 1) the boundaries of legitimate behavior and membership of the Danish community inside the Danish welfare nation-state, and 2) the transformations of these boundaries according to the Danish state’s changing (inter-state) relations within the regional and global community (cf. Bourdieu 1999).

At the methodological level the paper works with the research question of how it is possible to adequately bring two different types of sources from two different periods to communicate in order to conduct history research on the construction of Danishness across the periods?

Method

Empirically the analysis is based on sources pertaining to police officers and adjoining professionals and their handling of immigrants or foreign elements. The first period 1945 – 1955 is treated through the archival sources available at the ‘Regional Archive for Southern Jutland’ concerning the handling of the German minority in Southern Jutland/Nordschleswig (cf. Ydesen 2011). The archives contain information about the key professionals engaged in this period, such as the triad teachers, police officers and intelligence agents. The contemporary period is illuminated through interviews with police officers and street level workers working with (supposed) juvenile delinquents in Greater Copenhagen with a focus on immigrant youngsters, and through supplementary documents describing administrative and organizational arrangements addressing immigrant juvenile delinquency, for example the strategy of the cross professional organization called SSP, which is a well-organized collaboration between school administrations, social service administrations and the police force. Concerning the methodological level our preliminary answer is that it is possible to bring two different types of sources from two different periods to communicate. Our methodology for doing so is to put theoretically guided questions to work empirically, which means that the sources used are read in a way following from a theoretically informed way of understanding the object of study (Bourdieu et al. 1991, Bourdieu 2004, Øland & Ydesen, forthcoming). Yet, we seek to prevent the handling, reading and interpretation of sources and other types of data to be determined by theory. In this process, the notion of field is the most important tool (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, 97): it signals struggles and historicity (Steinmetz 2011). Covering both historical settings and all sources/data used, this means that every professional intervention, every professional position-taking and legitimization; every observed construction of ‘the immigrant’/’the foreigner’; every construction of the professional task and method, etc., should be placed in a structure of positions-taking, agents and institutions. Throughout the research process, in every choice we make, we will aspire to think relationally.

Expected Outcomes

Through the relational mode of thinking, the paper creates knowledge about the transitions and constructions of proper Danish-ness in and between two historical contexts: just after WWII (versus the German within) and after 9/11 (versus the imagined homegrown terrorist working from within). This entails knowledge creation about the spatial transformations and transitions of Danish-ness (from control of the mind to control of conduct). The knowledge created will be related to and contribute to European and international research in the area of study (e.g., Bookman & Woolford 2013, Maynard-Moody & Musheno 2003, McCarthy 2010, 2011, 2014). Working on this type of knowledge, undoubtedly, will be of relevance to most European countries today. The methodological insights created carry general relevance to the field of historical research (e.g., Noiriel 1995, 2007).

References

Bookman, S. & Woolford, A. (2013): Policing (by) the urban brand: defining order in Winnipeg’s Exchange District, Social & Cultural Geography 14 (3): 300-317. Bourdieu, P. (1999): “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” in State/Culture – State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz. London: Cornell University Press, 1999, 53-75. Bourdieu, P. (2004): Science of Science and Reflexivity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P.; J.-C. Chamboredon & J.-C. Passeron (1991): The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries. Walter de Gruyter. Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. (1992): An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Maynard-Moody, S. & Musheno, M. (2003): Cops, Teachers and Councillors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McCarthy, D.J. (2010): Self-governance or professionalized paternalism? The Police, Contractual Injunctions and the Differential Management of Deviant Populations, British Journal of Criminology 50:896-913. McCarthy, D.J. (2011): Classing early intervention: Social class, occupational moralities and criminalization, Critical Social Policy 31(4): 495-516. McCarthy, D.J. (2014): 'Soft' Policing. The Collaborative Control of Anti-Social Behaviour. London: Palgrave Macmillan Moldenhawer, B. & Øland, T. (2013): Disturbed by the ‘stranger’: state crafting remade through educational interventions and moralisations, Globalisation, Societies & Education 11(3): 398-420. Noiriel, G. (1995): Immigration: Amnesia and Memory, French Historical Studies, 19 (2) (Autumn): 367-380. Noiriel, G. (2007): The Historian in the Cité: How to Reconcile History and Memory of Immigration, Museum International, 59 (1-2): 13-17. Steinmetz, G. (2011): Bourdieu, Historicity, and Historical Sociology, Cultural Sociology, 5: 45-66. Wacquant, L. (2007): Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality, Thesis Eleven 91 (1): 66-77. Wacquant, L. (2010) Crafting the Neoliberal State - Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity. Sociological Forum, vol. 25, no. 2, June, pp. 197-220 Wacquant, L. (2012): Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism, Social Anthropology 20(1): 66-79. Ydesen, C. (2011): Educating Greenlanders and Germans - Minority Education in the Danish Commonwealth, 1945-1970. In: Niedrig, H., Ydesen, C. (eds.) Writing Postcolonial Histories of Intercultural Education. Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang Verlag. 2011, pp. 239-267. Øland, T. & Ydesen, C. (Forthcoming): Professional Interventions as a State-Crafting Grammar: Using a Sociological Concept of State in Historical Research. In: Heinesen, J.; Jørgensen, M.O.; Lytje, M. & Nielsen, T.K. (eds.): Challenging Ideas? Theory and Empirical Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge Scolars Publishing

Author Information

Christian Ydesen (presenting / submitting)

Aalborg University

Learning and Philosophy

Suldrup

Trine Oeland (presenting)

University of Copenhagen

Media, Cognition and Communication

Copenhagen S.

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