Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

This Ph.D.-thesis constitutes a study of the categorization of honour based violence by exploring the related narratives co-created by various individuals and authorities in the Danish society in relation to the themes culture, gender and violence.
In contrast to conventional explanations of honour based violence, which are based exclusively upon the culture of the women's families, this study suggests an inclusion of temporal and spatial underpinnings in accounts on violence. The emphasis that follows from making an alternative contextualization possible entails an inclusion, structuration as well as analysis in relation to two narrative 'levels' in the empirical material. This way, the thesis consists of what could be termed empirical fusion analyses in which diverse forms of exhaustive text analyses are combined with a focus on societal structures and discourses all integrated into each other.   
Texts in a more conventional sense are categorized under the collective designation public accounts in part I. These texts consist of the two autobiographies Æresdrab from 2003 by Sengül Güvercile and Når blod bliver tyndere end vand from 2005 written by Sandra Berkan, 90 articles from Danish daily papers published from 2007-2010, and two research-based publications: Ære og drab: Fadime – en sag til eftertanke, 2003 and Om ære from 2008. Those accounts in which I myself have been an interlocutor, and thus contributed to the creation, are categorized under the collective designation accounts generated by confident narrative meetings in part II. This analytical part consists of texts brought into existence as a result of participant observation conducted during my fieldwork at two aid efforts against honour based violence, R.E.D. and the Connect project, as well as 13 interviews with battered ethnic minority women staying at R.E.D. and one with a mentee affiliated with the Connect project.
Part I shows how a formula story on honour based violence has appeared in the wake of the murder of Fadime Sahindal in Sweden in 2002 and in relation to the publication of Unni Wikan's popular book Ære og Drab from 2003. The formula story provides a preconditioned narrative framework as the (notions of) majority Danishness is presented as an implicit ideal for the ethnic minority women to transform themselves into. At the same time, the ideal image establishes norms regarding how the ethnic minority women are to be relieved whereby a popular embedded solution model to the problematized phenomenon, honour based violence, is produced. Part II demonstrates how the public and institutional formula story is more unanimous than the battered ethnic minority women's accounts to me exemplify. Although the women re-apply (parts of) the above mentioned formula story in their self-presentations, this thesis points to a considerable narrative dissonance within the accounts as the women also include broad social issues. At the same time, the analytical chapters have pointed to the way in which narrative visibility limits the women when they are being subjected to discourse, scrutiny and control.
By providing a narrative analysis of accounts on honour based violence as well as establishing a basis for alternative contextualization, the thesis has contributed to rethink conventional and standardized explanatory frameworks for exactly this categorization of violence. Moreover, the thesis has delivered a culture-analytical exposition of the Danish majority society as well as of the inherent narrative processes. Lastly, as the first Danish study of its kind, the thesis has provided an in-depth and critical exploration of the establishment of narratives on honour based violence in Denmark.

Despite sparse scholarly attention from non-activists, Scandinavian interfaith fora are gaining momentum as a response to societal transformations of increased migration, world conflicts, and politically motivated violence. Combining theories of interaction, ritual performance, and civilizing processes, the article conducts a case study of public interfaith meetings held by a local interfaith forum in Kristiansand in Norway. Analyzing the meetings as organized cultural encounters, the study explores the transfor-mative aspects of the events and it points to how the enactment of civilized forms of cross-cultural religiosity created within and by these public interfaith meetings is interlinked with formations of citizenship. Keywords interfaith – minority religion – civilizing events – citizenship – multiculturalism – Norway

The chapter investigates dynamics of minority–majority religious interaction in two localities in Norway with a strong Muslim presence and considers the ways in which media, based on conflictual representations, comes to co-structure interaction relating to lived religion and conduct of citizenship. The chapter asks: How do Muslims active in interreligious initiatives in Kristiansand and Oslo relate to the media portrayals of Islam and in what ways does the coverage influence their engagement? The study argues that attending, and participating in, interreligious forums can be understood as a minority strategy to cope with, counter, and calibrate perceived negative media portrayals since these actions are ways of performing belonging to the Norwegian nation and conducting citizenship. As the interreligious forums provide an occasion for the Muslims to self-present in ways that allow them to demonstrate their Norwegian belonging, the Muslims' public conduct and self-representations, nonetheless, becomes restricted by the forums' diversity governance.

In the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as elsewhere in Europe, governance of religious diversity has become a matter of renewed concern. A unique aspect of the Scandinavian situation is the hegemonic status of the respective Lutheran Protestant majority churches, usually referred to as 'folk churches', with which the majority of the population associates, alongside a prevalence of high degrees of regional secularism. As such, the majority churches have played a key role as both instigators and organisers of several interfaith initiatives, and have thereby come to interact with the public sphere as providers of diversity governance. Based on country-level studies of policy documents on majority-church/interreligious relations and field studies, this article sets out to explore the prompting and configuration of majority-church-related interfaith initiatives concerning church-state relations and the governance of religious diversity.

Bringing together theories of media and policy frames of Norwegian Muslims as governance instruments, this article performs a microanalysis of the Norwegian 2015 de-radicalisation seminar Together against Radicalisation and Extremism as an instance of governance of religious diversity. The seminar was organised by an interfaith forum based in the conservatively Christian ‘Bible Belt’ of southern Norway and directed at local high school students who attended the seminar as part of their compulsory curricula. Analysing how Islam came to constitute a focal point to which the public presenters frequently related, this study explores how media and policy frames impact cultural encounters at the civic society level and points to how the seminar’s subtle workings reproduce significant religious, ethnic and cultural demarcations that stand in opposition to the seminar’s minority-inclusive objectives.

Applied to institute a distinct category of violence, the testimonial format of battered migrant women who escape their families is a recurrent narrative pattern in public discourses on honor-based violence. Through interviews with women categorized as victims of honor-based violence, this essay problematizes the presuppositions marking the narrated violence a distinguishable category including the testimonial format on which it derives. The critique is empirically based on resident-interviews and participant observation in a Danish refuge set to relieve honor-based violence and on resituating the analysis to include the socially, institutionally, nationally, and historically embedded setting of such interviews.