Contested Hospitalities in a Time of Migration: Religious and Secular Counterspaces in the Nordic Region

This book explores the duality of openness and restriction in approaches to migrants in the Nordic countries. As borders have become less permeable to non-Europeans, it presents research on civil society practices that oppose the existing border regimes and examine the values that they express. The volume offers case studies from across the region that demonstrate opposition to increasingly restricted borders and which seek to offer hospitality to migrant. One topic is whether these practices impact and transform the Nordic Protestant trajectory. The book considers whether such actions are indicative of new sensibilities and values in which traditional categories and binaries are becoming less relevant. It also discusses what these practices of hospitality indicate about the changing relationship between voluntary organizations and the Nordic welfare states in the time of migration. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and religious studies with interests in migration, civil society resistance and social values.

Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is the author of The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin and the co-editor of Egalitarianism in Scandinavia, Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity, and Difference, and Engaged Anthropology.

Trygve Wyller is Professor of Christian Social Practice at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the co-editor of Borderland Religion and The Spaces of Others - Heterotopic Spaces, and the co-author of Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age.