“ Something is at Stake ” : Northern European Cultural Studies Where , How , and Why ?

In this article, I address the current state of cultural studies in Northern Europe and more specifically in the Nordic countries, especially in Denmark. I take my point of departure in offering an answer to the question, what is cultural studies anyhow? and raise some questions about its future directions. From that, I then discuss how we can reason about regional cultural studies since in so doing we are caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, it provides a way to nuance hegemonic histories and ways of mapping the international field but, on the other hand, it also inevitably leads to new generalizations and new inclusions and exclusions. I go on to examine first the (im)possibility of scaling (regional, national, etc.) and, next, the challenge it raises at different levels of setting, i.e., Northern Europe, the Nordic countries, and Denmark. Finally, I focus on national, i.e., Danish cultural studies and return to the question of the future of the discipline.

[90] Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 "Wrestling with the Angles" "Wrestling with the angels" is a metaphor introduced by Stuart Hall, director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University from 1969 to 1979, in an article entitled "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies" from 1992.The metaphor is complex since it refers to the ambition to deliver a critique of power in society and academia but also the ambition to keep cultural studies dynamic and open to both external and internal critique.The metaphor articulates how cultural studies operates in the dilemma of being "noisy," at one and the same time contesting and contested.
Since 1992, cultural studies has struggled to match the new world order in the wake of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; the rise of new global tensions and agendas, signified by 9/11 (2001) and the war on terror; and a general crisis of the New Left in western societies that had spawned cultural studies.Power has been much more complicated to identify as well as "the common good" as phrased by another key figure in cultural studies, Raymond Williams.This is because local and global challenges are intermingled in new and complex ways, and the social movements that may provide future solutions are diverse and split.However, the renewed global focus on culture and the obvious need to transgress rigid academic disciplines have also put cultural studies at the center of the humanities and the social sciences since it has been interdisciplinary from the beginning.It might even be argued that cultural studies, in some parts of the academic world, constitutes the new general study.Today, cultural studies has spread geographically, been mingled into still more disciplines, and multiplied into a range of subfields.The crisis has been mirrored by the success, which again -paradoxically -has caused a state of diffusion, the more so since cultural studies, from the outset, has resisted being a fixed and institutionalized discipline.
The question of regional cultural studies can only reinforce this dilemma since it witnesses both the success and the diffusion.Furthermore, regional cultural studies, be it defined as, for instance, North European, Nordic, or Danish, is captured in the paradox of scaling in the era of globalization (Herod 2011) and in the dilemma of being cultural studies in as well as of a given region -tending to construct the region that it is supposed to have found "out there."This is what happened to cultural studies in Britain at least, when it gradually turned into cultural studies of the British and came to rectify at the same time as it criticized.This article discusses these challenges and especially the interrelatedness of the struggle of cultural studies in general and of its North-European or Nordic or Danish appearance in particular.But let me begin by asking: Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 [91] "What is Cultural Studies Anyway"?
The subtitle of this section echoes another paradigmatic article in cultural studies, written by Richard Johnson (1987).He raises the question, admitting that cultural studies is a noisy academic field in the sense that it is defined not as much by a distinct object since culture is a polysemic term, as by its approach, namely, that of cultural critique, claiming the role of society's "watchdog," always snapping at the heels of institutions and structures of power.Cultural studies is thus said to be distinguished by asking questions, such as: what is done with culture, by whom, and for what purposes?Still, the article can also be read as a kind of self-critical reflection on, on the one hand, the legacy of (structural) Marxism due to the pitfalls of reducing culture to society, and, on the other hand, the legacy of the (thenstill) new wave of post-structuralism due to the inherent risk of reducing society and politics to culture.
Johnson's way is to ask for the specific inquiry of cultural studies, namely, the inquiry as to the forms of social life or rather the subjective forms of social life and the time-space constellations they enact and, not least, the inherent pressures or tendencies by which they move us, their force (Johnson 87: 66).According to Johnson, such forms are dynamic and almost impossible to grasp as such, but they can be deduced in their tendency through an analysis of the circuit of culture: from production through distribution to consumption and new production, etc.This circuit of culture is, Johnson argues, again stretched between, on the one hand, the universal or abstract vis-à-vis the singular or concrete and, on the other hand, the public (display) vis-à-vis the private (lives).Johnson's key example (1986/87) is the Mini-Metro car, produced by British Leyland in the 1980s, which was meant to rescue the British car industry (and economy).It was designed, marketed, and, in the end, also consumed as a national hero to conquer external enemies (industrial competitors) as well as internal critics (the workers' union and the communists) in postwar Britain by bringing new periods of welfare to the British working-as well as (lower-) middle-class families.And it brought new opportunities for dual-working families and their children in terms of mobility and flexibility whilst making them partners in the postwar consumer project.Power and empowerment were intertwined in the consumer society under construction, so distinctively manifested in "the nationalist sell" of the Mini-Metro, which, both literally and symbolically speaking, was meant to push foreign cars over the cliffs of Dover into the Channel.This image-thing was both a representation of postwar Britain and an effective presentation hereof.
By offering a reading of contemporary culture in one's own cultural context, much the same way as anthropologists had approached distant, exotic cultures, and at the same time focusing on the ordinary and the everyday instead of the exclusive or the deviant, cultural studies constituted an alternative to anthropology, sociology, and art history.And by introducing the circuit of culture, Johnson and [92] Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 the Birmingham School also distanced themselves from their forerunners at the Frankfurt School and the former tradition of critical theory.Contrary to, in particular, Adorno, the Birmingham School was interested in consumption not only as a mass phenomenon and a prerequisite for formal production (be it industrial or artistic) -but as a sort of distributed, productive practice in itself.Johnson, in his article from 1986/87, reminds of Lukács' analysis of the British brewer's slogan "What we want is Watneys," which, in its critique of the commercial for turning consumers into passive dupes of consumption, misses out on the multiple enjoyments and social practices involved in both beer drinking and slogan speaking.The analysis grasps the direction of power, but not the empowerment, according to Johnson.In their rereading of the Frankfurt School Lash and Lury ( 2007) discuss the notion of power in Adorno's work in terms of a relation between "potesta" and "pontensa," which they now interpret as a tension between being (having had the power to become) and becoming (having the potential to become).From this revision of the issue of power, they analyze a range of examples from the new global culture industries (from Toy Story to Nike) that they call virtuals: image-things consumers can both relate to and interact with in multiple ways within the framing of the brand.The possibility of critique, then, lies in identifying what cannot come into existence within such a framing in terms of the common or public good or new forms of life.Thereby, critique itself has changed from a more political to a more ethical stand, as also suggested by, for instance, Bal (2002), Zylinska (2005), and Couldry (2010).I shall return to that at the end regarding the implications of the performative turn in cultural studies, the way this turn has been translated in Danish research.

Transnational Cultural Studies
Talking about cultural studies almost inevitably leads to critical theory as it was renewed by the Frankfurt School and this again critically revised by the Birmingham School etc.However, in the last decades, this history of origin and the subsequent establishment of a certain (north)western canon have been counteracted by a range of scholars, not least from non-(north)western regions, and accused of echoing an all-too-well-known narrative of, in this case, academic hegemony (Morley & Chen 1996;Stratton & Ang 1996;Chen 1998).Stratton and Ang, for instance, do not accept the story of influence that says that it all started in a European center and from there spread via the West (the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.) to the rest (the former communist East, Southeast Asia, etc.).They claim such a story of influence characterizes the same hierarchies that signify global economic, political, and cultural development and it is important to rewrite it as such a story, along with telling other stories of the disseminated and maybe strange cultural studies.
Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 [93] Since then, many such stories have been brought to the global public, for instance, Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (1998).They have again raised questions about new as well as old structures of center-periphery and possible reifications of the latter in terms of regional identities -for example, Asia today is a highly differentiated region and the very notion Asian is accordingly diverse.The subaltern is not, and never has been, one.Chen, the editor, acknowledges this and calls for a critical internationalism or syncretism by which each agent takes a geopolitical position, respecting that it is relative to that of other(s) and always in itself inherited in a complex global game of power, knowledge, and scaling (Chen 1998).At the same time, he insists that nonwestern regions can and should benefit from broad coalitions and provisional standings, such as the Inter-Asian in cultural studies and elsewhere.
Implied in the center-periphery discussion of influence and eventual dialogue is the delicate question of language.The academic monopoly of the English language worldwide -and not least in Asia -only seems to grow proportionally with the overall academic field.The situation constitutes a very principal, political as well as very concrete, practical problem at international conferences (Crossroads), in journals, and in publishing at all.And it is a condition shared by nonwestern as well as western countries, for instance, the Nordic countries (for a thorough discussion of the consequences not only for researchers and research but also for the very production of knowledge, see Alasuutari 2004;Fornäs & Lehtonen 2005).There are no easy answers to this challenge, and whereas cultural studies in English is spread all over the world, cultural studies from non-English-speaking countries and in other languages has to either be translated into English, or accept its desolation and absence from international dialogue.
Its upside is that cultural studies in English provides a common point of reference in a situation of general diffusion.From the very start, cultural studies has resisted institutionalization in the sense that it has refused to be boxed in a fixed discipline and insisted on an interdisciplinary approach.Throughout the twentieth century, cultural studies has instead spread to anthropology, sociology, and more so in terms of new disciplinary "halfies," such as cultural anthropology, cultural sociology.In the twenty-first century, the process has continued due to a general dual process of disciplinary differentiation and integration, caused by the new "flexible" and modularized research and education system -in Europe reinforced by the mainstreaming of research and higher education within the European Union and the general wave of New Public Management.
Simultaneously, cultural studies has multiplied into a range of sub-studies, in the beginning, for instance, gender, youth, gay, and race and ethnic studies, and later on, for example, (sub)urban studies, mobility studies, studies in visual and material culture, and in experience design.This internal differentiation has continued and been intensified by regular theoretical turns: from structuralism to post-structuralism, and as already predicted by Johnson (1987), a post-post- [94] Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 structuralism.Each of these bigger turns has made an epoch (differently so in various regions and institutions), with each having their minor moments that again have introduced new objects or foci.The post-poststructuralist turn has since been rephrased as the performative turn and as "that which does or makes things happen in the moment of naming" (Sørensen et al. 2010), which signals a research interest in the material, spatial, and sensual or emotional that has followed the linguistic or semiotic focus of post-structuralism.

Northern Europe, the Nordic Countries, or Scandinavia?
The first question that arises is: what is Northern Europe or the Nordic countries?
The answer depends on the premise of scaling: geographic, economic, political, historical, or linguistic?In Signifying Europe, Fornäs (2011) has discussed the paradox implied in either of these and consequently the impossibility of fundamentally defining (regions of) Europe.Instead, he suggests examining the symbols used to represent Europe and Europeanness, both inside and outside Europe and at different levels.Since scaling is nevertheless also impossible to avoid, I will, in the following, introduce the common ways of distinguishing (parts of) Northern Europe and the inherent dilemmas (see also Eskola & Vainikkala 1994).Northern Europe would, in the broadest sense of the term, include parts of Germany, France, the British Isles, the Netherlands, and maybe even parts of Poland and Russia.The narrower term would include the Nordic countries, and this would again in a rather broad sense mean Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, as well as the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), besides Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the Åland Islands.A tighter definition of the Nordic countries would exclude the Baltic states.A narrower term would be Scandinavia, which again would refer to the historical and cultural entity of the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (with closely related Germanic languages as opposed to, in this case, Finnic), in others to the geographical peninsulas of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.It would, in principle, not include Greenland and Finland even if it is often done in practice nowadays, whereas it would (most often) include the Faroe Islands and Iceland. 1 Yet another definition would refer to the shared roots in the pre-Christian Norse (mythology) and the Viking era, but, then again, it would widen to include at least northern Germany.
If we take the term the Nordic countries as a point of departure, and define them as minus the Baltic states, there are still major differences already in terms of acting on the European and international political, economic, and military stage: whereas Norway is outside the EU, Sweden and Finland are not members of NATO.On the other hand, there is an extensive social, cultural, and academic exchange through the Nordic Council, the Nordic Culture Fund, and the research organization Nordforsk respectively, including, for example, the Nordic Centre of Excellence Programme on Welfare Research.The center conducts research on the Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 [95] historical evolution of the Nordic welfare model and its ability to adapt to changing external circumstances as well as handle the internal pressure on welfare rights and institutions (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012).The Nordic countries are often seen as, and understand themselves as, a political as well as cultural entity due to the way they are associated with their particular formation of the welfare state and society in terms of extended social rights; differentiated democratic institutions, not least in terms of public education; and considerable freedom of speech.In this sense, they are distinguished as the hallmark of Europe as well.But the Nordic countries are also considered, and consider themselves, to be on the periphery of Europe (and the world) due to their geographical remoteness, relatively small populations and economies, and comparatively minor languages (cf.Fornäs & Lehtonen 2005).
Accordingly, the Nordic countries share the paradox of being both at the center and on the periphery and being split into a number of internal centers and peripheries.The southern parts of the Nordic countries have up till now benefited from their closeness to central Europe, whereas the northern parts have suffered due to the distance and, instead, looked to the British Isles or the American continent.At the same time, the distances between the center and the periphery within each country have grown -potentially fatiguing, for instance, northern Norway, northern Sweden, and northern Finland, not to mention Greenland (formerly a Danish province, but now an autonomous community that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark) and thereby also minorities, such as the Sami and the Inuit.However, globalization, in combination with digitalization, is changing the power balances of modernity, for example, by making both northern Norway and Greenland members of the Arctic (the polar region consisting of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Greenland, Norway, the United States, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland).This region is, in terms of natural resources, global infrastructures, and military interests, becoming increasingly important to international politics and the global economy, and along with the conscious positioning as such, the (economic, political, and cultural) rights of the region's minorities are more forcefully put on the agenda.

Cultural Studies in and of the North
We do not -yet?-have an anthology on cultural studies in the Nordic countries or Scandinavia that corresponds to, for instance, Trajectories (1998).One explanation might be the dilemma of regional cultural studies: criticisms of British cultural studies have pointed out how it tended to be studies of the regional that both rectified and identified.Another explanation might be that cultural studies has developed differently in the various Nordic countries (for a thorough discussion of the disciplinary crossroads in each country, see Eskola & Vainikkala 1994).What we have instead is a number of introductions to the field, each with their accentuations since the 1980s, and lately also an overall introduction to the theories and [96] Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 themes of cultural studies, published in Norwegian and Danish (Sørensen et al. 2010).In addition, this publication includes an introduction that maps the rather different pathways cultural studies has taken in the Nordic countries as well as the many contributions from Nordic researchers to international cultural studies (Alasuutari 1995;Fornäs 1995;Lehtonen 2000;Schröder et al. 2003).
As argued here, cultural studies has, since the early 1980s, established a rather strong research agenda in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, initially studying youth cultures, and with a common resource, namely, the journal Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research (now with a more sociological profile).Today, the national research center ACSIS in Sweden constitutes a resource for cultural studies throughout the Nordic countries, including the biennial conferences and the e-journal Culture Unbound.Finland has a national association of cultural studies, and along with Denmark and Norway, it has a journal in its own language to do with the broader field of interdisciplinary cultural research.In all the Nordic countries, there is also a range of courses in cultural studies, whereas study programs and departments are established according to the broader field of transdisciplinary studies of culture (often also within an even-broader umbrella, including, for instance, art, communication and/or media).In all the Nordic countries, the maxim has come true, namely, that cultural studies has influenced research agendas more than institutions.In each of the Nordic countries, the critical tradition is very much alive in research, now most often in combination with more local research traditions.In Sweden, there has been a particularly fruitful convergence with ethnology and ethnography, in Finland with sociology and political science, in Denmark with literary and media studies, and in Norway with anthropology and cultural policy studies.Up till now, only Sweden has a publication on national cultural studies, in which these particular convergences between international cultural studies and local academic research agendas are addressed more systematically (Axelsson & Fornäs 2007).
Due to the historically close cultural relations between the Nordic countries, Scandinavian studies has been established worldwide as an interdisciplinary academic field of area studies that covers topics related to Scandinavia and the Nordic countries, including their languages, literature, history, culture, and society.The field of Scandinavian studies, typically but not always (for instance, not in German "Skandinavistik"), adopts the broader definition to include Finland and the Finnish language.The tradition of Scandinavian area studies is very similar to what in Germany and other countries is called "Kulturwissenschaften" and as such they form a distinct tradition extremely different from, but sometimes also engaged in, cultural studies to the extent that they integrate critical theory and cultural critique.Along with the general academic epoch of post-structuralism and deconstruction, not only Scandinavian studies but also area studies in general have fertilized a self-reflective position as to the co-construction of the region they study.Nordic literature and culture have also been features of collaborative Nor-Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 [97] dic research projects related to, among others, feminist studies, media studies, and literary studies (see, for example, Povlsen 2007).In the last-mentioned, research in the Nordic countries has, moreover, been research on the construction of "the Nordic" or "the North" from cultural studies-related perspectives even if it has not been the only and primary agenda.

Danish Cultural Studies
The closest we have come to a national organization for cultural studies in Denmark is a national network for cultural research and analysis, funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research | The Humanities (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006), which published a series of four books in Danish.The series provided a broad overview of cultural studies-related research in Denmark at the beginning of the millennium, organized in four thematic subjects that mark the actual epoch and its moments: cultural critique and art criticism, cultural diversity and multiculturalism, space and material culture, cultures of taste, and cultural mediation (Bech & Sørensen 2005;Povlsen & Sørensen 2005;Erikson, Jantzen, Madsen, & Sørensen 2006;Sørensen & Zerlang 2006).
In Denmark, we have no "proper" cultural studies research center, but a range of university departments and academic milieus engaged in the discipline.Both in terms of research and education, they have positioned themselves vis-à-vis each other and each has adopted a profile.At the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University respectively (the old and established universities), there has been a strong affiliation with the arts and art criticism and an intellectual engagement in, on the one hand, the Frankfurt School, and, on the other hand, a local tradition called "kulturradikalisme" (cultural radicalism).It is a modernist and reformist tradition very similar to the critique voiced by the Frankfurt School, but has artists, writers, and cultural critics (intellectuals) at the forefront and engaged in public debates on literacy, sexuality, architecture and design, and pedagogy.At the University of Southern Denmark (main campus in Odense), the affiliations have been somewhat different and more at home with the Birmingham School in combination with another local tradition of cultural critique, stemming from broader social and educationalist movements and "classic" social democracy.Within this tradition, the word "folkeoplysning" (public education) means self-education by the people.At the new universities, Roskilde and Aalborg universities respectively, cultural studies-related activities have been involved in, on the one hand, migration and minority issues, and, on the other hand, the new experience economy.Other relevant agents today are Copenhagen Business School and the IT University of Copenhagen due to their massive appeal to academics educated in cultural studies and now engaged in cultural enterprises in a broad sense.Titles, such as Design as IT, Art & Technology, Experience Economy, Performance Design, etc., indicate a new horizon, a revitalized field of culture studies that is not only an [98] Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 umbrella for different disciplinary approaches but comes together with the aim of engaging in aesthetic and cultural transformation.
Since trying to give an overall survey of Danish cultural studies would be impossible and selecting a sample of outstanding work would be subjective and unfair, I shall only briefly mention some directions I see the discipline taking, and provide a single, hopefully illustrative, example hereof.In his article from 1986/87, Johnson outlined the circuit of culture as the object of cultural studies.He also warned against paying too much attention to either the productive or the consumptive end of the cultural circuit since it has to be seen as a continuum.He further advised focusing on forms since they not only mirror but also act as the force of their time-space.A number of scholars and research groups have since then taken this turn to performance and performativity further, for instance, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), initially founded by Mieke Bal, and an inspiration to many research milieus in Denmark.Whereas it has often been claimed that Bal, through her critique of cultural studies, positions herself outside the tradition, she has here been seen to take the position of an engaged dialogue (Sørensen et al. 2010).In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), Bal suggests cultural studies be repositioned as cultural analysis, taking the analysis of dynamic aesthetic objects in their cultural embedding and operation as their agenda.She further addresses the concept of performance along with other significant traveling concepts or rather the dual concept of performance and performativity, which is said to be found in art and culture as well as critique and research.Whereas performance signifies a distilled form of cultural expression, most often framed as art, performativity denotes the way it, as a popular subjective form, is cited, circulated, and negotiated -assembling the kind of time-space form Johnson is looking for.Only, Bal's point is about engagement and ethics rather than critique from a range of positions, such as citizen, artist, and researcher.
The dual concept of performance and performativity is addressed by a number of Nordic scholars too, also in international publications (Gade & Jerslev 2005;Jansson & Lagerkvist 2009;Knudsen & Waade 2009).Further, studies like these have been inspired by post-structuralists, such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, but have also discussed the traditions of ethnomethodology, microsociology, and actor-network theory as well as studies on body and space, emotionality, affect, and mobility.In this sense, they have brought both agency and materiality (or rather sensuality) back into cultural studies and enhanced a (new) focus on cultural "realness" or "liveliness."Another source of inspiration has been posthumanism and, in particular, the human geographers Hayden Lorrimer (2005) and Nigel Thrift (2007), who have introduced the concepts of non-and more-thanrepresentational theory respectively, the point of both being to study life and life processes rather than meanings or representations.
In Nye kulturstudier [Cultural Studies] (2010]), the authors give an example from Denmark to illustrate the epoch of performativity as a cultural mode and Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 [99] more-than-representation as a research agenda, namely, the Danish-Sudanese reggae artist and rapper Natasja and her song (and video) "Gi' mig Danmark tilbage" [Give Denmark Back to Me], from her CD I Danmark er jeg født [I Am Born in Denmark] (2007).The CD came out the same year she died in a violent car crash in Jamaica, where she had just won the big rap contest and was about to make her national as well as international breakthrough.In this song, she mimics Danish cultural traditions, from the Christian founder of the folk high school movement, F. S. Grundtvig, to the fairy-tale writer H. C. Andersen, both from the nineteenth century, to the heirs of twentieth-century cultural radicalism as well as the "true" social democrats of the twenty-first century, namely, the proponents of the free city of Christiania as well as the youth center "Ungeren."The implicit reference point of the song (and video) is a campaign by the (right-wing) Danish People's Party (a party founded in the 1980s) against immigration and immigrants.In the song, Natasja plays with the paradox that with her mixed background, she is the one to reclaim the "real" Denmark of liberalness and fairness and wrestle it out of the hands of neo-conservatism and a general moral and political backlash, including an inherent romanticized vision of national origin and authenticity.However, the performative effect stems not so much from the words and the specific references or even from the alternatives but rather from the energetic display of music, dance, visuals, and words that displays the atmosphere and free spirit of the country and nation that Denmark and the Danish would be. 2 As the song and video go on, old as well as new stereotypes are grasped with, engaging the listener or critic in the ambiguous process of culturally becoming.

Conclusion and Perspectives
The aim of this article has been to argue about the paradox of, on the one hand, the impossibility of defining national or regional cultural studies as well as the overall field of cultural studies, and, on the other hand, the necessity (and unavoidability) to do so in order to fight for an academic position at different levels from which to gain recognition and thereby the resources to keep the project alive and well.Critical theory, like cultural studies, has, from the mid-twentieth century on, constituted a dynamic center for trans-disciplinary cultural research, and has also been able to self-transform in a more vital, ethical, and active direction.Today, the project seems to have run out of steam, at least in the Nordic countries, notably due to its own resistance to institutionalization as well as its extreme reflectivity to the co-construction of the lifeworld it engages with.But my claim is that we still need cultural studies to go on exploring the possibilities of -and eventually the differences between -inter-and trans-disciplinarity and, based on this, produce studies focusing on how life takes shape and gains expression (Lorrimer 2005) in multiple and dynamic relations, experiences, and practices, insist- CultureUnbound, Volume 5, 2013    ing that knowledge is not universal, objective, etc., but inter-subjective, processual -and performative.AnneScott Sørensen, Ph.d. and associate professor, Institute for The Study of Culture, The Culture and Communication Section, University of Southern Denmark.Has written extensively on these subjects, for example a reader in cultural studies in Norwegian (2008) and in Danish (2010).Has directed a national network in Cultural Research and Analysis and been main editor of the network serial of four publications (2005-2006).E-mail: annescott@sdu.dkNotes 1 For an in-depth historical discussion in English, see U. Østergaard: "The Geopolitics of Nordic Identity: From Composite States to Nation States", http://diis.dk/graphics/CVer/Personlige_CVer/Holo-caust_and_Genocide/Publikationer/uffe_new_nordic.pdf. 2 Natasja: "Gi' mig Danmark tilbage" [Give Denmark Back to Me), I Danmark er jeg født [I Am Born in Denmark], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NONnUBKcNZI.