You’ll see how it is – it’s still that kind of city – here where one thing leads, shades into another; where footpath becomes road, road a roadstead, where the stone of the mountain turns to street-stone, and you’d almost believe the one were the other, and that where it all leads, the sole place […]
Racist speech does not function as an invitation to conversation. It does not offer reasons or arguments with which its audience can engage; and the visceral hostility it expresses effectively forecloses, rather than opens, the opportunity for further discussion. Caroline West, ‘Words That Silence? Freedom of expression and racist hate speech’, 2012. “We express ourselves […]
I have a commissioned chapter entitled ‘Re-coding nationalism: Islam, Muslims and Islamophobia in Norway before and after July 22 2011′, pp. 44-66 in the latest ‘Islamophobia Studies Yearbook 2016′, edited by Associate Professor Farid Hafez at the University of Salzburg, Austria. The volume is available by direct order from the publishers, New Academic Press in Vienna or from Amazon.com. […]
But race is the child of racism, not the father. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World And Me, 2015. Thinking through differences The drafting of a commissioned article on the contested concept of ‘race’ for a special issue of the Norwegian sociological journal Sosiologisk Tidsskrift later this year has availed me with an opportunity to re-visit […]
In response to recent groundless and fabricated claims in Norwegian media about the historical origins of Norwegian and international hate speech legislation from the Fritt Ord Foundation’s Director Knut Olav Åmås, I have together with Ervin Kohn of the Norwegian Centre Against Racism (ARS) and The Jewish Community in Oslo (Det Mosaiske Trossamfund) written the following op-ed, […]
As academic reviews go, it hardly gets any better than this review of my 2014 monograph Anders Breivik And The Rise Of Islamophobia (London and New York: Zed Books) by Alisa Perkins at Western Michigan University in the American Anthropological Association (AAA)’s flagship journal American Ethnologist (AE), ranked 10 out of 84 anthropological journals worldwide […]
Together with Olav Elgvin at Fafo (Institute For Applied Social Research) I have been commissioned to write this year’s entry on ‘Norway’ in the annual Yearbook of Muslims in Europe (vol. 7, 2016), edited by Prof Oliver Scharbrodt at the University of Chester in the UK, which is out now. In this chapter, we focus […]
Highlights from Mark Emmerson’s (University of Queensland, Australia) review of my monograph ‘Anders Breivik And The Rise of Islamophobia’ in the Taylor & Francis ‘Journal of Contemporary European Studies’ 2015: “Bangstad is an emphatic writer who is clearly emotionally vested in the issues that he discusses, yet this is not a weakness, and instead gives […]
Freedom of opinion is a farce, unless factual information is guaranteed, and the facts themselves are not in dispute. Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and politics’, 1966. On October 20 2014, an unemployed fifty-seven year old white Norwegian man entered a supermarket in an Eastern suburb of the Norwegian capital of Oslo. Walking through the supermarket, he […]
THE RELATION OF FEAR AND PHOBIA TO SOCIAL INTEGRATION Presentation for Conference on Xenophobia and Social Integration at the Institute For Advanced Studies (IAS)/Princeton Institute For International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), Princeton University, Oct 1 to 3 2015. Given by Sindre Bangstad (cand. Polit., PhD in Anthropology), Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Norway at Aaron Burr […]