On January 21, American-Scandinavian Foundation invites you to a panel on “Race, Identity, and Belonging” in the Nordic countries. In this discussion, panelists Elizabeth Löwe Hunter (Ph.D. Candidate, African American Studies, UC Berkeley), Jasmine Kelekay (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology, UC Santa Barbara), and Susani Mahadura (journalist and filmmaker), with moderator and ASF Fellow Ethelene Whitmire (Professor/Chair, Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison) will explore issues related to the present-day realities of ethnic and national belonging in the Nordic countries.

More details will be added closer to the date; please check back to this page for more details. This panel continues a series on inclusion and ethnicity in the Nordic countries. The September 2020 discussion “Equity, Inclusion, and Immigration in the Nordic Countries“ and January 2021 discussion “Race in the Colonial Past and Present” are now available to stream.

Please send audience questions ahead of the discussion to info@amscan.org. Select questions will be chosen for a Q&A following the conversation. Registration is required; please sign up at the link above.

Support has been provided by the Consulate General of Finland in New York.

*Due to the wide level of engagement during the chat for this event, this video is scheduled to premiere on Saturday, January 22 at 6 PM ET, to enable any interested viewers or audience members unable to attend to also chat and discuss throughout the video. It will also be available to stream immediately after.*

See a Transcript of the Event Viewer Discussion Here.

Elizabeth Löwe Hunter specializes in articulations of racism in a Western European ‘raceless’ context, specifically Denmark. She examines discursive and material conditions for national belonging across race, gender, sexuality, nationality and spatiality in the contemporary metropolis.  Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in African American Studies at UC Berkeley, California, with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She earned her MA in Cross-Cultural Studies from the University of Copenhagen and her BA in Cultural Encounters from Roskilde University.

Susani Mahadura has become a household name in Finnish media through her award-winning national radio program Mahadura & Özberkan which focuses on social and political issues in Finnish society. Ms. Mahadura and Yagmur Özberkan were awarded the Red Cross prize for courageous and uncompromising journalism in 2018. Her first film Ikuisesti sinun x3 was a short animation, which tells the director’s mother’s love story. The film was shown at the Artova festival where it won the audience prize and was shown at Helsinki International Film Festival 2014 & 2015, with further screenings in India, China and Germany. She has also appeared as a narrator on the 24H Europe – project, a 24h documentary film about young people in Europe, which was one of TV history’s longest documentaries.

Jasmine Kelekay is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Black studies. She is currently a visiting researcher at CEMFOR (the Center for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism) at Uppsala University and in the Department of Criminology at Stockholm University. Her work explores the relationship between racialization and criminalization, with a particular focus on constructions of Blackness, the social control of African diasporic communities, and the ways in which African diasporic communities construct counter-hegemonic identities, discourses, and movements in response to racial oppression.

Ethelene Whitmire is a professor and the chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is a former American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow, a Fulbright scholar at the University of Copenhagen, and a recipient of grants from the Lois Roth Endowment and Scan Design for research related to her current research project, African Americans in 20th Century Denmark.

She is the author of Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian.