Christine Jacobsen and Mette Andersson

”Gaza in Oslo. Social imaginaries in the political engagement of Norwegian minority youth”

In winter 2009 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Young people of visible minority and Muslim background were central actors in the demonstrations. The public manifestation of Muslim identities and symbols during the demonstrations, and clashes between some of the young demonstrators and the police, fuelled already polarized debates about the integration of immigrant youth and Islamic radicalism in the Norwegian public debate. In this paper we investigate how social imaginaries related to Islam, secular leftist internationalism, and integration nations mediated engagement in the Gaza question. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and web-ethnography we follow the engagement of youth organised in a multi-ethnic Oslo mosque on- and off-line. The analysis focuses on two questions: How were the youth causing tumults framed within the different social imaginaries?  Can the demonstrations usefully be analysed as an event in a series of “multicultural crises” in Western nation-states?

The paper will be commented upon by Laura Adwan from the Dept. of social anthropology, University of Bergen.

Mette Andersson is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen. She has published extensively on minority youth, identity politics, sports and racism. Contact: mette.andersson@sos.uib.no

Christine M Jacobsen is a Senior Researcher at Uni Global and Research Coordinator at IMER/UIB, University of Bergen. She has published extensively on Islam and Muslim youth in Europe, as well as on gender and migration. Contact: christine.jacobsen@global.uib.no