Organised Cultural Encounters: Practices of Transformation [1st ed.] 9783030428853, 9783030428860

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters (Lise Paulsen Galal, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen)....Pages 1-25
Tracing the Ideas of Organised Cultural Encounters (Lise Paulsen Galal, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen)....Pages 27-57
Guided Interactions: Scripting at Work (Lise Paulsen Galal, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen)....Pages 59-104
Orchestrated Turnarounds: Between Chaos and Order (Lise Paulsen Galal, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen)....Pages 105-147
Walking, Dancing, and Listening: Affect and Encounters (Lise Paulsen Galal, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen)....Pages 149-188
A Risky Business (Lise Paulsen Galal, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen)....Pages 189-215
Back Matter ....Pages 217-219

Citation preview

GLOBAL DIVERSITIES

Organised Cultural Encounters Practices of Transformation Lise Paulsen Galal Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

mpimmg

Global Diversities

Series Editors Steven Vertovec Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen, Germany Peter van der Veer Department of Religious Diversity Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen, Germany Ayelet Shachar Department of Ethics, Law, and Politics Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen, Germany

Over the past decade, the concept of ‘diversity’ has gained a leading place in academic thought, business practice, politics and public policy across the world. However, local conditions and meanings of ‘diversity’ are highly dissimilar and changing. For these reasons, deeper and more comparative understandings of pertinent concepts, processes and phenomena are in great demand. This series will examine multiple forms and configurations of diversity, how these have been conceived, imagined, and represented, how they have been or could be regulated or governed, how different processes of inter-ethnic or inter-religious encounter unfold, how conflicts arise and how political solutions are negotiated and practiced, and what truly convivial societies might actually look like. By comparatively examining a range of conditions, processes and cases revealing the contemporary meanings and dynamics of ‘diversity’, this series will be a key resource for students and professional social scientists. It will represent a landmark within a field that has become, and will continue to be, one of the foremost topics of global concern throughout the twenty-­first century. Reflecting this multi-disciplinary field, the series will include works from Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Law, Geography and Religious Studies. While drawing on an international field of scholarship, the series will include works by current and former staff members, by visiting fellows and from events of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Relevant manuscripts submitted from outside the Max Planck Institute network will also be considered. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15009

Lise Paulsen Galal Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

Organised Cultural Encounters Practices of Transformation

Lise Paulsen Galal Department of Communication and Arts Roskilde University Roskilde, Denmark

Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen Department of Communication and Arts Roskilde University Roskilde, Denmark

ISSN 2662-2580     ISSN 2662-2599 (electronic) Global Diversities ISBN 978-3-030-42885-3    ISBN 978-3-030-42886-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Michael Jones / EyeEm This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The ideas and perspectives developed in Organised Cultural Encounters: Practices of Transformation are the result of insights harvested from a collaborative research project on organised cultural encounters. The fieldwork that forms the basis for the analyses in this book was conducted in different domains: interfaith dialogue work (fieldwork by Lise Paulsen Galal); a youth diversity project called the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors (fieldwork by Helle Bach Riis); training activities related to diversity management (fieldwork by Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen); volunteer tourism (fieldwork by Lene Bull Christiansen); and a community dance project (fieldwork by Rasmus Præstmann Hansen). Besides the two authors, the other project members have contributed to this book with research data and through discussions during the project period. Lene has also been involved in the structuring of the volume through her participation in the writing of the book proposal. Thanks to all of them for inspiring and generous collaboration. Even though the performance incentives of the neoliberal university are heavily individualised, research in our view is always a dialogical accomplishment, and in that sense the collaborative nature of our research project is not unusual. What is perhaps less common is that this book refers to and analyses fieldnotes and interviews produced by all five research participants. This means that, in addition to analysing our own and each other’s material, we—the authors of this book—have also had v

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access not only to the publications of the other participants but also to their “raw material”. This, of course, implies that we as authors need to adhere to the same ethical responsibilities towards the research participants as the fieldworkers have done—both in terms of formal ethics and ethics in practice (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). It also means that it is necessary to consider the ethics associated with analysing—and writing about—data material not produced by oneself, which also implies laying some kind of claim to that material. In the book, we have adopted a politics of citation that aims to acknowledge the contributions of all the participants in the research project. However, the analyses and their merits and flaws are our responsibility. Where possible, we have supported the analysis of our co-researchers’ data by drawing on their writings on their own case material, but still with our analytical focus in mind. It is, however, not a straightforward venture to analyse other people’s fieldnotes and interviews. Reflecting upon the fieldwork related to his doctoral research into urban politics and responses to asylum, Jonathan Darling underlines: The need to consider more carefully the ways in which fieldwork produces more than simply “data”, narratives or notes to be analysed and represented. Fieldwork produces sensibilities and dispositions, it alters individuals and may orientate them differently towards others. […] sensitivity to context is never a final or full accomplishment. Context and positionality are always shifting beneath our feet as research develops, […]. As such, fieldwork demands the continual acknowledgement that the accounts we produce are incomplete reflections of a “here and now” never to be repeated. (Darling, 2014, p. 211).

This “more than data” can, of course, be partly recorded in fieldnotes. But the embodied sensations and collective atmospheres that linger in the memory, and at least partly take you back to a given situation, will not be evoked in the same way in a co-reader. When Kirsten writes in her fieldnotes that she was overwhelmed by an acute sensation of discomfort, Lise can of course take this into account as something that occurred—but for her it does not linger as a mood. And when Lise describes how she often

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feels “high” after participating in an interfaith encounter, this sensation does not emanate from the fieldnotes, and neither does it capture Kirsten in any straightforward way. During the joint writing process, the authors have had the opportunity to continually correct each other’s writings in a different way than the rest of the research group. This will probably also manifest itself in the book, in that the analyses based on each author’s own fieldwork come across as richer. Roskilde, Denmark Roskilde, Denmark 

Lise Paulsen Galal Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

References Darling, J. (2014). Emotions, encounters and expectations: The uncertain ethics of ‘the field’. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 6(2), 201–212. Guillemin, M., & Gillam, L. (2004). Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 10(2), 261–280.

Acknowledgements

This book would not exist without the willingness of the organisers and participants at the various organised cultural encounters to allow us to participate and observe, as well as to conduct both formal and informal interviews. Huge thanks to all of them. Research is always a collaborative process, which moves along through conversations in all kinds of formal and informal settings. We express our warmest appreciation to all of the numerous people, from near and far, who have helped our project move on by asking difficult questions, making insightful comments, and listening patiently. We have also benefitted from patience over the last few busy months spent on finishing this book, when other collaborative research activities and writing projects have not proceeded quite as smoothly as they might have done. We thank Karen Risager, Ann Phoenix, and Sverre Raffnsøe, who have contributed with valuable input at different points during the process of refining our perspectives and arguments. Thanks to Mette Buchardt, Louise Tranekjær, Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, Jette Kofoed, and Dorthe Staunæs who each contributed with comments on one of the chapters during the final stage of writing, helping us to fine-tune our arguments and perspectives. Finally, thanks to the Independent Research Fund Denmark, which funded the research project “The Organised Cultural Encounter” that ran from September 2013 to December 2017, with funding ID DFF-1319-00093. ix

Contents

1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters  1 2 Tracing the Ideas of Organised Cultural Encounters 27 3 Guided Interactions: Scripting at Work 59 4 Orchestrated Turnarounds: Between Chaos and Order105 5 Walking, Dancing, and Listening: Affect and Encounters149 6 A Risky Business189 Index217

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List of Boxes

Box 3.1 Box 3.2 Box 3.3 Box 3.4 Box 3.5 Box 4.1 Box 4.2 Box 5.1 Box 5.2

Training Courses for Municipal Integration Workers The Dialogue Pilot Course The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors Organizer Against Discrimination Global Citizenship Training Danish–Arab Interfaith Dialogue Programme Heavenly Days Community Dance Faith in Harmony

65 71 79 81 93 112 124 164 177

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1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters

How do we live with (cultural) difference? Or perhaps: how can we deal with all the conflicts in our contemporary world that are perceived to be associated with cultural difference? “We don’t want to, take it away” seems to be the preeminent political answer of governments, as well as a prominent trend of “public opinion” across the world, or more specifically: the geopolitical West of this world. This book is about a particular genre of intervention—which we call organised cultural encounters— into encounters with difference. It is a genre that seeks to establish a positive answer to the first question by working on, or dealing with, the conflictual breaking points addressed in the second. This genre of intervention can be found across the globe, but in this book we explore how it plays out in contexts that are either located in Denmark or related to a Danish organisation. In that limited sense, the book is also about Denmark. In Denmark, as elsewhere, over the last 30 years or so cultural difference has become an increasingly heated political topic, to a large extent through its association with immigration. In particular, the presence of newcomers from countries deemed culturally alien and religiously different have sparked an almost excessive interest in how to support © The Author(s) 2020 L. P. Galal, K. Hvenegård-Lassen, Organised Cultural Encounters, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0_1

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cohesiveness, integration, co-existence, and so on; in other words, how can we mould the perceived threat of disorder, disintegration, and conflict into its opposite? While this was predominantly formulated in a language of inclusion during the last decades of the twentieth century, the language of exclusion has gradually taken over during the current century. Policies at both national and local levels have increasingly defined and addressed problem areas in openly racialised terms. These include immigration and border control, gang crime, religious extremism and terrorism, labour-force marginalisation, ethnic and social “ghettos”, Muslim head coverings (the hijab and the niqab—the latter mostly called the “burka”), and honour-based violence (cf. Brochmann & Hagelund, 2012; Jensen, Vitus, & Schmidt, 2018; Keskinen, Skaptadóttir, & Toivanen, 2019; Keskinen, Tuori, Irni, & Mulinari, 2016). As well as being prioritised areas of government policies, these issues have also been taken up by civil society activists and associations who concentrate their efforts—often economically or ideologically supported by a neoliberal policy focus on civil society—at the interpersonal and community level as the primary locus of transformation (Martikainen, 2016). Drawing on ideas about social integration and co-existence, some of these efforts belong to the genre of organised cultural encounters, in which the problems associated with cultural difference are addressed through programmes that seek to foster good—or meaningful—encounters (Valentine, 2008). These programmes rest on particular problem formulations, such as in the following descriptions by two Danish associations that organise dialogue meetings (a youth and a faith-based organisation, respectively): Dialogue is necessary in a modern world characterised by contrast and change. This is a world where we meet each other, want to cooperate—and indeed have to do so, across borders, cultures, viewpoints and motivations. Dialogue can help overcome prejudice and create understanding of other people’s perspectives. It can show us new ways of perceiving the world. And it can expand our horizons. Dialogue enables reaching across an abyss of difference, as long as we see and recognise each other for what we are: different yet all human beings in the same world. (Helde, 2012, p. 10)

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• We cooperate with partners in Scandinavia, Asia, Africa and the Middle East—and have a long history of gathering people across religious beliefs and cultural affiliations. • We practice dialogue to achieve mutual understanding, solve conflicts or avoid the conflicts from even arise. • We do dialogue workshops in educational institutions, among civil society activist and in the religious sphere. We therefore meet people on many levels—from young people studying theology to high profiled religious leaders in for example the large-scale project Syrian Leaders. (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.) Thus, the “abyss of difference” is a problem that can be overcome through encounters and dialogue. This genre of intervention that works, in its broadest definition, through the organisation of face-to-face encounters, is adopted across a wide variety of social relations that are deemed in need of support, reparation, or transformation. Occurring across different social fields, examples include: interfaith activities, cultural exchange programmes, reconciliation projects, community cohesion initiatives, and projects associated with the inclusion of immigrants (Christiansen, Galal, & Hvenegård-Lassen, 2017). Each subscribes to their own definition of the problem, the purpose, and particular techniques of intervention, but they all rest on a definition of something “bad” that exists before the encounter, which is then worked on in the here-and-now of that encounter, to be effected after the encounter through a desired transformation of or among the participants. We have adopted the umbrella term “organised cultural encounters” to cover this broad range of intervention strategies. Considered as social practices, they share features, but they also differ, and in the research literature they are mostly dealt with through other classifications.1 We are not arguing that the gathering together of these intervention practices under the headline “organised cultural encounters” is more accurate than other classifications. We do argue, however, that this conceptualisation allows us to approach old or comparatively well-known phenomena in new ways. The term “organised cultural encounters” was coined during a collaborative research project2 involving fieldwork in five contexts in

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which encounters between people who are perceived to be culturally different were organised in order to produce “positive” effects. That is: attempts at creating a transformative space in which what are defined as the negative outcomes of cultural encounters in everyday life (e.g. prejudice, stereotypes, and conflicts) can be overcome and replaced by such aspects as understanding, communality, and peace. These five studies which are located in different social domains, all related to Denmark, form the empirical backbone of the analyses in this book.3 Across these studies and domains, we are curious about the performativity and practices of organised cultural encounters and their relation to the wider contexts within which they are played out. Our attention is directed towards what is (re)produced (e.g. positions, relations, difference, sameness, affect, knowledge) within these social spaces and how. This priority implies that we are circumventing the normative question of how change may best be enacted or how encounters may ideally achieve this aim. Given that organised cultural encounters are intervention strategies, and thus purposefully orchestrated events, it is not surprising that they are often studied through evaluative approaches that aim to establish “best practice” models through measuring the outcome in terms of success or failure (for examples, see Agergaard, 2011; Agrawal & Barratt, 2014; Fotel & Andersen, 2003; Kozlovic, 2003; Laurence, 2014). Seen from our perspective, the problem with these studies is that what actually happens becomes subsumed under what ought to have happened. This is a widespread tendency within the field of education, where intercultural education programmes (some of which could be conceptualised as organised cultural encounters), as well as research into these, predominantly work through developmental models (Perry & Southwell, 2011). These models conceptualise intercultural competence in individual terms, and research often aims to promote the spread of “best practice” cases. With respect to the programmes, this means that both aims and practices tend to become instrumental: a way of securing the current (power) state of affairs through different means (cf. Schoorman & Bogotch, 2010). David Coulby argues that the theorisation of intercultural education […] is not simply a matter of normative exhortation, of spotting good practice in one area and helping

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to implement it in another. It involves the reconceptualization of what schools and universities have done in the past and what they are capable of doing in the present and the future. (Coulby, 2006, p. 246; see also: Dixson & Rousseau Anderson, 2018).

Organised cultural encounters cannot be analysed through the lens of everyday practices alone. The fact that the kind of encounters we study are purposefully organised, or, as we describe in detail in Chap. 3, scripted, means that, if not determined by their organisers, practices are at least partly (in)formed by their intervention models. Consequently, we approach the practices that play out in the time-space of an organised cultural encounter as entanglements of everyday practices and practices that are encouraged by their organisers. In this way, we take into account the orchestrated character of these encounters, at the same time as we avoid the temptation (and mistake) to explain practices as the direct outcome of the organisers’ scripts. Avoiding normativity, in the sense described above, does not mean that we are uninterested in the transformative potential of encounters. In our readings, we prioritise critical analyses of how practices, techniques, scripts, emplacements, and so on are entangled in a field of power relations, which tends to be more or less comprehensively downplayed (whether intentionally or not) by organisers, that is, a mode of critique that, reading with Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick (2003), could be called paranoid. But we also, in a more affirmative or reparative mode of critique (ibid.), seek out the moments across our data material when something new seems to be opened up (intentionally or not), something that is not seamlessly embedded in the prevailing power relations. Importantly, however, newness is not in itself good or bad in a normative sense. In the remaining pages of this introduction, we sketch out an overall approach to organised cultural encounters that, in its flexibility, has guided our readings. In very general terms, our approach draws on postcolonial perspectives and a view of social practice as performative, and is developed further and in different directions in the ensuing chapters. We stated above that we are interested in the performativity and practices of organised cultural encounters and their relation to the wider contexts in which they are embedded. In the next section, we theorise these wider

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contexts in terms of “contact zones”, after which we turn to an initial sketch of the central concept of encounters and the way that concept can be related to the contact zone. Informed by the framing through the contact zone and encounters, we have paid particular attention to chaos and order, and the distribution of risk and safety within the encounters we have studied. In the following section, we expand upon this analytical approach. The introduction closes with an overview of the book.

 rganised Cultural Encounters: O Interventions into the Contact Zone Borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt (1991, 2008), we conceptualise organised cultural encounters—as a first step—as interventions into the contact zone. According to Pratt, contact zones are social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. (Pratt, 1991, p. 34)

Apart from this, Pratt does not offer a strict definition of the contact zone. There are, however, several aspects of her work that we find illuminating and important to take on board. In her keynote to the Modern Language Association (MLA), she argues that, among other things, the term involves a rethinking of models of community as essentially bounded entities (1991, p. 37), moving instead towards an understanding of communities as relationally constituted through the continual bordering processes negotiated between them. Through the notion of the contact zone, we turn towards spaces as well as temporalities of contact, and the performativity of encounters, as a particular form of contact; that is, towards encounters as productive of social practice and difference. The latter implies an ontological perspective on encounters: “species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters”, as Donna Haraway puts it (2008, p. 4).

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Pratt’s approach is not, however, primarily ontological. While her take may be likened in some respects to the (cybernetic) de-essentialising of ethnicity and community, of which Frederik Barth (1969) is a strong proponent, Pratt’s account is historical, since she points towards the (European) nation state as the model upon which the utopia of an essentially bounded community is built. Thus, contact may be the stuff from which social and cultural practice and difference emerge in a constitutive sense, but any actual occurrence of contact takes place within a particular historical and spatial context, where dominance, and following from this also meaning, categories, and differences are situated (if not completely pre-determined) ahead of that contact (Ahmed, 2000). In Pratt’s work on travel writing, which forms the backdrop for her coining of the concept of the contact zone, the subjects who meet were, however, “previously separated by geographical and historical disjunctures” (Pratt, 2008, p.  7). Present-day contact zones are “heirs to” the histories of contact that precede and condition them. They are spatio-­ temporally located in what Pratt terms the “aftermaths” of “highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery” (1991, p. 34). Or, perhaps, this is rather how we choose to employ the notion of the contact zone, since Pratt is more cautious in the quote above: cultures often meet in situations characterised by asymmetrical power relations, such as colonialism and slavery—relations that persist today in many parts of the world. Less cautiously, we argue that colonialism, imperialism, and slavery are historically formative of global epistemologies related to what it means to be human and how cultural difference figures in that equation (cf. Wynter, 2003). There is a strong tendency towards exceptionalism in Denmark, when it comes to the Danish implication in these global histories and epistemologies, but they are nevertheless formative of the present. Ann Laura Stoler argues that the aftermaths of colonialism are considerably more complex than either a reliance on rupture or continuity can capture—the rupture narrative “treats colonial history with clear temporal and spatial demarcations” (2016, p. 25), while the continuity stance “insists on a more seamless continuation that pervade the present” (ibid.). Instead, Stoler argues:

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Recharting imperial effects seems to demand another sort of labor on another scale: one that attends to their partial, distorted, and piecemeal qualities, to uneven and intangible sedimentations that defy easy access in the face of the comforting contention that there really is no imperial order of things. (2016, p. 26)

This also means that “the imperial order of things” plays out differently in different parts of the world. Like Pratt, Stoler points out the messiness of imperial relations and governance, and the implications this holds for how we may analyse these and their effects in the present. Following from these considerations, we explore the trajectory through which mission has become transformed or translated in terms of dialogue (see Chap. 2). Because our point of departure is the contemporary field of interfaith work in Denmark, this mapping will primarily reflect an archive of dominant voices. But it is nevertheless a mapping that takes us back to encounters within the imperial contact zone between missionaries and evangelised, colonised subjects. The outcome of these encounters (among these, the turn to dialogue) cannot be ascribed to a unilateral dominance of the missionaries, despite the way in which they were steeped in unequal power relations. Hence, we do not claim that there is an uncomplicated and direct line between our globally shared past, as it has been shaped by imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, and the way in which cultural difference is lived, governed, and conceptualised in the present. Rather, in adopting the contact zone as a framework, we place our approach solidly within a postcolonial framework, where the “post” does not imply that cultural difference—and racialisation—in the present can be sealed off from the past; a past that lives on in complicated ways. The productivity of thinking with the contact zone is related to the way in which it frames encounters in that zone as messy and unequal as well as relationally constitutive for the subjects who come into contact with each other. This co-constitution implies that meaning-making takes place in and on both sides of the relation, even though the archives only or overwhelmingly represent the order(ing) of the dominant party (the coloniser). The contact zone, according to Pratt, is the space of imperial encounters (2008, p.  8), but, as Helen Wilson points out in a recent article, Pratt does not elaborate upon the relation between the contact

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zone and encounter (2019, p. 5). Wilson argues that the contact zone houses multiple forms of contact, relations, and communicative practices (ibid., p. 7). Encounters, then, are one form of contact out of several others. This resonates with Pratt’s borrowing of the notion of contact from linguistics and, more precisely, the notion of contact languages (pidgin, creole, etc.). While Pratt argues that contact languages are produced through the creative grappling that occurs within the contact zone, they are “commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous and lacking in structure” (Pratt, 2008, p.  8). Accordingly, the appropriations and negotiations characteristic of interactions in the contact zone do not correspond to dominant imaginaries of order, the imaginaries that make their way into the archive. From this perspective, the contact zone is chaos. Crucial here is that imaginaries of order, and hence chaos, are not innocent, but rather tend to be diagnosed from the perspective of the dominant position(s). Order and chaos are historically constituted and deeply ingrained in the prevailing power relations. Majorities and minorities are differently positioned—to minorities, order might be as risky as chaos. Pratt’s conceptualisation of contact zones does not refer to the kind of purposefully organised interventions into the contact zone that we call organised cultural encounters. Pratt does discuss a specific example of an intervention, however: her teaching of a university course that dealt with “the Americas and the multiple cultural histories (including European ones) that have intersected here” (1991, p. 39). In this course, the diverse students in the classroom all experienced the precarity and historical legacies of both their own and others’ identities and positions. Pratt writes: “Along with rage, incomprehension, and pain, there were exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom—the joys of the contact zone […] No one was excluded, and no one was safe” (ibid.).

Encounters and Difference Encounters have become increasingly important as a conceptual device and an analytical focus for research preoccupied with cultural difference and diversity (cf. Ahmed, 2000; Amin & Thrift, 2002; Faier & Rofel,

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2014; Wise & Velayutham, 2009). We draw inspiration, if selectively, from across this work. In our framework, encounters are (1) empirical occurrences that circumscribe practices within a particular time and space. Even though the events that we classify as organised cultural encounters might also be categorised differently, they can all be described in terms of similar empirical elements. Encounters are also (2) ontologically constitutive or performative, through entangled interactions that unfold in the present—their thrown-togetherness (Massey, 2005, p. 149ff). While this implies an orientation towards the future (what is coming into being through encounters), they cannot, as implied in the last section, be disassociated from the past. Encounters, then, are both immediate and mediated. Informed by (1) and (2), adopting encounters as an analytical focus means that differences are not taken as given; rather, attention is oriented towards how they emerge and become negotiated within the spatiotemporal confines of encounters. At the same time, the negotiations occurring within encounters are (in)formed by the (asymmetrical) social terrain in which they are embedded. Through our classification of intervention strategies that are otherwise seen to belong to different fields in terms of (organised cultural) encounters, we open up an analytical movement that can work “sideways” across them (Krøijer, 2015). We specify encounters as circumscribed practices, through Erving Goffman’s (1972) micro-sociological and interactional approach (see Chap. 3), and, in the next section of this introduction, we specify our analytical strategy. While we expand upon the temporal aspects of encounters as well as their performativity throughout this book, in this section we draw out some initial contours. In the introduction to Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed, to whose work we are indebted, and to which we return throughout the book, describes the temporality and performativity of encounters in the following way: [E]ncounters between embodied subjects always hesitate between the domain of the particular—the face to face of this encounter—and the general—the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and antagonism. […] Differences, as markers of power, are not determined in the “space” of the particular or the general, but in the very determination of their historical relation (a determination that is never complete, as it involves strange encounters). (2000, pp. 8–9)

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While our formulation of the temporal aspects of encounters given above would seem to be captured more or less one to one in this quote, when she moves on from this, Ahmed tips towards the past. Differences, according to Ahmed, are constituted through encounters and, therefore, in our attempts to understand difference and identity, we need to prioritise the here-and-now of contact within encounters. That priority, however, meets its limits, because “we must pose the question of historicity, which is forgotten by the very designation of ‘the encounter’ as such” (ibid., p. 9). Following from this, it is the encounter (i.e. not only difference) that is in itself historically locked into a specific determination of the relation between the particular and the general. Even though this is not a complete predetermination, this leaning towards the past (see also Chap. 5) is, if not entirely dominant in Ahmed’s work (see the discussion of hope in Chap. 6), then a prominent tendency. In this way, it captures or prioritises the recursive character of social practice: “a practice endures between and across specific moments of enactment” (Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012, p. 7). While the constitutive dimension of encounters is not foreclosed from Ahmed’s perspective, using encounters as intervention strategies—organising cultural encounters—cannot be grounded in a straightforward trust in performativity or in the potential of face-to-­ face contact. The performativity of encounters is, from Ahmed’s perspective, most likely re-productive. Encounters have increasingly been taken up within the discipline of geography, constituting a new field within that discipline: the geography of encounters (cf. Askins & Pain, 2011; Darling & Wilson, 2016; Koefoed, Christensen, & Simonsen, 2017; Swanton, 2010; Valentine, 2013; Wilson, 2014; Wise, 2016). Within geographies of encounter, a “body of work… [on] social diversity, urban difference, and prejudice, [has been produced] which has sought to document how people negotiate difference in their everyday lives” (Wilson, 2017, p. 451). A large part of this work has been focused on the city, which is approached as constituted by encounters involving both human and non-human subjects and materialities, rather than as a more-or-less neutral scene within which encounters play out (Amin & Thrift, 2002). Helen Wilson distinguishes between a meeting and an encounter by arguing that an encounter is a genre of meeting “where difference is

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particularly noteworthy or of analytical interest” (2017, p. 455). Based on her impressive examination of how the “encounter” has been deployed across the discipline of geography, Wilson suggest[s] that any conceptualization must accept the impossibility of fully “capturing” encounters, their potentials and taking-place. Encounters are mediated, affective, emotive and sensuous, they are about animation, joy and fear, and both the opening up and closing down of affective capacity. (2017, pp. 464–465)

While Wilson does not romanticise encounters as a kind of pure potential, she does emphasise the possibilities of encounters as spaces of transformation, that is, encounters can become “a site of emergent politics and pedagogy” (2017, p. 456) through destabilisations, ruptures, shock, and animation. This potential is linked to their ultimate unpredictability (Wilson, 2017, p. 457). The work within geographies of encounter has mostly been preoccupied with everyday life, that is, encounters that are not purposefully and openly orchestrated. There is, however, a body of work that has taken up encounters as spaces of intervention in ways that are closer to our work with organised cultural encounters (Askins & Pain, 2011; Koefoed et  al., 2017; Lawson & Elwood, 2014; Leitner, 2012; Matejskova & Leitner, 2011; Mayblin, Valentine, & Andersson, 2016; Mayblin, Valentine, Kossak, & Schneider, 2015; Valentine, 2008, 2013; Valentine, Piekut, Winiarska, Harris, & Jackson, 2015; Wilson, 2013, 2017). Gill Valentine (following Ash Amin) even employs the notion of “purposeful organised group activity” (Valentine, 2008, p. 331), which shares similarities with our concept of organised cultural encounters. While we are inspired by and, in many ways, also on the same path as these geographers, our approach takes a different route in that, despite its relevance, we bypass the normative question of optimal or meaningful encounters, which is prioritised in many of these studies. Going down a slightly different road, we have paid particular attention to the organisers of encounters and their scripts, and this has implications for our approach. The primary transformation attempted through organised cultural encounters concerns the reflexivity and embodied subjectivities of the participants themselves. Paraphrasing Foucault, organised

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cultural encounters aim at conducting conduct (Foucault, 2003, p. 38) through micro-procedures or technologies that circulate power and orient (embodied) subjectivities in particular ways (Foucault, 1991; Valverde, 1996). From this perspective, the stage of the encounter can be perceived as a means of pushing the participants towards self-reflexivity and/or changes in behaviour; in other words, to act upon themselves. To this purpose, organisers present and activate their script, which is informed by ideas concerning cultural difference, encounters, and transformation, as illustrated by the two quotes presented at the beginning of the introduction. This would amount to a pedagogy of encounter, as Wilson puts it, but while this pedagogy is intentionally adopted and aims at “positive outcomes”, it relies upon epistemologies of the contact zone, which, as we show in the chapters that follow, to a large extent emerge as common sense or naturalised facts. So, to briefly sum up, we are able to define organised cultural encounters as purposefully organised in order to intervene in problems that are seen as caused by or, more weakly in terms of determination, related to cultural difference. Paradoxically, perhaps, both the problem and the solution are related to contact and interaction. This is one reason why a preoccupation with meaningful or good encounters is widespread in the literature: everyday contact between groups that are seen and/or see each other as culturally different may have all kinds of outcomes—some of which may be deemed bad rather than good (Keaten & Soukup, 2009; Valentine, 2008). We follow Pratt and her account of encounters in the contact zone as transformative and messy—or rather messy and therefore transformative. This poses a challenge to organised cultural encounters. If the transformative potential of encounters is associated with their messiness, then the mess cannot be ironed out, so to speak. The risky character (“no one is safe”) of encounters emerges forcefully in Pratt’s description of the affective circulations and intensities among the participants in her Americas course, referred to above. This also implies a risk that a given conflict is simply imported into, and reproduced through, an organised cultural encounter. This is one way in which the risk associated with the unpredictability of encounters emerges more concretely for organisers and participants alike. The translation of societal problems into a face-to-­ face interactional scale also involves a translation of questions relating to

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chaos and order into questions concerning risk and safety that apply to the subjects who are present during a given encounter. In terms of our analysis of specific organised cultural encounters, these meta-reflections on encounters and contact translate into paying attention to how unpredictability is negotiated and managed through both the organisers’ script and the interactions among participants.

Working Across Sites As we have argued above, working with our five empirical studies through the common lens of organised cultural encounters allows us to analyse across them. Through this movement across, we are able to produce interpretations of these intervention practices that would not have been possible if we had analysed each case in isolation from the others. Since we are neither adopting a comparative approach in a traditional social science sense, nor attempting to generalise based on examples, in this section we expand more precisely upon how we have made these analytical moves. We borrow the notion of “sideways” from Stine Krøijer (2015), who in turn is inspired by Brian Massumi (2002). Krøijer analyses activist practices and demonstrates how particular instances of activism (“examples”) “connect sidewards […], setting things in motion in unexpected directions” (2015, p. 86). This interpretation is the result of an analytical process in which Krøijer follows particular activist strategies around. Rather than seeing them as an “expression or manifestation of a larger whole or general rule”, as in a more conventional approach to the analysis of examples, the example becomes “[a] singular instantiation, serving as an example for other actions. Carving a new relation between the particular and the universal” (Krøijer, 2015, pp.  78–79; see also Højer & Bandak, 2015). Even though, in our material, particular practices and epistemologies may also “leak sideways into one another” (ibid.), as the two handbook quotes on dialogue at the beginning of this chapter indicate, this leaking is not what we are primarily aiming to explore. Rather, we let particular practices and logics leak from one example to another. Thus, we work analytically sideways, approaching the example in one field as

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the basis for setting in motion “particular trains of imagination, or series of particulars” (Højer & Bandak, 2015, p.  7) in another. Højer and Bandak argue that the aim of this is not to end up with a universal model, but to point to series of resemblances (2015, p.  7). In our approach, resemblances across our fields of study help us to establish an analytical path that is not only laterally grounded in our data material, but also continuously developed, both conceptually and theoretically. One of the paths that we started constructing at an early stage of the project targets the distribution of chaos and order, which appeared as either an explicit or an implicit concern across our sites. As hinted in the preceding sections of the introduction, this also guided our theoretical emphasis. Since this particular path has become important, when it comes to the choice of the shifting approaches that each guide their chapter in the book (most prominently, perhaps, our turn to approaches from ritual studies in Chap. 4), we use this particular analytical path to present how we have moved sideways in the data material. One of the recurring concerns that appeared empirically both in the interviews with organisers and in our observations was that cultural encounters (or contact) were perceived as being associated with actual or potential chaos. Thus, in the interfaith work cases, religious differences were generally seen as causal reasons behind current geopolitical conflicts, including incidences of terrorism and lack of integration, as well as discrimination and intolerance. In the opening speech at a dialogue meeting between Danish and Arab religious leaders, the Danish parliamentarian Karen Klint, for instance, named religion as part of the reason for extremism (see more about this meeting in Chap. 4). However, she also highlighted religion as part of the solution. In other words, in interfaith work, religious differences are both in need of mending due to their destabilising effects and, at the same time, a transformative tool within interfaith encounters. Differences, then, occasion chaos, but could also be a means for creating peace or order. This matrix of meaning informs how interfaith encounters are organised in order to (re)create or constitute order. According to the “Guidelines for Interfaith Meetings” (Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines for interfaith meetings], 2008),4 the encounter with religious traditions other than the Christian “has become a steadily growing challenge to the Danish

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Church”. The Guidelines refer to the 2005 Mohammed cartoon crisis that made Denmark the target of Muslim protests and anger globally (Henkel, 2010), but other than that there is no explanation of the sort of challenges faced by the Church. This suggests that they are seen as self-­ evident. The (potential) chaos that is addressed is global and/or societal, but in interfaith work it becomes rearticulated on another scale, when referring to different value systems and views of life that create “mistrust, insecurity and rift” (Støvring et al., 2010, p. 7). Despite the shift in scale, interfaith dialogue in itself becomes potentially threatening because, through their value systems and views of life, participants come to represent parties in macro-level conflicts. Bringing together people of different faiths involves encounters with other truths and hence runs the risk of starting to doubt one’s own: “By opening up oneself, one runs the risk of becoming rejected, trodden upon or challenged in other ways, thus afflicting the faith” (Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines for interfaith meetings], 2008). Macro-level conflicts, then, are rescaled and, consequently, chaos and order are translated into personalised risk and safety, which in this case become associated with the vulnerable nature of one’s beliefs and the ambiguity of truth. The adoption of encounters as a means of transformation lends itself to this rearticulation of conflicts at a face-to-face interactional scale. As we have shown, this happens in particular ways during interfaith work— ways that do not directly translate into the other domains included in our fieldwork. Thus, our development of an analytical approach does not strive for universality, but aims to make an analytically effective path that is useful also in relation to other organised cultural encounters. In this case, the analytical move relates to questions of chaos and order, and how these are translated into risk and safety that apply to the subjects who are present during a given encounter. This movement sideways helps us to pay attention to the specificities as well as the commonalities of this dynamic across our cases. At the policy level of the community dance project, for instance, chaos is linked to the multicultural reality—the contact zone—of the local neighbourhood. However, at the practical level, dance routines, techniques, and discipline become a way of creating order without directly addressing the ethnic or cultural differences of the participants, which,

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according to the political discourse, are in need of transformation. Instead of working explicitly with cultural difference as a tool for change, the community dance project uses the discipline and techniques of dance to create inclusion and thereby transformation. Safety for the participants, then, is brought about through a logic of the body and body language as a means of transcending difference (see Chap. 5). Bringing together these empirically based attentions with Pratt’s argument about the messiness of (encounters in) the contact zone, we may say that organised cultural encounters are interventions into the chaos of the contact zone that aim to transform it in accordance with a more or less specific imaginary of order. Paradoxically, contact is both the problem (i.e. the particular version of chaos addressed by an organised cultural encounter) and the solution: In the imaginary of order held by the organisers, contact holds promise, provided it is orchestrated and enacted in the right way. As argued above, imaginaries of order, and hence chaos, are historically constituted and deeply ingrained in the prevailing power relations. Therefore, the widespread normative evaluations of contact as meaningful, or not (Lawson & Elwood, 2014, p. 214; Mayblin et al., 2016, p. 2), raises the question: whose meaning is being used to define? (Wilson, 2017, pp.  460–461). In relation to our analytical approach, this means that we pay attention to the particular versions of chaos and order, as well as the encounter-specific governing of risk and safety, as distributed. This distribution is associated with both the organisers’ attempts to govern the interactions among participants and how participants enact their positionalities vis-à-vis each other independently of the script. Who is at risk in particular encounters, we ask, and for whom is safety an available affective state? These questions apply to the organisers’ script: what is opened up or closed down through the script? They also apply to the way in which positions and relations that were historically sedimented prior to the encounter, and prevalent outside it, seep into what goes on. Overlapping with the considerations above, there is another important distributive aspect related to the analytical emphasis on chaos/order and risk/safety. Thus, organisers are continually striving to strike a balance between risk and safety, because they perceive transformation to be associated with risk. The amount of risk, on the other hand, needs to be

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portioned correctly, otherwise the conflict that the intervention is aimed at amending may be repeated full scale within the encounter. As we shall see in the analyses, in encounters that are deemed too safe, risk is introduced by the organisers. When Helen Wilson argues that destabilisation, ruptures, shock, and animation can contribute to making encounters “sites of emergent politics and pedagogy” (2017, p. 456), she is addressing the transformative potentiality of encounters as related to risk—and to the ontological unpredictability of encounters. Within the fields of education and pedagogy, there is an extended discussion of risk and safety in relation to processes of learning and, in some cases, related to the notion of “safe spaces” or “safe houses” (Arao & Clemens, 2013; Canagarajah, 1997; Holley & Steiner, 2005; Leonardo & Porter, 2010). We address these debates towards the end of the book (Chap. 6), our main engagement with chaos/order and risk/safety is, however, informed by ritual studies (Chap. 4). By paying attention to how chaos and order are negotiated through the management and distribution of risk and safety, we are able to shed light on the transformative potential (whether for better or worse) of encounters. Or, more precisely, we can examine how this is rationalised and enacted by organisers and participants (according to the script, or off-­ script). The methods adopted by organisers are designed to enable participants to navigate the dangers of the contact zone, and thus deal appropriately with embodied risk. They attempt to distribute risk and safety in the encounter as a tool to teach participants how to navigate in a world of potential chaos. At the same time, real-world encounters are conditioned by a prior distribution of who is at risk, which, as we shall see, tends to disappear in organised cultural encounters.

Structure of the Book The overall framing of organised cultural encounters as interventions into the contact zone accompany us all through the book as the backdrop to our analyses and in conjunction with other theoretical perspectives. The concept of encounters will be more actively developed along the way.

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In Chap. 2, “Tracing the Ideas of Organised Cultural Encounters”, we continue to build the context around organised cultural encounters that we have begun in this introduction, but now in more specific terms. In this chapter, we turn to the field of interfaith work to explore how this particular kind of organised cultural encounter is formed through context-­bound ideas of “good” encounters. We analyse where ideas associated with interfaith work can be located in time and space. Even though the analysis could have followed other trajectories, had we chosen to engage with one of the other fields included in our studies, we argue that the ideas associated with interfaith work also emerge as important nodal points in other fields—the strong similarities in the guidelines for dialogue work, quoted earlier in this introduction, attests to this. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 each explore a particular aspect of our studies. These aspects are informed by our overall concept of organised cultural encounters, but each chapter also involves the adoption of a particular analytical lens that is employed across the different empirical cases. In Chap. 3, “Guided Interactions: Scripting at Work”, we analyse the organisation or orchestration of encounters and how this frames encounter processes in different ways. Thus, we address the fact that organised cultural encounters are explicitly and purposefully framed events. Like Goffman (1959), and the tradition around performance studies (cf. Striff, 2003), we explore the explicit staging of encounters through theatre metaphors: organised cultural encounters are staged through a script, in which time, place, roles, and interactions are more or less strictly (and more or less consistently) prescribed and regulated in advance of the encounter. In this chapter, the organisers’ script is our point of departure, with a focus on how this script works and what it produces. Thus, we focus on the subject positions that are on offer, how they are negotiated and, occasionally, resisted, and we explore the implications of the spatiotemporal organisation of the encounters. In Chap. 4, “Orchestrated Turnarounds: Between Chaos and Order”, the transformative practices enacted during organised cultural encounters are our focal point of interest. In dialogue with the five empirical studies, we have chosen to analytically address transformation and the balancing of order and chaos through perspectives borrowed from research on ritualised practices. This means that we adopt a perspective

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on transformation in terms of performative processes of embodied, condensed, and prescribed enactments removed from everyday practices. Where subject positioning (and hence, broadly speaking, a poststructural approach) played a central role in the analyses of Chap. 3, in this chapter we turn to a more phenomenological focus on bodies. Chapter 5, “Walking, Dancing, and Listening Affect and Encounters”, launches a perspective on organised cultural encounters that knits together a focus on bodies (which we bring with us from Chap. 4), and affective qualities. We also adopt a different reading strategy; namely, one that focuses on thematically chosen clips from across our data. We argue that encounters “work” in different registers—and in this chapter we bracket the rational and representational registers and dig into what we may broadly call affective registers. Chapter 6, “A Risky Business”, returns to risk and safety, and seeks to address how these states may be seen as historically particular constructions, that partially tame or translate danger and unpredictability. Risk, we argue, is associated with calculation—a calculation that anticipates the future. Risk may also be related, however, to another anticipatory affect: hope. Through this refined conceptual frame, we end the book by working though some of the preceding analyses in conversation with the notion of safe space.

Notes 1. Many of the activities that can be assigned to the category of organised cultural encounters have been studied as educational or pedagogical activities. 2. The collaborative research project “The Organised Cultural Encounter” ran from September 2013 to December 2017. 3. The studies consist of: interfaith dialogue work (fieldwork by Lise Paulsen Galal), a youth diversity project called the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors (fieldwork by Helle Bach Riis), training activities related to diversity management (fieldwork by Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen), volunteer tourism (fieldwork by Lene Bull Christiansen), and a community dance project (fieldwork by Rasmus Præstmann Hansen). Brief ­descriptions of the studies and the data that was generated through them

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will appear in boxes inserted into the text when a particular study is presented for the first time. 4. The Guidelines are produced by diocese collaboration on religious encounters named “The Danish Church and the Religious Encounters”, http://www.religionsmoede.dk/ (accessed 27 January 2016). All translations from Danish into English are the authors’.

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Darling, J., & Wilson, H. F. (2016). Encountering the City: Urban Encounters from Accra to New York. London: Routledge. Dialogue toolbox. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://dialoguetoolbox.com/ about-dialogue-in-danmission/ Dixson, A. D., & Rousseau Anderson, C. (2018). Where Are We? Critical Race Theory in Education 20 Years Later. Peabody Journal of Education, 93(1), 121–131. Faier, L., & Rofel, L. (2014). Ethnographies of Encounter. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 363–377. Fotel, T. N., & Andersen, J. (2003). Social mobilisering of forhandlingsplanlægning—Kvarterløfterfaringer fra Kongens Enghave [Social Mobilisation of Planning Negotiations. Experiences from an Urban Renewal Program in Kongens Enghave]. In K. Sehested (Ed.), Bypolitik mellem hierarki og netværk [Urban Governance Between Hierarchy and Network] (pp. 69–94). København: Akademisk Forlag. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In P. Miller, C. Gordon, & G. Burchell (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 87–104). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (2003). The Subject and Power. In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The Essential Foucault (pp. 126–144). New York and London: The New Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books Edition. Goffman, E. (1972). Encounters. Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. London: Allen Lane. Haraway, D.  J. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Helde, M. L. (2012). The Dialogue Handbook: The Art of Conducting a Dialogue-­ and Facilitating Dialogue Workshops. Copenhagen: Danish Youth Council. Henkel, H. (2010). Fundamentally Danish? The Muhammad Cartoon Crisis as Transitional Drama. Human Architecture, 8(2), 67. Højer, L., & Bandak, A. (2015). Introduction: The Power of Example. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1), 1–17. Holley, L.  C., & Steiner, S. (2005). Safe Space: Student Perspectives on Classroom Environment. Journal of Social Work Education, 41(1), 49–64. Jensen, T. G., Vitus, K., & Schmidt, G. (2018). Social sammenhængskraft. Begreb og virkelighed [Social Cohesion. Concept and Reality]. København: Samfundslitteratur. Keaten, J. A., & Soukup, C. (2009). Dialogue and Religious Otherness: Toward a Model of Pluralistic Interfaith Dialogue. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2(2), 168–187.

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Keskinen, S., Skaptadóttir, U. D., & Toivanen, M. (2019). Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region: Migration, Difference and the Politics of Solidarity. London: Routledge. Keskinen, S., Tuori, S., Irni, S., & Mulinari, D. (2016). Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. London: Routledge. Koefoed, L., Christensen, M. D., & Simonsen, K. (2017). Mobile Encounters: Bus 5A as a Cross-Cultural Meeting Place. Mobilities, 12(5), 726–739. Kozlovic, A. K. (2003). Seven Logical Consequences of Interreligious Dialoguing: A Taxonomy of Praxis Possibilities. Marburg Journal of Religion, 8(1). Krøijer, S. (2015). Revolution Is the Way You Eat: Exemplification Among Left Radical Activists in Denmark and in Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1), 78–95. Laurence, J. (2014). Reconciling the Contact and Threat Hypotheses: Does Ethnic Diversity Strengthen or Weaken Community Inter-Ethnic Relations? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(8), 1328–1349. Lawson, V., & Elwood, S. (2014). Encountering Poverty: Space, Class, and Poverty Politics. Antipode, 46(1), 209–228. Leitner, H. (2012). Spaces of Encounters: Immigration, Race, Class, and the Politics of Belonging in Small-Town America. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(4), 828–846. Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R.  K. (2010). Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157. Martikainen, T. (2016). Multilevel and Pluricentric Network Governance of Religion. In F. Gauthier & T. Martikainen (Eds.), Religion in the Neoliberal Age (pp. 141–154). New York: Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Matejskova, T., & Leitner, H. (2011). Urban Encounters with Difference: The Contact Hypothesis and Immigrant Integration Projects in Eastern Berlin. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(7), 717–741. Mayblin, L., Valentine, G., & Andersson, J. (2016). In the Contact Zone: Engineering Meaningful Encounters Across Difference Through an Interfaith Project. The Geographical Journal, 182(2), 213–222. Mayblin, L., Valentine, G., Kossak, F., & Schneider, T. (2015). Experimenting with Spaces of Encounter: Creative Interventions to Develop Meaningful Contact. Geoforum, 63, 67–80. Perry, L. B., & Southwell, L. (2011). Developing Intercultural Understanding and Skills: Models and Approaches. Intercultural Education, 22(6), 453–466.

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Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession, 91, 33–40. Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Schoorman, D., & Bogotch, I. (2010). Moving Beyond ‘Diversity’ to ‘Social Justice’: The Challenge to Re-conceptualize Multicultural Education. Intercultural Education, 21(1), 79–85. Sedgwick, E.  K., & Frank, A. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How it Changes. London: Sage. Stoler, A.  L. (2016). Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Striff, E. (Ed.). (2003). Performance studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Støvring, C., Albæk, A.  L., Lyngby, S., Aagaard, P., Kleis, C., Viftrup, L.  B., et  al. (2010). Dialogpiloten—En håndbog i dialog [The Dialogue Pilot—A Handbook of Dialogue]. Aarhus: IKON-Danmark. Swanton, D. (2010). Flesh, Metal, Road: Tracing the Machinic Geographies of Race. Environment and Planning. D, Society and Space, 28(3), 447–466. Valentine, G. (2008). Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter. Progress in Human Geography, 32(3), 323–337. Valentine, G. (2013). Living with Difference: Proximity and Encounter in Urban Life. Geography, 98, 4–9. Valentine, G., Piekut, A., Winiarska, A., Harris, C., & Jackson, L. (2015). Mapping the Meaning of ‘Difference’ in Europe: A Social Topography of Prejudice. Ethnicities, 15(4), 568–585. Valverde, M. (1996). ‘Despotism’ and Ethical Liberal Governance. Economy and Society, 25(3), 357–372. Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines for interfaith meetings]. (2008). Retrieved from http://www.religionsmoede.dk/index.php/materialer/fr-materialer Wilson, H. F. (2013). Learning to Think Differently: Diversity Training and the ‘Good Encounter’. Geoforum, 45, 73–82. Wilson, H. F. (2014). The Possibilities of Tolerance: Intercultural Dialogue in a Multicultural Europe. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 852–868. Wilson, H.  F. (2017). On Geography and Encounter: Bodies, Borders and Difference. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 451–471. Wilson, H.  F. (2019). Contact Zones: Multispecies Scholarship Through Imperial Eyes. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2(4), 712–731.

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Wise, A. (2016). Becoming Cosmopolitan: Encountering Difference in a City of Mobile Labour. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(14), 2289–2308. Wise, A., & Velayutham, S. (Eds.). (2009). Everyday Multiculturalism. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

2 Tracing the Ideas of Organised Cultural Encounters

On 17 March 2019, the Shia Muslim Imam Ali Mosque in Copenhagen organised a commemoration for the victims of the terror attacks against two mosques in New Zealand on 15 March, which killed at least 49 people.1 Among the speakers were a Sunni Muslim Imam, an opinion-­ maker and Muslim activist, a local youth pastor from the Danish Church,2 the general secretary of the Danish NGO Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (The Danish Association for International Cooperation), and two members of the Imam Ali Mosque. After the speeches, the participants lit torches and formed a “ring of peace” around the mosque. This event is an example of what we conceptualise as an organised cultural encounter, an intervention into a contact zone. There are organisers, participants, a distribution of roles, a script, and a ritualised practice or performance. The aim is to bring people of different cultural—and in this case also religious—backgrounds together in order to facilitate a transformation leading to peace and co-existence. It is also much more than that. It is this “much more” that we particularly want to explore through the study of a variety of organised cultural encounters which at first sight seem to belong to different societal fields or domains. However, we have chosen to study these as interconnected fields because, from our © The Author(s) 2020 L. P. Galal, K. Hvenegård-Lassen, Organised Cultural Encounters, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0_2

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perspective, they draw upon similar ideas of difference, togetherness, and transformation. Sites of organised cultural encounters are formed through context-bound ideas of “meaningful contact” (Valentine, 2008). These ideas relate to notions of difference, the human, and the social, which are, on the one hand, shared across fields, and, on the other, embedded in the particularities of the field in question. Associated with these epistemologies, shared ideas concerning the productivity of specific intervention strategies manifest themselves across the different cases, but at the same time each case plays by the rules of its field or domain. In this chapter, we explore how the ideas associated with organising cultural encounters as a strategy of intervention have developed. The “ring of peace” at Imam Ali Mosque draws upon contemporary local and global ideas about interfaith encounters, peace, and reconciliation, as well as public commemoration. Since we cannot go into the genealogy of each of the five types of encounters included in this book (interfaith dialogue, cross-cultural education, diversity training, volunteer tourism, community dance), and since this is not the main purpose of our work, in this chapter we explore ideas related to interfaith work. Loosely inspired by Foucault’s notion of genealogy (Foucault, 1978; Villadsen, 2008), and thus “a history of the present” approach, we explore how understandings of Christian mission and ideas about a universal human being and “the people” are constitutive elements of the Danish interfaith field of practice. Choosing interfaith work is not random. As will become apparent in the chapters that follow, ideas (and practices) associated with this particular field also emerge, and are rearticulated, as important nodal points in the other fields of organised cultural encounters addressed in this book.

Interfaith Work in Denmark The “ring of peace” event reveals important aspects of the Danish interfaith field. One of these is that it is highly unlikely for an interfaith encounter not to include a representative from the Danish Church. Another is that interfaith initiatives make sense to a wide group of actors (religious and non-religious) as a response to events that are interpreted

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as caused by interreligious conflicts or tensions. A third aspect concerns the way in which internal disagreements, conflicts, or power inequalities among the participants at an interfaith encounter are managed: You stand shoulder to shoulder without addressing them, even though they are often what has motivated the set-up of an encounter. The key position of the Danish Church, the issue-specificity, and the avoidance of addressing inequality in the encounter all relate to how ideas about religion, the universal human being, and people and the way in which they intersect have emerged and shifted over time in a Danish context. The emergence and changing of ideas about religion, the human, and people are produced through encounters with religious and national others, while simultaneously these encounters are conditioned by them. Thus, in the nineteenth century, it was encounters with other religions under the auspices of mission work and the revival of different, primarily Protestant, movements in Denmark—as in the rest of Europe—that, together with new ideas about the nation and the rule of the people, formed the backdrop for discussions of religious freedom. Today, it is the presence of non-­Christian religions as the result of immigration that motivates discussions about how to understand the relationship between religion and people (Davie, 2006; Griera & Nagel, 2018; Kivisto, 2014). At the same time, ideas and institutions grounded in the nineteenth century condition the possibilities for new immigrants to practise their religion. The Free School Act of 1855, for example, has made it possible for Muslim communities to establish their own schools (Korsgaard, 2004; Korsgaard & Wiborg, 2006, pp. 378–379). Ideas about transformation and ways of organising it are, in turn, intimately linked to such ideas about religion and people. We start in the midst of contemporary interfaith work: how are religious differences, the human, and the social addressed, and how does this relate to transformation strategies? From this starting point, we will explore how these ideas have come about. In this way, we follow the epistemology of interfaith work as it has become established within the field itself.

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The Danish Church Interfaith work in Denmark is decentralised, fragmented, and fluctuating. Many different actors are involved, but the Danish Church and religious associations related to this Church, for instance Danmission, are major players (Galal, Liebmann, & Nordin, 2018). Despite the overt fragmentation, it is therefore important not to underestimate the role of the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church in instigating and making sense of interfaith encounters as spaces of intervention. The formal transformation of Denmark from kingdom to (partially democratic) nation state occurred with the constitution of 1849. This shift in sovereignty also meant that the Danish Church became dislocated from the King and associated with the people: The People’s Church (the literal translation of Folkekirken, which is how the Danish Church is addressed in the vernacular). In keeping with the other bourgeois revolutions across Europe, this constitution stipulated freedom of religion. The Danish Church was, however, given special status as eligible for support from the state (Møller, 2019; Nielsen & Kühle, 2011). Thus, there was no absolute separation of Church—or religion—and State, but rather a strong link between State, Church, and the Danish people (nation), which has continued until the present. As of 1 January 2019, 74.7% of the population were still members of the Danish Church, despite a general decrease in membership numbers.3 Regardless of what these numbers mean when it comes to the beliefs of the Danish population, they illustrate the important position of the Danish Church. At the same time, globalisation and immigration, consisting of both labour migrants and refugees, have transformed Denmark into a more religiously diverse society.4 The entanglement of constitutionally granted freedom of religion, the Danish Church’s dominant position, and new religious immigrant communities has formed the backdrop for new discussions about how to govern religious pluralism. The dominant role of the Danish Church has hindered the development of more elaborate ideas on religious pluralism while, at the same time, its history of the inclusion of different (Christian) religious positions has served as a pragmatic model for governance. Minority religions have been

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tolerated, but not really dealt with (Møller, 2019; Vinding & Christoffersen, 2012). In the context of interfaith work, immigration and the diversification of religious affiliations have led the Danish Church and its institutions and associations to reconsider their own roles within a contemporary multi-religious, postcolonial, secular, and neoliberal Danish society (Mogensen & Christensen, 2015). Danish interfaith actors have looked for inspiration in the Church’s past experiences concerning religious difference. From within this archive, two historical trajectories have been revisited, reactivated, and rearticulated: mission work and peoplehood. Mission work has historically been the channel through which the Danish Church and other Christian organisations have encountered religious others, whereas peoplehood refers to the coming together of people and church that was codified in the 1849 constitution and which, as it developed, came to embrace a variety of (Christian) religious positions. Thus, whereas the mission experience relates to encounters with—and the colonisation of—religious others in the imperial contact zone outside metropolitan Denmark, the idea of peoplehood relates to the Danish Church’s encounters and dealings with the diverse beliefs of the inhabitants of Denmark at the time of nation building. In the following, we explore these two trajectories, which emerge as particularly influential in how contemporary interfaith encounters are organised. From our perspective, these trajectories hold ideas about difference, the human, the social, and transformation that, within the field of interfaith activities, have been rearticulated through their attachment to ideas about nation, democracy, human rights, and peaceful co-existence.

F rom Mission to Dialogue: On “Bearing Witness” The trajectory through which mission becomes transformed into dialogue is a process that knits together the global and the national scale and circumscribes both political and theological developments. As elsewhere,

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Danish mission associations and the Danish Church have distanced themselves from former colonial and imperial policies and practices, including racialised approaches to religious others (Baig, Rasmussen, & Iversen, 2018; Rasmussen, 2007). That is, the kind of mission that was founded upon force, threats, decoys, or material incentives and worked in conjunction with colonialism and imperialism. Among interfaith actors, the relation between mission and dialogue is seen as a break, but in some respects also as a continuity. Due to the dominance of the Danish Church, many of the leading interfaith organisers are university-educated theologians and either pastors by profession or employed in faith-based organisations. Among these, a widespread perception is that (interfaith) dialogue has replaced mission work. Despite this, “mission” has not disappeared as a term, but still appears in organisation names, such as, for instance, the largest Danish mission association, Danmission, which is also a major player when it comes to organising interfaith encounters. The turn towards dialogue is, however, apparent in the organisation’s presentation of its activities, where dialogue is described “as a natural part of our poverty-reduction work”, and “dialogue work and conflict resolution” is adopted as a mode of intervention “in religious conflicts”.5 Interfaith organisers are explicitly aware of the dangers of conflating interfaith work with (previous versions of ) mission work. In one of the available guidebooks about dialogue, for instance, it is stated that: If we are not to retreat to fear for what it [dialogue] will do to us, a high level of safety in the process is necessary, a confidence that the others do not want to change you. (Støvring et al., 2010, pp. 4–5)

In other words, interfaith organisers do not aim for a transformation that encompasses converting religious others. Instead, what links dialogue to mission work is the shared emphasis on the importance of bearing witness. Bearing witness to one’s Christian faith is repeatedly emphasised by organisers and in guidelines as a vital principle and practice in encounters with people from other religious traditions. In interfaith texts, it is translated into the idea that, through explicit articulations of “one’s own

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belief ” and honesty about “one’s own motives”, dialogue becomes safe for both conversation partners (Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines for interfaith meetings], 2008).6 As one organiser (a theologian) argues: A dialogue in which you don’t want to reveal [“vedkende”] who you are ends up being just a chat [“passiar”]. Thus, if the dialogue is to be, how can I phrase it, something valuable, you expect people to reveal who they are. Hence, there is always an element of testimony from both sides. (Interview with organiser of interfaith dialogue, Lise Paulsen Galal)

The replacement of mission by dialogue, with bearing witness as the hinge between them, is not confined to Denmark, but is related to global changes whereby, since the 1950s, the Christian Church has proclaimed itself to be a global church. Before this shift, the Church considered its western (Protestant and Catholic) theology to be universally and directly applicable to any mission field. But from the 1950s onwards, the Christian Church began to see itself as embedded in different societal and cultural contexts. This development is a belated institutional answer to the struggles within imperial contact zones, where colonised and evangelised subjects had for centuries resisted, not so much Christianity itself, but the authority of the mission associations and their European churches. Resistance included demands for the establishment of autonomous and independent local churches, which for a very long time was met with severe repercussions meted out by the European churches as well as the (other) colonial authorities (cf. Mudimbe-Boyi, 2012). The interest in interreligious dialogue within mission theology ran parallel with an interest in contextual theology during the second half of the twentieth century. Importantly, contextual theology grew out of encounters within the imperial contact zone and developed there as a branch of liberation theology. In European mission theology, what became emphasised was the importance of taking into account the cultural context wherein mission work took place, but also in a broader sense the contextual character of all theological work (Bevans, Schroeder, & Schroeder, 2004; Mogensen, 2007). This development led to an intercultural perspective on mission that was associated with the need to get to know current faith experiences within their own context.7 Dialogue with the

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local population became the entry point to such knowledge, but was also seen as the ethical way of encountering the other (Bevans & Schroeder, 2011; Mogensen, 2007). Whereas this version of contextual theology signifies a change in hermeneutics, dialogue is a tool for changing the relation to the other. As such, dialogue is not considered an alternative to mission, but a way of being in mission (Mogensen, 2007). In global theology, this development is inspired, according to Alain Wolf, by the concept of “dialogism” (2012). Dialogism addresses the need to be able to talk to others about their view on the truth, regardless of whether it is in opposition to one’s own. The German theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, among others, has endorsed this idea of dialogism. Through his analysis of the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity, guidelines for meaningful dialogue have been defined from a theological perspective. These specify the need for both conversation partners to be genuinely interested in the other’s religious convictions, that they are able to provide a representation of their own beliefs, and are open to the discovery of common ground and to critiques of their faith (Wolf, 2012, p. 40). Rather than adopting a relativist stance, the theological approach to interfaith dialogue universalises the human being and emphasises that witnessing and testimony are at the heart of dialogue, regardless of the way in which these practices are linked to mission work. As Bevans and Schroeder argue: “witness and proclamation (of the gospel) go together” (2011, p. 65). More recently, the turn towards dialogue has been further highlighted through interventions by Church institutions. Thus, in 1991, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue issued a statement that defined dialogue as directed towards mutual understanding in obedience to truth and respect for freedom. This statement includes both witnessing and the exploration of other religious convictions as integral elements of the Church’s evangelising mission (Dialogue and proclamation, 1991). Furthermore, in 2011, in what they termed a response to a multi-­religious world and increasing interreligious tensions, World Council of Churches, Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and World Evangelical Alliance published a set of recommendations and guidelines for Christian Witness. According to this response, bearing witness is a crucial aspect of being Christian. But it is underlined that witnessing needs to be

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accomplished without force or dishonesty and with respect for others’ faith and way of life. In their recommendations, they encourage relationship-­building and cooperation with people of all religions, as well as a strengthening of one’s own religious identity as Christian. They stress the need to get to know the other, and they call on governments to protect freedom of religion (World Council of Churches, 2011). Thus, building relationships, strengthening (Christian) religious identity, and fighting for the right to religion become identified as intimately connected.

From Authority to Authenticity The development from mission, via contextual theology, to dialogue and the ensuing translation of bearing witness may at the same time be seen as entangled with a move away from authority towards authenticity. In contemporary mission work, the request for authenticity bypasses the Christian claim to absolute truth (authority) and asks the believer—and the missionaries—to demonstrate Christianity in their behaviour and practice (Sørensen, 2009). In other words, what you say and what you do should coincide. Bearing witness becomes authentic only when words are linked to practical living. You bear witness by living in accordance with your inner (Christian) self. One interfaith organiser argues: And I think, if I were to put it into words, one would say that, in the Danish Church, the perception is that if you’re inclusive and befriend others without other agendas than being friends, this is in itself a testimony of the Gospel. To take care of a human being without trying to convert them and just help without any agenda, this is a testimony of the Gospel. (Interview with organiser of interfaith dialogue, Lise Paulsen Galal)

From this perspective, authenticity is about how you become a better Christian (and make a better world) through respectful and honest encounters with the religious other. “To dare to be together in that honesty”, as another organiser argues. This is a kind of “soft mission” (in the terminology of one organiser), where the demand that you must bear witness as a Christian remains intact. The focus on authenticity means

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that “being a witness”, “doing witness”, and “saying witness” should be interconnected. Ideally, words, deeds, and community go hand in hand (Nissen, 2015). In interfaith work, this is, among other things, translated into a diapraxis that is about working together on a project or service, side by side, rather than facing each other in dialogue. Through diapraxis, according to Lissi Rasmussen, witnessing becomes co-witnessing by sharing common experiences and activities related to real life.8 Witnessing becomes a shared human existence and dignity before God (Baig et al., 2018; Rasmussen, 1997). As we will show in the ensuing chapters of this book, bearing witness takes many forms in organised cultural encounters, including those outside the field of interfaith work. It is a practice that has been taken up in a broad range of organisational contexts working with transformation, where references to the Christian tradition are often obvious. One example is truth and reconciliation tribunals (Posel, 2008). Another is Alcoholics Anonymous and, by extension, the Minnesota Model of addiction treatment (Hvenegård-Lassen, 2008). Roughly speaking, bearing witness can be divided into two main modalities. The first concerns a person’s narrative about a religious experience or conviction; the second concerns a person’s oral or written statement about an incident or doing, which they have seen or experienced. In the second mode, it is not just any incident that elicits the need to bear witness, but rather incidents (conflicts, violence, and assaults) that involve others, and are important to these others (Lothe, 2008). The two modalities of bearing witness share an emphasis on truth. Witnessing, then, becomes a question of telling the truth as experienced or seen. In other words, witnessing becomes a mode of documentation, but a mode that begins with a rationalist proofor proposition-oriented epistemology. In the authentic witnessing of the Gospel, witnessing itself becomes the documentation of Jesus Christ. Since the Second World War, key discussions around witnessing and testimony have focused on Holocaust survivors. One central aspect of these debates concerns how we may know or be convinced that a witness, and therefore also a testimony, is authentic (Hartman, 2007). Whereas historical accuracy from one perspective may be perceived as the criterion for the authenticity of a testimony, Hartman argues that bearing witness does not occur under the same conditions as the writing of history, and

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therefore this kind of accuracy is not a relevant criterion. Hartman draws on Dori Laub (Laub & Felman, 1992), when arguing that securing authenticity is about recreating a damaged or deeply buried ability to talk, and thereby to witness. It is about reopening a channel of communication through a process wherein the survivor’s image of him- or herself is freed from debilitating distortions. Therefore, witnessing is dependent on a caring, thorough, and, most importantly, voluntary rather than captive and hypnotised listener. Witnessing, therefore, is not a solitary accomplishment, but rather a pact between the witness and the listener/ interviewer, which makes the narrative not only informative but also performative (Hartman, 2007). But this performativity is limited in that it has to be conveyed within a realistic way of narrating by referring to real or true experiences or convictions in order to be accepted as authentic (Hartman, 2007). Even though this debate attests to a shift in the evaluation of truth, the shift towards an articulation of witnessing and truth through authenticity makes fake testimonies a constant, potential threat. The idea that some testimonies may be inauthentic (and hence false) appears in interfaith dialogue settings, when the organisers interrupt or ignore particular narratives. Participants are continually encouraged or trained to perform witnessing in specific ways. Thus, interfaith organisers’ strong emphasis on the individual story and the encouragement to find “your inner voice” is intimately related to an idea of truth that links it to authenticity. In this way, truth is presented as located inside the self. This also comes to imply that it should not be corrupted by the truth of others, other believers, or authorities. As a believer, you hold the truth within yourself. During many interfaith encounters the individual is encouraged to give voice and bear witness to this inner truth. In doing so, you become an authentic human being. Hence, instead of transforming the religious other through conversion, the push towards transformation aims at the self: you become a truer Christian by bearing witness (for Christianity) in the respectful encounter with the other, but you also change the relationship with the other by being honest. As argued by James Wilce and Janina Fenigsen: “Authenticities are not about being, they are about becoming” (2015, p. 140).

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Consequently, the primary preoccupation in interfaith encounters is with how a community of believers, regardless of faith, share the practices of the authentic believer. Since this idea is picked up from Christian theology, the result is a paradoxical construction of firsts and otherings that remain asymmetrical. Firstly, this is because the strong focus on the individual, which is also found in conflict and reconciliation models, deviates from other interfaith dialogue models. Thus, Uzma Rehman argues in an article on Muslim approaches to conflict resolution (without ignoring that these are also influenced by western models), that they are more preoccupied with the repairing of the group or community and their values than the individual (Rehman, 2007). Secondly, the request for an authentic truth constitutes the organisers as “a representative moral elite” (Posel, 2008, p. 121). In Posel’s analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the commissioners become positioned as those whose moral habitus provide them with privileged access to the truth. Like the figure of the missionary, who was confirmed in his/her own belief through the conversion of another person to Christianity, the interfaith organiser is confirmed in his/her own authenticity as a Christian through organising an encounter between people of different religions. This point is similar to Thomas Brudholm’s (2007) argument about the magical moment of reconciliation, which is perhaps mainly the moment that the organisers crave. Making a connection between former mission work, and in particular the demand to bear witness, and current interfaith work, organisers of interfaith work rationalise the significance of the dialogue approach from within Christian theology. The encounter with religious others, then, continues to be a subject of theological study. Grounding the argument in theology, interfaith organisers partly decontextualise (or universalise) the method of encountering religious others. Thus, despite the denunciation of previous mission work’s misuse of power, the focus on Christian witnessing means that questions of past and present inequalities relating to the encounter between Christianity and its religious others are ignored. As Hugh Goddard (2000) argued in his historical analysis of Christian– Muslim relations, interfaith encounters have never been isolated interand intra-faith explorations, but have always intersected with concurrent political power struggles. In a Danish context, this focus on bearing

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witness paradoxically removes emphasis from the current politicisation of religious differences, which, as in other European countries, converges with an anti-immigration discourse (Joppke, 2018; Kivisto, 2014). Whereas ignoring majority–minority relations may be partly interpreted through the universalisation of the Christian discourse of bearing witness, it is also rooted in a particular Danish version of people and peoplehood—or folk, referring to the cohesiveness of an ethnic group or nation due to its own specific national soul. Posel writes that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a particular technique of nation building (Posel, 2008, p.  119). In a Danish context, the approach to organising and rationalising interfaith dialogue may also be analysed as part of a particular Danish, national and secular Christianity; in other words: a culturalised Christianity, which has been a pivotal element of Danish nation building. In the epistemologies of interfaith encounters, as in others of the organised cultural encounters we have studied, the universal and the particular are equally present. How this takes shape will be explored in the following.

Humans Together. Human First You have an experience of connecting and becoming recognised as well as recognising the other, or recognising yourself in the other. And, this is indeed what makes it so great when it comes about. Because you bypass all kinds of intellectualism and end up just being humans together. (Interview with organiser of interfaith dialogue, Lise Paulsen Galal)

This emphasis on “just being humans together” introduces a common humanity to which organisers repeatedly refer. In the quote, it is the president of one of the smaller interfaith NGOs who highlights this aspect. A similar argument is found among Danish theologians and religious thinkers who are also organisers of interfaith encounters (cf. Baig et al., 2018; Jørgensen, 2000). Based on academic theological studies, they argue that being human comes first, and further: “Sharing life and recognising one another as human beings is more important than making meaning systems fit together” (Baig et al., 2018, p. 157); “In brief, it is to be human

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and preferably an upright and true human being” (Jørgensen, 2000, no page). To these scholars and organisers, the risk of being challenged in your own belief when entering into interfaith dialogue can be handled through being human first (Baig et al., 2018; Jørgensen, 2000). Several organisers of interfaith encounters refer to the theology of creation in order to rationalise the emphasis on a common humanity. For instance, one organiser argues: “God has created us all like we are, and of course I also find a God image in a fellow human being”. And according to another organiser: God has created diversity and has wanted it in a way where God himself is different from himself, because God himself is a trinity and contains diversity within himself. God is different from himself, is diverse in himself through the trinity, and through the human and the divine. And, we are created in this image. We’re created in this diverse image. Thus, we’ve been given the assignment to embrace and love diversity. And this is what it means to be human, this is what it means to be Christian, this is what we are called for. (Interview with organiser of interfaith dialogue, Lise Paulsen Galal)

In this way, dialogue and engagement with other human beings, regardless of faith, are represented as essential Christian values. In entering into dialogue, you embody what it means to be a true Christian. This clearly resonates with the demand to live your life in accordance with yourself that we discussed in the previous subsection. Whereas the (exclusionary, cf. Wynter, 2003) idea of a common humanity is an element of wider European epistemologies, organisers (and theologians) of interfaith dialogue frequently refer to the Danish theologian and politician N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) (e.g. Baig et al., 2018; Jørgensen, 2000). This is not surprising, given the fact that, in a Danish context, which reaches far beyond academic circles, Grundtvig has become the personification of nineteenth-century (European) nation-building as it happened in Denmark.9 In the following, we explore how the universality of the human created in the image of a Christian God becomes articulated to the nation during the nineteenth century. Or how peoplehood is elevated into the platform for being human.

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State, Church, and People The idea of a universal human being who comes before and stands beside one’s faith marks a move away from a mediaeval European theocentric epistemology. This otherwise well-rehearsed story of European enlightenment is analysed from a decolonial perspective by Sylvia Wynter (2003, 2006). She explores the genealogy of what she calls “Man’s project”—the emergence of Man as universal humanity, which at the same time introduces the distinction between the human and the subhuman. According to Wynter, any social group reproduces its ordering principles through descriptive/prescriptive statements that stake out what it means to be human in that particular context. These ordering principles are grounded outside the social, and in that sense work to obscure the fact that social groups are the result of human agency (and vice versa). But human knowledge of the physical cosmos was nonetheless conceived in what Wynter calls “adaptive truth for terms” (2003, p. 281); that is: there were others—and other truths—outside that order. The monotheistic framework of Christianity, Wynter argues, is one such statement, in which, however, it is impossible to: conceive of another to what it calls God, this characteristic was to be carried over in secular terms as the humanist intellectuals of Renaissance Europe replaced the earlier public identity Christian with that of their newly invented Man defined as homo politicus, and as such, primarily the political subject of the state. (Wynter, 2006, p. 122)

With respect to mission and imperialism, Wynter sums up the shift in descriptive statements: two descriptive statements of the human: one for which the expansion of the Spanish state was envisaged as a function of the Christian evangelizing mission, the other for which the latter mission was seen as a function of the imperial expansion of the state; a dispute, then, between the theocentric conception of the human, Christian, and the new humanist and ratiocentric conception of the human, Man2 (i.e., as homo politicus, or the political subject of the state). (Wynter, 2003, p. 269)

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Wynter’s analysis raises the question of whether the universal human is part of the problem, when it comes to how difference is governed, and not, as suggested in interfaith and other organised cultural encounters, the solution. We return to this in the final section of this chapter. For now, we zoom in on how this matrix of meaning became actualised within the Danish context. The nineteenth-century slogan, “human first”, as hinted above, has a long history that involves a partial displacement of the Church. This also becomes, however, a rearticulation that is promoted by reform movements within Protestantism and Catholicism, alongside and intertwined with European state-crafting during the period from 1650 to 1800 (Buchardt, forthcoming). Mette Buchardt argues that the influence of religion (and churches) does not disappear, but rather shifts towards education, something that is increasingly becoming acknowledged within educational studies (Buchardt, forthcoming). So, the Enlightenment did not erase the influence of religion, but relocated it to education. The Reformation struggles, as Buchardt argues, had exposed a profound gap between the Church and the people. Education became a tool to bridge that gap as the local clerics became educators whose task consisted of “civilizing and moralizing the populations” (forthcoming). By the eighteenth century, local pastors in Denmark had become administratively responsible for education within their parishes on behalf of the state, and this was reconfirmed in the school reforms of 1814. The inhabitants of Denmark became subjects of the State through the Church, a Church you could not leave; the legal status of being adult, for instance, was predicated upon confirmation (Møller, 2019, pp. 42–43). The religious movements of the nineteenth century challenged this way of organising the relationship between State, Church, and people. They were influenced by democratic and national thinking, but also by religious ideas. In the quote introducing this subsection, the NGO president emphasises the need for “bypassing all kinds of intellectualism”. This resonates with the oppositional stance of religious movements during the nineteenth century. One of the exponents for this critique was Grundtvig, who criticised the Church for being governed by university theology that had developed into an “exegetic pope rule” due to its centralised authority that claimed a monopoly on interpreting the Bible. This is also an

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indirect critique of Luther’s emphasis on reading the scriptures. To nineteenth-­century religious movements, the true Church is not an institution, but consists of living humans—a congregation—who believe in the truth of Christianity. It is in the congregational practices of evangelising, baptising, and the Eucharist that the Christian truth comes into being, because it is here that the words of Jesus, and therefore Jesus himself, are present. This was what Grundtvig meant by the phrase “the living word”, another popular idiom of his (Møller, 2019). The aim of oppositional religious movements, then, was to redistribute authority away from the centralised institution of the Church and into local communities. In the case of Grundtvig, his support for freedom of religion was intimately related to his critique of university theology; but also of the fact that people (the congregation) were subjugated to the local parish pastor, not only in religious but also in state administrative affairs. Grundtvig’s relationship to the eighteenth-century reform movements, particularly Pietism, has been widely discussed (Thyssen, 1967). Despite their differences, Grundtvig shared with Pietism a critique of the Church and the emphasis on “the interior of the human” and “the experience of faith”, thereby putting less stress on dogmas (Buchardt, forthcoming; Thyssen, 1967). With the constitution of 1849, the discussions about how to organise the relationship between State, Church, and people gained new vigour. During the ensuing decades, several laws that (partly) changed this relationship were passed (many of these pushed by Grundtvig, who was a member of parliament). In 1855, the so-called parish untanglement possibility law [sognebåndsløsning] was passed. This authorised members of a congregation to choose a different pastor than the local parish pastor. In the same year, the Free School Act was passed, giving parents the right to found schools based on their own ideologies and/or beliefs. This meant that parents gained the opportunity to avoid the parish school where the local pastor was the final authority (Korsgaard & Wiborg, 2006). In 1868, the law on the right of a group of believers to set up their own congregation [valgmenighedsloven] was passed. Following this, a congregation could choose their own pastor, while still being affiliated with the Danish Church. Taken together, these laws diminished the power of the local parish pastor over local inhabitants (Møller, 2019). The three laws

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supported individual freedom of religion, but they also resulted in a large degree of congregational self-determination. This became vital for the development of the Danish Church, which, due to local self-­determination, succeeded in embracing various opposing and competing Christian revival movements, such as the Grundtvigian movement and Inner Mission.10 Instead of becoming separate church communities, they became integrated into the Danish Church, with the result that both Grundtvigianism and Inner Mission came to have enormous influence on local church and community life (Møller, 2019). This embracing of different ideological positions still exists today, Rubow argues, stating that the Danish Church “seems to be defined by a social and symbolic structure, which with a minimum of dogma and shared rituals can contain within it opposing interpretations of key existential or political questions” (2011, p. 107). During the nineteenth century, this inclusivity was symbolically constructed around the term folket, that is, the people. Following the 1849 constitution, the former King’s or State Church became Folkekirken (the people’s church). This amounts to the introduction of a new symbolic order in which the community, the Danish people, is placed at the centre. The common people’s school became Folkeskolen (the people’s school), and the assembly of estates became Folketinget (the people’s assembly). Folket—the people—became the invisible, or perhaps rather the indispensable, core of the symbolic order of democracy, established as folkestyre (people’s rule) (Korsgaard, 2013, p.  91). Under the influence of the national romantic movements, an understanding of a Danish peoplehood that constructed Danes as the same—or similar—due to their shared history and language acquired strength. This raises the question of how, in more specific terms, did the connection between Christianity and peoplehood, or Danishness, become articulated. Grundtvig’s account of the relation between Christianity and Danishness is illuminating with respect to this question, not because it was necessarily shared across the religious movements of his time, but because it exemplifies how the nation and Christianity became mythologically knitted together. Grundtvig perceived folkeånden (the people’s spirit) to be an assistant on earth of the Holy Spirit. To enable the Holy Spirit to touch the hearts of the people, the people’s spirit must assist and,

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in order to succeed, the Gospel must be preached in the mother tongue. In this regard, Grundtvig connects the concept of spirit with the nation and the people, without displacing the Holy Spirit (Korsgaard, 2013, p. 95). This emphasis on the mother tongue as the key to accessing the people’s spirit, and subsequently the Holy Spirit, reflected the romantic national ideas of the time. Education became the means to support access to the people’s spirit as well as to the Holy Spirit. In the Danish imaginary, Grundtvig has become a figure who stands for any number of important events and processes associated with the formation of Denmark as a nation state. He is, we might say, a national hero, and as such the figure of Grundtvig belongs to the terrain of mythology. Education, however, is one field where Grundtvig is less of a figure and more of an actual influence. Grundtvig’s approach to education was based on an understanding of the human being as a historical and linguistic creature. This understanding led him to highlight history and Danish literature as the most important subjects to teach. Educating the common people was a way of giving them access to Danish history and language and thereby to the spirit. Education was important not only for children, but also for adults. Among other, adult education was institutionalised in Folkehøjskolen (the people’s high school), which was inspired by Grundtvig’s idea of adult education as education “for life”. With respect to the education of children, Grundtvig did not promote comprehensive schools, understood as “a system of education with mixed-­ ability classes from grade 1 to 9/10” (Korsgaard & Wiborg, 2006, p. 361). As one element within a nation rather than a state-centred ideology, he, and later the Grundtvigian group, promoted the free schools, not state-­ organised mandatory schools (Korsgaard & Wiborg, 2006, p. 373). However, the comprehensive, state-organised national school won the struggle, and became the institution through which the people acquired their national “spirit”. This was supported by Danish theological thinkers from within liberal theology.11 Through schools, Christianity and the Gospel became objects of scientific study, and were taught by teachers from a science of religion approach. Consequently, and under the influence of theologians, religion became transformed into culture and, as argued by Buchardt: desacralised, whereas in the same move the state became sacralised through a culturalised Protestantism (2013, p.  137;

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2015). Mass education became the means by which to produce “the population” and religion/Christianity was objectified into a historically scientific form far removed from the heartfelt and personalised religiosity promoted by the nineteenth-century religious movements. Thus, the role of religion in the construction of the Danish people is suspended between two staggered developments. The Grundtvigian movement wanted to desacralise the state and sacralise the people, and to that end fostered a vocabulary that constructed a particular Danish people. This symbolic community was then transformed through mass education and promoted by liberal theologians, among others, becoming a population that was produced “with the aim of creating an identification with labour and the nation” (Buchardt, 2013, p. 138). Nowadays, ideas from both developments—religion as outside the state and the Protestantised state—inform organised interfaith encounters. In the introduction to this subsection, we quoted statements from two organisers of interfaith encounters in which they motivate their approach to interfaith dialogue through ideas about universal human beings, togetherness, and peoplehood, and subsume this trinity under the heading “just being humans together”, in some cases with explicit reference to Grundtvig. Moreover, the institutionalisation of the relation between Church and State, and therefore also interfaith dialogue, is strongly influenced by the nineteenth-century discourses. Even today, the Danish Church is decentralised, with no central church council or synod. Any attempt to change this has so far been unsuccessful (Dabelsteen, 2015). Consequently, interfaith dialogue in the Danish context is not a policy adopted by the state or political elites. This sets Denmark apart from other European countries, where interfaith dialogue has been embraced as an official policy at different levels of society (Duemmler & Nagel, 2013; Giordan & Lynch, 2019; Griera, 2012; Griera & Nagel, 2018; Liebmann, 2017). In contrast to Sweden and Norway, neither does Denmark have a national interfaith body. Instead, interfaith activities are almost entirely dominated by civil society organisations, including minority communities, and (invariably involving) the Danish Church. These organisations, communities, and institutions have taken it upon themselves to organise and promote interfaith dialogue, even if, to some extent, this happens on behalf of the State (Galal et al., 2018). Related to

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this, interventions address civil society and community members rather than the political domain. While its claim to a secular identity partly explains why the Danish State does not see itself as a dialogue partner per se, this identity is intimately related to the way in which the Danish Church has been organised and how the State happened to include religion. Other faith communities have had no incentive to construct national councils or lobbying bodies, because there is no partner to address at the governmental level. Not surprisingly, the Muslim Council of Denmark has had no significant impact on the perception or governing of religious diversity. Whereas civil society and faith-based organisations in other countries, especially the USA, work together on a regular basis to advocate for issue-specific purposes (Halafoff, 2013; Yukich & Braunstein, 2014), this is seldom the case in Denmark. When it comes to the governance of religious diversity, a sceptical approach towards state intervention in religious matters remains intact. Thus, when discussing the position of different religions in Denmark, one of the Danish interfaith organisers admits that his initial admiration of the Norwegian model, which offers equal rights for all religions, quickly developed into a rejection. He did not like it, he said, “because it’s really very unlike the Danish way, it’s ufolkeligt (not in accordance with the people or peoplehood), in a way, since the State becomes too big”. Along the same line of thought, he argued that interfaith dialogue must have higher ambitions than promoting human or civil rights. Seen from this organiser’s perspective, the Danish Church is the natural place for addressing religious differences. In this way, it becomes apparent that the history and structure of the Danish Church serves as a model of how to include different religious positions by creating togetherness under the umbrella of sameness. Working with religious difference is not about changing unequal relations, but about creating sameness, a collective “we”, regardless of religious differences. In organised interfaith encounters, the result is a universalisation of the human being which is connected to the demand that the individual believer must be authentic: the individual human being should stay true to her inner self. The individualisation of belief is essential in the sense that you are expected to only (re)present yourself. This expectation concerns not only the ordinary participants but also the organisers who, in

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accordance with the decentralised structure of the Danish Church, are asked not to speak on behalf of the institution. The current Bishop of Copenhagen, when participating in an interfaith encounter, felt the need to stress that he was participating as an individual Christian and not as a representative or leader within the Danish Church. This approach is also taken by organisers of other faiths. For instance, one of the Muslim organisers, who often participates in interfaith work as a religious scholar, stressed in an interview that he did not see himself as a representative of any Muslim branch or community. The concurrent emphasis on individual authenticity and peoplehood embodies a paradox. All participants are considered to be human beings of the same kind, and therefore approachable as individual believers. At the same time, peoplehood refers to a specific national construction that includes privileged access to a particular history and language and is ultimately connected to the state, which positions the human being within a culturalised Protestantism (Buchardt, 2015). The historical convergence of peoplehood and Christianity in Denmark has been a way of culturalising a form of religion that is still supported by the State as well as the Church. Despite competing secularisms within the Danish Church, they “share an understanding of the Danish Church as a public good for the wider society and not just for church members” (Dabelsteen, 2015, p. 44). In other words, the role of the Church is—on behalf of the state— to help the nation cohere. This role has gained increasing importance within a secular Europe witnessing new religious diversity, as Joppke argues: “if the state wants to associate itself with religion, it can do so only by transforming religion into culture” (Joppke, 2018, p. 236). Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that in the Danish context both the State and the Church prefer to stick to their particular relationship. “The main strategy for the state to square the circle of principled neutrality and unavoidable majority privileging is to declare religion ‘culture’” (Joppke, 2018, p. 238).

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Man’s Project When perceived as social phenomena, organised cultural encounters occur in different social domains that—partly—play by their own rules, as we argued above. The genealogy of “rules” (ideas, rationalities, epistemologies) that we have explored takes its point of departure in interfaith work. Had we instead chosen education, for instance (starting with the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, and thus the Border Association, see Box 3.3, p. 79), the genealogy would have followed other trajectories. Given the association with Danish nation building during the nineteenth century and the importance of the Danish/German border region in that process, and given the importance of (the figure of ) Grundtvig in this respect (and indeed also concerning education), we would still have gone down some of the same roads. This means that there are shared epistemologies, or at least points of convergence, across our sites. We also—if briefly—argued above that our choice of the interfaith field is not random. One reason for this choice is empirical and related to the centrality of dialogue across our studies. The two quotes cited in the beginning of Chap. 1 are excerpted from handbooks and guidelines on how to conduct dialogue meetings. The first stems from The Dialogue Handbook: The Art of Conducting a Dialogue – and Facilitating Dialogue Workshops published by the Danish Youth Council, which is an umbrella body for a wide variety of youth organisations (Helde, 2012); the second quote is from Danmission’s online dialogue toolbox (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.). The conceptualisation of dialogue, and the reliance on the human as embodying a kind of sameness that becomes the condition of possibility for dialogue, is almost the same down to the wording in these two contexts, which might otherwise be seen as belonging to different social domains. We are not arguing that there is a simple causal (or temporal) relation, whereby ideas have their origins in developments within Christianity (institutionally and theologically) and are then recirculated elsewhere. Rather, from the particular starting point of interfaith encounters, we have followed trajectories that are important nodal points in the formation of a contemporary white, majority Danish context that make inroads into all the encounters we have studied. The choice of interfaith dialogue

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as our point of departure implies that we have followed some of the ways in which these nodal points have been constituted, as well as how they have been rationalised within this particular field. It is also a strategic choice, which implies that we do not, in the spirit of—or claiming— secularism, bypass the importance of Christianity as a source of current, dominant rationalities when it comes to difference, the human, and the social, as well as transformation. In their introduction to a recent edited volume on testimony and bearing witness, Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel (2017) summarise “Testimony studies” in this way: The variety of this field ranges from research on trauma and memory to the fields of history and legal studies to political and juridical debates about testimony in the context of international and national courts and truth commissions. It includes theological, religious and cultural historical discussions as well as considerations of testimony in art and image studies. In philosophical epistemology, as well as in the history of science, scholars have reflected critically on testimony as an individual or social source of knowledge, while post-structuralist philosophy has been concerned with the topos of the unsayability of bearing witness and the deconstruction of a concept of truth that strives for objectivity. (2017, p. ix)

Theology and religion are not, however, included in their otherwise insightful overview of the scholarly debate, which (in an exemplary way, the authors argue) focuses on philosophy and the philological-historical humanities (ibid., xii). Our starting point was interfaith work, and in particular the central notion of dialogue, rather than bearing witness and testimony, and, of course, this makes a difference. Still, circumventing theology and religion—and Christianity—would for us imply that one important source of the dominant definition of “the human”, which reappears across our sites, disappears from sight. Returning to Wynter’s genealogy of Man’s project mentioned above, she analyses in depth how that project is formed and rearticulated over time in increasingly secular terms, but in continual overrepresentation of Man as the human. Man’s project implies that “Man” becomes accepted as the generic sex, the bourgeoisie as the generic class, the Indo-European as the generic race, Christianity as the generic religion, and homo

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oeconomicus as part of the generic genre of being human (2006, pp. 130–131). Wynter’s analyses of Man’s project embark us on a violent journey during which she shows how the contemporary notion of the human, as it is envisaged in that project, “interfaces with gender, coloniality, slavery, racialization, and political violence” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 24). Wynter does not, however, argue that humanity is a terrain that needs to be evacuated, but rather that it is in dire need of being disentangled from the dominance of Man’s project. The interfaith genealogy that we have established in the preceding pages is not (only) a genealogy incorporated into Man’s project. The move from mission to dialogue comes about through encounters and struggles in the contact zone, attesting to the creativity, negotiations, and adaptations that, along with violence and suppression, characterise that zone (Pratt, 1991, 2008). Interfaith organisers in Denmark—as elsewhere—are negotiating difference, sameness, universality, particularity, representation, individuality, and community in a terrain full of ambiguities, tensions, and paradoxes. We have explored how these elements are tied together in an unstable coherence through the currently dominant interfaith epistemology. In the chapters that follow, we turn to how the performativity of interfaith encounters, as well as other organised cultural encounters, plays out in practice. As we will show, the ambiguities, tensions, and paradoxes are managed differently across our studies, and (in) form the interactions of participants (organisers and non-organisers) in different ways.

Notes 1. See https://www.facebook.com/events/1213293995505058/ (accessed 20 March 2019). See also https://www.tv2lorry.dk/artikel/moskeholder-mindehoejtidelighed-terror-ofre (accessed 20 March 2019). 2. When we write “the Danish Church”, we are referring to the national, state church The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark. 3. http://www.km.dk/folkekirken/kirkestatistik/folkekirkens-medlemstal/ (accessed 22 May 2019).

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4. In Denmark, no official registration of individual religious belonging exists except for members of the Danish Church due to their payment of a church tax to the State. If religious communities do not publish numbers of members, the way of counting religious belonging is therefore to calculate followers based on country of origin. Based on such calculations, about 299,000 in total numbers (5.2%) of the Danish population are Muslims (as of 1 October 2016). Most are immigrants or descendants of immigrants with origins in such countries as Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iran, and Morocco. Since the 1600s, Jews have lived in Denmark and today constitute a population of about 7000 people. About 47,673 people are members of the Catholic Church in Denmark (as of 1 October 2017). Other groups are Hindus (19–20,000 in 2018, mainly with a background in Sri Lanka and India) and Buddhists (33,000  in 2018, of whom 90% have an immigrant background). In addition, there are a number of smaller religious communities. 5. Cf. https://danmission.dk/hvad-gor/dialog/ (accessed 26 August 2019). Danmission is a private organisation sharing the values of, and working in partnership with, the Danish Church. 6. See also the organisation IKON’s view on mission and dialogue: https:// danmission.dk/ikon/om/dialog-og-missionssyn/ (accessed 8 April 2019). IKON is one of the Christian organisations actively involved in organising interfaith encounters. 7. Missionaries on the ground had for centuries—for pedagogical reasons—worked to gain knowledge of the local cultures and languages, and were indeed also important sources of knowledge about this through their reports to metropolitan Europe (Mudimbe-Boyi, 2012, p. 90ff). 8. One of the key individuals in a Danish context is Lissi Rasmussen. She is a theologian and pastor, who wrote her doctoral dissertation about interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians and started the Islamic–Christian Study Centre (IKS), which was the very first initiative of its kind in Denmark. See also http://ikstudiecenter.dk/wp-content/ uploads/2014/02/DIAPRAXIS.pdf (accessed 27 August 2019). 9. Grundtvig was a Danish theologian and politician, who engaged with questions of the role of the church, freedom of religion, and education of the people. He gave his name to the Grundtvigian movement, even though he never saw himself as the leader of a movement (Møller, 2019),

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and he has become a symbol of a specific interpretation of the intersection between nationality and Christianity in Denmark (Korsgaard, 2013). 10. Inner Mission is a more direct heir of Pietism and, whereas Grundtvigianism sees the spirit of the people as supporting the Holy Spirit, Inner Mission distinguishes between “the devoted” and “the world” (Møller, 2019, p. 57). 11. Burchardt points to Aage Bentzen (1894–1953) and Edward Lehmann (1862–1930) as influential in this development (2013, p. 130).

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Thyssen, A. P. (1967). Grundtvig og Spener. Især til belysning af den pietistiske Grundtvig [Grundtvig and Spener. In Particular Concerning the Pietistic Grundtvig]. Grundtvig-Studier, 20(1), 9–50. Valentine, G. (2008). Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter. Progress in Human Geography, 32(3), 323–337. Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines for Interfaith Meetings]. (2008). Retrieved from http://www.religionsmoede.dk/index.php/materialer/ fr-materialer Villadsen, K. (2008). Freedom as Self-transgression: Transformations in the ‘Governmentality’ of Social Work. European Journal of Social Work, 11(2), 93–104. Vinding, N. V., & Christoffersen, L. (2012). Danish Regulation of Religion, State of Affairs and Qualitative Reflections. A Report on 20 Qualitative Elite Interviews. Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilce, J. M., & Fenigsen, J. (2015). Introduction: De-essentializing Authenticity: A Semiotic Approach. Semiotica, 2015(203), 137–152. Wolf, A. (2012). Intercultural Identity and Inter-Religious Dialogue: A Holy Place to Be? Language and Intercultural Communication, 12(1), 37–55. World Council of Churches, P. C. for I. D., and World Evangelical Alliance. (2011). Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World: Recommendations for Conduct. Retrieved from https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/interreligious-dialogue-and-cooperation/christianidentity-in-pluralistic-societies/christian-witness-in-a-multi-religious-world Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Wynter, S. (2006). On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project. In L. R. Gordon & J. A. Gordon (Eds.), Not Only the Master’s Tools. African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (pp. 107–169). Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers. Yukich, G., & Braunstein, R. (2014). Encounters at the Religious Edge: Variation in Religious Expression Across Interfaith Advocacy and Social Movement Settings. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 53(4), 791–807.

3 Guided Interactions: Scripting at Work

Prelude At the beginning of each dialogue meeting, the [Cultural Encounters] ambassadors display a couple of ambiguous pictures containing “double” motifs (for instance, rabbit/duck depending on what catches the viewer’s eye). Two people, the ambassadors explain, may see different things, even if they are looking at the same picture. This is true for dialogue as well: all perspectives and viewpoints are welcome. Today, there is no right or wrong. (Helle Bach Riis, fieldnotes, see also Riis, 2017, p. 699).

The aim of dialogue in the context of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors (see Box 3.3, p. 79) is to reduce prejudice and dismantle stereotypes, or, more precisely: to work on the assumptions about minorities in Denmark that are supposedly held by the participants. In the meetings, which are facilitated by young white and non-white “ambassadors”, the phrase “there is no right or wrong” works to propel the dialogue forward. The script stipulates that, in order to do so, assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes must be brought to the table first. Thus, the script’s underlying theory of transformation relies on repetition as the

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necessary precondition for displacement. The formula “there is no right or wrong” is in the script to ensure that assumptions are in fact repeated.1 There is, however, a delimiting marker attached to the ambassadors’ launch of the rule “there is no right or wrong”. Thus, “today” marks the exceptionality—or more precisely: the spatiotemporal confines—of this rule. The delimitation implies that this encounter is sealed off from the decorum (see also Chap. 4) or deference patterns (Goffman, 1972, p. 31) normally associated with face-to-face encounters. In the everyday life of most social spaces, it would be inappropriate behaviour to explicitly and self-consciously voice or otherwise enact one’s stereotypical assumptions in direct interaction with the embodied others to whom these assumptions “stick” (Ahmed, 2014b). The script of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, however, requires that appropriate behaviour is bracketed—made temporarily irrelevant. The need to carve out this intermediate space is further exacerbated by the fact that most of the ambassadors’ dialogue meetings take place in educational institutions. In other words, the script is performed on stages that are very much associated in their everyday use with the existence of right and wrong, true and false. According to the project coordinator of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, the function of the rule “there is no right or wrong” (and its associated credo, that the ambassadors are not supposed to preach one truth) is to make the participants feel safe (Riis, 2017, p. 699). In this way, according to the script, the exceptional space is designated as a safe space for the participants, if not necessarily for the ambassadors, or indeed for participants who share minority positionality with them. While white majority Danes are usually numerically dominant, all the observed dialogue meetings were also attended by non-white minority Danes. These participants are forced— along with the ambassadors—to face and listen to vocalised prejudices without being allowed to contest them—at least not in the first round. In an interview, one of the ambassadors explains why this rule is adopted: “It’s simply about pushing people as far out as possible, so they join in. Otherwise we can’t work with them  – if we don’t have these, these, how can you say it, points of contention”. On several occasions, the participants either resist or reluctantly enact the roles they are assigned. “You have to be careful not to create prejudice if it isn’t already there”, one participant sums up in the evaluation of a dialogue meeting, where resistance to the script was widespread (Riis, 2017, p. 702). After another

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dialogue meeting in an educational institution catering for youngsters with various kinds of special needs, a participant somewhat reluctantly relates to the researcher: “This is a strange place for a dialogue meeting; we’re all different [i.e. we all deviate from the norm]; we know how it feels to be different” (Helle Bach Riis, fieldnotes). While this participant is not talking about racial or ethnic difference, she/he is nevertheless pointing out that, in the script of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, participants are tacitly assumed to hold majority positions. The rule that “there is no right or wrong” positions the imaginary participant as someone who subscribes to (some of ) the widely circulating stereotypes related to non-white minorities in Denmark, at the same time as it ensures that she/he can safely voice any assumptions in this particular space. Following from this, we suggest, is the reality that the Cultural Encounters Ambassador script (tacitly) presupposes that participants are white majority Danes. This interpretation is corroborated by other features of the script. The mixing of white (belonging to the national minorities— Danish and German—living on either side of the border between Denmark and Germany, see Box 3.3, p.  79) and non-white ambassadors who are performing at any given dialogue meeting aims (according to the project website) to give “ethnic Danes a unique opportunity to see themselves represented as a minority” (Riis, 2017, p. 698). Ontologically speaking, the script thus gestures towards the arbitrariness of minority positionality. And, in that gesture, it also seeks to destabilise the racialised character of the ethnic other (if not necessarily of the Danish self ). This proves to be a difficult move to sustain, not only because the script is ambiguous, but also because the interaction between participants and ambassadors to a large extent becomes regulated by the not-so-arbitrary history of prior encounters that precondition who embodies an “ethnic minority” positionality. “The stranger is some-body whom we have already recognized in the very moment in which they are ‘seen’ or ‘faced’ as a stranger” as Sara Ahmed puts it (2000, p. 21). Both the white German/Danish border minorities and the non-white “ethnic minorities” who perform as Cultural Encounters Ambassadors are representatives of the cultural encounter. But, if we follow Ahmed’s point above, the white ambassadors mirror the white participants—who come to recognise these ambassadors as “the same with a slight difference”—while the non-white co-ambassadors become the embodiment of the encounter through their “strangeness”.

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Scripted Practices The prelude above introduces this chapter’s focus on the organisers’ scripting of encounters through a discussion of the orchestration of the dialogue meetings organised by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors. In Chap. 2, we used the field of interfaith dialogue to demonstrate how organised cultural encounters are formed by prior practices and epistemic worldings. Thus, we have exemplified how the resources that feed into ideas and practices associated with encounters as intervention practices pick up and knit together elements that precede any particular encounter. These ideas and practices inform the organisers’ scripting of encounters in various ways. In this chapter, we explore how scripts channel the enactment of encounters, focusing on positions, interactions, resistance, and emplacement across the empirical sites included in this book. Our attention is still partly directed towards the organisers’ ideas, but the analyses that follow focus on how the practices that are performed within encounters are (in)formed by the organisers’ scripts. Along with other theatre metaphors, the notion of script might have been used—following Erving Goffman (1959)—to designate all the various elements that form the historical, socio-cultural, and spatial context around organised cultural encounters, as well as the practices performed within them. Since we are working with encounters that are purposefully scripted by the organisers, script is not a metaphor in our contexts: there is in fact a script. Consequently, we use the term “script” and the associated vocabulary (roles and stage, for instance) to designate the organisers’ attempts to direct or govern the encounters in particular ways. As such, we are leaning towards the juxtaposition of the everyday and the theatre found within performance studies (cf. Striff, 2003). Goffman’s fine-grained approach to situated interaction is useful in other respects, even if we also need to amend it to our purposes. Thus, the analyses in this chapter draw (selectively) upon his work on face-to-face interactions, in particular his book on encounters first published in 1961 (Goffman, 1972). The social situations—the kind of encounters—that we are studying are, however, different from the “naturally” occurring social interactions that Goffman focuses on. Goffman defines encounters as “focused gatherings” (which is how they are distinguished from “small group” (1972, p. 8) activities). “Focused” in his framework implies a particular activity (an operation,

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a game of cards, or a turn on a merry-go-­round, for instance). Organised cultural encounters may be focused gatherings in Goffman’s sense, but the focus is on interaction itself. In this way, they contain a doubling of interactional dynamics: the dynamics of self–other relations and interactions are both the focus of the gathering and something that plays out in the encounter among participants, and between the organisers and participants. Interactional practice does not necessarily play out in a way that “corresponds to” the focus on interaction. Goffman argues that, as in any other social situation, a (dominant) “definition” is in charge of encounters (1972, p. 117). In our encounters, the dominant definition of the situation targets the practices that are performed, and the purpose of the activity is to intervene in these practices and transform the dynamics of future interactions. Returning to the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, their definition can be boiled down to the following: stereotypes and prejudice related to cultural difference channel interactions in problematic ways. Re-enacting these problematic interactions is what sets the activity going, but is also what needs to be modulated. The “today, there is no right or wrong” rule works to suspend what would otherwise be seen as appropriate behaviour, as we argued above. In Goffman’s terms, appropriate behaviour in this instance paradoxically becomes part of the “rules of irrelevance”, to which focused gatherings adhere (1972, p. 18). These rules of irrelevance are sustained (or there is an attempt to do so) through various social processes that form a “structure of inattention to most things of the world” (1972, p. 19). In the normal course of events, they aim to ensure that social interactions do not run too far off the beaten track. For Goffman, the rules of relevance and irrelevance are very much associated with patterns of deference or decorum: The process of mutually sustaining a definition of the situation in face-to-­ face interaction is socially organized through rules of relevance and irrelevance. These rules for the management of engrossment appear to be an insubstantial element of social life, a matter of courtesy, manners, and etiquette. (1972, p. 72)

In order to ensure that participants join in, as one of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors puts it, the rules of irrelevance in this context precisely concern the “insubstantial elements” that otherwise sustain a (relatively) smooth face-to-face interaction.

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While the encounters included in this book each adhere to their particular rules of relevance and irrelevance, several of them share some features with the rules adopted by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors. This is related to the fact that all organised cultural encounters aim to transform interactional patterns. They rest on a definition of something “bad” that exists before the encounter, which is then worked on in the here-and-now, to be enacted after the encounter through a desired transformation, which in one way or another is associated with changing self–other relations. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter explores the relational distribution of explicit and/or tacit pre-positioning of organisers and participants. We focus on the positions made available for participants through the script. Following Goffman, we think of the positions assigned through the script in terms of roles.2 “Subject position” is a much broader concept, which we employ following other approaches. Our point of departure is that participants act upon and are simultaneously determined by pre-existing cultural conditions (Butler, 1993; Foucault, 2003; Hall, 1996; Staunæs, 2003). The script is an attempt to direct conduct and assign roles to participants, but the actual performance deviates in various ways, partly because dynamics associated with pre-existing cultural conditions seep into the encounter. In the second section, we analyse resistance to the organisers’ scripts. The reluctance of participants in one particular Cultural Encounter Ambassador dialogue meeting to enact the roles they were assigned is one such example, which we return to in this section. Here, we also return to Goffman and expand upon some of the interactional dynamics he identifies. As suggested in the prelude, the classroom accentuates the necessity of the rule “there is no right or wrong”, as well as the difficulty of performing it. In the third and final section of the chapter, we turn to questions relating to the space in which the encounters take place. We argue that different scripts involve more or less deliberate interactions with the space of the encounter, both as place-making and as management of the pre-­existing conditions of a place (e.g. Bakhtin, 1984, 2001; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1994). Hence, different organised cultural encounters produce different spaces, drawing on pre-existing institutional dynamics and scripts, such as classrooms, urban spaces, religious buildings, festival grounds, and exhibition halls. We explore what the spaces are expected to do with or to the participants; and how places come into being during the encounter between script and practice.

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Subject Positioning The organisers’ scripts assign particular roles to the participants, in terms of both who the expected participant is, and the repertoire of (inter) actions and discourses that are associated with these roles. In the following, we use two examples from our empirical studies to illustrate how the subjectivity of the participants overspills the roles to which they are assigned, and how this affects the practices that unfold.

Box 3.1  Training Courses for Municipal Integration Workers This study concerns training courses for employees in Danish municipalities working with integration programmes for newly arrived refugees, or more broadly with welfare services that also include aspects relating to the integration of ethnic minorities. The courses were collaboratively organised and developed by NGOs and governmental (though independent) organisations, and partly financed by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration. They were offered in the wake of the rising number of refugees arriving in Europe (mainly) due to the war in Syria. We use “integration” as a term referring to public measures that in Denmark are regulated by law (the Integration Act) as well as through detailed administrative procedures. The courses are encounters with difference “once removed”, because they are not set up as encounters; their aim is to make future encounters between municipal employees and their clients better, and ultimately to produce better integration. A full course consisted of four modules (one day each). These modules dealt with legal and administrative practices as well as existing possibilities for action related to the labour market, family, traumatised refugees, and so on. The module observed for this study was entitled: Intercultural Competence and Communication. It focused on the participants’ perceptions and reflections on encounters with their clients as well as their cultural self-awareness. The researcher (Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen) participated in three sessions, which were held in three different locations in Denmark during the autumn of 2015. Two of these followed almost identical programmes, while the third was smaller and had a particular focus on illness. The data material consists of observation notes, including notes on conversations with both participants and facilitators during lunch and other breaks.

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 he Oddness of Danish Culture and the Universality T of the Human Like the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors in the prelude, the organisers’ script for the training courses for municipal integration workers (see Box 3.1, p. 65) established a cut between “the real world” and the situational time-space of the courses. These courses were explicitly advertised as apolitical, which meant that debates related to the field of integration politics, as well as the increasingly detailed administrative procedures that this political field has been translated into in Denmark (cf. Olwig & Pærregaard, 2011; Rytter, 2019), were excluded from the agenda of the sessions on intercultural competence. This exclusion emerged through the way in which the need for intercultural competence was introduced by the course facilitators: “intercultural competence is needed when it doesn’t work, when there is no progression. It’s about finding alternative points of contact”. The “it” refers to the expected shared knowledge among the course participants about the normal procedures of their trade, and “progression” hints at the idea that there is a measuring rod against which progress may be measured. The prospective outcome— “integration”—is, however, not on the agenda (not directly at least); rather, it is implicitly made relevant as a premise for things to work and progress. Hence, the training, as well as interculturality more generally, becomes preoccupied with (reformed) technologies: how can we reach the (un)specified ends through a reformed procedure. In this sense, these training activities were caught up in the already established governmentality of this contact zone.3 The training sessions thus address strictly framed institutional contact zones where interactions are performed through, and channelled by, particular governmental technologies (Foucault, 1991, 2004). This also means that the leeway for municipal workers is becoming more and more limited, and the positions that are opened up for the recipients of services related to integration are equally narrowly defined. Due to the strictness of the framing, the transformative aims of the training (producing interculturally competent integration workers who may, in turn, produce

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more or better integration) were limited in the sense that an array of issues were not up for change or debate. As mentioned above, the target group for these training courses was municipal employees whose jobs consist of or involve integration work. Hence, participants were defined by their professional job description, and accordingly the organisers’ reflections about who the participants might be were tied to differences in professional background and job position. This is also the focus of the midway evaluation of the courses, in which participants were categorised according to gender (participants were predominantly female, which was not surprising given the gendered make-up of public welfare employees in Denmark), profession (nurses, teachers, case workers, etc.), status position (leader or “ordinary” employee), and the number of years they had worked within the field of integration. These distinctions, along with the relative distribution among them, are deemed important and relevant to the participants’ evaluation of their learning outcome. The evaluation does not mention the fact that there were also participants who were not white majority Danes. This was the case in all of the observed sessions on intercultural competence. Like the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, a position as minority Danish was not made available to participants during these sessions (ruling out the possibility of making encounters part of the here-and-now of the training). This, then, was not a marked position in the organisers’ script, and even if the issue did—occasionally—pop up, it was never given room to unfold further. Cultural difference was ascribed to the topics and the subjects that were talked about, not to the participants in the room, or indeed Danish society at large. The following example of the backgrounding of minority positions took place in a session with relatively few participants compared to the other sessions observed. The situation involved 16 participants who were more homogeneous in their composition with respect to their line of work (employment) and education (case workers4) than usual. Among the participants, three had a minority Danish background. Initially, this was judged (by the researcher) from visible cues, since the introduction round centred on profession and line of work. The session was divided into sections in which the facilitator was teaching (about the concept of culture and how cultural difference is experienced, illustrated through

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hands-on examples), interrupted by frequent exercises that pushed the participants towards self-reflection. In one of these, the participants were divided into groups based on the socioeconomic status of their parents (“it’s a random choice”, the facilitator said, “it could have been whatever”). The first task was to discuss “how it was to be ill when you were kids—what did it take to be categorised as ill?” The idea was to use this to reflect on how definitions of illness learned during childhood might influence the participants’ professional encounters with “the sick client”. Immediately after this, and in the same groups, another discussion concerning “who were seen as the others in your parental home?” took place. The latter brought up a gallery of different protagonists: people living on the other side of the river; rich people; those who were religious; those who did not belong to Jehovah’s Witnesses; those who live on Mors (a small island). One participant with an Iraqi background related that, in his home, the others were other Iraqis, but most prominently the Danes, who had inferior values and principles for bringing up children. In the plenary round-up, he added that his parents were most certainly well integrated. The researcher and this particular participant were the two members of the group designated as the ones who had a parent with higher education. The facilitator concluded this section by saying that when something becomes threatening, the ties to “us” are strengthened, and this is important to bear in mind when you communicate with a client. The exercise had several functions and consequences, some of which were part of the script and some not. Firstly, it highlighted othering as a universal mechanism (the ensuing section was about stereotypes and prejudice). So othering was presented as “human”, as a stable part of the psychological makeup of the human being. The particular otherings reported by the participants were clearly situational, but the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that we have all been part of othering processes. The exercise mirrored the participants’ own experiences, but jumped scale from the situated and local (“Mors”) to the universal, and in that move also equalised all othering processes as being of the same kind. The facilitator’s concluding remark might be understood as follows: first you may consider communicating in ways that do not feel threatening to the client, and second, even if interactions with the clients seem to

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be antagonistic, you might consider how this reflects universal psychological processes. Thus an understanding of the “deeper” causes behind a client’s reactions may take shape even if you do not understand the specific issues at stake. Secondly, and in contrast to the emphasis of the script, the exercise worked to bring the heterogeneous non-professional subjectivities of the participants into the room but, due to the jump in scale, they became articulated as entangled in universal processes related to human nature rather than constituted in specific contexts and related to local spaces. Thus (some of ) the rules of relevance and irrelevance—to use Goffman’s terms—were guided by the group targeted by the courses, which meant that professional subject positions were foregrounded. Other aspects of the participants’ subjectivities were irrelevant, or were only allowed an intermediary and individualised presence, as in the exercise described above. Embedded in the organisers’ script, however, there were implicit rules of irrelevance that were guided by a rationality that was not explicitly part of the script, but still became salient because of it. To a very large extent, the module on intercultural competence aimed to make the participants aware of their own common sense as particular rather than universal—and as related to “Danish culture”. To do this, the more traditional teaching elements (on the concept of culture etc.) invested a lot of effort in stripping the imaginary of a homogeneous Danishness of its status as the natural state of affairs. Rather than focusing on the particularity and cultural specificity of the others—which is often the case in courses on interculturality—emphasis was oriented towards the self. The participants’ initial reflections concerning their own cultural embeddedness varied in terms of self-reflexivity. One nurse, for instance, was very preoccupied with the drawn curtains in the flats of the families to whom she paid home visits: Children need to see the trees and the sky, she stated: this is important for a child’s development. On the other hand, the leader of an administrative unit declared that you need to choose your fights, and she was no fan of “rye-bread conversations”, referring to a widespread preoccupation (shared by other participants) with the need to put this Danish speciality into children’s lunch boxes in order to secure a proper diet.

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Resonating with how the foregrounding of profession became the backgrounding of other categorical distinctions discussed above, the focus on the Danish self involved a positioning of the participants and their professional subjectivities (as well as the institution itself ) as part of a (culturally defined and white) Danish “we”. “We’re very odd”, one facilitator concluded, for instance, after having referred amongst other things to Hofstede’s IBM study (1991): “we deviate from the overall patterns on all Hofstede’s dimensions; and we’re exceptionally self-satisfied; one may well wonder what happens when we receive others into our little country”. This position of self-proclaimed particularity, or “oddness”, was harder for some participants to be oriented by and embody than for others, even if there were no overt transgressions of the tacit positioning. Sara Ahmed argues (in the context of European countries, or perhaps “the West”) that some bodies will have to struggle more to be part of institutions: “whiteness is what the institution is orientated ‘around’, so that even bodies that might not appear white still have to inhabit whiteness, if they are to get ‘in’” (2007, p. 158). Returning to the exercise on childhood conceptions of otherness, discussed above, the whiteness of integration work emerges when the participant with an Iraqi background feels the need to stress his parents as well integrated. In the same session, a participant with a mixed Arab/Somali background repeated the same statement twice: “I experience things [i.e. the encounter with clients] differently. I have a different ethnic background, and the clients expect me to understand them better. And then they become disappointed”. This statement is interesting in several ways: firstly, because the participant is partly breaking the tacit rules of irrelevance (her repeated statement is, however, ignored or left without comments), and secondly, because the statement implies that integration work is not about understanding—or at least it is about understanding in a particular way related to human psychology and othering processes. Thirdly, because her struggle to become part of the Danish “we” of the institution emerges through her discomfort with the clients’ view of her as being like them. Her position as an integration professional becomes insecure or questionable due to this overt likeness. In addition, she cannot—due to the racialised marking of her body— occupy the position offered by the script with an “effortless unawareness”

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(Goffman, 1972, p. 24). We return to the latter below in the section on Resisting the script. The organisers’ script for these training sessions in intercultural competence distributes universality and particularity in ways that, paradoxically, given the focus on interculturality, results in a tacit reproduction of Danishness—including its institutional landscape—as a kind of homogeneous entity, even if it becomes highlighted as peculiar and thus particular, rather than mainstream. There are clear resonances to the peoplehood construction that we discussed in Chap. 2—indicating that this has been included in a (Danish) common sense. The emphasis of the teaching and the pre-positioning of the participants, each in their own way, contribute to this. Box 3.2  The Dialogue Pilot Course This course was organised by Ikon [a Danish NGO, which is a branch of the largest mission association in Denmark, Danmission], Brorson’s Church in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen, and CPH in Dialogue, a network for young Muslims and Christians living in the Copenhagen area. The course took place during November 2016 and lasted from late Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. It was located in Brorson’s Church and in the Imam Ali Mosque (also Nørrebro). Course facilitators were members of the three partner organisations. There were around 30 participants (mainly women), most of whom were in their twenties or early thirties and undertaking education or newly educated. Three participants, among these the researcher (Lise Paulsen Galal), were older. The majority of the participants identified as religious believers, while the few who did not were engaged in intercultural voluntary work or education. The course was announced on Facebook as dialogue training with a focus on conversations about faith, outlook on life, and existential issues. It was organised as an encounter focusing on the interactions among participants, but the aim was also to train the participants to become facilitators of similar dialogue events. The course is offered once a year, alternating between the capital city of Copenhagen and Aarhus (the second largest city in Denmark). The data material consists of observation notes, programme and text material used in the course, informal interviews with half of the participants about their backgrounds and motivation for attending, and a formal interview with one of the organisers. The researcher participated in the entire course and all activities on equal terms with other participants.

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F oregrounding the Individual Believer/Privileging a Religious Position As in the integration courses, a Dialogue Pilot Course in Brorson’s Church (see Box 3.2, p.  71), co-organised by Christian and Muslim organisations, aimed to train the participants in navigating or managing difference. In contrast to the training courses for integration workers analysed above, the Dialogue Pilot Course involved a scripted encounter with “the other”, and while the participants were preoccupied with the training aspect—and the fact that as a result they would become dialogue pilots, the organisers prioritised the encounter aspect. On Facebook, the announcement of the event combines these two aspects: learning is promoted through the encounter, by “doing the encounter”: In the context of the Dialogue Pilot Course, there are no stupid questions and no correct answers. Instead, the focus is directed towards listening to each other and asking open questions. The programme is offered to anyone who is interested in dialogue and learning more about a practical perspective on dialogue, independently of their religious persuasion or cultural background […] You may expect to acquire competencies and tools in relation to promoting dialogue among people of different faiths. […] The programme is participant oriented and primarily based on exercises. (FB entry 5.10.2016)

This means that the mimicking of encounters with difference, which was used as a didactic and transformational resource in the context of the training courses for municipal integration workers, is not a necessary item in this script. We may also point out in passing that the Facebook entry contains a version of the rule “there is no right or wrong”, which is so important in the script of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors. In this version, which is clearly associated with the fact that this encounter prioritises religious difference, “wrong” is left out. This implies that, while there may not be one right answer, some answers might still be wrong. The primacy of the ear—of the position of the listener—is a recurring feature, to which we return in Chap. 5.

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Following from this description (and the field), it is not surprising that the various exercises clearly played with and activated the religious subject positions of the participants. Thus, the encounter foregrounded the differences that were considered problematic outside this organised cultural encounter, in particular the division between Muslims and Christians.5 Whereas the course did not specifically target these groups, the organisers’ network and promotion of the course may explain the dominance of Muslims and Danish Church members. Hence, other religions and denominations were represented by one Buddhist and one Catholic among the 30 or so participants. The ethnic and national composition of the Muslims was more varied: The participating Muslims had Turkish, Somalian, or Arabic backgrounds and also included white Danish converts. The Danish Church members were white majority Danes, with the exception of one Greenlander. Even though “cultural background” is mentioned in the Facebook entry, these differences were not addressed at all due to the foregrounding of religious distinctions. In one of the exercises, all participants were positioned in the main church hall and asked to move to one of four corners depending on their answer to the following question: if you fell in love with a person with another religious background than your own, how would you respond? Would you reason: (1) it would never work, we’re too different; (2) it could work, if one of us converted so that we belong to the same religion; (3) fine, as long as we respect each other’s faith and traditions; or (4) love overcomes all obstacles. The participants all dispersed to their corners, with a few in the first category, the highest number in the ambivalent group, slightly fewer in the third group, and only two in the fourth. There was no correlation between where people placed themselves and their faith. As such, the outcome of the exercise was in accordance with the organisers’ script in that it demonstrated that people might have things in common across religious divides. This idea of being able to identify with varying groups based on values and attitudes was further strengthened by the repetition of the same exercise addressing a different dilemma, which created new constellations of participants. In other words, sameness and difference were redistributed or blurred. On closer scrutiny (and in line with the analysis in Chap. 2), this blurring depended on the individualisation of values and attitudes that were

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disconnected from collective religious belonging. Despite the foregrounding of religious identity or belonging, the script established transversal lines across religious divides through the establishment of the individual human being as the locus of values and attitudes, and thus disagreement became related to differences between individuals. This was further underlined during the next step of the exercise, when the participants in each corner were told to share amongst themselves why they took this stand; and then to present the array of arguments in their corner-group to all participants. There was no attempt to include other possible causal (or perhaps rather intersecting) relations between the stand on interreligious marriage on the one hand and religious, ethnic, gender, or class affiliations on the other. Instead, individual reasoning and attitudes were recognised and acknowledged without contestation. Thus, the array of possible right answers was firmly located in the individual and decontextualised participant. The individualisation of disagreement and the prioritisation of the participants as beings in their own right meant that different attitudes or dispositions were never addressed, questioned, or explored in terms of their possible relation to minority and majority positions (i.e. to power relations). Thus, marriage and partnership may be questions that prompt different answers depending on a person’s majority or minority position (related to intersections of gender, ethnicity, race, and, indeed, also faith). There was, for instance, no mention of the dominant Muslim practice of not allowing Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men, while Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women, a rule that might have affected how Muslim men and women respectively placed themselves. Furthermore, the fact that each participant brought a personal story with them into the exercise came up only once, when the researcher went to a different corner than the one she had initially selected during the exercise. The researcher had started out in corner 4, but moved after some consideration to corner 3, trying to adopt a realistic rather than idealistic position. Afterwards, she explained why she stood where she stood with reference to her own across-religious-divides marriage (see also Chap. 5). Shortly after she had moved, the local pastor, who was one of the organisers, changed from group 3 to group 4. Considering that this happened at the moment when it became clear that one woman was now standing alone in corner 4, this could have been a move aimed at backing her up.

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There would seem to be ample room in this organised cultural encounter for individual commonalities and differences, as long as these were not explicitly tied to collective units or sociocultural categories. As a consequence of the scripted foregrounding of religious persuasion, however, there was little room for participants without this kind of persuasion—even though this was not an explicit precondition for participation. Towards the end of the course, participants were asked to do an exercise in pairs, sharing what they had found particularly intriguing or challenging. The researcher paired up with a young woman who was puzzled and also a bit disappointed because she had experienced that there was little room for presenting a nonreligious narrative or taking a non-religious position. She did not feel that she had been forced to identify as religious, but she found that there was no place for her position and that her narratives were not heard. The foregrounding of religion also emerged in a conversation during Sunday lunch between the researcher and two women, who were slightly older than the other participants and—again in contrast to the majority of participants— did not have an academic education. They argued that the open space for talking about religion during the course had convinced them that Christianity was important to them and their identity. One of them had previously converted to Islam, but had returned to Christianity before the course.

Relevance and Irrelevance The two examples given above demonstrate that, while it is not surprising that particular subject positions are foregrounded (in casu: profession, religious persuasion) in the organisers’ scripts, this is entangled in a network of meanings, power, and politics that carry wider consequences in terms of which subject positions are readily available and which are either downplayed or more forcefully left out. Returning to Goffman, as a first move we may conceptualise these openings and closures in terms of the rules of irrelevance that underpin the interactions among participants. Because organised cultural encounters target interactions and seek to transform them, the inattention to the world that follows from the rules of irrelevance is differently structured than in Goffman’s “naturally occurring” social situations. In the two examples above, organiser scripts display a selective inattention, which amongst other things has to do with managing the risk of importing the problems that a

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given encounter is set up to solve or ameliorate into the interaction of that encounter. Goffman suggests that, metaphorically, we may think of “the world building” of encounters (1972, p. 25) in terms of a membrane. This membrane ensures the boundary of the encounter but, at the same time, the wider world may seep in through its porous surface: the wider world must be introduced, but in a controlled and disguised manner. Individuals can deal with one another face to face because they are ready to abide by the rules of irrelevance, but the rules seem to exist to let something difficult be quietly expressed as much as to exclude it entirely from the scene. (1972, p. 69)

In his lucid and exemplifying style, Goffman describes how difficult issues are partially avoided or hindered from becoming too loud through various interactional dynamics. Of general importance in our context, however, is that the difficult issues highlighted by Goffman often concern “social attributes crucial in the wider society” (1972, p. 31): gender, race, and disability being the ones mentioned most often. In our encounters, these categorisations are often of central concern. This does not mean that they are permitted to become loud, but neither can they simply be part of the rules of irrelevance. These rules are, in some cases, but by no means always, the result of explicit decisions on the part of the organisers when writing their scripts. Organisers are—like the participants—embedded in fields of cultural meaning that provide the resources and rationalities associated with their scripts. In the two examples above, the rules of irrelevance that form the backdrop of the organisers’ scripts, and which they have undoubtedly adopted consciously, are associated with the prevention of chaos through risk management, which we take up in more depth in Chap. 4. The politics of integration measures—and therefore the practices that integration workers are required to perform in their working lives—are off limits in the training courses for municipal integration workers. Thus, intercultural competence becomes a means to an end that is divorced from any evaluation of what it means to be integrated; this is something of which the organisers are very aware (see note 2). But, attached to these rules of irrelevance, Danish society, municipal institutions, and, by extension, the socio-cultural space of the training and the participants become reinforced as homogeneous and white (if also odd and particular).

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In the Dialogue Pilot Course, the rules of irrelevance manifest themselves in the fact that the conflictual nature of Muslim–Christian relations that are so prominently part of the representations circulating in Danish society cannot be allowed to enter the space of the encounter. This means that the script ambiguously navigates between the participants as representatives of their faith, which follows from the foregrounding of religious difference, and the blurring of this difference through the prioritising of individual sameness and difference across religious divides. The latter, on the other hand, has limits, since these divides are not to be dissolved altogether. The aim is not conversion. The dislocation of religion from “community”, and its attachment to the individual, is premised on the foregrounding of religion as a separate (or separable) substance to be worked on during the encounter. This move also means that majority–minority relations and the categorical intersections (culture, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality) that feed into these become part of the rules of irrelevance. We have previously argued that the intervention logic of organised cultural encounters is associated with individualisation: the intervention is directed towards transforming the encounter participants based on more or less explicit ideas concerning how this may also generate change outside and after the encounter. Therefore, the individual subject is the obvious scale for work in an organised cultural encounter. Organisers’ ideas concerning the make-up of the individual, and the relation between the individual and collective units (society, community, religion, ethnicity, etc.), as well as ontological questions concerning “human nature”, experience, and orientation, are basic ingredients of organiser scripts. This also means that scripts operate through ideas concerning the distribution of “traits” between the individual and society, society and religion, and so on. To complicate things further, these ideas in turn are often ingredients in the conflict or “problem” into which the encounter aims to intervene.

Resisting the Script One way of gaining insight into both the implicit and explicit components of organisers’ scripts is through paying attention to what happens when the script is transgressed—when resistance to it appears. The way

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this is handled by the organisers also tells us something about the script’s degree of strictness or plasticity: to what extent can it include unexpected, undesired, or contradictory occurrences? As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, Goffman argues in relation to “naturally occurring” encounters “that a particular definition is in charge of the situation” (1972, p. 117). This does not necessarily mean that the encounter breaks down if interactions circumvent the definition: “as long as this control is not overtly threatened or blatantly rejected, much counter-activity will be possible” (ibid.). In organised cultural encounters, the “definition” is embedded in the organisers’ script, and participants have signed up to the encounter based on a description of what it involves that at least partly reveals the overall “definition”.6 In contrast to the encounters studied by Goffman, organised cultural encounters carry a more sustained risk that participants’ tacit interactional skills will deviate from the definition; and, in some of our cases— as shown in the prelude to this chapter—the script relies on suspending these skills. Organisers are well aware that resistance among participants is a factor they need to be prepared to handle. For instance, the Danish Youth Council’s Dialogue Handbook devotes a paragraph to “The facilitator’s challenges—resistance” (Helde, 2012, p. 101). Goffman specifies a number of strategies that may be employed to safeguard the definition of the situation—strategies that we also see operating in our contexts: To adhere to these rules [of irrelevance] is to play fair. Irrelevant visible events will be disattended; irrelevant private concerns will be kept out of mind. An effortless unawareness will be involved, and if this is not possible then an active turning-away or suppression will occur. (1972, p. 24)

In Goffman’s type of encounters, overcoming transgressions of the rules of irrelevance is a mutual accomplishment among participants, and therefore “transgression” is a more accurate term than “resistance”. Across the encounters we have studied, outspoken resistance occurs, as do other kinds of transgression. In what follows, we pay attention to both participants’ resistance and organisers’ responses to transgressions of the rules of irrelevance.

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Box 3.3  The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors are a team of young people (self-­ identifying as minorities) who carry out dialogue meetings, mostly in educational settings. The primary objective is to enhance social cohesion in Denmark through education and enlightenment (Riis, 2017). The Cultural Encounters Ambassador project is initiated and run by The Border Association, which was established in 1920 after “The Reunion” [Genforeningen], when the border between Germany and Denmark was moved southwards after a referendum in the area. The Border Association supports the interests of the Danish minority living south of the Danish– German border. The ambassadors project is based on the idea that the peaceful co-existence and cross-cultural experiences of the Danish–German border region may be utilised in other cross-cultural contexts (Riis, 2017, p. 698). The ambassadors consist of white (belonging to the national minority) and non-white (of immigrant background) minorities. They organise their encounters as meetings between participants and themselves by explicitly encouraging participants to address differences and racial stereotypes. Their aim is “to surprise, reveal, enlighten, create understanding and suggest solutions”, and thereby to create transformation (Riis, 2017, p. 696). The researcher (Helle Bach Riis) conducted participant observation of seven dialogue meetings over a period of ten months during 2014 and 2015. All the meetings took place in educational settings in different parts of Denmark.

Resistance and Regulation As pointed out in the prelude to this chapter, the script of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors involves a temporary bracketing of the tacit interactional rules governing appropriate behaviour in face-to-face encounters, through the script’s orientation towards discomfort or “pushing people as far out as possible”. Therefore, we have argued, safeguarding the scripted course of events deviates—partly at least—from a reliance on deference patterns as an interpersonal ritual (Goffman, 1972, p. 31). At the same time, there are also limits to the bluntness—since the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors are also tasked with establishing the encounter as a safe space for the participants, and since interactions also encompass interactions among participants, and not only between ambassadors and participants. The latter relation is less

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thoroughly safeguarded, as demonstrated in this introduction to a dialogue meeting, recorded in the researcher’s (Helle Bach Riis) fieldnotes: • Ambassador 1: Today, there is no right or wrong; please just ask questions and don’t be afraid that we will be wounded by your prejudices. It’s why we’re here. • Ambassador 2: We’ve heard the worst, so don’t be afraid. • Ambassador 1: We’ll tell you if you go too far. In accordance with the principle of “not preaching one truth”, mentioned in the prelude, the ambassadors do not debate with the participants—this is part of their training. Regulation rather aims at moving the meeting on from a difficult moment through various versions of: “Okay, does anyone think something else?” (Riis, 2017, p. 700). Or, in other cases, through a repetition of the rule “there is no right or wrong”, as in the situation below, where the participants are asked to answer yes or no to statements concerning whether or not a particular kind of person is Danish: They [the participants] start to talk quietly to each other, and the mood of the group clearly turns negative. One of the high-school teachers says: “In asking such a question, it’s necessary to define what being Danish means.” A participant says: “We have thirty different answers, but you only give us two options.” The ambassadors clearly sense the negative atmosphere. It seems harder to just “facilitate” the dialogue, so one of them tries to smooth things over by saying: “No, no. There is no right or wrong here.” Another participant mumbles: “This a completely absurd discussion,” and he raises his voice and replies to the question: “Yes, that person can be Danish, but he/she can also not be Danish.” (Riis, 2017, p. 700)

The classroom and its associated positionalities manifest themselves here, particularly in the teacher’s statement, which is clearly an instruction: “please be aware that a yes or no answer requires a definition”. More to the point in this context, the situation illustrates that the ambassadors are on a difficult mission in navigating the seemingly contradictory elements of the script: on the one hand, the space for any speech act is wide

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open through the rule “there is no right or wrong”; but, on the other, the participants are required to deliver simple yes or no answers to the selected statements in this so-called dilemma exercise. While the intention is to demonstrate that “it depends” and “things are complicated”, and while this is also what the participants arrive at, the intense animosity that is set in motion comes to counteract the intention—it is the exchange that becomes “absurd” rather than the stereotypical content of the statements. The Cultural Encounter Ambassador’s script is thus vulnerable to transgressions. If participants do not “play fair”, the ambassadors’ options of regulating interactions are few, and rely on repeating the script rather than digressing from it in order to circumvent the disturbance. Box 3.4  Organizer Against Discrimination This course was organised and subsidised (participants paid a small fee) by a Danish NGO. There were two course facilitators, both of them majority Danish (white) and male. The participants (16–20 depending on the particular session) were mostly young, all female, and more than half of them had a minority Danish background. The participants had an academic education, were enrolled in one or were on their way to doing so. The script for the course was modelled on the American Organizer tradition of community organising, originating in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It also formed the backbone of Barack Obama’s first election campaign, and has made its way to Denmark since then. Organising in this context is defined as: “leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want” (Sinnott & Gibbs, 2014, p. 5). The aim of the course was to transform the participants into being Organizers through a learning-by-doing approach in which they developed their own anti-racist projects in accordance with the Organizer concept, and through exercises that were themselves part of a skilled Organizer’s practice. The participants had applied to enrol on the course based on a draft project which they were expected to work on during the course. The course was spread across six weeks in the spring of 2017 (two weekends and two afternoon/evenings, plus a follow-up meeting). The researcher (Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen) participated in the entire course except for the follow-up meeting. The data material consists of observation notes, informal conversations with facilitators and participants, and texts used during the course.

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In contrast, the script of the Organizer against Discrimination course (see Box 3.4, p. 81) was, generally speaking, open to amendments. The facilitators were (as they put it themselves) paving the way as they went. The following rather strict regulation is, if not exceptional, then not reflective of the ordinary course of events. It does, however, demonstrate a dismissal, which did not quite amount to ignoring or smoothing over the transgression, but rather marked an indirect, but still rather firm turning away. During lunch on the first day of the Organizer course, a guest speaker delivered a talk. This speaker is a community activist whose family migrated to Denmark from the Middle East. While participants were eating pizza slices in the canteen, the visitor delivered a passionate talk. Following the language of Organizing, she skilfully wove together “story of self—story of us—story of now” (Sinnott & Gibbs, 2014, p.  9 ff). Storytelling plays a central role in Organizing. The story of self is crafted as a call to leadership, the story of us is about shared values and experiences, while the story of now is the basis for strategy and action. Together, these elements form a public narrative, which says: “Here’s who I am, this is what we have in common, and here’s what we’re going to do about it” (Sinnott & Gibbs, 2014, p. 11). The guest’s story begins with her privileged childhood and youth in one of the richest areas of Copenhagen; the turning point that made her start Organizing occurred when a young Jewish man was shot by a young Muslim man in Copenhagen—it was, she says, someone like me who did the shooting. The researcher writes in her fieldnotes: “She is carefully presenting herself as appropriate – as one who is ‘a stranger’ but not too strange. Islam is diffusely present in her story, but never quite explicitly. Her hair is hidden, but not by a hijab. She also talks in an aside about walking down the street with her LGBT friends”. Although the participants are novices when it comes to the language of Organizing, her talk makes a deep impression—everyone is very preoccupied and impressed with it afterwards. This is due to not only the content but also her adoption of pathos, something which is also in accordance with the Organizer framework. Thus, Organizer storytelling is to be directed towards “the heart not the head”, as one of the facilitators puts it in a later session devoted to storytelling. “Anger is an important driver”,

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the activist says at the beginning of her talk. “Not the kind of hot anger that makes you punch back there and then, but rather a cold anger that delivers energy. But it’s also about love for all the good things”. Later that same afternoon, the participants discuss leadership, which has also come up previously during the lunchtime talk: to be an Organizer is to take up leadership, a leadership which is not hierarchical, but distributed. During this discussion, a participant who had recently migrated to Denmark from a Southern European country refers back (in English, even though the discussion had so far been conducted in Danish) to the talk in an equally passionate modus: “Hot anger is very much what you experience as a migrant. Leadership is not really an opportunity for me”, she begins—her voice already trembling. After having delivered more detail as to how this plays out, she ends by saying: “There is a power that I don’t have, and I can’t reach it being a foreigner”. This elicits applause from the other participants. The facilitator says (also in English): “Thank you for sharing”, and continues: “Organizing is taking leadership. Self-­ assurance is necessary when you grab that power, but where do you find the energy? I think what our guest said about love was inspiring”. The participant’s intervention and not least the very visible as well as audible emotional delivery made it impossible to ignore. The participants were not at this point in the course aware of the fact that it might also be deemed “inappropriate” under the rules of irrelevance defined by the Organizer script, but their habituated interactional skills told them that a response could not be delivered in a rational debating mode (for instance: I agree… or even worse: I disagree). The act of applauding thus became a resource for recognising the intervention as well as displaying appreciation. The facilitator, however, closed down the incident through his thank-you-for-sharing, which to the researcher came across as a conventional (American) and polite appreciation, but also as a firm sanctioning of the participant’s breach of the rules of irrelevance: we don’t go down that road. The ensuing “Organizing is taking leadership…” worked to exclude the participant’s concerns about the structure of opportunity (and feeling) facing the migrant. As we are told later in the course, during a skyped interaction with one of the American inventors of the Organizer framework: “Victimhood and Organizing don’t go together”.

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The participants on the Organizer course struggled with “the language of Organizing”, a struggle that partly related to the fact that most of the concepts were communicated in American English. There were, for instance, extended debates over how to translate “constituency” (also referred to as “my people” in the Organizer framework) into Danish, and how to distinguish between “problem” and “issue”. Thus, in practice, the Organizer course was very much about learning the language of Organizing. Andrea Voyer (2011) argues that the main effect of the American diversity training courses she has studied was that the participants learned the language of multiculturalism, not that they became better at advancing equality or dealing with diversity. As such, there are similarities with the Organizer course. There are, however, no examples of the kind of interactional disciplinary regulation reported by Voyer, whereby participants are instructed to cry “ouch” when a statement or narrative from another participant is deemed offensive in one way or another. The “language of multiculturalism” in this way becomes installed through open shaming. The most prominent governmentality in our studies is not disciplinary but rather consists of incitements to self-governing; the scripts aim to conduct conduct (Foucault, 2003, p.  138). In some cases, the regulation of participants’ conduct does, however, border on a disciplinary mode. In the Organizer example above, the facilitator hovers somewhere close to that border, even if his technique is initially appreciative, his follow-up—and closing—statement simply rejects the participant’s intervention as incompatible with Organizing without, however, directly addressing the statement. During the Dialogue Pilot Course, a more explicit regulation occurred, when an organiser stopped a Muslim participant, who started talking about what Islam is not, directly referring to prejudice towards and misunderstandings about Muslims circulating in Danish society. The organiser asked her to avoid this defensive storyline, and stressed that the appropriate way of reasoning revolved around the self: participants should find their inner voice and speak on behalf of themselves and their personal beliefs (see also Chap. 2). On the one hand, the relation between religion and society (social relations) is the raison d’être for interfaith encounters as an intervention practice. On the other hand, the rules of

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irrelevance designate that the religion–society relation is left behind when entering the encounter. As argued in the previous section of this chapter, this reflects the dilemma that any organised cultural encounter seeks to balance: the encounter is caught up in the conflictual relations it aims to modulate in new ways—hence, the encounter may hold potential, but it is at the same time dangerous (which may be the reason for its potential). Pursuing this further, we may say that, besides managing the risk of importing a conflict unabated into the encounter, organisers are wrestling to open up other ways of enacting and relating to religious difference, ways that circumvent the frozen borders so characteristic of the current social climate in Denmark, as elsewhere. How does one do this unless through a change in the terms of discourse; a leap to another scale? This leap does, however, prove to be difficult, among other things, because individualisation involves a universalisation of (aspects of ) “human nature” that works to ignore how minority and majority positionalities make a difference in encountering society as a religious person. Furthermore, the rejection of the Muslim participant’s attempt to introduce a different collective Muslim voice follows the line of reasoning that Protestant Christianity has adopted in a Danish secular context (as introduced in Chap. 2), emphasising that giving voice to individual belief is the basis for authenticity and truth. Thus, the overt priority of establishing dialogue on equal terms is preconditioned by the regulation of interactions that adhere to a particular secularised way of presenting—in terms of witnessing—religious identity. As argued above, foregrounding and individualising religion while backgrounding society also backgrounds the power differentials between the minority and majority positions.

Disagreements About the “Definition” “Why does she talk so much about religion?” whispered a Muslim Egyptian woman to the researcher during a presentation by a young Muslim Dane at an interfaith conference between Muslims and Christians from Denmark and Egypt that took place in Denmark.7 While this question was posed softly as a kind of aside, it points towards a basic issue:

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what are the central themes, in this case, of interfaith dialogue, but more broadly of organised cultural encounters as such? What do participants expect dialogue to revolve around? For the Egyptian participants at the interfaith conference, societal issues took the place of prominence, and the importance of religion as a separate issue did not sit well with this priority. Thus, the priority of religion and the individual discussed above is questioned from within the field itself. The analyses below concern interfaith dialogue. In addition, most of the contestations that we analyse occurred within encounters between participants living in different countries. In these contexts, struggles over the definitions (in Goffman’s terms) of the scripts emerge more clearly than in the rest of our data material. As we discuss further in Chap. 4, this also means that the organisers tend to rely on decorum (or again with Goffman: deference patterns) as the main way of directing interactions. At the 2018 annual conference of the Christian–Muslim Dialogue Forum for religious leaders,8 the main topic was “boundaries in the religious encounter”, and the question of whether Muslims and Christians are capable of understanding each other’s religions. The first conference day mainly addressed the topic on theological grounds. In contrast, two presenters on the second day addressed the role of Muslim and Christian minority faith groups and their contributions to Danish society. The Christian participants emphasised how the primarily theological discussions on day one had been exciting and refreshing compared to previous conferences’ focus on societal and minority political issues, while some of the Muslims seemed more preoccupied with the topic of day two, precisely because of its societal perspective. As described above, this divide would seem to occur mainly as a split between Muslim and Christian participants; however, on closer scrutiny it becomes more complicated. During the encounter referred to at the start of this section, Egyptians and Danes appeared to adopt different and competing definitions regardless of faith, but very much related to the states in which they live. When Egyptians argued for a focus on societal issues, these were related to problems with structural inequalities between rich and poor, and between Muslims and Christians. Thus, their main focus was on how to fight inequality through cooperation and legal initiatives. When talking about

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religious differences, the predominant answer was: “You have your faith and I have mine, let’s leave it there”. In contrast, there was a tendency among Danish participants, Christians and Muslims alike, to address religious differences within an agenda of “getting to know the other” and correcting misinterpretations of each other’s religions. Regardless of the shared aim of strengthening peaceful co-existence, the different situations (and conflicts) in Egypt and Denmark, and the different ascription of meaning to religion as part of these conflicts, meant that contestations challenged the organisers’ scripting of the event. At the 2018 annual conference of Muslim and Christian leaders, in contrast, it was minority and majority positionality that divided the waters. During this encounter, the Christian participants were all ethnically Danish (and white), while the Muslim participants, apart from a few converts, had an ethnic minority background. Whereas the minority was preoccupied precisely with their position as a minority, the Christian participants seemed more interested in theological discussions. This would seem to be the outcome of the categorical pairing of Muslim/ minority and Christian/majority. The question is, however, to what degree is it possible to include both of these preoccupations in the encounter, and who decides which of them is legitimate? A third example concerns an interfaith dialogue conference in Lebanon between Danish and Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims (see Box 4.1, p. 112). At the conference, the participating Middle Eastern women challenged the script of the dialogue, which both directly and indirectly favoured the male participants due to the fact that all the attending religious leaders were men. This was explicitly challenged by some of the participating women when the head of the conference took much more time to introduce the religious leaders as speakers than the NGO representatives, who were mostly women. Interestingly, most of these critical women were from other Middle Eastern countries, such as Jordan and Egypt, perhaps reflecting that the scripting of interfaith work differs between countries in the region. In Lebanon, the sectarian political structure invites the acknowledgement of and keeping good relations with religious (primarily male) leaders (something to which we will return in Chap. 4).

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These examples illustrate how contestations are related to different positions among participants within the encounter. In addition, it seems that scripts often take their point of departure in rather simplified categories—or even binaries—resulting in a reduction of complexity. Across the field of interfaith work, another conflict appears between activities that target religious leaders (such as most of the examples in this subsection) and encounters like the Dialogue Pilot Course in Brorson’s Church, where the participants are “ordinary” youngsters. Dialogue meetings between religious leaders, like parts of the conference in Lebanon, target leaders based on the idea that they will then be able to influence “their flock”. In the Dialogue Pilot Course, this is almost turned upside down; thus, when the organiser at Brorson’s Church asks the Muslim participant to find her own inner voice based on individual reflections and positions, and to stop talking on behalf of the group, she is at the same time undermining the authority of religious leaders by discarding the voice of the collective. Thus, on the one hand, a lot of energy is invested in establishing dialogue between leaders, encouraging them to influence “their flock”, while members of “the flock” themselves are asked in other contexts not to listen to leaders, but rather to themselves.

Place-Making The “hesitation” between a particular face-to-face interaction and the traces left by the general framing of any encounter (Ahmed, 2000, p. 8) is also associated with the emplacement of encounters, since space orients bodies and direct activities (Lefebvre, 1991). Any particular place is formed by prior encounters involving both human and non-human entities and materialities (Amin & Thrift, 2002),9 and thus encounters are suspended between being spatially framed and place-making; between being and becoming. When it comes to organised cultural encounters, this dynamic is, to some extent, part of the organisers’ scripts. In the following, we turn to two examples, where space- and place-making are explicit elements of scripts. Space is an aspect of all encounters, but usually it is not explicitly included in the organisers’ scripts.

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Brorson’s Church The Dialogue Pilot Course had its primary base in Brorson’s Church in the outer part of Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district, bordering on neighbouring North-West (NW). While both Nørrebro and NW are gentrifying (the latter to a lesser degree, but increasingly so), both districts are still characterised by a high number of immigrants and a diverse population more generally in terms of ethnicity, religion, and class (Lapina, Forthcoming). Nørrebro (and later NW) became added to Copenhagen during the nineteenth century, when migration from the countryside of Denmark (and beyond) was rapidly growing (Schmidt, 2015). The district(s) became the home of the then emerging working class—both those with and those without employment. Brorson’s Church was inaugurated in 1901 and is one of many new churches built to cater for the increasing population of the new districts of Copenhagen. The outward architectural features of these churches are more or less the same, meaning that they have become not only signals of religion and signs of the Danish Church as an institution, but also in a broader sense material traces of this period. Today, Nørrebro is one of the areas of Copenhagen where the number of church members has dwindled significantly, partly following the general pattern of decrease that is strongest in the capital city, and partly because immigrants of other religious persuasions have settled in the area. Related to this pattern, Brorson’s Church is no longer an ordinary parish church, but a Youth Church, which, prior to the organised cultural encounter taking up this space for its own purposes, had attempted to recreate the church as an inclusive and hybrid space through such aspects as interior design and choice of music. Inclusivity and hybridity were indeed foregrounded by the pastor when the participants on the Dialogue Pilot Course were introduced to the church after the introductory session at the meeting premises. Thus, he emphasised deviations from the century-old design and mix of material objects and their spatial distribution. In the main church hall, the pastor showed the participants the altarpiece adorned with graffiti and the beginning of the Bible verse: “Whoever does not love does not know God…” in both Danish and Arabic.10 While the altarpiece is placed in the choir above the altar, in accordance with tradition (and hence also present as a trace of that tradition), this altar is not used during services.

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Instead, a round wooden table is placed at the centre of the main hall to function as the altar, and from here the pastor reads the sermon, hands out the Eucharist, and talks to the congregation. The congregation surrounds the central table—it radiates out from the centre, as it were, indicating a horizontal rather than a vertical relation to God. Likewise, the traditional organ is still there, but it is no longer in use most Sundays. Instead, a jazz orchestra accompanies the psalms. Through these transgressions of the normative features of a church, Brorson’s Church reaches out to a wider audience than the average (and diminishing) congregation. Brorson’s Church is still a church—and a church belonging to the Danish Church—but at the same time it is also a church with a difference. This also pertains to the activities housed by the church. One of these is Church Yoga (the name provided for it by the church itself ), which was also an activity included during the morning of day 2 (Saturday) of the Dialogue Pilot Course. The evening before, the pastor had told the participants that the yoga programme was not a way of bringing other religious traditions into the Church. Everyone could participate and there was no particular religious content. It was obvious that he had previously been required to justify the decision to allow yoga to take place in the church, indicating that the transformations it is undergoing involve struggles and disagreements. None of the participants on the Dialogue Pilot Course seemed to be worried about it. No one voiced any critical remarks. When arriving on Saturday morning, participants found their mats and sat down in the main hall, from which the altar had been removed, filling the entire floor of the church. For just under an hour, the main hall transformed into a yoga studio as participants were instructed in how to perform various exercises. While the pastor had tried to tone down the religious aspect of yoga, the training was concluded by him taking over and blessing the participants. According to the Brorson’s Church webpage, “Church Yoga is an activity that links body and spirituality and develops a balance between body and mind. Through various physical exercises, reflection and relaxation, we aim to be fully present in the church, conscious also of God’s presence”. Thus, the push and pull of physical and metaphysical traces circulates in the hybrid space of the church: on the one hand, it is dislocated through the reorganising of matter and the inclusion of new activities, but on the other it is also held in place—it is still a church, still God’s house.

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After morning yoga, the participants had breakfast in the meeting room, followed by exercises in the main hall (still without the altar), among these the corner game described above. The entire space of the main hall was in use when participants dispersed to the corners or later, in another exercise, when they sat in small groups of three sharing stories of faith. The church hall gradually became a familiar place through participation in activities and the sharing of different identities and positions. Through these exercises, the idea of a singular ontological truth that sticks to the church (and most other religious spaces) was backgrounded. Instead, the church became a space where different religious “truths” were voiced and listened to, very unlike the church as a place of worship. This amounted to a kind of (informal) de-consecration of the church space which opened it up to bodies that would otherwise be disoriented in that space. It invited and accommodated itself to profane activities that were not in accordance with the pre-established choreography (or genre) of this space.11 It was, however, also a spatiotemporally confined move, since the space was re-consecrated when everyone was invited to the Sunday service on the third day of the course, even though the inclusion of visibly Muslim bodies (wearing the hijab, for instance) still marked the intentional hybridisation of the space. Marianna Valverde (2015) takes up Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, which she translates from the field of literature to her own field of sociolegal studies, in order to integrate temporal and spatial analyses of law. This, she argues, is helpful in ascertaining what makes each genre what it is. Using the Court of Law as an initial example, she points out that the performativity of legal speech acts is precisely a spatiotemporal accomplishment. The space of the courtroom—like the church—contains an immediately recognisable architecture, and the judge holds sovereign power only within the confines of that room. But it is also a space that encompasses a number of different activities and interactions; when the court is not in session, for instance, informal conversations take place between jurors or lawyers that do not belong to the genre of the law.12 Valverde summarises: the space of legal speech acts to draw boundaries around law’s official time; and, in the same way, temporal markers (e.g. the judge’s or clerk’s pronouncement that the court is now in session) also redefines, instantly, the space in which the remark is made. (Valverde, 2015, p. 17)

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Leaving aside the question of past and present relations between the Law and the Church, what we wish to suggest, based on Valverde’s analysis, is that the dynamic of de- and re-consecration of Brorson’s Church is a spatiotemporal accomplishment. As such, it hinges on both the spatial arrangement of the church and the temporal markers provided by the pastor. Valverde’s analysis concerns the court of law in its conventional mode, whereas Brorson’s Church and the Dialogue Pilot Course mark unconventional spatial rearrangements and temporal interactions. Perhaps this also means that the interventions of the pastor (introducing the yoga, concluding the session with a blessing, etc.) become both vital as a boundary-setting marker and at the same time debatable or precarious, since they do not follow a well-worn conventional or ritualised pattern. Brorson’s Church was the home base of the Dialogue Pilot Course, but other spaces and locations were also included in the script as spaces of interfaith encounters: the districts of Nørrebro and NW and the Imam Ali Mosque, which is located in NW. Already on Friday evening—the first day of the course—the participants were invited to join a walk through Nørrebro district and, on Saturday, we finished the morning session by walking together as a group from the church through NW district to the Imam Ali Mosque (see Chap. 5 for an elaboration of walking as a transformative method). The visit to the mosque was not an example of mutual courtesy visits, which is often the case when different faith groups invite the public to open-door events. Rather, it was a case of spatial convergence through the inclusion of non-Muslims in prayer and the use of the mosque’s space for presenting oppositional values and beliefs through diverse exercises. By arriving at the mosque at the time for prayer, the participants were prepared to take their position based on a previous dilemma exercise regarding the question of participating in the prayers of other faith communities. Following the participants’ respective positions, some joined the prayer, others just observed. The slow building of mutual trust in the church seemed to make people feel relatively safe in the mosque as well. After the prayer, the participants went to one of the other halls in the mosque and were once again introduced to diverse exercises requiring them to use the room for other than religious purposes. The visit also included a more traditional meeting-the-imam conversation, but the primary outcome was that the Imam Ali Mosque also became a place with space for diversity without being associated with religious or political agitation.

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Whereas the organisers (and their script) deliberately worked—and with some success, judging from the positive evaluations of participants—to produce places with space for religious diversity, the question is: what were these spaces not able to include? What became irrelevant due to the spatiotemporal context of the encounter? The temporal confines, as argued with reference to Valverde, suggest that this space is produced to create a transformation within and among the participants, but not necessarily within the church. Likewise, the unease of some participants at not being able to voice a non-religious position may also be influenced by the choice of religious venues, regardless of their temporal de-consecration. Both organisers and participants emphasised the importance of creating a (safe) space where talking about individual religiosity was legitimate and not backgrounded, as it usually is in secular places.

Box 3.5  Global Citizenship Training This study examines processes of cultural encounters during a training programme organised by a people-to-people NGO, Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke [The Danish Association for International Cooperation], which is a large and influential aid organisation in Denmark. The association has a long history of organising and celebrating cultural encounters. The training programme was undertaken under the title “Global Citizenship”. It lasted for three weeks and took place in Tanzania. The researcher (Lene Bull Christiansen) adopts the term “volunteer tourism” to denote this encounter, which involved a group of Danish seniors. It refers to the practice of people travelling with “a purpose” to gain an alternative experience from conventional tourism’s focus on consumption, and is characterised by holding the ideal of a transformative power (cf. Lyons & Wearing, 2008). The course was organised to introduce the Danish seniors to “Africa” and had the explicit educational purpose of getting to know “the other”. Furthermore, and in accordance with volunteer tourism, the researcher also found that the travel had an altruistic purpose as it encouraged the participants to morally and financially support not only a local girl in trouble, but also generally the aid policy of Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (cf. Christiansen, 2017; Coghlan & Fennell, 2009). The researcher participated in the three-week training programme while conducting participant observation. She also took part in the preparatory seminar before the travel.

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Danish The Global Citizenship training was located at Danish in Tanzania (see Box 3.5, p. 93). While this could be taken as a contradiction in terms, it may also be seen as an apt headline for a description of this hybrid space. Danish is the local (Tanzanian) nickname for the Training Centre for Development Cooperation, which was established in 1976 (then under the name: Danish Volunteer Training Centre) by the Danish NGO Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (The Danish Association for International Cooperation). The centre was established through an agreement between the Tanzanian and Danish governments, and the aim in the early days of the centre was to educate Danish development workers, who were employed by the Danish Government and NGOs to work in Tanzania. Since then, the centre has undergone several changes in its scope of work, as well as its organisation and leadership structure. These changes follow the shifts in rationalities within the field of development in a broader sense. In accordance with the current rationalities, the centre is now led and staffed almost exclusively by Tanzanians (Christiansen, 2017, p. 709). But the nickname “Danish” has stuck. According to the presentation on the centre’s webpage: MS TCDC is a Training Centre for Development Cooperation in Eastern and Southern Africa. We are situated close to Arusha in Northern Tanzania (East Africa). Throughout the year, different courses and workshops run concurrently in a lively international atmosphere promoting the sharing of experience and cross-cultural discussions. Excellent facilities, together with a quiet and pleasant atmosphere, makes it an ideal place for reflection and learning.13

This presentation knits together particular geographical locations across scales; the local (close to Arusha), which is nested within a regional area (Northern) of a nation state (Tanzania in bold, and hence the national scale may be seen as privileged) of a region (East) of a continent (Africa). From this vantage point of nested situatedness, the centre also includes development cooperation in Southern Africa in its main field of work. The atmosphere at this location is lively and international as well as quiet

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and pleasant and promotes cross-cultural discussions. At a first reading, Danish or Denmark is not part of this network—but to one in the know the acronym MS (Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke) signals this link, and also serves as a trace of the centre’s history. This history reappears in the material composition of the compound. The researcher, who spent three weeks with the Danish senior citizens participating in the Global Citizenship training course, describes the compound: The history of Danish influence remains visible throughout the centre today. The compound itself is laid out as a small village, with a centre of administrative buildings, classroom buildings, library and a dining hall. Guest houses for students/guests are organised as individual little houses in clusters distinguished by the colour of the doors – a popular style in Danish buildings from that period. A meeting between aesthetic elements, which draw on “African” and “Danish” components is visible throughout the compound. Imported electrical fixtures and furniture from Denmark are mixed with locally crafted furniture, fabrics and decorations (general fieldnotes). (Christiansen, 2017, p. 710)

Like Brorson’s Church, the centre’s space is intentionally (if unevenly) hybrid. The composition assembles material traces of different spatiotemporal scales, which are important elements in the agency of that space. The architecture, along with features of the design (like the coloured doors), are imported—or translated—elements associated with a particular period of the Danish welfare state’s (urban) planning (1960s and 1970s). During this period, new minutely planned (sub)urban areas were built in accordance with the idea that welfare planning (undertaken by the state) was the road to a bright future for all. The social housing areas were designed in accordance with a credo of affordable quality housing for all, as well as ideas associated with family (privacy) and community (public spaces and facilities).14 These ideas are important components of the then prevalent credo of equality, which also fed into the laws and regulations governing tax-financed social benefits at the time. Some of these housing areas also became widely known and praised outside Denmark. Albertslund is one such famous project, which during the

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1960s and early 1970s regularly received visits from town planners from outside Denmark. There is a close resemblance between the architecture at Danish and that at Albertslund—photos of particular sections of the Danish compound could easily be mistaken for depictions of locations in Albertslund. While, as the researcher argues (Christiansen, 2017, p. 711), the material patterns and the immaterial atmosphere they exude provide a kind of homely reception and bodily comfort for the Danish senior citizens, this is not necessarily the case for other students or guests at Danish. This became explicit during the welcome and introduction to the centre on the first day of the training undertaken by the director of the centre. This welcome event was not exclusively for the Danish guests, but included all participants in the various activities hosted by the centre during this period. The participants on the Global Citizenship training course arrived in the comforting atmosphere of the centre late in the evening before the welcome event. The transition from the airport to the centre involved a rather chaotic sequence of events that were not immediately readable for the participants: first the lengthy airport formalities associated with visas that involved multiple queuing at seemingly arbitrary desks, then finding one’s luggage and getting it to the centre’s bus that was waiting for the participants. The latter involved difficulties in distinguishing who were centre staff and who were not and, related to this, embarrassing episodes concerning tips. After breakfast the following morning, the participants attended the centre director’s welcome address. The director informed the audience of the three principles that underlie all activities at the centre: relevance, empowerment, and innovation (Lene Bull Christiansen, fieldnotes). In relation to these principles, she described: Danish as deliberately challenging for students, who might expect the place to offer comforts, such as waiters and hotel-style comforts. This, she explained, was a deliberate part of the ideology of Danish: “At Danish, we challenge you. You must serve yourself in the dining hall, and remove your plates yourself ” (fieldnotes 17 November 2016). This, she instructed the arriving classes, was meant to instil democratic values of equality in us, and was part of the gender-equality ideology of the centre. Likewise, not having

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comfortable beds was also crucial. The courses and the setting were meant to be a safe space where basic needs were met, but luxuries were not available, allowing for both high-profile experts and young activists to be safe. This, she explained, signalled equality. To underline this point, small posters on the notice boards in each room advertised “Gender Equality” and listed a number of guidelines for gender-sensitive behaviour at the centre (general fieldnotes). (Christiansen, 2017, p. 711)

The Danish senior citizens were not particularly challenged, but instead surprised that these remarks or conditions were deemed to be challenging. They were mostly a bit uncertain about how to interpret what the director was trying to convey. It was probably something that was beyond them, they agreed afterwards. What emerges here is the fact that the Danish participants are rather seamlessly embraced by the space; they have no need to be assured that this is a safe space, since it effortlessly comes across as being so. Their bodies are extended by the spatial design and the atmosphere. They are seamlessly attuned, rather than misattuned (Ahmed, 2014a). Spelling out the ethos of equality and so on becomes both superfluous and a bit strange. By extension, it also means that Danish does not pose a challenge or risk that may push them into unfamiliar terrain when it comes to their own positionality—it stays safely in place, and therefore the strangeness of the encounter is glued to the strangeness of the other. The nested network of locations in which Danish situates itself is also more bluntly held in place outside the centre, because: Danish is a guarded compound with a clear boundary that is policed by armed guards. The compound is thus physically closed off from the surrounding village (a normal security measure). This allows visitors and staff to move around in relative safety, but also creates a barrier, which sets the compound apart from the normal life of the Usa village. (Christiansen, 2017, p. 709)

For the Danish participants, this means that the unsettling and unfamiliar transitional space between the airport and the centre is held at bay. Therefore, we may think of Danish as a place that, on the one hand, folds

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nicely around the bodies of particular participants (Ahmed, 2006, 2014a), but that—precisely because of this fit—it does not provide a transformative learning potential for this group of participants. The space simply becomes too safe—free of disorientation or discomfort. As the training proceeds, this becomes manifest in that the participants take up positions from which they aim at “getting to know the other”; they become eager observers, treating the Tanzanians they meet during the training as informants rather than teachers. Probing into the “private” lives of the Tanzanian teachers thus becomes a recurring feature of the interaction. This emphasis means that their own positionality stays in the shadows and thus also that the relationality between that position and the position of the other disappears from sight. In one sense, there are interesting similarities between the Dialogue Pilot Course in Brorson’s Church and the Global Citizenship training at Danish. In both cases, the main base is a hybrid space that intentionally aims to provide the grounds for transformative experiences, dialogue, and learning. In both cases, the hybridisation of space is uneven, and the surrounding terrain is rife with (potential) unsafety and conflictual relations. An additional shared feature is that, as a point of departure, some bodies are more comfortably oriented within the space provided by the centre and the church, but all the same the two places also house other participants and, not least, they are explicit about how the materiality and layout of the places carry meaning and practices. While all of our encounters are informed by their spatial contexts, it is unusual for it to become an explicit element of the script. We have pointed out a couple of times the influence of the spatial genre of the classroom when it comes to the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors—but this emerges due to our analysis, and not as an element in the script.

Exceptional Spaces In this chapter, we have explored aspects of how organised cultural encounters are formed through the organisers’ scripts, and how these scripts (seek to) conduct practice in ways that are effective, even if they do not always work as intended. The organisers “write” their scripts based on an analysis of the nature of the problem and a more or less clear idea of

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how things ought to be. The encounter itself is situated in a here-and-­ now between the problem (how things are) and the solution (how things ought to be), which in temporal terms is a before-now-after sequence. Scripting the encounter itself, then, involves: an analysis of the problem, normative ideas relating to the outcome, and a choreography of interactions on the stage of the encounter. In this way, organising a cultural encounter involves complex epistemologies as well as a negotiation of ontological assumptions that are in some cases contradictory and in any case formed by the fact that organisers—like participants—are embedded in fields of cultural meaning. Informed by Goffman’s (1959, 1972) work on encounters, we have analysed the way in which organiser scripts work as bordering processes that carve out a porous time-space for the encounter. These bordering processes seek to ensure that conflictual breaking points can be brought up and modulated in face-to-face encounters between embodied agents, who are seen to personify positions related to these breaking points. In this way, organised cultural encounters are exceptional spaces, laboratories of interaction that aim to render participants capable of interacting differently in the afterlife of the encounter, outside the laboratory. The bordering processes that characterise the spaces of  encounter, which we have explored in this chapter, both include and exclude—seek to sterilise the laboratory, so to speak—through foregrounding and backgrounding particular aspects. As a result, (cultural) difference becomes blurred and highlighted in different ways. An ambiguous alternation between the particular or singular and the universal does, however, emerge repeatedly and works in conjunction with a focus on (cultural) difference as individual rather than collective. The Dialogue Pilot Course, for instance, is suspended between a positioning of the participants as representatives of their faith, which follows from the foregrounding of religious difference, and the blurring of this difference through the way in which interactions within the encounter are directed by focusing on individual sameness and difference across religious divides. This suspension is in accordance with the epistemics of the interfaith field, which we have explored in Chap. 2. The positioning of the participants as integration professionals in the training courses for integration workers results in a backgrounding of the cultural diversity that is actually present in the

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room, and, paradoxically perhaps, the particularising of Danishness contributes to this backgrounding, since it works to homogenise the participants, Danish society, and its institutions. We have also argued that unequal power relations become backgrounded through both the bordering processes and the face-to-face scale of organised cultural encounters. Bordering processes and the way in which they (seek to) regulate interactions, to the extent to which they are intentionally adopted by organisers, are governed by their deliberations over how to introduce the conflictual or problematic self–other relations that the encounters aim to transform. Organisers seek different ways to find a balance between the unwanted prospect of just repeating problematic interactional patterns on the one hand and evading the problem altogether for fear of hurting or provoking participants on the other. As we have shown, this balance is struck very differently in the encounters we have studied. The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors push their participants towards repeating prejudiced assumptions concerning ethnic minorities, whereas the participants in the Dialogue Pilot Course are instructed to only talk on behalf of themselves—and thus to avoid generalisations. The senior citizens on the global citizenship course at Danish in Tanzania are seamlessly embraced by the space of the encounter, and thus their own positionality becomes backgrounded, with the result that the relation between self and other disappears from sight. We have argued along the way that the transformative techniques adopted by organisers involve questions concerning the extent to which encounters are safe for participants, and we have pointed out that safety tends to be distributed unequally, often as an effect of how positions and relations are foregrounded or backgrounded by organisers. In the next chapter, we explore in more depth how these transformative techniques distribute risk and safety and how this plays out in the encounters we have studied.

Notes 1. See Wilson (2013) for other techniques that have the same aim. 2. In relation to encounters or focused gatherings, Goffman argues that: “A situated system of activity and the organization in which this system is sustained provide the individual with that one of his roles that will be

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given principal weight on this occasion” (1972, p. 134). Our use of the role concept is reduced to what is implicitly or explicitly staked out in the actually existing script. 3. The organisers’ scripting of the training courses for integration workers was to a large degree constrained by factors not of their own making, and perhaps not reflective of what they would have wanted to do, had they had freer hands. The Ministry of Immigration and Integration supported the courses economically and controlled the content through an approval procedure. 4. In Danish socialrådgivere, which in literal translation means “social advisors”. This is a specialised three-year educational course in Denmark. 5. As mentioned in Chap. 2, most interreligious activities in Denmark are bilaterally organised between Christians and Muslims, reflecting the current focus on Islam as a challenge in Denmark, as in other European countries (Galal, Liebmann, & Nordin, 2018; Kivisto, 2014). 6. In some of our studies, it is not the participants themselves who have signed up, but they are still aware of the kind of activity they will be participating in. 7. For more about this event, see Galal (2015). 8. The Christian–Muslim Dialogue Forum for religious leaders is an independent forum that was established in 2006 as a response to the Muhammed cartoon crisis (Christensen & Vestergaard, 2016). It was initiated and is now facilitated by the Committee for Church and Encounter with other Religions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark [Folkekirke og Religionsmøde]. 9. Amin and Thrift’s argument concerns “the city”, but the dynamic pertains to all social spaces, we argue. 10. John 4:8 (Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love). 11. During the course, some of the out-of-town participants were also sleeping in the pews. 12. Following a fierce debate that circulated around the hijab, religious symbols have been banned from the Danish Courts of Law since May 2008. 13. http://mstcdc.or.tz/ (accessed 26 September 2019). 14. Many of these housing areas and estates have become targets for punitive political measures during the past few decades due to the changing demographic. Thus, a high percentage of inhabitants with an immigrant background means that these areas have been designated as “ghettos”.

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Schmidt, G. (2015). Nørrebros indvandringshistorie 1885-2010 (The History of Immigration to Nørrebro 1885-2010). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Sinnott, S., & Gibbs, P. (2014). Organizing: People, Power, Change. Vancouver & Victoria BC/Coast Salish Territories. Staunæs, D. (2003). Where Have All the Subjects Gone? Bringing Together the Concepts of Intersectionality and Subjectification. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 11(2), 101–110. Striff, E. (Ed.). (2003). Performance Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Valverde, M. (2015). Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Voyer, A. (2011). Disciplined to Diversity: Learning the Language of Multiculturalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34(11), 1874–1893. Wilson, H. F. (2013). Learning to Think Differently: Diversity Training and the ‘Good Encounter’. Geoforum, 45, 73–82.

4 Orchestrated Turnarounds: Between Chaos and Order

Prelude Before participating in an interfaith dialogue workshop in Lebanon, a participant identifies his worries: Lack of understanding and miscommunication. There has to be room to express your opinions without facing a feeling of being intimidated. Therefore, it’s important to have a “safe space”, where there’s room for different positions and opinions.1

He also presents his hopes or positive expectations: I look forward to hearing the other participants’ stories. I hope that my viewpoints will be challenged this week and that I will push my own limits and learn something new every day.2

These two statements are available on Danmission’s website, where they appear as a teaser aimed at recruiting participants to a new dialogue workshop. The deliberate choice of these quotes reflects how Danmission understands dialogue work as taking place on the spectrum between a threatening lack of communication on the one hand and positive transformation on the other. Following our conceptualisation of organised cultural encounters as interventions into the messiness of the contact zone, these fears and hopes are indicative of the simultaneously conflictual and creative potential of that zone (Pratt, 1991, 2008). In other words, Danmission’s dialogue workshops are inscribed within the messiness associated with encounters in the contact zone. Transformation is hoped for, but ultimately unpredictable. © The Author(s) 2020 L. P. Galal, K. Hvenegård-Lassen, Organised Cultural Encounters, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0_4

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The happy moments, when transformations are seen to take place, are repeatedly addressed in terms of moments of turnaround; ruptures or cuts where something new happens. One organiser of interfaith dialogue, for instance, describes a transformative moment like this: “And when she understood that she was heard, she could hear the other side. (…) Something magical happened”. In the dialogue pilot handbook, one of the authors writes: “Revelation is a huge word, but my first encounter with dialogue has this flavour” (Støvring et al., 2010, p. 88). She adds that her body continues to carry traces of that revelation (2010, p. 89). Thus, she indicates that this is not a momentary sensation, but rather a lasting transformation. Given the religious connotations, “revelation”, and perhaps also “magic”, would seem to be the terminology that is most readily available in interfaith encounters, but descriptions of these momentary turning points are not confined to these kinds of organised cultural encounters. In the Danish Youth Council’s Dialogue Handbook, for instance, the term “a golden moment” appears several times. The handbook illustrates its advice on how to build a dialogue workshop with statements from the young facilitators—or ambassadors, as they are named (like the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors). In one of these statements, a dialogue ambassador describes a situation in which a participant openly confessed that he was not able to trust the ambassadors, but: In the course of the workshop, he began to take part in an increasingly open and committed manner. And afterwards he invited us home for lunch. We saw this as a sign of how trust had been built between him and us in the course of the workshop. It was a golden moment! (Helde, 2012, p. 70)

Another ambassador describes a similar experience with a participant: who completely changed his way of communicating in the course of the three hours that the workshop lasted. In the beginning, he constantly interrupted us and really wanted to hear his own voice. But after he had tried the dialogue with the talking stick, he changed completely. It was my golden moment to see such a change in such a short time. (Helde, 2012, p. 103)

These examples illustrate how organised cultural encounters are evaluated by both organisers and participants based on their ability to foster transformation in fields where conflict is lurking around every corner.

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They also show that transformation becomes related to particular “happy” moments of turnaround that locate the participant’s body (and soul) in a time and place saturated with meaning. In this chapter, we turn to these happy moments and how they take place in tension with the ever-present potential for conflict.

Organised Encounters as Ritualised Practices Transformation of the participants, as we have already argued, is the central aim of organised cultural encounters. This aim is seen as a way to change the wider social dynamics characteristic of the contact zone, such as segregation, extremism, prejudice, discrimination, and conflict. As discussed in Chap. 3, organiser scripts seek to work on subject positions and create places from which the process of transformation can be set in motion. In this chapter, we turn our analytical attention towards transformation and the tension between that “happy moment” and the need to balance chaos and order in such a way that the encounter does not reproduce the “unhappy” social relations it seeks to ameliorate. Thus, we also turn to the analytical line concerning chaos/order and risk/safety introduced in Chap. 1. A shared assumption of any organiser script is that people (may) transform through face-to-face, embodied encounters. As we have argued in previous chapters, encounters can be theorised as being potentially transformative. They are suspended between past and future, and the latter means that their outcome is unpredictable, even if there is a danger that they will reproduce a pre-existing state of affairs. In our settings, organisers seek to push towards transformation but, at the same time, they also try to regulate unpredictability. In that sense, organised cultural encounters are ordering devices that work through the management of risk. Encountering the (mutual) other is therefore a push, which in itself needs to be carefully managed, since it might reproduce the established relationality—as illustrated by the fears expressed in the prelude above by the participant in an upcoming interfaith dialogue workshop. In accordance with the face-to-face scale of organised cultural encounters, chaos and order are not abstract, distant qualities, but rather translate into risk and

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safety for the participants. Across our studies, different strategies are adopted by organisers in order to balance risk and safety for participants. With a view to the desired outcome—the order that the encounters seek to establish or promote—organisers try to support the participants in their enactment of encounters. As argued in Chap. 1, understandings of order and chaos are historically constituted and embedded in the prevailing power relations, and consequently organisers’ perspectives are also situated within these structures of dominance. Promoting transformation through a form of regulation that is associated with attempts to create order in an interactional terrain where chaos and order, risk and safety are intertwined—this matrix of meaning and practice has led us towards thinking in terms of ritual and ritual theory as a way of exploring the practices associated with transformation in organised cultural encounters. Catherine Bell (1997) sums up the different perspectives within ritual studies. One key interest has been to explore ritual as attempts to preserve the existing social order. This line of thinking is represented, for instance, by Mircea Eliade, who approached rituals as re-enactments of Creation, and thus a repetition of the creation of order out of chaos (Bell, 1997, p. 11). From Victor Turner’s (structuralist) perspective, where disorder is conceptualised as the opposite to structure (of society), ritual also becomes a technology of ordering and preserving the status quo. In addition, Turner, and the strong tradition following his work, has been preoccupied with identifying the universal regularities of rituals (Bell, 1997, p. 55). Moving towards a view of ritual as performative practices, universalising approaches have been challenged. Vincent Crapanzano (1981), for instance, questioned whether rituals do what they claim to do. Informed by Erving Goffman’s work, ritual is approached from this perspective as symbolic activities that enable people “to appropriate, modify, or reshape cultural values and ideas” (Bell, 1997, p. 73). This turn towards performativity, then, also involves an attention to change. Based on a study of rituals, Köpping, Leistle, and Rudolph argue: Man’s [sic] capacity to intentionally perform the social roles and cultural types available to him becomes synonymous with his power to bring social-­ cultural reality into being. Furthermore, by being able to creatively invent

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and performatively embody new cultural meaning, he is presented with a means to actively transform reality (sometimes even by the way transgressing and subverting this reality). (Köpping, Leistle, & Rudolph, 2006, pp. 17–18)

If we ignore the strongly androcentric character of the wording in this quotation, there is a clear resonance with the assumptions concerning “man” that undergird organised cultural encounters as intervention practices. Organised cultural encounters happen deliberately and at least partly by design, as addressed in Chap. 3. Their spatiotemporality is different from everyday social life, even though, like rituals, they are inserted into that life and aim to intervene in it. Organised cultural encounters try to re-enact encounter interactions, relying partly on how they are perceived to play out in the ordinary course of social life. Since they aim to transform (negative) interactions, they also dislocate enactment—hence the term re-enactment. Rituals share other formal features with organised cultural encounters. Important among these is the fact that the transformations that (it is hoped) take place within the space of an organised cultural encounter aim to become effective outside this space. We are not arguing that organised cultural encounters are rituals, but rather that adopting ritual as an analytical framework helps us to grasp important aspects of how the distribution of chaos and order, risk and safety hangs together with transformation. We draw selectively upon concepts and analytical perspectives from ritual studies, not in order to categorise the encounters we have studied as particular kinds of ritual, but rather to explore the way in which transformation is situated within the tension between chaos and order. We are particularly inspired by approaches that explore rituals as performative and sensory enactments (Bell, 1992; Grimes, 2014; Leistle, 2006; Turner, 2012). Ronald L.  Grimes theorises ritualised practices based on a comprehensive case study of the Santa Fe Fiesta in New Mexico, in which he addresses historical, religious, and cultural aspects. Grimes suggests that rituals can be explored as “performative processes of embodied, condensed, and prescribed enactments removed from everyday practices” (Grimes, 2014, p.  196, emphasis added). Rituals cannot be purely mental, Grimes argues; rather, they are performed by people in

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embodied ways. They are condensed because ritual practices are not ordinary actions but rather a tense and packed dramatisation of everyday life; an “extraordinary ordinariness” (2014, p.  195), or, in Catherine Bell’s wording, ritual performances are framed in a way that makes them stand out as distinctive, and which “creates a sense of condensed totality” (1997, p.  161). As we have argued through our use of Goffman in Chap. 3, human interactions follow norms of behaviour. Rituals are normative in another sense, however, since they are overtly prescribed. They contain clear instructions about the right way of enacting the ritual. The performativity of rituals implies that they are enacted through being put into force or brought into play. Even if, as Bell argues (1997, p. 160), participants engage in a “deliberate, self-conscious ‘doing’”, this is not stage acting—hence the use of the term “enactment” (Grimes, 2014, p. 196). Like rituals, organised cultural encounters are prescribed and performative. Participants act as themselves and, despite the organisers’ positioning of participants in their scripts, they are not asked to take on a role that diverges from how the organisers perceive them to be in everyday life. On the contrary, to act as oneself is the precondition for changing oneself. In Chap. 2, we showed how participants in organised interfaith encounters are not only asked to behave as themselves, but encouraged to behave in accordance with their “true” or “authentic” self, that is, a better version of that self. While this is not a shared feature of all organised cultural encounters, the self is invariably centre stage, and a dynamic between staying the same and becoming changed plays out. Ritualised practices may be intentionally adopted in order to safeguard the status quo. But, as Grimes argues, “there is inevitably an undercurrent, a swirling dynamic threatening to upend apparently static ritual traditions” (Grimes, 2014, p.  315). However, while practices work to contain that undercurrent, they simultaneously induce change with the aim of transforming both participants and their environments. This simultaneity of transformation and status quo works by wrapping “ideas and values in a blanket of feeling and multisensory stimulation” (ibid.). It seeks to arouse a feeling of being part of an inclusive and all-embracing community and “incubate sensibilities that are simultaneously good to

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perform, good to think, and good to feel” (ibid.). In accordance with this view, Bell argues that the performative power of rituals derives from these multisensory experiences, which are induced through the use of visuals and sounds as well as tactile, olfactory, and gustatory stimulation: “one is not being told or shown something so much as one is led to experience something” (1997, p. 160). According to Bell, cultural performances—which among other things encompass carnivals, crowning ceremonies, and political parades—share with rituals the aspect that they explicitly model the world and become meaningful when they successfully envisage and offer an order that is “projected over the chaos of human experience […] [W]hen experienced and embodied in these orchestrated events, the categories or attitudes that appear to be in conflict can be resolved and synthesized” (1997, p. 161). Despite this transformative power, both Bell and Grimes emphasise that the result is ambiguous. Performances may empower or disempower groups, attune or disattune bodies, and make or unmake meaning (Grimes, 2014, p. 307). Grimes distinguishes between different modes of ritual: ritualisation, decorum, ceremony, magic, liturgy, and celebration. Subscribing to particular actions and moods, each of these works differently on bodies. These distinctions are analytical, which implies that at times they interact or combine during particular events. We selectively attend to some of these modes, since some of them are more analytically relevant than others when it comes to organised cultural encounters. In the following, we analyse how participants are guided through the challenges associated with encounters through the lens of ritualised practices. The sections in this chapter analyse practices of managing chaos and order and promoting transformation through practices associated with the ritual modes of decorum and celebration, and through the figure of the clown or trickster. Thus, we aim to show how chaos and order are negotiated through the management and distribution of risk and safety in encounters and among the embodied subjects who are present— through both the organisers’ script and the interactions among participants.

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Box 4.1  Danish–Arab Interfaith Dialogue Programme The Danish–Arab Interfaith Dialogue Programme was initiated in 2011 to promote dialogue, mutual understanding, and cooperation between Christian and Muslim leaders in Denmark and the Arab countries. In collaboration with partners in Lebanon, it was decided to organise a series of international conferences for religious leaders, academics, and activists who were engaged in interfaith dialogue (Christoffersen, Hoxbroe, & Vinding, 2018, p. 10). Two of these conferences are included as cases. The first of these, entitled “Interfaith Dialogue Confronting Extremism”, took place in May 2016. The conference included closed sessions for invited delegates only and a public event that took place in the Danish Parliament, Christiansborg. The researcher (Lise Paulsen Galal) only participated in the public event as an audience member. The second conference addressed in this book was entitled: “Towards a Better Understanding Between Religious Communities: Active Dialogue in Preventing Violent Extremism”, and was organised in collaboration between the Lebanese organisation and NGO, “Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue”, and the Danish organisation “Danmission”, which is the largest mission association in Denmark. This was the fifth in a series of conferences organised as part of the programme and included visits to religious leaders and institutions in Lebanon, followed by a formal conference. While it was mainly Danish participants who engaged in the visits, the conference also included participants from several Arab countries. The researcher (Lise Paulsen Galal) participated by invitation in the entire tour and conference. The data material consists of observation notes, written presentations, and informal conversations with facilitators and participants.

Decorum: Facing the Other with Civility In one of the conference halls at a five-star hotel in central Beirut, Lebanon, successive speakers from Lebanon and Denmark introduced and praised the value of encounter and dialogue across religious divides to an audience of Christians, Muslims, and Druze from Denmark, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. The speeches were short and celebratory. On the first two rows, ten to fifteen men in diverse religious regalia gave the opening of the conference a certain aura of solemnity and esteem. These men represented the different religious sects in Lebanon: Shia and Sunni Muslims; Maronite, Greek-Orthodox, and Armenian

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Christians; and Druze. They did not give speeches, neither did most of them take part in the following two conference days, but they were nonetheless greeted with great reverence by the Lebanese organiser in his welcome speech. It became obvious from the behaviour of the participating organisers and media that the men in the first two rows were vital participants. The aim of the conference was to facilitate and strengthen dialogue between religious communities in order to improve mutual understanding and prevent violent extremism. The conference took place in late 2017 and was the fifth one to be associated with the programme Danish– Arab Interfaith Dialogue (see Box 4.1, p. 112). The overall aim of this programme is to work towards improved interreligious understanding and co-existence (Christoffersen et  al., 2018). The opening ceremony took place in the evening and initiated the following 2 days of presentations and dialogue that were modelled on a conference format. Prior to the conference opening, the Danish group of participants, together with some of the other delegates, had spent 2 days visiting religious institutions, political celebrities, and the town of Saida, which is famous for its multi-religious co-existence. In Saida, the participants also witnessed an interreligious dialogue event between local religious leaders, which mirrored the opening ceremony in Beirut in its focus. In both cases, it was obvious that the religious leaders knew each other well and had performed this kind of dialogue many times. This formal and staged dialogue format is quite common in interfaith dialogue. It is a prevalent model in the Middle East, but is also adopted by organisers in such countries as Norway and Denmark (cf. Abu-Nimer, Khoury, & Welty, 2007; Christoffersen et al., 2018; Fahy, 2018; Haddad & Fischbach, 2015; Hansen, 2015; Liebmann, 2017). Dignity and mutual respect are encouraged by the organisers not only through their invitations to religious leaders who are at other times oppositional, but also through their praise of each speaker, and in particular the leaders of a religious group, as open to dialogue. This kind of decorum—a performative enactment of civilised behaviour—is characterised in Grimes’ conceptualisation of ritual modes by being formal and interpersonal, with a focus on cooperation and being together. It promotes politeness, respect, civility, and appropriateness (Grimes, 2014).

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But how does decorum work, and what does it produce? In the Lebanese context, the religious leaders are there to infuse the conference with a legitimacy that is extremely necessary in a religiously and politically complex society such as that of Lebanon. The interfaith dialogue conference mirrors the management of sectarian diversity at the national level in Lebanon, where civilised and representational dialogue and cooperation between sectarian groups are seen as the solution to violent conflicts, of which Lebanon has had its share. In other words, the praising of religious leaders is also a confirmation of the division of political power between the religious sects represented by these leaders. In the current situation in Lebanon, decorum works as a way to confirm the religiously based political order. Decorum works through repetition, by reiterating the existence of a good relationship between the religious communities represented by these leaders. Decorum in this case is the conservation work of ritualised practices, which was performed in front of a sometimes-­ puzzled Danish audience. To the Danes, but also to other participants— especially some of the participating Arab women—this practice of decorum came across as verging on pompous, shallow, and trivial. Not surprisingly, it was therefore also occasionally contested, as we will return to later in this chapter. Decorum also works, however, as a way of containing risk. It is the permanent undercurrent of chaos during decorum that makes it work. Devoid of chaos, decorum would indeed be shallow and trivial. In Lebanon, chaos due to religious differences is a constant threat, as mentioned above, which makes decorum an important mode of practice at the national level. One might then ask: what was the function of the non-Lebanese audience? If we only look at the opening ceremony, the media coverage of the event gave the impression that the presence of a non-Lebanese audience functioned solely as a means of legitimising the Lebanese model for managing religious differences. The non-Lebanese were cast as the silently approving, but also important and prestigious, international audience. This international audience was positioned in the same way during visits to some of the religious leaders before the conference. One of these visited the Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, who is also head of the Amal movement, Nabih Berri.3 The visitors were received

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like honoured guests, with formal exchanges of courtesy, but conversation was limited to the formal, polite, and civilised level of decorum. While this meant that his guests could feel rather important, given the time this powerful man was taking from his busy schedule, the visit was simultaneously a confirmation of his importance. This became apparent when, a few days later, the visit was broadcast by NBN (National Broadcasting Network), a TV channel that was launched by Berri in 1996. This visit, together with other international visits, was documented by the channel and worked to confer international legitimacy on Berri as a Lebanese leader who supports interfaith dialogue.4 Another reason for adopting decorum as the prime interactional mode is related to geopolitical relations between the Arab countries and Denmark, not least influenced by the 9/11 terror attacks and the so-­ called Mohammed cartoon crisis in 2005. Organised interfaith dialogue between Arab and Danish religious leaders, activists, and grassroots organisations went through a revival as part of Danish development and foreign politics with the launch of the programme “The Arab Initiative” in 2003, now “The Danish-Arab Partnership Programme (DAPP)”. Funding the conference in Beirut, the DAPP programme sees support of the collaboration between the organisers (the Lebanese organisation and NGO: Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue, and Danmission) as a way of dealing with the potential chaos connected with religious encounters. Thus, whereas the political handling of the cartoon crisis at the time fuelled further anger, the current approach, which is condoned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, focuses on partnership and dialogue. To adopt decorum is not the same as to avoid talking about difficult issues. Rather, it seems to be the choice when the difficult issues are considered very dangerous and therefore have to be contained with the help of a very formal style of interaction. Talking about difficult issues in a civilised way becomes a way of avoiding the chaos that motivated the necessity of the encounter. In this context, decorum works to maintain order and avoid chaos within a designated time and space. However, the transformation allowed by decorum is delimited by clearly marked subject positions that are difficult to challenge or transcend.

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Containing Risk: Reducing Complexity In May 2016, another conference organised by the Danish–Arab Interfaith Dialogue programme, entitled “Interfaith Dialogue Confronting Extremism” took place.5 The public part consisted of a half-­ day conference held in the Common Hall [Fællessalen], which is one of the meeting rooms in the Danish Parliament, Christiansborg. Among the invited speakers were religious leaders, interfaith activists, civil society activists, and politicians from both Denmark and various Arab countries, along with one researcher from the USA.  The audience was a mixed group of Danish Christians and Muslims, academics, and practitioners. As the title implies, this was more than yet another conference on extremism, it was an interfaith encounter. Among the studies in this book, this interfaith conference is perhaps the most formal kind of organised cultural encounter. In contrast to the conference in Lebanon, this was an open event, which the public could attend, and perhaps because of this it was even more important to adopt decorum, because of the unpredictability of the responses from the audience. As in Lebanon, the speakers occupied fixed positions which, to a large degree, determined the performative practices they adopted. There were speakers who were assigned a specific time slot; there were moderators who kept the time and handed over the floor to speakers; and there was an audience, who were supposed to listen quietly from their rows of seats facing the speaker’s table. As argued by Bell, formalism as a ritualised practice emphasises politeness, which means “that people tend to avoid frank discussions of topics about which they personally care a great deal; they tend to stick to more standard opinions on more impersonal subjects” (Bell, 1997, p. 139). In addition: “Formalized speech appears to induce acceptance, compliance, or at least forbearance with regard to any overt challenge” (Bell, 1997, p. 140). A challenge to this script occurred only once during the conference, when a religious scholar, who had not been announced as a speaker in the programme, requested and was given the floor, and spoke for quite some time. Since his Shia Muslim community was not represented among the speakers, he insisted that this should be rectified. According to the principle of representation, which also dominated the Lebanon conference,

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all religious leaders should be heard during this encounter in order to acknowledge all the groups participating in the conference. This rupture in the programme was managed with forbearance, that is, in the same spirit of civility that dominated the rest of the conference. Even though this religious scholar contested the choice of speakers, and thus partly the script, he did not challenge the fixed character of the setup. Within the limits of the script, he could have been a speaker from the start and to give him the floor did not disrupt the formalised setting that, according to Bell, helps to maintain traditional social hierarchy and authority (Bell, 1997). Speaking in his role as a religious leader, the unannounced speaker did not disturb the structure of authority that dominated and was endorsed by the conference. As with the conference in Lebanon, the formality of this event contains the conference topic’s obvious conflictual potential. Risk is present on several levels. Firstly, it is associated with the encounters between religious leaders from different and politically opposing Arab countries. Secondly, encounters between religious and political leaders from Denmark and Arab countries, as argued in the last section, are still affected by the Muhammed cartoon crisis. Thirdly, religious extremism is a highly politicised and securitised topic across the globe. These risky aspects could easily have resulted in agitated debates. Thus, the formal organisation and the clear signposting of positions worked as a ritualised mode of balancing risk with the desire to address a difficult issue. Karen Klint, Danish Member of Parliament for the Social Democrats, had the role of formal host and gave the opening speech, in which she addressed religion as part of the problem of extremism as well as part of the solution. In other words, religion was presented from the very start as both risky and safe. This articulation was reiterated by several of the speakers, who emphasised the role of religion in promoting peace, in stark contrast to an extremist “hijacking of religion” for the wrong purposes. Furthermore, the emphasis on religion was strengthened by the speakers’ self-presentations as either Muslim or Christian, and—in the case of one speaker—a mixture, since he emphasised himself as the outcome of a mixed European-Arab marriage. In addition, the distinctions between Muslims and Christians were clearly readable from visual bodily signs such as clothing (turbans, hijabs), which contributed to the

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performativity not only of Muslimness as a general category, but of particular kinds of Muslimness. Several of the pastors, including the Danish ones, were wearing a visible Cross. This explicit staging of religious difference was a precondition for the facilitation of an encounter that aimed to bring the participants towards common ground. Alongside the principle of representation, the speakers varied, as did their approaches; some were activists, others were Muslim reformists, and yet others were mainstream Muslim leaders from different countries. Among the Danish speakers were the Bishop of Copenhagen, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a Muslim activist. Whereas the former minister (Karen Klint) mostly spoke about her moral and financial support for interfaith initiatives across borders, all the speakers, regardless of background, ended up talking about Islam and/or democratic values as universal categories. The Bishop of Copenhagen tentatively criticised the current political atmosphere regarding minorities in Denmark and Europe, but otherwise speakers did not address political or national contexts. Instead, speakers emphasised a common and universal humanity, and did so through the articulation of a shared history or shared religious narratives. One example was the speech by Dr Al-Sammak, who is the SecretaryGeneral of the Christian–Muslim Committee for Dialogue in Lebanon. He pointed out that Jesus and the Virgin Mary are important figures in Islam. This emphasis on religious similarities came to downplay the national, ethnic, and political differences, which in other contexts are constituents of explanations for the development of extremism. In the talks by Arab speakers, the differences between different Islams, as well as between Islam and Christianity, were blurred. Instead, the speakers employed other kinds of differentiating markers: tradition versus modernity, Salafism versus a truer Islam, and religion versus spirituality. In doing so, the centre of attention became the question of how Islam should preferably develop or transform. The speakers differed in terms of how they thought change within Islam should happen but, as an accumulating narrative, the presentations ended up confirming the hegemonic Western idea of the need for a transformed Islam. It left the impression that the difficulties relating to encounters between Danes and Arabs, or Christians and Muslims, were the result of an Islam in need of transformation, whereas the political aspects of these relations were only tangentially addressed.

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How dialogue could lead more specifically to less extremism, except for an internal Muslim introspection, was—with a few exceptions— downplayed, because a democracy- and dialogue-oriented approach was placed centre stage in accordance with the location of the event: the parliament. At the same time, this approach downplayed any appeal for a Danish Christian critical introspection, since the Danish Christian adoption of dialogue-based democracy was taken for granted. A leader of one of the Christian Free Churches in Denmark, who was participating in the conference as part of the audience, highlighted the talk by Dr Al-Sammak when speaking to the researcher at the end of the conference. She was particularly fond of his emphasis on the similarities between Muslims and Christians and his story about the shared prophets of the two religions. Since this story of similarities between the two religions is well rehearsed, this came as a surprise to the researcher. However, as Bell argues, “formalized activities can communicate complex sociocultural messages very economically, particularly messages about social classification, hierarchical relationships and the negotiation of identity and position in the social nexus” (Bell, 1997, p. 141). Bell highlights how the aesthetics, simplicity, vitality, and rhythm of such aspects as gestures and phrases that “are practiced, perfected, and soon quite evocatively familiar can endow these formalized activities with great beauty and grace” (ibid.). The story about the shared prophets may work precisely because of its repetitive, ritualised character. It negotiates with and counters representations of Muslims as the other; instead, they become construed as not even distant but close relatives. To this member of the audience, this story transferred the Muslim to the terrain of the familiar. This also means that the conference made a difference to her. Despite its formality, its formatting through decorum, the dialogue was not necessarily empty or trivial. It owes its compelling power to an aesthetics and rhythm that (may) leave[s] the participants uplifted and inspired. By participating in the performance in the Common Hall, the audience members are trained to become self-regulating human beings, who know how to behave within a specific culture—in this case, a religious encounter with the Muslim other. They are also trained to show “respect for ‘some object of ultimate value’, such as the personhood of another or the whole edifice of codified relations” (Goffman in Bell, 1997, p.  237). In this case: the religious

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leaders. In other words, we can ask, as Grimes does: “Who is empowered and disempowered by this ritual?” (Grimes, 2014, p. 303). As in Lebanon, the religious and political leaders are empowered, their authority is conserved and confirmed. The universalisation or homogenisation of Islam amounts to a reduction in complexity, which, along with the one-sided focus on Islam, meant that the event came to present a group of leaders who were united in their emphasis on the necessity of dialogue across religions; and who at the same time could stand as role models for the audience. This position as role models was intimately linked to the confirmation of leader-authority. The lack of time put aside for questions or discussion with the audience underlines that this is a dialogue event where the audience watches the stage and listens to the monologues. But even though they never become speaking partners within a dialogue, they are still vital to the performance. It would not work without an audience. However, what remained was also that the riskiness of religion was the riskiness of Islam. The Muslim leaders were positioned, and positioned themselves, as “the right kinds” of Muslims, but the authority, or perhaps rather superiority, of the representatives from Danish church organisations was reinforced. They represented a democratic national culture defined by its civility and politeness (cf. Joppke, 2018). In this way, the Danes were assigned a position as individuals who are already inherently civilised and therefore do not harbour extremism. Through the mode of decorum, both the conference in Lebanon and the one in Copenhagen contained the potential for chaos, which, as we have argued, was near at hand in both these encounters. They kept the peace through embracing “the conserving work of ritual” (Grimes, 2014, p. 312). Instead of inducing change, the two conferences were more likely to (re) produce an unstable status quo. However, the strong focus on male religious authority during the Lebanon conference also led to some rebellion, particularly among female participants, as we return to later in this chapter.

Suspending Decorum In the prelude to Chap. 3 (see also Box 3.3, p. 79), we briefly explored how the script of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors suspended decorum or civilised behaviour in order to work on or with the stereotypes and

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prejudices supposedly held by participants. These stereotypes and prejudices are supposed to be widespread and shared due to their location in a currently dominant discourse. In contrast to the situation in Lebanon, where the recent history of civil war has produced clear distinctions between friends and foes, the stereotypes and prejudices that are invited to the table by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors cannot be assigned to particular groups or positions. But, through this supposition, the ambassadors implicitly come to assume that their audience consists of white, majority Danes, and that therefore they also hold stereotypes concerning (non-white) ethnic minorities. Representation, in this case, clings to the ambassadors, who are cast to embody specific, if hybrid, positions. They are “hyphenated Danes” and, as the term “ambassador” indicates, they represent the cultural encounter. We return to this hybridity, seen through the figure of the trickster, later in the chapter. Here, the pertinent issue is that, in order to present or introduce this blurring of positions, the ambassador’s script passes through clearly marked stereotypical and prejudiced boundaries. Thus, whereas ideas about self and other—friends and foes— are introduced and distributed by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors in order to stir up rather than to contain controversy, this controversy is brought in so that it can be dealt with in order to transform ideas about friends and foes into new, less prejudiced relationships that allow for a blurring of categories, and an opening up of new positionalities. As we saw in Chap. 3, this is not always what happens. Following Crapanzano (1981), Bell argues that ritual processes are complicated, and that they do not hold any guarantee of success—ritual does not necessarily succeed in incorporating participants into social groups. There is no linear progression. Rather, ritual “is meant to instill anxiety, not resolve identity” and it crystallises “a particularly total and dramatic submission to the demands of civilization and the group” (Bell, 1997, p. 57). Thus, the creation of risk by suspending decorum brings anxiety into the encounter, which could lead to “profound feelings of inadequacy, inferiority and worthlessness” (Bell, 1997, p. 58). Indeed, the suspension of decorum by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors creates resistance and emotional circulation. However, anger seems to be more prominent and appears when the audience feels forced to occupy positions of prejudice, when only offered simple binary yes-or-no options in exercises. Whereas

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anger may be a response to feelings of inadequacy, it may also be an available emotion to participants who are comfortable with their own positions as indeed being white, majority Danes. Ritual studies mostly take it for granted that rituals succeed, or at least they seldom discuss or examine rituals going wrong (Hüsken, 2007; Hüsken & Hüsken, 2007; McClymond, 2016). Perhaps this is what happened during one of the training sessions for municipal integration workers on intercultural competence (see Box 3.1, p. 65). This episode, relating to an assumption game discussed here, shares features with the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors in that stereotypes are explicitly invited. In this context, the suspension of decorum is not, however, an equally vital element of the script. We suggest that, here, suspension of decorum is related to a necessary introduction of risk in an otherwise rather safe space. The assumption game was introduced relatively early on during the course sessions devoted to intercultural competence. The participants were asked to write down their immediate association with a category, object, or activity read aloud by one of the course facilitators. The words followed each other in rapid succession: Cyclist. Refugee. Smoking. Norwegian. Coffee. Somalia. Headscarf. Blonde. Islam. Afterwards, the participants shared their associations. Refugee became associated with “work” (since it was not discussed further, it is unclear whether this refers to the fact that working with refugees is what that participant does for a living), war, truck, black, and chaos. The participants attached black and criminal to Somalia, while Islam was associated with terrorists by several of the participants. The facilitator asked if anybody had written something other than what first came to their mind and a participant answered that she thought hijab, when “refugee” came up, but wrote something else. “Do you recognise this?” the facilitator asked the other participants. “We would be lying if we said we didn’t”, a participant replied. Another stated that she/he is prejudiced against Kurds, apparently taking up the opportunity to share this. “This tendency to put one’s head in the sand may also have to do with Danish culture”, the facilitator said, and tried to move on from the exercise to the next section, about the particularities of Danish culture. The other facilitator present at this session broke in (she/he was clearly not quite satisfied with the way the game had been handled) and argued that negative associations are much more prominent than positive ones. The exercise was then closed down with a concluding remark from

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the first facilitator: “usually the things we know are associated with experience-based, warm and nuanced characteristics, while the unknown draws from media representations—but”, she/he added “this is of course not the case for you, since you have much more experience”. The suspension of decorum in order to bring in prejudices or “assumptions”, with the ultimate aim of transforming these, was supposedly the role assigned to the exercise. Opening the floor to the participants’ associations with specific categories might produce contestations and protests, perhaps even anxiety or shame, and thereby invite an element of risk into the training. The facilitator’s question—had anybody written something other than their immediate association—rests on the assumption that the suspension of decorum might produce discomfort, or at least that it might be difficult. And this is also what some participants indirectly reported. In another session from the one described above, one participant brought “political correctness” into the picture; being politically correct is a part of middle-class culture, she/he argued. In this way, decorum, in terms of political correctness or sticking one’s head in the sand, rather than stereotypes, became the target of the exercise. Apart from the considerations concerning how proximity and distance affect the quality (“warmth”, “negative”, and “positive”) of assumptions, these were not debated. Rather, they were reinforced as facts, not least through the facilitator’s closing remark about the participants’ superior “experience”. As described in Chap. 3, the training courses were announced as strictly apolitical, but in this exercise the facilitators moved into highly politicised terrain. This was risky for the facilitators, and judging by the way the exercise came to play out, they (or particularly the one who was in charge of the exercise) did not really dare to take the risk. Contesting the participants’ assumptions or encouraging dialogue seemed to be too demanding, too close to the no-go terrain of politics, and perhaps also too close to participants’ professional positions. Seen in the context of a ritual going wrong, the choice to close down the exercise without much debate may be seen as the inability of the facilitators to actually deal with the potential discomfort (whether this manifests as anger, or feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and worthlessness) related to the position into which the participants are placed by revealing their assumptions, and have them exposed in terms of stereotypes and prejudices. When rituals fail, Edward Schieffelin argues, this may have to do with “the clash

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between traditional cultural understandings and new socio-political allegiances” (2007, p. 1). The references to political correctness and sticking one’s head in the sand may be indicative of such a clash between a liberal, middle-class ideology of equality and tolerance on the one hand and a less “correct” but somehow increasingly accepted (as factual) discourse in which the stereotypes articulated by the participants are becoming mainstream and “protected speech” on the other. The suspension of decorum in this case reproduced, rather than challenging, the participants’ assumptions. The deliberate introduction of risk is in itself a risky undertaking. In this case, the facilitators may not have been ready to risk enough. Perhaps this was because they would have risked their own position if they had pushed for a more critical discussion of the participants’ assumptions. Box 4.2  Heavenly Days In spring 2016, the Danish Church Congress “Heavenly Days” took place during the four days of the Ascension Day holiday. More than 400 free activities were organised by local churches, religious organisations, and NGOs. The Danish Church Congress has taken place every third year since 1971. It is an ecumenical event in which around 50 different church communities participate. In 2016, the different activities took place in the streets, squares, and churches of the city of Copenhagen and were framed like a festival. One of five highlighted topics was interfaith encounters, and this included several activities that in some way addressed the encounter between different religions. The other topics were food, environment, children, and science. As a Christian festival, the activities positioned religion, and not least Christianity, in the foreground. Several parallel services opened the festival. One of these was a cross-­ cultural service in one of Copenhagen’s historic churches, Holmen’s Church. Other events included city walks that were launched as interfaith encounters: one was called “Walk of faith—a personal encounter with other faith communities” and another focused on “Pilgrimage through the city”. The pilgrimage trip took place at Nørrebro, a district of Copenhagen characterised by a high concentration of immigrants, huge ethnic, religious, and class diversity, and with a reputation as a location for gang crime. Another activity was “The Conversation Sofa”, where passers-by could sit down and talk to a person from, for instance, another faith community. The sofas were distributed around the streets and squares of Copenhagen city. The researcher (Lise Paulsen Galal) participated in the cross-cultural service and the pilgrimage walk, and visited some of the activities in the streets during the festival days.

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 elebrating Difference: Making C Difference Safe One of Copenhagen’s historical churches, Holmen’s Church, was full. Positioned on one of the pews in the middle of the church, I sensed the celebratory atmosphere. We, the churchgoers, had not signed up for a traditional service. Instead, Christian immigrants living in Denmark were responsible for bible readings in different languages and the highlight of the service was the stories told by Christian immigrants about how Christianity had helped them in their flight or migration. In particular, the emotional story told by one of the speakers about a deadly crossing of the Mediterranean in a boat without a captain spoke directly to our empathy and ability to identify with the significant other: the refugee. A Gospel Choir delivered the music, combining happiness and sorrow, which created an atmosphere of festivity and conviviality. (Lise Paulsen Galal, fieldnotes)

People enact rituals with their bodies, or, as Grimes argues, it is perhaps more correct to say “as” bodies. “Because we are embodied beings, rituals can attune us” (Grimes, 2014, p.  307). The worship described above was one of the opening church services of the Danish Church Congress at “Heavenly Days” during the four days of the Ascension Day holiday in spring 2016 (see Box 4.2, p. 124). The music, narratives, and bodily movements during the service attuned the bodies of the participants. We—average Danish churchgoers—were, if not actually on the same boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea as the refugee telling his story, bodily attuned with refugees and immigrants due to our shared Christian faith. Four refugees and immigrants told their individual stories of flight and migration, emphasising how Christianity had led them on their way towards freedom. We were celebrating freedom and Christianity as two sides of the same coin. Grimes (2014) argues that the attunement of bodies is an element of ritualised practices. In this section, we focus on practices in which the attunement of sensorial bodies is at the centre of attention. In these practices, bodies are deliberately brought together to get a (positive) sense of the other. Edith Turner writes about “collective joy” as a way of creating

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an essence of communitas, or “an immediate and genuine sense of the other, the plural of beings” (Turner, 2012, p. 6). Thus, joy and the sensing of the other are connected. Turner identifies collective joy as an element of festivals, sports events, comradeship, disasters, and revolutions. In the following, we look at partying and playing through festive and celebratory modes of ritualised practice. In the context of organised cultural encounters, these practices are adopted in order to bridge differences through the attunement of bodies. In the following, we explore how different organised cultural encounters celebrate and embrace diversity, while aiming at integration, tolerance, and mutual understanding. We argue that the celebratory approach is dependent upon the ability to create an atmosphere that appeals to both bodies and senses (Leistle, 2006) in order to produce moments of conviviality. We also zoom in on the way in which this form of sociality is characterised by bringing unlikely people together, by turning positions upside down, and by accepting non-conventional behaviour. In this way, celebration becomes a particular way of balancing chaos and order. Like the carnival, the festival contains elements of “maximum social chaos and licentious play” that “draw together many social groups that are normally kept separate and create specific times and places where social differences are either laid aside or reversed for a more embracing experience of community” (Bell, 1997, p. 126). Celebration, Grimes suggests, is a ritual mode that is expressive, ludic, dramatic, and aesthetic, as are festivals, birthdays, and feasts, which he offers as examples. There is an element of play in this ritual mode, which is associated with different moods: festive, exuberant, creative, spontaneous, and subjunctive (Grimes, 2014, p.  204). Compared to the appropriate behaviour promoted by decorum, celebration encourages a spontaneous and more unpredictable behaviour, even though celebrations are also scripted events. As Galal (2019) has argued, the hyper-visibility of celebrations, for example, in public streets and squares, may be analysed as a way of making what Judith Butler (2015) conceptualises as spaces of alliance. From this perspective, multicultural celebrations can be analysed as performative assemblies that produce new and potentially inclusive places in time and space, even though they may last only for a moment. From Butler’s perspective, bodies become allies in claiming “a plural and

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performative right to appear” (2015, p. 11), when, for instance, during the so-called Arab uprising in 2011, they assemble at Tahrir Square in Cairo. Bodies that are gathering together in themselves come to signify persistence and resistance (2015, p. 23). This is not about uniting as one body or one hybrid: but something that happens by virtue of the relation between us, arising from that relation, equivocating between the I and the we, seeking at once to preserve and disseminate the generative value of that equivocation, an active and deliberately sustained relation, a collaboration distinct from hallucinatory merging or confusion. (Butler, 2015, p. 9)

This is a form of performativity that is bodily rather than mental (or communicated through language), whereby the body takes on an expressive and signifying function that is registered through the senses. This argument is similar to Bell’s conceptualisation of feasting rites in terms of a “public display of religiocultural sentiments” (1997, p. 120). Processions that stimulate our senses are ingredients of many religious rituals. While the carnival does something similar, it can also be seen as an orchestrated anarchy, bringing together many social groups that do not normally meet. The carnival (and festival) “create specific times and places where social differences are either laid aside or reversed for a more embracing experience of community” (Bell, 1997, p.  126). Drawing upon Victor Turner, Edith Turner argues: in a great celebration, a community is sending a proboscis out of itself, a long arm reaching up high with an eye on the end of itself that turns around and looks at itself, fascinated. This is “we the people” seeing the people as multiple versions of “each other,” an entity that is entirely beneficial to gaze on and enjoy when the vision is upon us—and it is love, communitas. (2012, p. 23)

When organising multicultural celebrations, this idea of bringing diverse bodies together to meet around shared activities of joy, instead of dialogue about (potential) conflicts, are widely adopted. The question is: whether and how does such a gathering of bodies create spaces of alliance or communitas, and how is the risk attached to bringing such diverse bodies together managed?

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The Welcome Party A Welcome Party (Velkomstfesten) organised by volunteers took place on a brilliant sunny day in September 2016. The party was announced as “Europe’s largest welcome party” and consisted of 100 separate events (music, art, film screenings, activities for children, Lego serious play, talks, workshops etc.) which involved a large number (500, according to the poster announcing the party) of individual volunteers, organisations, and companies. The party took place in Copenhagen in a large exhibition hall, often used for concerts and commercial fairs. The programme greeted participants (among them, the two authors) in the following way: Welcome to you! Welcome to Europe’s largest Welcome party! Welcome to a programme loaded with over 100 activities and 500 players. But most of all, welcome to new solutions, cooperation, and actions that create better integration for Denmark’s refugees! We hope you will have a lovely day!6

The text does not specify who that “you” is, which raises the question: who is, in fact, invited to the party? Is it a self-celebrating event for “volunteer Denmark”? And yes, this was partly what it was. It was also, however, a public demonstration of the existence of a “different Denmark” that held different opinions about diversity, and in particular refugees, than the Government and hence the State. In Denmark, as in the rest of Europe, the number of refugees surged dramatically in 2015. This—as well as the “inadequate”7 reaction of the Government—led to an increase in civil society engagement. Danes who had never before engaged in volunteer work organised the (illegal) transport of refugees to Sweden (the preferred destination for many of the refugees), organised food and water supplies, donated and collected clothes, shoes, and other essentials. Gry Ravn, the organiser behind the welcome party, was part of this civil society engagement.

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Most of the partygoers were white majority Danes who in some way sympathised with this engagement, or more broadly found it relevant to welcome refugees. However, there were also a substantial number of minority non-white persons among both the volunteers and the guests. Among these were asylum seekers—families, adults, youth—who had been bussed in from asylum centres (the trip was donated by a private bus company). When entering the exhibition hall, the first stand that party guests encountered was a (self-declared) pop-up charity where volunteers dressed as Amish people served homemade apple juice, among other things. The outfits—they told us—had originally been made for the Roskilde Music Festival, where groups of people make their own camps (and may win a prize) in the designated tent area surrounding the festival grounds. Next to these were a number of volunteers from the organisation LGBT Asylum and, further in, there was a computer area where job-seeking training took place. All kinds of NGOs, large and small, also had their own stands. The initiator of the event welcomed us all, together with a well-known Danish actor speaking from the main stage at one end of the exhibition hall. “Listen with your heart”, she said, “refugees are not a burden”. The speech circulated around notions of loving thy neighbour and stated that “love is in the air” at the welcome party (this was saluted by “hallelujah” from the actor). As people walked around, participating in different activities such as football, games, exercises, and talks on different stages, majority and minority bodies came together in an atmosphere of festivity. The computer area where job-seeking training took place was also an encounter of bodies, with the white majority body occupying the position of instructor and the minority bodies the position of those who are in need of training. Two strings of attunement interlaced during several of the events; on the one hand, channelling the collective joy embedded in the celebratory mood, also reflected in the opening ritual’s emphasis on love. Bodies were there to meet across differences on equal terms. On the other hand, the focus on work competences reflected an idea of bodies that should become integrated or transplanted into an already-­existing national body of Danes. A similar interlacing occurred during a short team-building activity.

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Late in the afternoon, three young volunteers conducted this activity on the lawn outside the exhibition hall, which proved to be extremely noisy when the main stage was being used for performances or music. The participants, as well as one of the authors, consisted of five young (male) asylum seekers (among the ones who had been bussed into the city from a camp) and six majority Danish visitors to the festival (most of them elderly). The exercise was performed in a circle, where the participants initially clapped out the names of other participants: Kir-sten, Ha-mid, and so forth. Each person clapped a new name after their own had come up. This went on for some time, with everybody seeming slightly nervous about getting the names wrong but also flushed by the rhythmic clapping. After this, participants were instructed to clap three different rhythms, first together and then in three teams—performing at the same time; and, finally, a competition between two teams took place: who was able to first (collectively) lower a bamboo rod to the ground. Together, the teams initially held the rod high balancing on their fingertips. It was surprisingly difficult to lower the rod—it kept moving up instead of down. All the activities were accompanied by much laughter along the way. This ephemeral festival encounter momentarily, there-­ and-­then, created a flow of intercorporeally shared orientations and rhythms. Afterwards, as the participants chatted together, this shared orientation dissolved. It became obvious that there were no common aims. The volunteers wanted to demonstrate their abilities and were interested in being invited to the asylum camp of the young men; at least one of the young asylum seekers was clearly keen to become engaged in the activities of the volunteers—as one of them; and the majority-Danish festival-­ goers had a feel-good experience. The researcher, we might add, was observing as well as participating. Prompted by all the laughing, two of the women (who clearly knew each other) had a conversation about their “laughter club”. The conversation closed when they agreed that it would be inappropriate to stage a laughter event in an asylum camp. The stakes involved in participating in the teambuilding were different, but so was the distribution of vulnerability. The exercise deliberately worked towards a re-attunement of bodies, but this was only accomplished momentarily—since attunement returned to its “normal” state afterwards.

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Through the Welcome Party, the majority participants confirmed their idea of being open-minded and inclusive, while the refugees—in the best of worlds—experienced that some doors into Danish society are open to them. The interaction was a matter of bodies occupying the same space, it was about proximity, not intimacy. If any transformation took place, it could be ascribed to the shared making of place, but this was constructed on a foundation of the values and ideas of the majority. By making the place in the image of the majority, the risk inherent in bringing these diverse bodies together was contained. Müller (2012) argues in a similar way in her analysis of the “We Amsterdammers” projects, which were launched to counter interethnic conflict after the assassination of the Dutch filmmaker and Islam critic Theo van Gogh. Leaving differences unrecognised may produce a moment of joyful re-attunement, but ignoring them may hinder transformation from a longer perspective, he argues. The framing of the encounter as fruitful vis-à-vis integration into the labour market, in combination with a celebration of different bodies, produced (seen from a majority perspective) “a uniquely uncontroversial way to address interethnic tensions in an otherwise polarized political climate” (Müller, 2012, p. 438). People bussed in from asylum centres without any right to work may wonder about the purpose, while refugees who have obtained asylum may question how to interpret the statements of love when encountering a discriminatory labour market.

Playing with Risk Inviting play or playfulness into an encounter is not limited to festivals or celebrations. Play is adopted as a technique to activate or encourage spontaneous, sensory experience and works in a subjunctive mood, that is, play evokes an “as if ” world. The sessions on intercultural competence for municipal integration workers (see Box 3.1, p. 65) contain a particular exercise, “disguised” as a game. The following is an excerpt from the fieldnotes of the first training session in which the researcher participated: After lunch, the course participants return to their seats in the small clusters of 5–7 people that we have been sitting in all morning. On the table is a deck of cards, and the facilitator says that post-lunch time is always a

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critical point when the energy tends to be low since our bodies are busy digesting. Therefore, we are now playing a card game—but we have to play in silence. Along with the deck of cards, the rules of the game are laid out for us to read (but not discuss). We will play two rounds, the facilitator continues, and after the first round, the winner will rotate to another table—so that each table has a new participant in the second round. The rules are fairly straightforward (at least if you have played cards occasionally): Ace is the lowest, Spades is trump, you must come clean, and the winner is the one who takes most tricks. […] At my table, we proceed in an orderly fashion until one player does not come clean, which elicits a lot of pointing to particular cards and colours. After this our attention is directed suspiciously towards the “cheater”. When winners are found at all tables, they rotate, and after this, the sound of laughter and of fingers tapping cards and tables increase. Even though the new participant at our table is visibly confused, the rest of us are still mostly attentive towards the “cheater”. It does, however, dawn on us that something else is wrong. (Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen, fieldnotes)

The trick played on the participants, including the researcher, was that each table was playing according to different rules; the rotating winners of the first round were hence confronted with a different order that appeared chaotic and unreadable when seen through the lens of the order she/he had come from. And seen from the point of view of the players who stayed behind, the new arrival was not competent, was cheating, and doing random things that did not conform to the rules. At the researcher’s table, as mentioned, attention was divided: there was already an outsider within—which meant that our attention was not on the new arrival alone; some of the “old-timers” did not, in fact, notice that the newcomer was behaving strangely. Interestingly, the cultural differences actually present in the room also came up. One participant with a non-Danish origin confessed that she did not know the cards at all. To her, it was not a question of one set of rules or another, but rather of a more radical unfamiliarity with the objects we were handling between our fingers. Miming the other participants at her table (doing as they did, as she put it), the player in question ended up winning the game. She might have been dealt a good hand; but still, she must have been particularly deft at reading unknown games.

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Afterwards, the facilitator told us—with a trace of disappointment— that we were unusually calm during the exercise; often, she said, the game would elicit strong reactions of anger and resentment, moving bodies to stand up, voices to be raised (despite the ban on speaking), fists to be banged on tables. Following up on the card game, the facilitator asked the rotating newcomers how they had felt and what their strategy had been to overcome the situation, and she asked the non-rotating old-­ timers the same question; thus opening up space for reflection and for the apparent analogy with “real-life” encounters with difference. This card game became a metaphor that was frequently used to describe encounters with difference during the training sessions. One of the facilitators argued, for instance, that we might think of a refugee’s encounter with the Danish municipality in terms of a meeting where participants are playing different games. According to the facilitator, a refugee, like anybody else, will always play his or her best card. But when this has been done repeatedly without ever “winning”, she/he gives up. And this, again according to this facilitator, is when the refugee may start thinking in terms of racism. Answering the facilitator’s questions about how they felt, the participants said: “I felt bullied”; “but you were so good at integrating” (this statement was addressed to the player, mentioned above, who did not know the cards); “it was really weird”; “I was so sure I was right”; “they just wanted to make me lose”; “now it’s me first!”; “he just thinks he’s really something!”; “so frustrating not to be able to communicate”. Thus, a mixture of resentment, discomfort, anxiety, frustration, and perhaps also anger entered the mood of the room through the card game. In contrast to the assumption exercise discussed earlier in this chapter, the card game was thoroughly debated. This may be because it was not risky for the facilitators, but, more pertinently, it was due to the subjunctive playfulness of the game. Even though there was a purpose that overspilled its game-like character, it played out within a bounded timespan, and after this the (ambiguous) rules would no longer be in force. In this way, the push into an affective register (see Chap. 5) worked through a temporary suspension of the established order, which produced discomfort among the participants. The risk associated with this push was not excessive, however, due to the “as-if ” character of the game. It might therefore be more accurate to describe what happened as a temporary

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reduction of safety. Nevertheless, the card game was performative—it brought forward something that was not entirely predictable; the participants were (mildly) pushed or nudged out of their comfort zones and into bodily sensations of being out of tune. This push was aimed at directing the participants into another kind of affective attunement with difference than the one prescribed by habit and institution. The participants were invariably eager and uplifted after the exercise. When evaluating the session afterwards, they agreed that this was “good”, because they were led towards sensing and feeling. In this case, risk or reductions in safety appeared to produce something new: new experiences or new perspectives. Perhaps this is because it was “rightly” portioned—or managed. Too much risk may lead to unresolvable conflicts. But too little risk does not serve the purpose either. In the Dialogue Pilot Course (see Box 3.2, p.  71), a game was also played, after the course had relocated from Brorson’s Church to the Imam Ali Mosque. On the floor of one of the meeting halls, small pieces of paper were piled up and participants were asked to each take one. Each pile contained pieces of paper displaying a “value”: tolerance, trust, generosity, family, career, money, house, honesty, and so on. The organisers instructed the participants to circulate among each other and try to trade the values they did not favour with the ones they treasured the most. The rules were changed during the game, when one of the participants started bargaining over the number of values she/he wanted in return for the value that another participant wanted. The play then developed into a capitalist exchange, with some values quickly gaining high market value due to high demand, which in turn made them even more in demand. The result was a strong consensus that the most precious values were honesty, trust, and generosity, rather than career or money. In the end, when participants were asked to argue in conversation with one of the other participants, why they treasured the values they had gathered, the conversation quickly lost steam, since everyone agreed. Whereas the aim of the game was to make people realise what they had in common, while simultaneously enabling them to understand why other people may invest in values different from oneself, the bargaining part of the activity seemed to overrule the potential risk associated with competing values. Therefore, the conversation ended up being too safe. No one dared to

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invest in career or money, although some people probably do so in real life. In the dialogue pilot handbook, competing values are described as the source of “mistrust, insecurity and rift” (Støvring et al., 2010, p. 7), but this game never became risky. Both the festival and the playing offer modes of encounter that can be seen through our analytical prism as associated with celebration, joy, and “as-if ” worlds. Whereas the festival is playful and joyful, creating a momentary time-space of togetherness, the two examples of play were seeking to prepare participants for the chaos of reality, where differences make it potentially difficult to communicate or interact. The card game seems to have succeeded, since a bodily experience of being out of place, or not knowing the rules, became sensed by the participants. In this way, the game mirrors the world of reality, even though the participants can inhabit that world through the “as-if ” character of the game. In contrast, the values game fell apart, either because it was positioned too far away from the anxiety that participants might experience in relation to contrasting values, or because they found the universalising of values too banal.

The Trickster Returning to the two conferences discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the Muslim religious scholar who asked for and was given the floor in Copenhagen, without originally being part of the programme, did contest the script to some degree. However, he also confirmed it through his alignment with the script’s emphasis on the representative religious leader. During the conference in Lebanon, participants generally embraced decorum as a performative enactment of civilised behaviour, as argued above. Sometimes it was embraced with an element of fatigue, as when one of the Egyptian participants answered the researcher’s question about what she had gained from the conference by saying, smiling and a little indulgent, that she had heard it all before. Nevertheless, one participant on the conference trip to Lebanon found the conserving work of decorum unsatisfactory. As one of the Danish participants, she—Özlem Cekic8—continuously challenged the script

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and the mood of awe and reverence by posing questions that repeatedly contested the male authorities and at times directly challenged the script. She was never impolite or aggressive, but her questions created an embarrassed mood within which responses took shape in the form of silence, awkward smiles, or polite evasions. As mentioned above, along with the Lebanese organisers and some of the other participants, the Danish participants had visited influential religious and political leaders prior to the conference. One of these visits was to the prominent Shia, Sheikh Sayyed Ali Fadlallah, who is the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussain Fadlallah, a prominent but controversial Shia cleric. Sayyed Ali Fadlallah is known to be a promoter of interfaith dialogue. Before entering the guest reception room, the female participants were asked to don a headscarf to cover their hair—out of respect for the Shia tradition, they were told. As they sat on chairs along the wall, the sheikh welcomed the guests, and spoke about Shia Islam’s tolerance and desire to partake in interfaith dialogue work. When encouraged to raise questions, Özlem asked why the women were expected to wear a headscarf. After the sheikh gave a vague answer, she persisted and asked for a more substantial answer, thereby insisting on challenging the habitual way of abiding by tradition. But she was also simultaneously contesting the mode of formalised dialogue. The sheikh never responded clearly. Afterwards, while walking in the streets towards the next destination, Özlem and the researcher discussed the incident, and the researcher heard herself arguing—with admiration—that Özlem was the right person to raise these kinds of questions. This was an indirect reference to Özlem’s hybridity, being both Muslim and Danish, and not wearing a headscarf or any other religious symbols. The researcher had already assigned her a position from which she was able to act differently because of this ascription of hybridity. From the analytical perspective of this chapter, this position can be inhabited by the ritual figure of the clown, the trickster, or the monster. According to Edith Turner, the ritual clown is someone who contests the position of religious authorities and “manages to disentangle people from their proper, respectful attitude to the religious figures” (2012, p.  38). This was indeed what Özlem was doing when she allowed her headscarf slide down as female visitors were being photographed together with the sheikh. One of the sheikh’s assistants told her that these photos could not

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be published, not because the sheikh could not accept meeting a woman without a headscarf, but because his followers would disapprove and perceive it as disrespectful to the sheikh. Whereas the researcher (as a white, Christian Dane) could not inhabit the position of the ritual clown without appearing rude or colonial, Özlem could. Always with a smile, sometimes with what appeared to be naïve curiosity and astonishment, she continuously asked all the disturbing questions. “Why didn’t interfaith dialogue in Lebanon or at the conference include any Jews?” she asked, for instance. Furthermore, when realising that one of the attendees represented the Syrian regime, she confronted him in front of the entire conference with the shallowness of his declaration of support for interfaith dialogue, while the war was contributing to the conflicts between sects and religious groups in Syria. Regardless of whether her questions were answered or rejected as irrelevant, the responses to them were kept within the terrain of decorum, always polite and reasonable. Nonetheless, these questions produced a visible rush of bodily discomfort. People moved anxiously on their chairs, smiled, frowned, or looked away. She did not, however, create any barriers or conflicts among the participants and as such she did not seem to disturb their investment in working together towards a common aim. Turner argues that the clown “opens a door where nothing else can open a door” (2012, p. 41). Pnina Werbner relates this ability to the hybrid identity of the clown: Ritual clowns and monsters are very much like avant-garde works of art or novels: they are meant to shock, to inseminate, to impregnate, to bring otherness from beyond the boundaries into established routines of daily life. They are intentional hybridities; they work to transform, to revitalize, to create new ordeals to be transcended. They generate, as Bhabha has rightly proposed liminal spaces, betwixt-and-between tropes that render authority structures ambivalent. (2001, p. 141)

From Werbner’s perspective, Özlem used her hybridity to transgress and critically resist the taken-for-granted hierarchies of religious and male dominance within the organised encounter. She knew that she was playing “dangerously on the boundary” (2001, p.  133). This became clear

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when she shared with the researcher her doubts about what she had said and what she perhaps should have kept to herself. She expressed relief when the Syrian attendee, whom she had criticised in front of everyone, invited her to visit Syria. Thus, she succeeded in spelling out paradoxes and ambiguities without really offending the authorities she was criticising. Werbner argues that hybridity is disturbing and interruptive, but also potentially dialogical and double voiced (2001, p. 136), which is the territory Özlem appears to navigate so skilfully. Not only is she a Muslim, a Dane, a woman, and has a Turkish-Kurdish background, but she is also a former member of the Danish parliament (representing a left-wing party) in a country that is known in the Arab world for its Islamophobic politics. This gives her a different kind of authority than an “ordinary” activist would have. She is not easily dismissed because she embodies “the contradictions and dilemmas that culture itself had invented” (Werbner, 2001, p. 139). This is the ambiguity that she literally embraces bodily when promoting her initiative of “dialogue coffee”. While working as a politician, she received a large amount of hate mail of the worst kind and, as a response, she invited herself for coffee to the homes of the people who had sent these messages. In this way, she became acquainted with the people who despised her due to her ethnic and religious background and her public appearance. Later, she developed this practice into a programme, using herself and her hybridity, hoping that she might create spaces for dialogue. Thus, when the Danish organisers invited Özlem to join the conference and talk about her dialogue coffee programme, they also invited in a figure, a potential clown or trickster, who has chosen with her own body to present the very opposite of decorum. Indeed, while the embracing of decorum to some extent leads to a reproduction of the status quo, Özlem and her “acts of interruptive enunciation” (Werbner, 2001, p.  144) and bodily hybridity challenge the order of decorum by pointing out cultural tensions and ambivalences and thus bringing risk back in. This is not a simple or non-risky performativity, as Werbner argues. Just as it could be considered revitalising and “fun”, it could also be perceived as threatening and provocative, “a fine line between delightful transgression and real offence” (2001, p.  144). When Özlem succeeds, it might have to do with the “sensibility” that she possesses; something Werbner emphasises as a precondition (2001,

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p. 144). And it may indeed have to do with the performative power that she skilfully employs through the ambiguity of her hybrid body. In Özlem’s case, the position of ritual clown was not scripted or given to her by the organisers. In other organised cultural encounters, the position of the trickster can be applied to the way in which transformation is intentionally stimulated by organiser scripts.

Trickster on Purpose The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors are deliberately given a position that can be conceptualised in terms of the trickster figure. They embody (and represent, as argued earlier in the chapter) hybrid identities that are performed to shock or, as presented in Chap. 3 (Box 3.3, p. 79), “to surprise, reveal, enlighten, create understanding and suggest solutions” (Riis, 2017, p. 696) through addressing differences and stereotypes head-on. Through their casting as hybrid, they aim to contest taken-for-granted categories of ethnic difference, and who these categorisations cling to through racialised bodily signs in everyday life. Initially, the trick being played out concerns the composition of white and non-white. All the ambassadors are minorities, but some are white. Any dialogue meeting: begins with a quiz section called “icebreakers”, an assumption game, in which the ambassadors ask the participants questions like: Who does not speak Danish at home? Who went to a Danish kindergarten? Who has a Danish passport? etc. The ambassadors each stand in a different corner of the room when they ask these questions, and the participants are instructed go to the person they think fits the question. Before this game, the participants only know the ambassadors’ names, so they are left to navigate very much from the appearance of each ambassador and as such reveal assumptions about each ambassador and about minorities in general. (Riis, 2017, pp. 698–699)

The main (prospective) outcome of the icebreaker is to challenge assumptions through the demonstration that minorities can be white, and even Danish for generations, as is the case with the ambassadors from

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the Danish minority living on the German side of the border between Denmark and Germany. During encounters, the ambassadors present their carefully crafted life stories to the participants, always including a self-presentation in terms of being “hyphenated Danes”. They are in a sense Danes with a difference but, as we have shown, the set-up implies a homogenisation of the participants as Danes without a difference, who in addition are ready to reveal the assumptions that presumably follow from this position. This comes out when participants are annoyed by the invitation to think in stereotypical categories in order to let the ambassadors reveal their hybridity. Thinking with Crapanzano (1981), the hybridity of the ambassadors does not “trick” participants who find themselves occupying positions outside the norm, even though these non-normative positions are not always defined by ethnicity (see Chap. 3). The trickster in the shape of the ambassador does not create the expected anxiety or surprise when the participants’ reality deviates from the expectations inherent in the ambassadors’ script. The Cultural Ambassadors are cast in a trickster role, through a script that is carefully managed and predefined, drawing on historically constituted ideas about difference in a Danish context. Özlem, on the other hand, became a trickster through her way of approaching and challenging a specific organised context. Özlem may have played a part in the contestation of the script by some of the participating Middle Eastern women (see Chap. 3). By challenging the hierarchies within the encounter, Özlem invited in other positions and identifications that foregrounded being female and Arab, while backgrounding religion. Turning to the Dialogue Pilot Course in Brorson’s Church (see Box 3.2, p. 71), some of the exercises on this course were similar to the ones used by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors. However, the organisers of the Dialogue Pilot Course were not positioned as hybrids. Although— if seen through the logic of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors—they might embody hybrid positions (white, Danish, and Muslim for instance), they were presented through their individual religious identities only. They were cast as facilitators and leaders rather than tricksters. This aligns with the fact that the Dialogue Pilot Course did not invite any differentiating categories other than religion into the room. There was no invitation to perform hybridity. It could be that religious differences were

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considered risky enough in and of themselves. Or is it perhaps because the Dialogue Pilot Course is not so much a matter of transforming the participants’ prejudices about religious others, as it is a question of transforming the participants into authentic and true believers, each within their creed, as discussed in Chap. 2? In this case, hybridity is neither necessary nor desired, because, regardless of religion, the believers are nudged into seeing reflections of themselves in the authenticity of other believers. This is not about transgressing, but rather about accentuating individual(ised) boundaries. Rather than facilitating change, a trickster or a ritual clown in the shape of a hybrid would invite in chaos by questioning the idea of an authentic and true believer.

This Revolution Will Not Be Televised Informed by perspectives on what rituals do, this chapter has explored modes of managing risk and safety in organised cultural encounters. When viewed as intentional phenomena, rituals are practices that aim to secure an existing order through careful orchestration that works on the borderline between chaos and order. From this perspective, rituals model an order that (if successful) works through participants’ embodied and sensory experience of that order as meaningful vis-à-vis the “chaos of human experience” (Bell, 1997, p. 161). The latter implies that the scale of rituals is the human body, and that their performativity relies upon the bringing together of bodies. When adopting a practice perspective, performativity, and thus also unpredictability, enters the picture; the “undercurrent” identified by Grimes is a dynamic that threatens to upend a static ritualised practice (2014, p.  315). The embodied and sensuous experience of an inclusive community, Grimes further suggests, is the way in which ritualised practices seek to promote attunement. Seen through this prism, it has emerged that organised cultural encounters do not work with change in the modality of revolution, but rather—like rituals—in a slow, repetitive modality of change through the moulding of participant’s interactions with cultural difference. We have demonstrated that decorum is a mode of regulating interaction which is adopted in encounters where the bringing together of

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difference is in itself a risky undertaking. These encounters are situated within contact zones characterised by conflicts that are only tenuously kept at bay. At the conference in Lebanon, interfaith dialogue was preconditioned by the repetitive performance of decorum, which reconfirmed the unstable division of power between religions groups in the country. Thus, peace or the prevention of open conflict may be seen in this context as the aim of interfaith dialogue. However, at the same time, keeping the peace was associated with a highly regulated pattern of interaction that would not challenge the precarious status quo. Özlem Cekic, as a trickster figure, was able to challenge the prevailing rules of decorum, only because she was simultaneously positioned both within and outside both Lebanon and Denmark. In contrast to this, the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors in particular, but to some extent also the training courses for municipal integration workers, worked to suspend decorum in order to import elements of the chaos of the contact zone into the encounter. When the rules associated with decorum are suspended, however, some participants are rendered more vulnerable than others. The majority Danes among the audience might feel shame when uttering the stereotypes and prejudices invited to the table by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, but for others they work as a repetition of violations associated with their everyday lives. In the Danish context, vulnerability has been a subject that triggers heated debate, and there is an increasing tendency to dismiss this as a valid consideration. Returning to the Mohammed cartoon crisis, a prominent and widespread defence of the right to publish cartoons of the Muslim Prophet was that everyone, in the name of freedom of speech, must submit to or tolerate “derision, mockery and ridicule”, as the saying went. When one of the participants on the training course for municipal integration workers referred to political correctness as a middle-class culture, and a facilitator argued that a tendency to stick one’s head in the sand may inhere in “Danish culture”, both are indirectly referring to these debates. There is a stark contrast between this insistence on speaking one’s mind, without regard for how it may offend or wound the listener, and the regulation of speech associated with decorum. The inclusive community (however it is perceived in more specific terms) is what organised cultural encounters are striving to create, but at

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the same time it is also a problem, since inclusiveness is contested, both as an ideal and in terms of what that ideal might imply in practice. One element that seems to be circumvented in the encounters we have studied is the relation between difference, inclusivity, and inequality. Across the examples taken up in this chapter, the unequal positions of the participants before they enter the social space of the encounter are left on the doorstep—at least when it comes to the organisers’ script and the use of methods. Historically sedimented inequalities are not explicitly denied, but they are to a large degree left out. The card-game analogy used in the training courses for integration workers, for instance, posited racism as an outcome of failed intercultural communication between social workers and their immigrant clients—thus bypassing the question of whether the integration measures (or some of them) might in themselves be racist. Omissions are rarely explicit, but the practices carry them, for instance through the embracing of decorum. Hence, omissions also partake in managing risk. Some issues are too dangerous or divisive to be included. Through the prism of ritual, what we become aware of is that the ideal of inclusivity is addressed, not through working on exclusions or inequalities, but rather through attempts to arouse inclusivity among participants. This raises the question: are some participants in organised cultural encounters more at risk than others? One aim of most organised cultural encounters is to lead participants towards respecting difference, but, as we see it, this aim affects the majority and the minority differently. In their chapter on the politics of listening, Tanja Dreher and Poppy de Souza (2018, p. 24) argue that, while “debates on free speech and the politics of voice often focus on rights, the literature on the politics of listening brings questions of responsibilities to the fore”. They also point out that these two modalities of politics work from very different perspectives, and position minorities and majorities and their relationality differently. Dreher and De Souza discuss two examples of what they call “located listening”, that is, practices that might potentially open up “a possibility to settle into discomfort/difference—and hence might serve as preparations for political listening” (2018, p. 22). One of these examples is the Acknowledgement of Country and Welcome to Country protocols that have become established ways of paying respect to Australia’s indigenous populations, as well as recognising that Australia’s colonial settler

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population was not invited. They did not ask permission to settle (Kowal, 2015; Merlan, 2014). Or, in other words, these ceremonies speak to the formative violence of the building of Australia. Welcomes are usually performed by an indigenous speaker, while a non-indigenous speaker can make the acknowledgement. Dreher and de Souza quote the wording of the official acknowledgement of one of their workplaces, the University of New South Wales: I would like to acknowledge the Bedegal people that are the Traditional Custodians of this land. I would also like to pay my respects to the Elders both past and present and extend that respect to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who are present here today. (Dreher & de Souza, 2018, p. 26)

The protocols of Welcome and Acknowledgement are ritualised practices performed in the mode of decorum; but in this case decorum may be seen to oppose the status quo. Perhaps this is because these performances can also be interpreted as empty, tokenising gestures (Dreher & de Souza, 2018, p.  28; Kowal, 2015, p.  186). Or, in the case of Acknowledgements, as non-performative speech acts by white anti-­ racists, as Sara Ahmed argues in relation to both Australia (2004b), and “commitments” to diversity in university policy documents and committees in the UK and Australia (2012). In Ahmed’s analysis, there is no significant break from the status quo, since a majority position is reinforced without involving change for the minority. To Dreher and de Souza, the protocols do not hold any guarantee, but their potential lies in the way in which they “frame and choreograph listeners and speakers within a set of differently located, interdependent relationships”. Thus, establishing a situation in which the majority must repeatedly listen to the minority and indeed to a repetitive message that disturbs and breaks away from “The Great Australian Silence” (Dreher & de Souza, 2018, p. 23) may open up a space for new kinds of relationality. This would then amount to the low-key, patient, time-consuming, and repetitive work of decorum.

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Notes 1. See https://danmission.dk/blog/2015/09/02/hvorfor-vil-du-til-libanonog-oeve-dialog/ (accessed 25 September 2019). 2. See https://danmission.dk/blog/2015/09/02/hvorfor-vil-du-til-libanonog-oeve-dialog/ (accessed 25 September 2019). 3. The Amal movement is associated with the Shia community in Lebanon. 4. Several of these visits were communicated to Lebanese society via Twitter, TV, or newspapers. 5. A shorter version of this analysis is presented in Galal, Hvenegård-Lassen, and Tranekjær (2017). 6. In Danish: Velkommen til dig! Velkommen til Europas største Velkomstfest! Velkommen til et program spækket med over 100 aktiviteter og 500 aktører! Og størst af alt velkommen til nye løsninger, samarbejder og handlinger, der skaber bedre integration for Danmarks flygtninge! Vi håber, at du får den dejligste dag! 7. In some cases, this is reminiscent of the situation before and during World War II; for instance, a legally sanctioned confiscation of valuables from refugees attracted global outrage in late 2015/early 2016. 8. Özlem Cekic is a former member of the Danish Parliament for the green left-wing party: The Socialist People’s Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti). She left national politics after refusing to follow the party line. Since then, she has been an enthusiastic advocate for dialogue and has introduced the phrase dialogue coffee, referring to the initiative she has taken to drink coffee with Danes who have sent her hate mail due to her political and ethnic background. Özlem has a Kurdish Turkish background.

References Abu-Nimer, M., Khoury, A., & Welty, E. (2007). Unity in Diversity: Interfaith Dialogue in the Middle East. Washington DC: US Institute of Peace Press. Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-performativity of Anti-­ Racism. Borderlands, 3(2), 1–15. Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Bell, C. (1992). Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford & New  York: Oxford University Press. Bell, C. (1997). Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford & New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Christoffersen, M., Hoxbroe, S., & Vinding, N.  V. (2018). From a Common Word to Committed Partnership: Danish-Arab Interfaith Dialogue 2012–16. Frederiksberg: Secret Chamber Press. Crapanzano, V. (1981). Rite of Return: Circumcision in Morocco. The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 9, 15–36. Dreher, T., & de Souza, P. (2018). Locating Listening. In T.  Dreher & A.  A. Mondal (Eds.), Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference (pp. 21–39). Cham: Springer. Fahy, J. (2018). The International Politics of Tolerance in the Persian Gulf. Religion, State & Society, 46(4), 311–327. Galal, L. P. (2019). Making Space for Faith. Interfaith Initiatives in Denmark. In J. Fahy & J.-J. Bock (Eds.), The Interfaith Movement: Mobilising Religious Diversity in the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Galal, L. P., Hvenegård-Lassen, K., & Tranekjær, L. (2017). Det Arrangerede Kulturmøde [the Organised Cultural Encounter]. Sprogforum. Tidsskrift for Sprog og Kulturpædagogik, 23(64), 13–21. Grimes, R. L. (2014). The Craft of Ritual Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haddad, Y.  Y., & Fischbach, R. (2015). Interfaith Dialogue in Lebanon: Between a Power Balancing Act and Theological Encounters. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 26(4), 423–442. Hansen, H. L. (2015). Christian-Muslim Relations in Egypt: Politics, Society and Interfaith Encounters. London: I.B. Tauris. Helde, M. L. (2012). The Dialogue Handbook: The Art of Conducting a Dialogue-­ and Facilitating Dialogue Workshops. Copenhagen: Danish Youth Council. Hüsken, U. (2007). Ritual Dynamics and Ritual Failure. In U. Hüsken (Ed.), When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual (pp. 337–366). Leiden, Boston: Brill. Hüsken, U., & Hüsken, U. (2007). Mistakes, Procedural Errors and Incorrect Performances. In When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual (pp. 21–23). Leiden, Boston: BRILL. Joppke, C. (2018). Culturalizing Religion in Western Europe: Patterns and Puzzles. Social Compass, 65(2), 234–246. Köpping, K.-P., Leistle, B., & Rudolph, M. (2006). Introduction. In K.-P.  Köpping, B.  Leistle, & M.  Rudolph (Eds.), Ritual and Identity. Performative Practices as Effective Transformations of Social Reality (pp. 9–30). Berlin: LIT Verlag. Kowal, E. (2015). Welcome to Country: Acknowledgement, Belonging and White Anti-Racism. Cultural Studies Review, 21(2), 173–204.

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Leistle, B. (2006). Ritual as Sensory Communication: A Theoretical and Analytical Perspective. In K.-P. Koepping, B. Leistle, & M. Rudolph (Eds.), Ritual and Identity. Performative Practices as Effective Transformations of Social Reality (pp. 33–73). Berlin: LIT Verlag. Liebmann, L. L. (2017). Interfaith Dialogue in Christian Norway: Enactment of Inclusive Religiosity as Civilized Behavior. Journal of Religion in Europe, 10(3), 301–327. McClymond, K. (2016). Ritual Gone Wrong: What we Learn from Ritual Disruption. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merlan, F. (2014). Recent Rituals of Indigenous Recognition in Australia: Welcome to Country. American Anthropologist, 116(2), 296–309. Müller, F. (2012). Making Contact. Generating Interethnic Contact for Multicultural Integration and Tolerance in Amsterdam. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(3), 425–440. Pratt, M.  L. (1991). Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession (pp.  33–40). New York: MLA. Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation (Second Edition). London and New York: Routledge. Riis, H.  B. (2017). It doesn’t Matter if you’re Black or White. Negotiating Identity and Danishness in Intercultural Dialogue Meetings. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 38(6), 694–707. Schieffelin, E. L. (2007). Introduction. In U. Hüsken (Ed.), When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual (pp. 337–366). Leiden, Boston: Brill. Støvring, C., Albæk, A.  L., Lyngby, S., Aagaard, P., Kleis, C., Viftrup, L.  B., et  al. (2010). Dialogpiloten—En håndbog I Dialog [the Dialogue Pilot—A Handbook of Dialogue]. Aarhus: IKON-Danmark. Turner, E. (2012). Communitas—The Anthropology of Collective Joy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Werbner, P. (2001). The Limits of Cultural Hybridity: On Ritual Monsters, Poetic Licence and Contested Postcolonial Purifications. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7(1), 133–152.

5 Walking, Dancing, and Listening: Affect and Encounters

Prelude And later during such a week [i.e. during a dialogue camp between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon organised by Danmission], when I know them a little better, I may pair people up, a Christian and a Muslim. I send them on a pilgrimage together and tell them a little about pilgrimage in Islam and Christianity. And then they walk (…) the point is that they share their stories of faith, their private faith stories (…). And suddenly you get access to the other’s religion, not through dogma or comparing one world religion with another, but something more personal and much more beautiful, and then you get an interest in the other’s religion or belief personally through another human being. And then you’re better able to embrace the other. They’re very surprised when they return, and think it was the best and that they’d never experienced anything like it before. (Interview with organiser of interfaith dialogue, Lise Paulsen Galal)

Walking is a recurring feature, particularly in the range of interfaith dialogue activities included in our field studies. The organiser who is speaking about pilgrimage above uses interfaith dialogue in relation to development work. In Danmission’s Dialogue toolbox, this tool or exercise bears the name “Spiritual dialogue—walk and talk” (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.). The aim is described in terms of discovering similarities through the sharing of faith stories; and through these similarities to create identification and recognition; but also to discover the beauty of the other faith. Prior to the quote above, the organiser had told the interviewer that her aim is to use © The Author(s) 2020 L. P. Galal, K. Hvenegård-Lassen, Organised Cultural Encounters, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0_5

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the participants’ beliefs positively and that it is very much about the participants each finding their own voice. The interviewer asks for examples, and the organiser answers that what is important for her is that people should only speak on behalf of themselves, as well as listening from that situated stance. They should represent themselves, not a religion, a people, or a culture. In the context to which she is referring (participants from different Middle Eastern countries and Denmark meeting in Lebanon), this is not easy—the first days of a dialogue camp are dedicated to working towards this. The pilgrimage is one specific example of how this is done. Her aim is in tune with the widespread priority within interfaith dialogue initiatives—which we have discussed in detail in Chap. 2—of the individual and his or her belief as a personal rather than a collective matter. The suspension between similarity and identification on the one hand, and keeping “the beauty of the other faith” intact in its difference on the other, also comes across clearly in Danmission’s description of the exercise referred to above. The organiser does not say anything about walking as such, and we do not know what she told the walking fellows about pilgrimage; as it appears in the interview, walking is a means to an end. A technique. In the description of the activity posted on the dialogue toolbox webpage, it is suggested that a facilitator introduces pilgrimage through sharing: “how walking and journeying with others through the landscape of one’s faith is part of the inner dialogue and journey towards a deeper relationship with God and with the person of the other faith” (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.). Jesper Østergaard and Dorthe Refslund Christensen argue that the mediaeval and the postmodern pilgrim are connected through “the practice: walking to gain some kind of new knowledge. But when the mediaeval pilgrim walked towards God, the postmodern pilgrim walks towards him or herself ” (2010, p. 244). Whether this comparison holds for all pilgrimage practices, past or present, is questionable, but the logic associated with the use of pilgrimage in this setting is clearly associated with “walking towards oneself ”—towards one’s own “voice” and through this to obtain “a deeper relationship with God”. But in addition to this, also with “the person of the other faith”. The pilgrimage is not dedicated to a solitary inner dialogue, since it is undertaken by two people who walk together. During this walk, they

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experience a transformation that, in the organiser’s reasoning, is established through the beauty of an authentic self (one’s “own” voice) that is intersubjectively established or confirmed. In other words, and according to the script, the walkers are bearing witness in the contemporary interfaith modality (see Chap. 2), where this is articulated to an authentic true self. The other (i.e. the mutual other) emerges as divorced from religious dogmas and the sharp divisions between world religions, and becomes a private, beautiful, and believing self, who arouses interest and is embraceable. In this way, differences are transferred from the chilly and distanced atmosphere of confrontation and conflict to a shared mood of warm orientation towards a proximate and beautiful other. A particular kind of re-attunement is obtained. Judith Butler argues that, in order to appear, we have to appear to someone and “that our appearance has to be registered by the senses, not only our own, but somebody else’s. […] The body must enter the visual and audible field” (2015, p. 86). Here, Butler leaves the terrain of discourse and representation, and speaks to an intercorporeal process of appearance through the senses that may capture the potential of organised cultural encounters as face-to-face meetings where bodies “enter the visual and audible field”. And, conversely, they also leave, or at least may leave, that other field where the figure of the stranger—the other—is fixed by history and representation. We would like to go along with Butler and add a focus on—in this case—what walking does, and how this relates to affective circuits, that is, processes whereby affective flows intensify, defuse, or become redirected. It could be that walking does something that escapes or overflows the imaginary of the organiser and the script. Walking might hold a potential that does not correspond in any one-to-one way with the organiser’s account—even if the mood becomes entangled with a representation that is in accordance with the pre-­ established imaginary. When the Muslim and Christian participants are sent on a pilgrimage during a dialogue camp, the contact zone is on the move, we suggest, and an atmosphere seems to envelop the two walkers even though, or perhaps because, the atmosphere is unfixed or mobile. Thus, we stay with the walkers’ profound feeling of newness, as reported by the organiser; but we bracket her representation of that newness. Or, in other words, we accept her identification of a shift, but we move beyond her rationalisation of it.

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This newness or shift can be taken as an example of the “much more” that may always happen in any encounter, including an organised one. In line with what we have argued in preceding chapters, Ben Anderson highlights that: Encounters are made through repetitions, something of the past persists in an encounter, any encounter contains reference to past encounters, and encounters are made through accumulated relations, dispositions and habits. Encounters also involve differences, in that as bodies come together in encounters life is opened up to what is not yet determined or is to be determined. (Anderson, 2014, p. 82, emphasis added)

In this chapter, we turn our analytical focus towards affect, which we initiate through a (selective) theoretical discussion of the relationship between affect and encounters in the next section. This shift of perspective has both analytical and methodological implications. Analytically, we are interested in the moments when something seems to shift. Moments when affective circulations intensify—whether this is related to an intentional push into an affective register orchestrated by the organisers, or whether it just happens as a feature that relates to the ontological unpredictability of encounters. In doing so, we adopt a reading strategy that focuses less on the repetitive character of encounters and more on how, in encounters, life is opened up to what is not yet determined or is to be determined, as emphasised in the quote from Ben Anderson above.

Framing Encounters and Affect Working in an affective register or attending to how an atmosphere can be created, modulated, or defused is often an ingredient in organisers’ scripts. Danmission writes in the organisation’s online dialogue toolbox: Facilitating dialogue isn’t easy. Feelings, values and opinions are at stake, and the good atmosphere can easily change when vulnerable topics such as racism, sexism, classism or heterosexism comes up. (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.)

Atmospheres, then, are important; and should preferably be “good”, or perhaps rather, facilitators of encounters should be prepared to deal with

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changes in “the good atmosphere”. Danmission further states that “Dialogue can be practiced with both head, heart and hand” (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.). As such, they gesture towards the need to work in different registers. The card game played by participants during the training courses for municipal integration workers that was discussed in the previous chapter is an example of how organisers intentionally work with affective flows. The game was introduced as what in conventional workshop jargon is called an “energizer”, when the facilitator announced that, after lunch, the energy tends to be low as the reason for playing a card game (see description in Chap. 4). The game was performative—it eased forward something that was not entirely predictable; the participants were pushed or nudged out of their comfort zones and into bodily sensations of being out of tune. This push into an uncomfortable non-order was set up as a threshold experience that might direct the participants into another kind of affective attunement with difference than the one prescribed by habit and institution. Even if there were other purposes to the game, it did in fact energize people—since afterwards the participants were eager and uplifted and agreed that this was “good”. In her study of a diversity leadership training workshop, Helen Wilson points out that there is: a proliferation of programmes and policies that have sought to manage race relations and conflict by targeting the affective subject as a means to develop or design “meaningful interaction”, “shared belongings” and “cohesion”. (Wilson, 2013, p. 75)

This proliferation attests to the fact that rationality, or even reflexivity, is not deemed effective as a means of transformation, or, less decisively, that it cannot stand alone. Sara Ahmed describes “mood-work” as a pedagogical enterprise, where “re-tuning through attunement—is how feelings become matched to the appropriate actions” (2014a, p.  19), and argues that “much […] ‘diversity work’ involves the effort to minimize differences so that those who arrive can appear more ‘in tune’ with those who are already here” (2014a, p. 22). As shown in previous chapters, this minimisation of difference frequently occurs and coincides with a tacit or

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overt turn towards ideas of a universal human being that come to stress sameness. By thinking through mood and attunement, Ahmed is expanding on her previous work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014b). According to Ahmed, emotions, which in her phenomenological framework are not distinct from affect, “do things, and work to align individuals with collectives—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments” (2014b, p.  26). Emotions circulate between bodies. They stick to bodies and mould their surfaces in ways that delimit orientation. Some bodies are (or through the particularities of circulation have become) stickier than others, and therefore the intensity of attachment is unequally distributed. Both Wilson and Ahmed attend to how working in the affective register is adopted as an intervention strategy. Ahmed speaks to the way attunement and the demand to tune in are unevenly distributed as a requirement, since the effects of history “linger as mood” (2014a, p. 22).1 Ahmed’s approach, then, is oriented towards the past and to the repetitive dimension of encounters. In the same vein, Wilson underlines that participants in the kind of activities she has studied are differently positioned in relation to interventions that work in the affective register. When, for instance, one participant is asked to read his list of stereotypes aloud in front of the other participants, shame and discomfort make him almost unable to do so. The facilitator of the workshop asks the participants what it felt like to listen to this, and one of them says “that even though she had heard them all [the stereotypes] before and knew that they weren’t about her personally, it still somehow felt that way” (2013, p.  78). In other words, this reading out loud may re-open particularly painful wounds for some participants (2013, p. 79). Shame may promote transformative learning for the one who is ashamed, but if this happens at the expense of causing all-too-familiar pain for another, is this, then, ethically sound? While Wilson raises this question (but does not answer it), she still holds a more hopeful view of what might be done through the re-­ channelling of affect, a hope that is oriented towards the future. For Ahmed, attunement mostly describes a process whereby what is already in place becomes reaffirmed; whereas Wilson is more interested in pursuing the transformative potential of working in the affective register.

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What becomes clear from this line of argument is a difference in temporal emphasis. This difference is associated with how affect is approached. In contrast to Ahmed’s (queer) phenomenology, non-representational approaches (cf. Massumi, 2002) conceptualise affect as a free-flowing, autonomous, and pre-conscious force that is associated with a basic (human and non-human) capacity to affect and be affected. Affect, according to Brian Massumi, “is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is” (2002, p. 96). Massumi certainly recognises that “confinement” happens—and that it happens through representation or signification (and the translation into emotions); but his focus is directed towards “escape” and potentiality. Like Wilson, Ben Anderson combines an interest in how affective life is mediated and organised with attention to potentiality. Thus, Anderson and Wilson both take on board insights associated with non-­ representational approaches to affect, while at the same time they insist on how affect as a force is entangled with representation and organisation—and, we would add, positionalities and the way in which they are (partly) historically fixed through intersecting social categories (Hvenegård-Lassen & Staunæs, 2015). In contrast to Ahmed’s approach, for Anderson, affect on the one hand and emotions (hate, shame, anger, etc.) on the other are distinct from each other, but: affects and emotions are always-already entangled with one another in encounters—encounters that mix and render indistinguishable the personal and impersonal (but may involve processes whereby emotions come to be felt as personal). (2014, p. 84)

For Anderson and Wilson, there is no promise of change associated with interventions that work in the affective register—nor is the transformative potential necessarily “good” or “bad” in a normative sense. Rather, interventions may transform in ways that secure the existing distribution of privilege, or even enhance it (cf. Hvenegård-Lassen & Staunæs, 2015). The turn towards the future, to “what is not yet determined or is to be determined” does, however, partly loosen the grip of the frozen status quo. As such, it may also pave the way for a more affirmative or “reparative” mode of critique (Sedgwick & Frank, 2003).

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Taking our point of departure here, this chapter launches a perspective on organised cultural encounters that knits together a focus on bodies or corporeality (which we bring with us from the preceding chapter) and affective qualities. We also adopt a different reading strategy; namely, one that focuses on tendencies. While this means that we turn our orientation towards the future, we still hold on to our insights concerning the distributed nature of positionality and orientation within encounters. Our reading strategy implies that the analyses become more speculative. Borrowing Raymond Williams’ concept of a structure of feeling, Ben Anderson argues that “Because it ‘hovers on the edge of semantic availability’, articulating a structure of feeling is always a matter of speculative description” (2014, p. 124). Returning to the prelude, we cannot “know” what the atmosphere was like for the two walkers. This could be attributed to the fact that we were not there, and our only access goes through the organiser’s representation. But, even with respect to situations in which we have participated through our fieldwork, it is pertinent to ask: how can the researcher “know” that the atmosphere she senses or registers is associated with an intensifying circulation of particular emotions (of love, as suggested by the organiser in the prelude above, anger, discomfort etc.)? The answer is that she cannot, if “knowing” is employed in a conventional social science sense. It is a knowing that is not grounded in an epistemological structure of “proof ”. She can register (or her body can) that something is intensifying, and that—even if she is only partly “in” it (after all, she is the researcher)—it also envelops her. Digging into it means to speculate: how may this atmosphere that is hovering on the edge of semantic availability be made semantically available? Not without grounding, but still as a suggestion, as something suggestive. Taking seriously the attention to the distribution of affect—the fact that the capacity to affect and be affected might be unevenly distributed—also means that she cannot be sure that the atmosphere is enveloping all participants in the encounter in the same way, or whether it might require an effort— rather than being a seamless experience—for some participants to sink into that atmosphere. In what follows, we turn to two themes that came up in our data material in relation to affective circulations. Firstly, we delve into walking, and what walking does or may do. This section also includes a focus on

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dancing, which in some respects shares features with walking. We then turn to listening, and in doing so we pick up on the way in which listening as a requirement appears across our empirical material. We are also interested, however, in making a move away from the preoccupation with visuality and speech so characteristic of the current “politics of difference” (whether mainstream or oppositional), dominated as it is by ideas associated with “recognition” and “voice” (Dreher & Mondal, 2018).

Walking Walking together is, according to Lee and Ingold, “not to walk into but to walk with—where ‘with’ implies not a face-to-face confrontation, but heading the same way, sharing the same vistas, and perhaps retreating from the same threats behind” (2006, p. 67). In visual terms, then, walking together is not about seeing the other eye to eye, but rather of being side by side, literally sharing the same view. In this way, walking together— if conceptualised as an encounter technology—marks a move away from the “face”—being en-face. Returning to Butler’s notion of appearance quoted in the prelude, we note that it might be important to think of the term “appear” not in visual terms but in terms of a bodily proximity. Lee and Ingold further argue: A person walking generates a particular style of movement, pace and direction that can be understood as a “rhythm” of walking. Sharing or creating a walking rhythm with other people can lead to a very particular closeness and bond between the people involved. (Lee & Ingold, 2006, p. 69)

Walking side by side encourages a shared rhythm and pace; a kind of proximity that is remarkably different from sitting or standing face to face with one another. Interpreted through this lens, “companionship” among the walkers in the Lebanon dialogue camp comes into being, not through visual appearance and not (necessarily) through talk, but through a shared, mobile (and thus shifting in emerging ways) corporeal rhythm. This, we suggest, may also blur the boundaries between the bodies of the walkers (and between these and the environment). The latter formulation

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marks a move away from Lee and Ingold’s focus on the individual walker, which, as Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman argue, “risks a framing of embodiment that emphasizes an interiority of self ” (2017, p.  32). Following Ben Anderson’s argument that affects are transpersonal (2014, p. 87), we suggest that the personal feeling of companionship is set in motion through a transcorporeal flow of affect massaged forward by walking (Springgay & Truman, 2017). In the following, we discuss two examples of walking that are both related to interfaith encounters. Walking, we argue, works very differently in these two examples.

From Church to Mosque Walking is highlighted on the webpage of one of the (Christian) organisations behind the Dialogue Pilot Course (see Box 3.2, p. 71). Here it appears as the first bullet point in a description of dialogue: “Daring to walk part of the road together”.2 This is, of course, a metaphor, but not entirely so since walking as a practice is also an element of the script. On day two of the course, the participants thus finished the morning session by walking together as a group from Brorson’s Church through the North-West district of Copenhagen to the Imam Ali Mosque. The walk started at 11 am and was announced in the programme as a “Walk ‘n’ Talk”, that is, as a well-used item of all kinds of seminar and course agendas (see also Chap. 3). Since it was a Saturday, the city, according to the researcher’s description, was on the brink of waking up, and the streets were almost empty. The atmosphere was crisp, and the streets felt like pristine ground, open for exploration. While in some respects this half-hour walk bears a likeness to the pilgrimage discussed in the prelude, there are also differences. Most obviously perhaps is that this was not two people, but a group of approximately 30, and that the destination mattered, as did the environment. The latter may also have been the case in the pilgrimage in Lebanon, but it did not feature as important in the organiser’s reasoning. Through this walk, a “line” (Lee & Ingold, 2006, p. 76) is established between the church and the mosque, and the terrain in between becomes spatially and

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temporally attached to this line. In this way, the moving group is a place-­ making “unit”. Not all the participants had a prior sensory experience of the area, they were first-time walkers here. For them, the (seen from above) mediatised socio-cultural map of a dangerous Nørrebro and NW mutated (temporarily at least) into a different kind of space, associated with the dialogical encounter-on-the-move. The researcher describes how she initially transported the mood from the preceding events in the church onto the walk: The last exercise before the walk concerned the participants’ respective positioning on the question of whether they considered it possible to marry a partner who had a different faith than their own (see Chap. 3). Explaining his position, one participant emphatically stated that marriage across faiths was impossible—it could not work. This position, and the way it was communicated, felt extremely provocative to the researcher, who, when her turn in the round of explanations came, equally emphatically stated that it was possible and based this on her experience of being married to a Muslim for 20 years, without being or becoming Muslim herself. “It felt as though I could not be in my own body”, the researcher writes in her fieldnotes, and adds that this argument felt much more invasive (in essence: “my life is deemed impossible”) than a dogmatic reference to a religiously sanctioned ban on mixed marriages. In this instance, the researcher is made not only inappropriate but also unrecognisable—not because it is a religious ban to live as she does, but because of the mundane judgement: it cannot work. Outside the church, a young female Muslim with a familial background in Turkey fell in beside the researcher, and as they started walking, she picked up on the question of mixed marriages in general and the researcher’s marriage in particular. As they walked side by side for a long time, a deeply personal conversation developed, which also jumped to other topics. The conversation became a kind of collaboratively built collage. In a methodological vein, Jon Anderson (2004, p. 258) argues that: talking whilst walking is also useful as it produces not a conventional interrogative encounter, but a collage of collaboration: an unstructured dialogue where all actors participate in a conversational, geographical and informational pathway creation. As a consequence, the knowledge produced is importantly different: atmospheres, emotions, reflections and beliefs can be accessed, as well as intellects, rationales and ideologies.

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We may speculate that this dialogue was set in motion by the unmooring of the researcher’s religiously “mixed” marriage, and consequently a displacement of her researcher positionality, immediately before the walk. The dialogue was not initiated by the researcher’s interest in her co-walker, but rather the other way around. In addition, it is doubtful whether this conversation would have come about in the church, since the format of the exercise did not promote exchanges of this kind. The other participants in the walk likewise grouped into twos or threes, and walked and talked their way, while also constituting a line towards the Mosque. The researcher writes that the terrain itself did not leave any great impression on her, but that the shared orientation towards the Mosque and the assemblage of the participants into one moving corpus did come to matter. She also noted in a more reflexive mode that, with the possible exception of a class of schoolchildren, it is very rare to see a group so diverse in terms of visible ethnic, racial, and religious markers moving along together. So, the group does something to the environment at the same time that “walking with” in that environment does something to the group. Based on the way from home research project, which was conducted in the UK between 2002 and 2008, Misha Myers refers to a walk performed with a group of diverse participants. She argues that the presence of a group, compared to walking (and talking) in pairs, offered: an additional dimension of conviviality […] While it provided an opportunity for more intimate dialogue, the walk also became a social event of a group walking together […] enabling the presentation of heterogeneous forms of knowledge. (2011, pp. 198–199)

As mentioned above, walking in our field studies is related to interfaith encounters.3 Walking as an intervention strategy is not, however, confined to this type of encounter, as Myer’s study, which in our terminology is an organised cultural encounter, exemplifies. In Myer’s project, walking practices were employed “as both participatory and interventional performance research, and indeed as arts practices that involve transcultural communication and exchange of diverse perspectives” (Myers, 2011, p.  184).4 The activities in that project involved refugees and asylum

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seekers as well as (voluntary) support workers, and walking was both a methodology and the main activity, since the question of mobility was central. While home and “homing” as a transnational process of location across space and time were central aspects of the interventions of that project, mobility and movement were the processes that aimed to promote “homing”. But, “the unequal relations and distributions of power in mobility” (2011, p.  198) also became apparent when, for instance, participants challenged the project’s assumptions and highlighted the constraints of homing through mobility. One participant, for instance, had had his asylum application refused, and while he was awaiting deportation, he had no other option than sleeping rough since he was also denied all financial support (ibid.). The group walk described in the quote above was performed by a voluntary organisation which focused on the empowerment of women. They chose the group format over the project recommendations of walking in pairs due to gendered inequalities in relation to mobility: the group provided safety for the participating women that walking in pairs could not offer. Returning to the diverse group of walkers on the streets of Copenhagen that Saturday morning, it was unusual because of the ensemble of bodily differences on display, but it might also hint at differential mobilities among these bodies. Walking with someone mostly implies a shared pattern of mobility, including when it comes to the limitations of that mobility.

Making Home? During the festival of Heavenly Days in Copenhagen in 2016 (see Box 4.2, p. 124), the researcher participated in the event called “Pilgrimage Through the City”, which took place at Nørrebro. This was not a surprising choice, as will have become apparent above and in previous chapters. Nørrebro is clearly a place saturated with affective circulations associated with (the politics of ) difference.

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The pastor at Stefan’s Church (affiliated with the Danish Church and located at Nørrebro), led the walk. Participants had gradually gathered in front of the church, some coming alone and others in pairs or small groups. Some were from the congregation, others, like the researcher, were not. The pastor presented the theme of the walk as home and asked us to use all of our senses, attending to sounds, smells, and sights, while walking. The walk lasted a couple of hours and meandered through Nørrebro district. On the way, we met different local inhabitants at significant and in some cases highly contentious places, where they presented their story about Nørrebro. First stop was a peace monument placed in the heart of Nørrebro (at The Red Square) that was erected as a direct response to the killing of a young backpacker from Italy in 2003. On the monument is written in different languages: “We want to live together.” Here, we listened to the story of how Nørrebro had stood united to counter hatred and violence. Afterwards, we passed through Mjølnerparken, a social housing area, which is on the official state-compiled ghetto list due to its high number of tenants with an immigrant background, on social benefits, or having a criminal record. One of the housing board members met us there and told us about the positive aspects of living there. Next, we met with a headmaster from one of the most socially disadvantaged schools in Nørrebro. She has a media reputation for being outspoken and committed to the well-being of immigrant children and the local community. Towards the end of the walk, we met a young woman with a Somali background. She told us with an infectious humour her own personal story of travelling within Islam and between countries. (Lise Paulsen Galal, fieldnotes)

The walk, the localities, and the repeated encouragement to sense the city may be understood as an invitation to understand and experience Nørrebro as what Nagel has named “an inclusive spiritual social space transcending religious differences” (2015, p.  209). At the same time, most of the participants were ethnic Danes. Hence, unlike the dialogue pilot walkers above, the group was not a massive manifestation of diversity in itself. The participants were not walking alongside the other and sharing his or her orientation. Instead, they met the locals along the route face to face rather than as a body “next to mine” and moving into an emerging re-attunement. In this way, the other became a feature of the environment, like the monument in the Red Square. She/he was at home

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and, like the statue, had her or his dwelling place in the district. Thus, it was the movement, the lines of walking, that made Nørrebro come into being as an inclusive and peaceful place, removed from its mediated status as conflictual and unruly. “Mjølnerparken is a nice place”, as one of the walkers, who had never visited Nørrebro before, noted with surprise. The young woman with a Somali background mentioned above walked the last part of the tour with the group. Walking along did not change her positioning vis-à-vis the rest of the walkers: she was already firmly established as outside the skin of the moving corpus. This became obvious when she was praised for her way of handling life in Denmark by the female participant she was walking next to. Thus, the relationality that came into being between the two was patronising rather than companionable. The main outcome of the walk seemed to be that the walkers gained a new sense of the district, and although the event was orchestrated so that diversity and inclusivity were presented as major ingredients of that sense, the walkers were established as outsiders. They were not part of that diversity. They became (diversity) tourists (Lapina, Forthcoming), gazing at the locals. Maggie O’Neill et  al. argue that “in walking together and acting together, we orient ourselves and our actions to emergent relational goods without collapsing the Other into a totalizing ‘we’” (2019, p. 133). Like Myers, O’Neill and colleagues have employed walking both as a research methodology and as a transformative technique in participatory action research in the UK with refugees and asylum seekers (O’Neill, 2018; O’Neill, Erel, Kaptani, & Reynolds, 2019; O’Neill & Hubbard, 2010). According to O’Neill et al., walking enables a variety of “goods”: listening, attunement, recognition, respect, and reflexivity, which in turn are the building blocks of trust and lead to understanding (2019, p. 133). These qualities, then, are seen as being hinged to walking; along this line of reasoning, walking becomes a condition of possibility, a potentiality, that is then articulated to (or represented as) a set of normatively wished-­ for states of being. This dynamic is recognisable from the organiser’s account of what happens on the pilgrimage in the prelude to this chapter. Among the qualities that are articulated to each other, listening and attunement refer to sensory registers, whereas recognition, respect, and reflexivity rather belong to the representational field associated with an

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emancipatory politics of difference. It is through the establishment of a bridge from walking to the desired outcomes that the potential is governed or channelled in a particular direction. Walking becomes mediated rather than immediate. Whether or not walking does in fact transform, establish new connectivity, and so forth depends on the specifics of the hinges or the mediation. In the “Pilgrimage Through the City” event, the outcome is contradictory—since the change does not concern the connectivity of the walkers and/or the locals, even though it may disturb the pre-established representations of the district. As Lee and Ingold argue (2006, p.  67), “walking does not, in and of itself, yield an experience of embodiment, nor is it necessarily a technique of participation”. Or, if we consider walking to be not only a sensory enterprise, but also a particular way of transmitting affect transpersonally, we could say that “affects may constrain and restrict as well as enable, open up and disrupt” (Anderson, 2014, p. 92).

Box 5.1  Community Dance This study explores a community dance project located in a multicultural neighbourhood of Copenhagen, Denmark. The aim of the project is the inclusion of ethnic minority children and young people through dance, which, according to the organisers, is a nonverbal language and a direct approach to the body. At the policy level, the project emphasises the multicultural and socially vulnerable neighbourhood as the background for setting up the project, whereas the practices focus on dance technique and discipline, that is, on cultural and artistic forms of communication as a means to create new futures (Nielsen & Sørensen, 2017). During the period from September 2014 to June 2015, the researcher (Rasmus Præstmann Hansen) conducted fieldwork at the community dance centre, observing and interviewing the young dancers and the dance instructors. He observed 25 training sessions for three different teams (popping, house, and breakdance) as well as special events (shows) at the dance centre. The interview material consists of nine individual interviews with six young dancers aged 14 to 16 years, two dance instructors, and one of the centre’s artistic leaders. In addition, a number of informal conversations with instructors, staff members, parents, and youngsters took place during the fieldwork.

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Dancing Dancing, as practised in the community dance project (see Box 5.1, p. 164), shares various features with walking. Most prominent is the fact that dancing, like walking, is a corporeal activity and, like the walks we have discussed above, dance is an inter- or transcorporeal experience. As mentioned briefly in Chap. 1, the community dance project seems to be suspended between an explicit attention to the multicultural and socially disadvantaged local context at the policy level and a focus on dance techniques in everyday practice. This tension can be explained in different ways; for instance, it is related to financing: a dance project has a better chance of attracting government (local or central) funding if it is associated with aims deemed to be of public importance. Seen from a practice perspective (in contrast to a policy focus), the aim of this organised cultural encounter is to produce proficient dancers, and this is seen—as a by-product—to have effects when it comes to building better intercultural relations. We argued above that walking is taken up by the organisers as a means to an end, and therefore walking is also rationalised in terms of these other ends. The prospective outcome is not, however, to produce walkers. In contrast, dance, in the community project, is deemed in and of itself to hold a transformative potential. The project leader argues that “dance communicates on an entirely different level than language does … many of them [the youngsters] are bi- or trilingual. So it’s all of a sudden a channel of communication that’s opened up for them”. And one of the instructors says: “One of the values of dance is that it’s for everyone. All ages, sizes and colours, faiths. Dance is for everyone. Dance is a universal language”. Even though the project leader and the instructor resort to descriptions in terms of language and communication, what they are conveying here is that dancing involves a different register than “ordinary communication”. Dancing does something that bypasses the obstacles associated with communication or representation. The youngsters interviewed by the researcher do not (either directly or indirectly) talk about cultural difference, and when they are prompted to do so, the answer (as well as the question) comes across as hesitant. Consider the following exchange between the researcher (R) and one of the youngsters (Y):

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R: Are there different kinds of youth and children here? Y: There are really many different kinds. I’ve attended classes with some who were really different from me. It’s also because it’s all about not being afraid of expressing yourself. And where you learn to accept others when they have a different style. I think I’ve learned a lot through that. R: There are many, you know … Danes and non-Danes, and … or like different groups and things like that? Y: That also varies, I think … the House class, the one that’s performing today, I think there are, like, people from all over the world. It’s quite … many of them at least. (Interview with dancer, Rasmus Præstmann Hansen)

When the researcher asks about “different kinds”, the youngster answers from within dance: difference is about different styles, different expressive modes. Hence the researcher hesitantly rephrases the question—and, in his attempt to put it in a way that comes across as meaningful to the youngster, comes to employ a conventional distinction in terms of nationality, that he immediately tries to reformulate in terms of “groups”. The youngster’s “this also varies” confirms that the important differences are about style. It also comes across that he is thinking about it as he answers. So the organisers and participants agree that what they are doing here is dancing. It is doubtful whether dancing is for everyone, or perhaps rather that the obstacles may be greater for some than for others, depending on such factors as religious belonging or the intersection between this and gender. This comes out in our interview with the leader, who tells the researcher that they have tried “to do something for the girls who wear the hijab, and things like that, but this is a little difficult”. The street genres of dance that dominate the repertoire in the community dance project also carry socio-cultural positionalities that impact upon who may aspire to be a proficient dancer, or who may embody the right “attitude” (there are, for instance, many girls in the house classes, while boys dominate in breakdance). But, in the context of this chapter, we stay with “the opening up of life through encounters”. Thus, the question we are pursuing is: what does dancing do to those who have arrived on the dance floor?

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The researcher observed dance classes in three different street styles: popping, house, and breakdance. The classes varied between communal rehearsals of step sequences choreographed by the instructors—often in front of a mirror—and individual freestyling (battling) in circles, turning away from the mirror. The mirror and the way in which it became an agent that intra-acted with the dancers (including the instructor) quickly caught the researcher’s interest. The dancers would divide into those who chose a place in front of the mirror and those who took the second row; formations would be difficult to get right, when they turned their backs to the mirror; and the researcher would observe himself in the mirror not dancing, but looking at the backs and the fronts of the dancing bodies/ body simultaneously. Therefore the mirror also became an interview theme. One of the young dancers reflects on the intra-action between themselves, the mirror, and the co-dancers: When you don’t really know how to do the steps, or you missed out on a class, then you have the mirror to watch what the others are doing […] If you start in a new class, and you feel you’re doing the exercises right and then you may look into the mirror, and then maybe you’re not doing it right … or you feel you’re stretching your arm and then it’s not really stretched at all. Often you feel that you’re doing things really forcefully, but maybe this isn’t how it is at all. And then maybe you, like, I wouldn’t say compare yourself to others, but see how the others are dancing at the same time as you dance, to, like, get inspiration. (Interview with dancer, Rasmus Præstmann Hansen)

We argued above that walking side by side may result in a particular kind of bodily re-attunement, where the walkers share their orientation alongside each other and co-create a walking rhythm. We also argued that this implies a turning away from contact in terms of face-to-face interactions. While the youngster’s description above is clearly an account of a process of bodily attunement, it differs in several respects from “walking-attunement”. Most obviously, perhaps, there is a particular script to follow—a choreography that you need to approximate, even though you may adopt

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your own style to some extent. Secondly, you cannot trust your bodily feeling (proprioceptive or kinaesthetic senses) that you are doing things right—not even whether you are stretching your arm or not; even if it feels right, it might not look right. There is a to-be-looked-at-ness associated with becoming a dancer. This means that you need to match the proper visual impression with your bodily sensation. Doing it right according to the look feels like this. Thirdly, looking into the mirror, you see yourself and your co-dancers at the same time as you are performing side by side; and knowing that they can see you as well as themselves. The use of mirrors in dance training divides the waters among practitioners and researchers (Diehl, 2016; Ehrenberg, 2010; Purser, 2011). The instructors in the community dance project propagate a both/and approach: The mirror is, um … it’s just a tool which gives you immediate feedback on something you’re doing. It’s just a tool. Um… mirrors have assets and downsides. The downside is that if you get used to it as a tool that helps you discover your mistakes, then you miss it if it isn’t there… Instead of looking straight in your dance, then you look down, because suddenly you get drawn into it not being there and, uhhh, what do you do then? … and then you also become dependent on watching the others and when it [the mirror] isn’t there, then you start looking right and left to see what the others are doing, because you’re used to it. (Interview with instructor, Rasmus Præstmann Hansen)

In this account, bodily sensing becomes interrupted by the mirror— even when it is not there. Rather than establishing a transcorporeally transmitted and shared rhythm, the mirror introduces watching as a requirement for moving with others. One of the young dancers tells the researcher that he has previously trained in dance in another setting where they did not use mirrors: because they said that you learn, you dance much better when there are no mirrors, because then you learn to use your body much more, right? When there are mirrors, then you see, oh no this looks ugly, but it’s about how you feel it [the moves], right? But I think it’s pretty cool that there are mirrors because then I can see if it looks sick, and if my hair is OK, no, I

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mean … if it looks cool, and when you do the routine, when everyone is straight in line, then you can see it in the mirror. I think it’s good. That’s what I think. (Interview with dancer, Rasmus Præstmann Hansen)

Despite the fact that this is a community dance project training children and youngsters, there is a clear resonance with what professional (mostly ballet) dancers relate about mirrors (Diehl, 2016). We have argued that “walking with” is a mobile next-to proximity that involves affective corporeal transmissions. Even though the organisers (the leader and the instructors) rationalise dance in terms of voice (communication/ language), dancing would seem to embody some of the same affordances. The mirror, however, introduces vision as a guide to “truth” (coolness). But visuality is also heavily involved in the way in which socio-cultural differences are racialised and gendered (among other things), transmitted, and frozen. “In our everyday encounters we see a common-sense understanding that produces subjects and difference through the garnering of often visible characteristics and visceral cues”, as Wilson (2013, p. 75) puts it. Perhaps, on second thoughts, style is not as distinct from ethnic, racialised, and gendered differences as the analysis of the exchange between the researcher and the youngster above suggested? Massumi (2002) distinguishes between “mirror-vision” and “movement-­vision”, whereby the former freezes the body into a static positionality, while the latter fractures and multiplies. Movement-vision is a kind of blind-sight which sees what Massumi terms “an infra-­empirical space”—the space of the body without an image (2002, p. 57), which, he argues, is the locus of much lived experience. Mirror-vision, then, is the confinement that occurs through representation, whereas movement-­ vision is escape, vitality, and hence encompasses the space of potentiality (see the section “Framing Encounters and Affect”, above). Massumi’s distinction takes its point of departure in discussions within different versions of developmental psychology of the so-called mirror-stage of infant subject formation, in which the infant becomes separated from “the world” and individuated to itself through the formation of a body-image (hence the body without an image as the space of non-contained vitality). Seen from this perspective, the repetitive dimension of encounters is caught up in mirror-vision, that is, in the prevailing representations,

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whereas their openness to what is not yet determined would correspond to “the body without an image”. We have argued that the two temporalities, past and future, are entangled in the here-and-now of encounters, which we might conceptualise as their third temporality. This entanglement (which also involves their spatial location) makes encounters messier than the distinction between mirror-vision and movement-vision suggests. This messiness emerges in Aimie Purser’s (2011) staging of a conversation between Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject and interview accounts from professional dancers, in which the mirror (body-image) plays a central role. Based on the interview accounts, Purser argues (2011, p. 196) that there is “a definite tension for the dancers between the internal and external pictures of the movement and which is more ‘real’ and ‘correct’”. More broadly (i.e. not limited to dance), she proposes that: body-subjectivity is far more than an awareness of the body’s position in space as it has both dynamic and affective dimensions as well as being a fundamentally intersubjective phenomenon. (2011, p. 183)

In a similar vein (although not precisely the same), Maxine Sheets-­ Johnstone argues that dancing is a process of thinking in movement, which is “from the inside”, and furthermore: It is a mode of thinking that, by its very nature, is the work of a mindful body. The kinetic intelligence that creates dance—any dance—informs the dance itself: a kinetic bodily logos is at work throughout. (2017, p. 12)

The potentiality of dance, then, is not that it transports the dancers (or the audience) into a utopian elsewhere, but that it enters into a dynamic register of movement. The body’s position in space (as reflected in the mirror) becomes entangled with these other dimensions. Returning to the young dancer’s statement above, it contains an interesting gesture towards the intersubjective, when he first jokingly refers to how he can see in the mirror if his hair is OK, and then, in a more serious mode, he jumps to his insertion into a line with his co-dancers. Dancing as it is enacted in the community dance project does not hold unlimited transformative potential; as with walking, “it depends”. Given

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the messiness of encounters in the contact zone, this is not surprising. But, in the turn to an affective, corporeal register, the focus on becoming a dancer implies not an obliteration of differences but rather a jump to another terrain. We cannot say that “style” as employed by the youngster in this interview with the researcher disappears or is unrelated to gendered and racialised differences, but we could say that the jump matters, because it at least partly displaces these differences; they become rearticulated with a difference. The youngster who responds to the researcher’s questions about difference in terms of style attests to this displacement.

Listening In the analyses of walking and dancing above, we turned our attention towards sensory registers associated with touch (feet touching the ground), rhythm (bodies in sequential mobility) and proximity as affective and embodied flows that (may) promote a being (or becoming) alongside. Walking, in the examples above, is intertwined with talk. Talking while walking, as we have seen above, is associated with other ways of talking, of making dialogue, than immobile face-to-face conversations; O’Neill even argues that her research group uses walking as a “biographical and phenomenological method” (O’Neill, 2018, p.  75). Thus, (life) storytelling transports or translates the potentiality of walking into something else. Or walking and talking become entangled and co-­ constitutive of new relationalities. In what follows, we pick up on talking (storytelling) not so much in relation to what comes out of the speaker’s mouth, but rather in terms of what enters the ear of the conversational partner. In other words, we turn to another sensory register: listening. Jean-Luc Nancy argues: Every sensory register […] bears with it both its simple nature and its tense, attentive, or anxious state: seeing and looking, smelling and sniffing or scenting, tasting and savoring, touching and feeling or palpating, hearing and listening. (2007, p. 5)

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For Nancy, hearing is captured in the already-established “sense” (meaning) of things, “to hear a siren, a bird, or a drum is already each time to understand at least the rough outline of a situation, a con-text, if not a text” (p. 6), whereas listening “is to be straining towards a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible” (ibid.). A distinction between different modalities or states reappears in much recent critical work on listening,5 much of which focuses on ethics and research encounters (methodologies) (Angel-Ajani, 2004; Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016; Davies, 2014; McRae, 2014). Lisbeth Lipari uses the terms “listening otherwise” (2009) and “listening being” (2010) to designate a mode of listening that does not domesticate the other, but is “awakened and attuned to the sounds of difference rather than to the sounds of sameness” (2009, p. 44). Like Nancy, she makes a distinction between hearing and listening. Unlike Nancy, however, she stays with the relationality between self and other: Etymologically listening comes from a root that emphasizes attention and giving to another, while hearing comes from a root that emphasizes perception and sensation of sound. Indeed, the ideas of “gaining” and “possessing” found in hearing foreground a focus on the self ’s experience, while the ideas of attention and obedience found in listening focus on the other. (2010, p. 349)

We may think of this by way of the expression “I hear you”, which shares its defusing quality with the expression “thank you for sharing”, discussed in Chap. 3. Saying “I hear you” to someone closes down a subject rather than opening it up. Bronwyn Davies (2014, p.  21) distinguishes between “listening-as-usual” and “emergent listening”. Listening in its emergent modality, she argues: is about being open to being affected. It is about being open to difference and, in particular, to difference in all its multiplicity as it emerges in each moment in between oneself and another. Listening is about not being bound by what you already know. It is life as movement. (2014, p. 1)

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Davies underlines that emergent listening involves a blurring of the subject as a self-contained unit (the subject-of-will), but at the same time also that “being recognizable […] is necessary for survival” (2014, p. 36). Listening as usual is thus not something that we (as subjects and researchers) can escape, and any attempt at listening emergently always runs the risk of being recaptured in the listening-as-usual mode. Lipari notes that “listening being” is not “an actual state or principle”, but “perhaps [a] utopian vision of listening […] a horizon toward which we might travel” (2010, p. 348). The entanglement of temporalities (past, present, future), which we have focused on throughout this chapter, also emerges in these attempts to distinguish between different modalities of listening. Taking our point of departure here, we adopt an affirmative reading strategy, trying to tease out moments when listening does not altogether stay within the parameters of what we already know; we listen to our research encounters with attentive ears towards the unexpected, you might say. And, for a while, we also seek to suspend judgement (i.e. our analytical judgement)—even if what we are listening to tends to be a mixed tune. We turn to listening, since this sense is prioritised as important across our cases. In dialogue with the growing literature on what listening does and the potential that it may hold, we dig into situations in our empirical material where listening is performed or evoked. Like walking, above, the examples in the following are about listening partly because that sense is prioritised in the organiser script, and partly because listening is performed in a particular way off-script.

Listening to “Prem” The fictional refugee Prem from Bhutan was introduced in an exercise during one of the observed modules on intercultural competence (the training courses for municipal integration workers, see Box 3.1, p. 65). In this particular module, the focus was on (cultural understandings of ) illness, and Prem was called upon late in the session after several other exercises and teaching sections that circulated around illness. The facilitator repeatedly underlined that the aim of this session was to attend to the

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“cases” that are stuck—the cases where “it” (the normal procedural process) doesn’t work, and where intercultural competence is needed (see also Chap. 3). Prem is presented as a refugee who has health issues, and in addition he understands illness as something that requires rest, which clashes with the municipal cure that prescribes activity. Introducing the exercise, the facilitator argues that communicating with “the sick client” means that you need a context-sensitive approach. In the exercise, the participants are divided into smaller groups and asked to discuss how they can set up and perform a meeting with Prem, using these guidelines: (1) Listen more than you speak. (2) Communicate very explicitly with Prem. (3) Frame the meeting clearly and investigate whether Prem knows why he has been summoned to a meeting. At the table where the researcher is sitting, this goes completely wrong. Instead of discussing how they can obtain knowledge of Prem’s understanding of his condition—and of the meeting, the participants rush head-on into an administrative lingo associated with their position as public authorities: This is a “clarification” (afklaring) meeting, and Prem’s rights and duties are…, they say. The researcher tries to pull them back to the guidelines and argues that we are supposed to get a grip on Prem’s understanding of his illness through open and exploratory questions, but is completely ignored. Instead, the participants start talking about where Prem might be in “the system” and what may have happened (in terms of the system) before this particular meeting. One participant (with an Iraqi background) launches into a long speech about how refugees have been made into victims since the 1970s and now it is time to make clear demands. If the participants orient themselves towards listening at all, it is clearly in a listening-as-usual modality. It is stuck in the past, and in an attempt to read the present as well as the future as predictable through that past. The facilitator quickly realises that this is not working the way it was supposed to. Two participants volunteer to perform a role-play—one is Prem, the other the integration worker—in front of the rest of the participants, with the facilitator as the intervening director of the play. As the performance proceeds, interrupted by frequent time-outs called by the facilitator, the integration worker becomes increasingly and very visibly uncomfortable. “I can sense through the heat under my shirt”, she/

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he says, “that it’s very unfamiliar for me to ask questions in this way. I don’t have the law and all that to back me up—and this is what I’m used to”. Later she/he adds: “you should really try this, all of you”. The affective intensity set in motion by the staged conversation with “Prem” comes about through the embodied experience of being in unsafe terrain; the body is no longer unnoticed, because it is no longer extended by the institutional space6 (Ahmed, 2007). The performance proceeds as the facilitator shifts herself in as integration worker and demonstrates how exploratory questions may be asked. It is important, she says, to find out where the conflict lies. Something is happening here. Ask exploratory questions, and listen to the answers. Make sure the Prems in your office understand why they are there. Remember that there might be other understandings of illness than your own institutionalised ones. As banal as these instructions may seem, they still cause a deep unease among the participants. “The law and all that” is what backs up the figure or positionality of the integration worker and makes her body sit comfortably in the institutional chair (Ahmed, 2006, 2007). If we interpret “all that” as the administrative procedures associated with the law, we may say that neither the law nor these procedures contain any incentive towards listening. The municipal integration workers can only hear what they already know, and this knowledge is oriented by and towards the law, and securely locked into the past. We argued in Chap. 3 that integration work is not about understanding—partly based on this statement from an integration worker with an Arab/Somali background: “I experience things [i.e. the encounter with clients] differently. I have another ethnic background, and the clients expect me to understand them better. And then they become disappointed”. We argued that this attests to the way in which her likeness to the clients threatens her positionality as an integration worker. She is not unquestionably backed up by the law in the same way as her white Danish colleagues. The body is not completely attuned to the chair. So she will have to overtly insist on not understanding. Not listening. The speech by the Iraqi participant mentioned above may be interpreted in the same light. Even though intercultural competence in these course modules is introduced as a means to reach the institutionally (and politically) defined

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aims (see Chap. 3), the seemingly banal techniques may not be banal at all. The intervention is not introduced by the facilitator in terms of listening but, from our perspective, this is what is required in this exercise. Listening to Prem, we argue, may hold a shaky potential of displacing the law. Not an absolute promise in any way, but it might still open up a small crack in “the institutional wall” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 26). The integration workers can only listen otherwise (or emergently) if they move into a zone of discomfort, where what they listen to is not the familiar tunes of the law—and all that. This is—what they also become aware of. And hence the wall comes into view. Or, to stay with a sound vocabulary: it returns as an echo. The integration courses are strictly regulated through the existing politics of difference, and as such seem to be spokes in the wheel of a governmentality characterised by a disciplinary power-­ modality. If we listen attentively to what is going on, there are fissures through which something else may emerge. When we were finishing the course session discussed above, one participant said: “I can’t promise that I can go through with this at home. It’s difficult to break away from the habits”. So the potentiality seems to be shaky, but it is still there.

Listening to Stories Storytelling, often stories of self—or life stories—is a widely used ingredient across a whole range of self-help, DIY-related and empowerment-­ related groups, organisations, or events. It is also a central feature of several of our organised cultural encounters (the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, the Organizer course, some interfaith encounters). Even if storytelling always requires an audience (sometimes an imagined one), the main therapeutic/transformative target is often the narrator’s self. In several of our contexts, it is rather the audience that is the main target. An audience that will change through listening, it is hoped. This is a mode of bearing witness that prioritises the interdependence between witness and listener. Or perhaps rather a shift in priority away from the ability of the witness to speak towards the receptivity of the listener (see discussion on bearing witness in Chap. 2).

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Box 5.2  Faith in Harmony The Faith in Harmony Forum [Tro i Harmoni] is a multilateral interfaith and grassroots group that was established in 2012. In contrast to most Danish interfaith associations’ bilateral or trilateral character, the Faith in Harmony Forum has a multifaith board and a president who does not have her religious roots in the Danish Church. With low membership numbers, its activities are dependent upon collaboration with other religious and non-religious civil society organisations, as well as with the Danish Church and municipalities. Through these networks, the organisation has worked to bring faith into the public sphere as a positive contribution, with a focus on anti-­ discrimination, co-existence, and tolerance. Once a year, the Forum coordinates interreligious activities in connection with the World Interfaith Harmony Week that was adopted by the UN in 2010. Taking place every year during the first week of February, the Forum succeeds in encouraging different faith communities (local churches, the synagogue and mosques, Brahma Kumari, etc.) to commit to organising interfaith events. In 2017, these consisted, among others, of a visit to the Mariam Mosque, which is a mosque only for women, an interfaith music event at a local church, and a conversation between four women of different faiths at the premises of Brahma Kumari. The forum also organises an annual New Year’s banquet for invited guests, nurturing the connections and network of diverse kinds of stakeholders and faith-based organisations. The researcher (Lise Paulsen Galal) participated as a member of the audience during the conversation between the four women and by invitation during the New Year’s banquet in 2018. The data material consists of observation notes and informal conversations with facilitators and participants.

During the Faith in Harmony Week in February 2017, coordinated by a small NGO, Faith in Harmony Forum, one event took place on Brahma Kumaris’ premises and was an invitation to come and listen to four women’s stories about their individual spiritual journeys (on the Faith in Harmony Forum, see Box 5.2, p. 177). Twenty-five, mainly female, participants responded to the invitation. At the event, a Christian (who was a pastor), a Muslim, a Buddhist, and a follower of Brahma Kumaris shared their personal stories about standing at a crossroads where faith defined their choice of direction. The researcher recapitulates the narratives of these four women:

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The Buddhist and the Brahma Kumaris adherent told about their background as non-religious Danes with limited knowledge of religion, and how they had gone through several existential crises leading to a slowly growing spiritual interest that ultimately resulted in their conversion. For the Buddhist, this also resulted in a change of lifestyle when she chose to become a nun. […] The Christian pastor told about a dream she had had, where she had found a set of false teeth babbling at the altar. She realised that she had put her faith on autopilot and had come to a crossroads. She quit her job and became a pastor of pilgrimage. The Muslim woman told about her spiritual development as a journey from being an uneducated goatherd in Somalia, a wild teenager in a provincial town in Denmark, a radical Salafi Muslim in London, to becoming a married woman and mother with a Sufi-aspiration lifestyle in Copenhagen. Going through a series of transformations, her narrative culminated in the change she went through when leaving the conservative Salafi version of Islam. (Galal, 2018)

Thus, these four women are bearing witness (see Chap. 2). Their stories are offered to the audience as journeys towards a truer, more authentic self. Whereas all four stories presented personal choices that carried great risks—such as quitting a job, leaving a community, changing family relations—these risks were ameliorated through the insistence on doing what felt right to them. The stories were moving, and at times humorous, but their framing within the organised encounter also produced a specific orientation. The risk of bringing four rather different worldviews together, potentially leading to conflict and chaos, was tamed through a framing that transformed the particularities of each story into a universalised narrative of individual authenticity (cf. Lindholm, 2008; Taylor, 1992). By emphasising personal self-reflection, transformations were expected to occur through an inner dialogue with yourself, your values, and your emotions. Whereas the narrators universalised the individual need to find a truth replicating a hegemonic discourse of modernity (Taylor, 1992), they did not iron out religious differences. So, in line with the readings presented in the preceding chapters, truth becomes articulated to the self and, in the same move, is also (partly) de-ontologised. While truth is in this way rendered singular and individual, it becomes plural across different individuals. But the process of transformation—the way to get

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there—as well as the quest for authenticity, is the same (see Galal, 2018 for an expanded reading of the event along these lines). The women repeatedly encouraged their audience to listen and to reflect upon parallels with their own (life) story. In this way, the stories were signals designed to reverberate among the audience. The listener was invited to attentively tune in to the four stories and, through them, to ultimately return to the self. After the four presentations, one person from the audience asked if the four women had discussed aspects of their different faiths among themselves—in other words, if they had tried to convince each other about their individual truth. The women answered that they preferred to listen to each other. For them, listening was a way of respecting and learning, they argued. In a paranoid mode of critique, a form of listening articulated to the orientation towards individual selves domesticates difference and minimises the risk or rupture presented by the introduction of co-existing truths. It becomes listening as usual, in Davis’ terminology; we listen to the other, but hear only what we already know, because the sounds uttered by the other return as an echo of ourselves. In this case, the experience is even actively framed in this way. This framing clearly worked for some of the audience: “we’re essentially the same across religious differences”, as one of the listeners stated in the Q and A. In a more affirmative reading, we may start from the four women’s way of relating to each other. We prefer to listen and learn, they said. Here, listening is framed as a non-judgemental and therefore non-­domesticating orientation towards difference; or perhaps a postponement of judgement?

L istening and Speech: Risk and Safety Revisited Listening without commenting or correcting is a technique that we meet in several of our studies, among them the Dialogue Pilot Course, where participants were instructed to speak only on behalf of themselves, and in exercises to listen to the other and to refrain from initiating a dialogue or asking questions. This mode of non-critical listening in small groups

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provided a kind of safety for those who wanted to talk about faith. In this reading, being listened to without receiving comments becomes a precondition for speaking—for talking about one’s faith to others who do not share this faith. But, conversely, listening in its attentive modality is perhaps equally conditioned upon being silent. If this is so, judgement becomes a speech-act; and, conversely, suspending judgement relies upon preventing speech-acts; or, to be more precise, preventing responses that are enacted through speech.7 In the diversity workshop analysed by Helen Wilson, “Participants are expected to welcome the ‘mistakes’ of others, which are described as anything that may cause offense as the result of either misinformation or ignorance” (2013, p. 77). This is the one rule that participants are required to observe: “mistakes” must not be treated as intentional. They must not be perceived as an inherent trait of the individual who makes “the mistake”. This rule also works as a way to ensure that prejudice is not solidly located inside individuals, but (supported through interventions by the facilitator) becomes linked to structures and rationalities of domination. Leaving this aside, the framing is similar—if not identical—to the one adopted by the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors (see prelude to Chap. 3). Participants in their dialogue meetings are encouraged to air assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices. This works as a way to push the participants “as far out as possible, so that you join in. Otherwise we can’t work with them”, as one of the ambassadors put it. Thus, it must be safe for the participants to voice offensive statements but, paradoxically perhaps, this safety is introduced in order to import risk into the encounter. The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, as mentioned in Chap. 3, are trained not to debate with or directly comment on the participants’ statements. This is partly also the case in “Wilson’s workshop”: Responses to the vocalisation of prejudiced thoughts are carefully monitored by the facilitator. Participants are prohibited from challenging the content of the disclosure and are allowed to comment only upon how it made them feel. (Wilson, 2013, p. 78)

In this case, the prohibition is not total, since reactions in (personal) emotional terms are allowed. Prejudiced thought, then, must not (openly

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at least) be seen as intentional or located “inside” the one who utters it, whereas responses to these thoughts must be located in a personalised affective register. Judgement in this case is associated with particular kinds of speech acts: those that challenge the content, while affective and, crucially, personalised reactions are not only allowed but constitute important elements in the intervention strategy of the workshop. Listening and speech are in this way differentially associated with risk and safety, depending upon the intervention strategy employed. The four women performing at the Faith in Harmony event listen to difference without commenting, and thus make it safe to speak out differences that might otherwise be risky, since they each hinge on truths that might otherwise be seen as mutually exclusive. The participants in Wilson’s workshop arrest judgement and listen without commenting in a rational register in order to promote risk-taking from a safe position of not being seen as personifying hate or prejudice. We return to these questions of judgement and safety, respectively risk in the next chapter.

Affective Modulations In this chapter, we have (selectively) discussed the relationship between affect and encounters by engaging with “subtle, affective modulations in the relations between different bodies” (Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016, p. 2) within organised cultural encounters. While affective flows are in motion across the encounters we have studied, we have focused on moments when something seems to shift, and more specifically we have attended to walking, dancing, and listening as (bodily) sensory registers. We have tried to bracket the organisers’ and, to a lesser extent, participants’ representations of what happens in order to explore how affective modulations and (re)attunements are (or may be) effected through these sensory registers. Walking together, we have suggested, may affect the walkers in ways that are not accessible through rational or reflexive registers. Walking involves a mode of relationality that works through being side by side rather than face to face. This next-to proximity is furthered through the bodily sensation of feet touching the ground and the emerging, shifting,

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transcorporeal transmission of rhythm. These sensory and affective transmissions open up the possibility that bodies may leak into each other; that is, the boundaries of the bodies of co-walkers are partly dissolved. Talking and listening while walking are affected by both the rhythmic transmissions and this leaking, and may therefore take the form of a non-­ linear bricolage. The potential of walking is that it offers a way to achieve mutual re-attunement that does not rely on a sameness grounded in ideas of a universal human nature, and hence becomes another way of transgressing any binary relationship between “us” and “them”. But, as we have shown by working through examples from our field studies, walking together does not hold any guarantees. Walking is also situated, not only in terms of where it is performed and by whom, but also because it is an element—a technique—in an encounter. The entanglement of elements in encounters, in both temporal and spatial terms and, related to this, in terms of how representations, positions, interactions, and relationality play out, means that the leaks walking may have occasioned can become stopped up again. And, hence, caught up in the prevailing representations. Like walking, dancing affords intercorporeal and affective modulations. In the community dance project, the organisers present dance as a means to circumvent the representational logics of a conventional politics of difference. The categories and positions that matter belong to the world of dance, and hence the potential of dance is that it offers a dynamic, affective, and corporeal relationality that relocates differences to another terrain. However, the world of dance—and its categories and positions (style, attitude, etc.)—may not be quite as far removed from that other terrain, where cultural difference matters in particular ways, as the organisers think. The third affective modulation that we have discussed in this chapter is associated with listening. Distinguishing between listening as usual, and listening emergently, we have focused on the latter meaning as a modality of attentiveness and of silence. Listening emergently implies both an attention towards the stories told by others and silence as the expression of a non-judgemental response. The different modalities of listening hold temporal orientations; listening emergently implies being oriented towards becoming, to what is coming into being. The potential of

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listening emergently is that it may circumvent the domestication of difference. Across the encounters we have studied, silence has been adopted as a mode of suspending judgement, and in this way can be seen as further attempts at listening emergently. As we return to in Chap. 6, this “no judgement” rule is not without flaws. As illustrated in the section “Listening to Prem”, listening emergently is also a venture into unsafe terrain. Stretching towards paying attention emergently involves the suspension of wider structures and rationalities, and thus also affects the position of the listener. The four women’s stories discussed above display difference, but the potential discomfort that it might have promoted among the listeners was eased through the adoption of a relatively safe storyline that fits with prevalent ideas of religious positions as individual and self-reflexive. And, judging by the responses from the audience, this was what came across to them. In the final section of Chap. 4, we briefly addressed how the politics of difference tend to prioritise speech and rights, while adopting a politics of listening shifts this emphasis towards responsibility. In this chapter, we have attended to how listening, walking, and dancing may work, through their sensory, affective affordances, to shift the relationality between self and other. Pursuing tendencies that we have tried to affirm has revealed leaks and cracks with respect to opening up a shift in relationality. But they cannot be taken as manifest or solid in any way—we have been listening to mixed tunes. Helen Wilson argues that it might be more fruitful to ask how encounters may be multiplied rather than the frequently asked question of how they may be scaled up from the micro scale (2013, p. 81) and thus have a bearing on other, more “macro”, scales. Thinking along the same lines, we suggest that evaluating organised cultural encounters in terms of success or failure does not make much sense if these outcomes are messy and shifts in relationality take the shape of tiny cracks in the wall of repetition rather than revolutionary changes. But perhaps the success/failure dichotomy is an entirely inappropriate measuring rod. Paraphrasing Elizabeth Grosz (1993), we might say that transformations take the form of a thousand tiny cracks rather than one big bang.

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Notes 1. Ahmed develops her conceptualisation of mood/attunement from Heidegger’s writing on “Stimmung” (2014a, p. 14). Something is lost— and perhaps also gained in the translation of “Stimmung” into mood/attunement. One might argue, for instance, that Stimmung and atmosphere (which Ahmed also uses occasionally) have more in common. Ben Anderson turns to Raymond Williams’ work on structures of feeling to describe moods. “Structures of feeling”, he argues, “link different sites, occurring across them, and create something like a predisposition to self, others, and the world. Affective atmospheres envelop and emanate from particular ensembles that are gathered together for different durations around particular bodies” (2014, pp. 160–161). The German concept of Stimmung carries with it a heavy load associated with Enlightenment philosophy and its orientation towards universality and harmony (Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016; Jackson, 2016). Traces of this may linger in Ahmed’s approach to and critique of attunement, where attunement both describes an existing state of affairs and a process in which those who are not attuned are required to enrol. But: what if the social world (including the Northwestern part of it) is (and was) more fragmented than Kant and his successors within enlightenment philosophy would have it? 2. In Danish: at turde gå et stykke vej sammen; the other points are courage to talk about oneself with confidence that the other will listen; listening to the other; sharing experiences, frustrations, hopes, and longing; showing respect for that which is sacred to the other; to be critical; to take a stand on one’s own position. See https://danmission.dk/ikon/om/dialog-ogmissionssyn/ (accessed 2 October 2019). 3. The Organizer course also included a walk ‘n’ talk, but since this was on day one of the course, and participants were paired for the first time in “learning partner” teams, the researcher chose not to participate. This was mainly because, at this early stage, she was preoccupied with a balancing of participation and disturbance (i.e. disturbance of the participants and the script, not of the data). 4. This interdisciplinary deployment of art, (participatory) research, and intervention, is a shared feature of a number of recent projects involving walking (O’Neill, 2008; O’Neill, Erel, Kaptani, & Reynolds, 2019; O’Neill & Hubbard, 2010; Springgay & Truman, 2017).

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5. It is important to note that Nancy’s effort to establish listening as an “ontological tonality” (Nancy, 2007, p.  4) goes through sound, not through speaking or talking. 6. It could be that the researcher was more surprised or perhaps affected than the facilitator by the fact that the participants found it so difficult and unsettling to perform this exercise. 7. This observation or suggestion offers a very different approach to the current obsession with free speech which in Denmark (as to different degrees elsewhere in Europe) is solidly articulated to debates over diversity (pertaining to race, gender, and ethnicity in particular). Any attempt to appeal for the use of gender-neutral pronouns or refraining from using racialised terms (a case in point: negro) is inevitably met with either a defence of free speech or a reference to the snowflake character of those making these appeals; or a combination of these. What if listening were to be prioritised over speech?

References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2007). A Phenomenology of Whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168. Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014a). Not in the Mood. New Formations: A Journal of Culture/ Theory/Politics, 82(1), 13–28. Ahmed, S. (2014b). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Anderson, J. (2004). Talking Whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge. Area, 36(3), 254–261. Anderson, B. (2014). Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. Angel-Ajani, A. (2004). Expert Witness: Notes toward Revisiting the Politics of Listening. Anthropology and Humanism, 29(2), 133–144. Brigstocke, J., & Noorani, T. (2016). Posthuman Attunements: Aesthetics, Authority and the Arts of Creative Listening. GeoHumanities, 2(1), 1–7. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.

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Davies, B. (2014). Listening to Children: Being and Becoming. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Dialogue toolbox. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://dialoguetoolbox.com/ about-dialogue-in-danmission/ Diehl, K. (2016). The Mirror and Ballet Training: Do you Know how Much the Mirror’s Presence Is Really Affecting you? Journal of Dance Education, 16(2), 67–70. Dreher, T., & Mondal, A.  A. (2018). From Voice to Response: Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference. In T. Dreher & A. A. Mondal (Eds.), Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference (pp.  1–19). Cham: Springer. Ehrenberg, S. (2010). Reflections on Reflections: Mirror Use in a University Dance Training Environment. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 1(2), 172–184. Galal, L. P. (2018, 07). Interfaith Dialogue—A Quest for Authenticity. Retrieved from Religious Matters in an Entangled World Website: https://www.religiousmatters.nl/buildings-images-and-objects/article/blog-interfaithdialogue-a-quest-for-authenticity/ Grosz, E. (1993). A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics. Topoi, 12(2), 167–179. Hvenegård-Lassen, K., & Staunæs, D. (2015). ‘And Then we Do it in Norway’. Learning Leadership through Affective Contact Zones. In R. Andreassen & K. Vitus (Eds.), Affectivity and Race: Studies from Nordic Contexts (pp. 77–93). Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. Jackson, M. (2016). Aesthetics, Politics, and Attunement: On some Questions Brought by Alterity and Ontology. GeoHumanities, 2(1), 8–23. Lapina, L. (Forthcoming). Diversity Tourists? Tracing Whiteness through Affective Encounters with Diversity in a Gentrifying District in Copenhagen. Social & Cultural Geography. Lee, J., & Ingold, T. (2006). Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing. In S. Coleman & P. Collins (Eds.), Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology (pp. 67–85). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Lindholm, C. (2008). Culture and Authenticity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lipari, L. (2009). Listening Otherwise: The Voice of Ethics. The International Journal of Listening, 23(1), 44–59. Lipari, L. (2010). Listening, thinking, being. Communication Theory, 20(3), 348–362.

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Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual. Durham & London: Duke University Press. McRae, C. (2014). Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. New York: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. Myers, M. (2011). Walking Again Lively: Towards an Ambulant and Conversive Methodology of Performance and Research. Mobilities, 6(2), 183–201. Nagel, A.-K. (2015). Religious Pluralization and Interfaith Activism in Germany. Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, 25(2), 199–221. Nancy, J.-L. (2007). Listening. (C. Mandell, Trans.) New York: Fordham University Press. Nielsen, A. M. W., & Sørensen, N. U. (2017). Når Kunst gør en Forskel: Unges Deltagelse I Kunst-Og Kulturprojekter Som Alternativ Arena for Sociale Indsatser [when Art Makes a Difference: Youth Participation in Art- and Culture Projects as an Alternative Arena for Social Work]. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag. O’Neill, M. (2008). Transnational Refugees: The Transformative Role of Art? Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(2), 59. O’Neill, M. (2018). Walking, Well-Being and Community: Racialized Mothers Building Cultural Citizenship Using Participatory Arts and Participatory Action Research. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(1), 73–97. O’Neill, M., & Hubbard, P. (2010). Walking, Sensing, Belonging: Ethno-­ Mimesis as Performative Praxis. Visual Studies, 25(1), 46–58. O’Neill, M., Erel, U., Kaptani, E., & Reynolds, T. (2019). Borders, Risk and Belonging: Challenges for Arts-Based Research in Understanding the Lives of Women Asylum Seekers and Migrants ‘at the Borders of Humanity’. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 10(1), 129–147. Østergaard, J., & Christensen, D. R. (2010). Walking towards oneself: The Authentification of Place and Self. In B. T. Knudsen & A. M. Waade (Eds.), Re-Investing Authenticity: Tourism, Place and Emotions (pp. 241–253). Bristol: Channel View Publications. Purser, A. (2011). The Dancing Body-Subject: Merleau-Ponty’s Mirror Stage in the Dance Studio. Subjectivity, 4(2), 183–203. Sedgwick, E.  K., & Frank, A. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2017). Thinking in Movement. Contact Quarterly, 42(2), 7–12.

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Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). A Transmaterial Approach to Walking Methodologies: Embodiment, Affect, and a Sonic Art Performance. Body & Society, 23(4), 27–58. Taylor, C. (1992). The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Wilson, H. F. (2013). Learning to Think Differently: Diversity Training and the ‘Good Encounter’. Geoforum, 45, 73–82.

6 A Risky Business

In this book, we have framed organised cultural encounters as interventions into the contact zone. With Pratt (1991, 2008), we have argued that the contact zone is a messy space where cultural difference is negotiated, transformed, and adapted in an overall atmosphere of highly unequal power relations. We have also argued that encounters—organised or not, in the contact zone or outside it—are partly lodged in the past. They bear traces of past encounters, of “accumulated relations, dispositions and habits” (Anderson, 2014, p. 82). But encounters are also, in their here-and-nowness, their thrown-togetherness (Massey, 2005), oriented towards the future, to “what is not yet determined or is to be determined” (Anderson, 2014, p. 82). This implies that encounters are unpredictable and, as Helen Wilson, among others, has argued, a politics or pedagogy of encounters (among these, organised cultural encounters) can only create order out of this unpredictability at the risk of curtailing their transformative potential (2017b, p. 457). This means that organising encounters is a “risky business” or, to quote Wilson: “Encounters are events of relation and are thus unavoidably risky and unpredictable” (2017b, p. 464).

© The Author(s) 2020 L. P. Galal, K. Hvenegård-Lassen, Organised Cultural Encounters, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0_6

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“The contact zone” and “encounters” conceptually introduce messiness, unpredictability, and risk in a kind of dual sense. This has been the theoretical backdrop for focusing upon the negotiation and distribution of risk and safety in the encounters we have studied. From this perspective, organisers work in a paradoxical terrain where, on the one hand, they cannot smooth out the unpredictability of encounters without losing their transformative potential. But, on the other hand, they need to provide a sufficient amount of safety for participants within the encounter space to avoid reproducing the relations they are trying to change. In other words, too much risk and too much safety would seem to have the same, undesirable, effect. In Chap. 3, we explored how organiser scripts seek to regulate interactions within encounters, and how these regulations variously informed enactments of compliance or resistance by participants, related to the positions that were opened up for them through the scripted performance. Through this attention to regulation and interaction, it emerged that the organisers’ embeddedness in matrices of cultural meaning and practice (as well as constraints of a more overt nature, for instance, state surveillance, as in the case of the training courses for integration workers) to some extent plays out in encounters behind organisers’ backs. Thus, safety in terms of being free from hurt or harm emerged as being distributed unequally, due, among other reasons, to organisers’ implicit assumptions about participants. Through perspectives drawn from ritual studies, Chap. 4 explored how the balancing act between risk and safety in encounters is influenced by the evaluation of how safe or risky the bringing together of difference in encounters is deemed, in itself, to be. Encounters that were seen to take place at the edge of chaos were hence regulated through decorum, that is, through highly formalised, civil rules of interaction, while encounters seen to be far from that edge instead worked hard to invite risk-taking among participants. Or, in other words: considerable effort was invested in producing a sufficient level of discomfort to circumvent a cautious and unadventurous course of events. Aspects of risk and safety also came up in Chap. 5, where our readings were informed by theoretical perspectives that relate affect to encounters. Theoretically, our point of departure was that the capacity to affect and

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be affected is unevenly distributed among participants in organised cultural encounters. Questions concerning risk and safety came up most prominently in our analyses of listening. A widespread requirement to listen and refrain from commenting thus appears across many of the encounters included in our study. This requirement, we argued, provided a kind of safety for participants—it protected them from being directly intimidated in situations where they were sharing their experiences (for instance, related to faith). We also argued that this emphasis on listening marks a move away from the prioritising of speech and voice in contemporary politics of difference. In Chap. 1, we described chaos/order connected to risk/safety as an analytical line that we have constructed through a movement back and forth between our empirical material and the theoretical framework associated with the contact zone and encounters. We did not, however, explore in any greater depth what safety and risk imply more precisely. While safety is explicitly articulated in our data material to a greater extent than risk, interpretations regarding risk and chaos related to organiser scripts, as well as the practices occurring during encounters, come about in many cases through the affordances of our “analytical line”. We have so far left a number of questions unaddressed, for instance: What does it mean to be safe? And what does being unsafe amount to? Do safety and risk stand in a binary relation of opposition to each other? Is unpredictability necessarily a more anxiety-inducing state than predictability (and for whom might that be so)? In the following, we address risk and safety in more depth. In the next section, we work our way through parts of this terrain with a point of departure in the dictionary definitions of the two terms, along with their etymology. In the ensuing section, we turn to the notion of “safe space”, which comes up several times in our data material. We have so far circumvented that notion and the often-­ fraught debates over it in academic texts and the political domain; a debate that circulates around diversity, identity politics, and so-called political correctness. In this section, we return to some of the analyses related to risk and safety, and work our way through them again by engaging with the notion of “safe space”.

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 isk and Safety: Unpredictability R and Anticipation safe, adj. Origin: A borrowing from French. Etymons: French salf, salve. Etymology: < Anglo-Norman salf, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French sauf, Old French saf, salv, Middle French saulf, sauff […] saved, who has attained eternal salvation (end of the 10th cent.), intact, unharmed (1130–40), in good health (1155), (of a place) secure, not dangerous (13th cent.) < classical Latin salvus (of persons) secure, unharmed, unimpaired in health, still alive or existing, immune from punishment, (of a country) secure, unharmed, (of circumstances) in a good or sound state, well, (of things) intact, undamaged, surviving, extant, still holding good, in post-classical Latin also saved (in a Christian sense) (Vulgate), possessing rights of sanctuary (10th cent.).

What does the word “safe” imply? According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “safe” enters the English language from French, where in the late tenth century “Saulf/Sauff” designated salvation in the Christian sense, and approximately 100  years later expanded its reach from the domain of the soul to that of the body: being intact, unharmed and in good health. And yet, another 100 years later, it extended to the perimeters of space: secure, not dangerous. According to the OED, in current use, safe has two primary meanings: “free from hurt or damage; unharmed” and “free from danger; secure”. The latter meaning is divided in the OED into several uses, of which some pertain to certainty, or predictability, perhaps; for instance: “Of a course of action, plan, etc.: not attended by risk of failure; without disadvantages, prudent” (emphasis added), and: “Excessively cautious; unadventurous, unimaginative; bland, boring”. Safe seems to be mostly related to states of being safe from something (injury, illness, harm etc.). While the word mostly refers to what seem to be positive states obtained by the exclusion of something negative, “unimaginative, bland and boring” suggests that being safe does not hold any promise of excellence or ingenuity. In other words, playing safe implies that you stay with things as they are. If, as we have argued, “things

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as they are” implies that some people are more likely to be at risk than others, safety (and risk) must be seen as unequally distributed. The OED does not include an entry on “safe space” (even though the meaning of safe is also recorded as being associated with space). In dictionaries, the word most often referred to as a translation of safe into Danish is sikker, but this seems to be more or less equivalent to the secure and certainty aspects of safe. Being safe from injury is not, according to the dictionaries, covered by the word sikker in Danish.1 When organisers in our contexts explicitly refer to “safe space”, they use the English term. And, as we return to below, much of the work on safe spaces refers to the USA, and in particular to the past and present of education in that context. “Risk” seems to be more disputed with respect to etymology, even though that word too (and again according to the OED) is a borrowing from French, albeit as a much later occurrence (1578) in that language than safe. In earlier versions, going back to around 1200 (in Old Occitan, and later in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian), risk seems to be strongly associated with damage to merchandise transported by sea. This brings to mind the way in which risk permeates all aspects of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, beginning with Antonio’s lack of cash, since his ships and their merchandise are at sea on their way to or back from the “old” as well as the “new world”, that is, the imperial contact zone (Tripoli, the Indies, Mexico, and England). Antonio’s plight is in the future: he does not know whether his ships will in fact arrive (which, in the end, they do); and this is what his fortune depends upon. Property and wealth are also what risk denotes in Arabic, which is pointed out as one of the possible etymological trajectories in the OED.  While “a person or thing regarded as a threat or source of danger” (i.e. someone or something poses a risk to someone or something else, who, then, might be at risk) is among the current meanings of risk in English, the association with profit, goods, and financial matters seems to persist: “(Exposure to) the possibility of harm or damage causing financial loss, against which property or an individual may be insured. Also: the possibility of financial loss or failure as a quantifiable factor in evaluating the potential profit in a commercial enterprise or investment”. Risk, in the latter meaning, involves a calculation that is oriented towards the potential pitfalls of the

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future; when calculated, or calculable, risk is something against which you may be insured. With respect to risk, the corresponding Danish noun risiko and the verb risikere cover the same terrain of meaning. In our framework, we have employed risk and safety as situated answers to fundamental questions concerning chaos and order, as these play out in contact zones. In other words, the distribution of risk and safety becomes a way of managing the dangers of contact in organised cultural encounters. In a broader sense, the risk/safety pairing can be thought of in relation to a descriptive/prescriptive statement, or epistemology, that stakes out what it means to be human in a particular context, and works to reproduce the prevailing ordering principles (Wynter, 2003, 2006; see also Chap. 2). The etymologies of safety and risk are indicative of transformations in (European) ordering principles. Thus, the late tenth-century meaning (in French) of safe as salvation is related to a Christian divine order, where worldly events (including dangerous ones) reflect the purpose of the Creator (cf. Knights & Vurdubakis, 1993, p. 734). The slippages in the meanings of safe mark the gradual decline of that divine order: safe no longer points towards the relation to God, but rather turns towards the human body. The arrival on the scene of risk/risque, in France, in the late sixteenth century and in England during the next century, marks a perhaps even more profound break away from the divine order. At this time, the idea that danger may be calculated and managed (through, for instance, the technology of insurance) opens up a new way of ordering the human world and its ultimately unpredictable character (Ewald, 1991; Foucault, 2008a, b; Knights & Vurdubakis, 1993). From a perspective that draws upon Foucault’s conceptualisation of governmentality (1991), where ordering (government) takes the form of the conduct of conduct, risk draws together aspects of life and environment (e.g. accidents, sickness, death, loss of property, or even “natural” disasters) that, in the same move, are produced as belonging to the terrain of risk as well as potentially governable in accordance with the specifics of risk. Risk, as Knights and Vurdubakis (1993, p. 731) argue: [is] not an intuitive category which refers back to some transhistorical condition, but is derived from specific practices of recording, measurement,

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and calculation. It refers to a way of processing certain events which occur with respect to a particular population.

As indicated by the dictionary meaning of risk, insurance is a means— a technology—through which harmful events may be governed; insurance replaces the arbitrariness of those events (resulting from the dislocation of these from the divine purpose) that might occur with the constancy and objectivity of risk (Ewald, 1991). Neither divine purpose nor the calculation of risk imply that danger is removed; killings, illness, and death happen, and if not, then old age arrives, fires break out, earthquakes shatter cities and destroy homes, and so on. Neither risk calculation nor God’s will imply that you are—in fact—safe from danger or harm. According to Niklas Luhmann (1993), the relevant or important distinction is not between risk and security (or safety), but rather between risk and danger. Risk is an attribution (this is roughly in line with the governmentality perspective), an object/subject becomes risky through its attribution as such, that is, through a decision, which establishes a relationship between risk-object and at-risk object (threat—vulnerable to threat). Danger, and the harm that may follow from it, on the other hand, belongs to the external environment; this is not a distinction between “nature” and culture/society. If society (or the insurance company, or both) has decided that the harm caused by flooding is something for which the people affected by it are responsible themselves, since they have built their houses in a low-lying area, flooding becomes a risk-­object, not a danger. Mikkel G.  Christoffersen (2018, p.  1237) illustrates the difference between danger and risk using Donald Rumfeld’s reference (in relation to 9/11) to unknown unknowns: the unknowns that we do not know that we do not know about are entirely outside assessment. Thus, risk is constitutively associated with anticipation, calculation, and knowledge or, in a more phenomenological vein: experience.2 While there are plenty of indirect references to risk in our empirical material (see, for instance, the prelude to Chap. 4), it is, unlike safe(ty), not something that is explicitly mentioned; except for this one instance, which we also quoted in the introduction: “By opening up oneself, one runs the risk of becoming rejected, trodden upon, or challenged in other ways, thus afflicting the faith” (Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines

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for interfaith meetings], 2008). The anticipatory character of risk emerges clearly in this statement, where—following the logic described above— the risk-object that is explicitly mentioned is “opening up oneself ”, whereas faith is the at-risk object. The more specific, but absent, risk-­ object is, of course, the other towards which one opens up. But, even if the calculative anticipation specifies the risk of facing potential harm, this is still a risk that one might choose to take. Indeed, participating in interfaith dialogue, which surpasses “a chat” (see Chap. 2) demands that one runs that risk. Along with Sverre Raffnsøe, we may conceptualise this opening up in terms of trust. Informed, among others, by Luhmann (2018), Raffnsøe argues that, unlike confidence, which is rooted in the past, “[t]rust is the active resolve to rely and gamble on the reliability of other people or circumstances, despite experienced uncertainty and unpredictability” (2013, p.  252; see also Christoffersen, 2018). In this sense, trust is an anticipatory affect, like hope or fear. Like hope (and unlike fear), trust is oriented by a longing for something new to happen. It is associated with risk in the meaning described above, because it is related to knowledge or experience. In this way, it is an active choice that you make, knowing well that “Entrusting ourselves to others, we hand over part of ourselves to others and thus let others gain power over us. As a consequence, we risk being let down, disappointed or even betrayed” (Raffnsøe, 2013, p. 253). Or, in the wording of the guidelines referred to above: rejected, trodden upon, or challenged. Raffnsøe’s “we” and “us”, like the “one” in the guidelines for interfaith meetings, appear as universals. Raffnsøe does argue that “whether we are prepared to take the risk of adopting a trusting attitude also depends to some extent on whether past and present experiences give us reason to trust” (2013, p. 254). We have repeatedly argued that past and present experiences are not (only) individually patterned but rather (in our contexts) tied to minority and majority positionalities. This also implies that, while the capacity to affect and be affected is a shared property of subjects and objects (see Chap. 5), confinement means that this capacity is shaped in unequal ways through particular affective economies. The distribution of shame and pain in Wilson’s workshop (2013), referred to at the beginning of Chap. 5, is a case in point. When one participant reads out his list of stereotypes, he can do so because he entrusts himself to the other participants. This is a

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trust that is perhaps eased or promoted by the one rule set up for the workshop: the giving of offence is to be treated as a mistake caused by either misinformation or ignorance (Wilson, 2013, p. 77). The participant who is listening to this shameful reading experiences the pain associated with the repetition of stereotypes. Even though she knows that this is not about her (since it is about ignorance or misinformation), “it still somehow felt that way” (ibid., p. 78), she says. In this way, the investments (to stay with the risk vocabulary) of these two participants are very different: the pain of one participant becomes the means for promoting a transformative shame in another. If past and present experience involves a structural relation where a majority more or less consistently hold power over a minority,3 for that minority it is not a question of letting others gain that power, since in a collective sense these others already hold it in some respects. Rather, choosing to “open up” might involve the circumstance that, in this particular instance, I (being the minority) hope things might turn out differently. Hope, Sara Ahmed argues with respect to feminism, is an investment that is “directed towards the future only in relation to an object that is faced in the present” (2014, p. 184). And: I suggested emotions involve readings of the openness of bodies to being affected. Fear reads that openness as the possibility of danger or pain; hope reads that openness as the possibility of desire or joy. These readings reshape bodies. Whilst fear may shrink the body in anticipation of injury, hope may expand the contours of bodies, as they reach towards what is possible. (ibid., p. 185)

To Ahmed, this openness involves the coming together of bodies in the present, that is, (feminist) hope is not a solitary emotion, but rather involves hope for “others, whose pain one does not feel” (ibid., p. 188). The latter also implies that the feminist “we” is a narrative that “has another edge: the ‘we’ of feminism is shaped by some bodies, more than others” (ibid., p. 189). Thinking along these lines would mean that both shame and pain might be ameliorated or negotiated through the joy and

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desire aroused by a shared hope for a better future between the two participants in the workshop analysed by Wilson (see also Wilson, 2017a). While organised cultural encounters and feminism do not lend themselves to direct comparison, we might still say, based on Ahmed’s argument above, that hope as an investment in the future may also be shared across differences and inequalities in the present in encounters of the kind that we have studied. Or at least this can be assumed when participants have signed up voluntarily, which is the case for everyone except the student participants in the dialogue meetings of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors (where students participate because their educational institution has invited the ambassadors) and the integration workers (who have been signed up by their municipal workplaces). The widespread universalisation of participants (in terms of a universal human nature), in combination with an equally widespread circumvention of inequality (and thus power relations) that becomes manifest across our analyses in the preceding chapters, does not sit easily with Ahmed’s account of what hope might do, and how it might be taken on even in the face of the risk associated with encounters. Due to these circumventions, organised cultural encounters are performed (partly at least) in a kind of subjunctive “as-if ” mode. In Chap. 4, we used the subjunctive to describe particular techniques; for instance, those associated with play, as in the training courses for integration workers, where the card game worked as a push into a confusing, non-ordered terrain and thus a move away from a safety that the organisers more or less took for granted. This push was ameliorated, however, by not being either personalised or direct. It was a game that aimed to mimic what it “feels” like to be “the stranger” for the ones who played by the wrong rules; and how the ones who knew the rules reacted to “the stranger’s” transgression of order. This worked as an arousal that circulated affect, but it was not risky to (most) participants outside the confines of the game. In this context, however, we are referring to a more overall tendency that emerges in the encounters we have studied. Thus, a reliance on common humanity in the here and now means that this humanity does not belong to the virtual terrain of hope (and thus the future); rather, it becomes something that already exists, even if it needs to be excavated through the encounter. The latter is perhaps most prominent in interfaith encounters, where individual believers

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are prompted to become truer, more authentic versions of themselves (see Chap. 2). Seen through the decolonial lens of Sylvia Wynter (Wynter, 2003, 2006; see also Weheliye, 2014), this means that the genre of the human, as it has been monopolised through Man’s project, is not challenged. It also means that, to some participants, an investment in encounters as hopeful may prove to translate into, in Laurent Berlant’s (2011) terminology, “cruel optimism”; that is, an attachment to happy objects that are motivated by the hope of a good life, but where these same objects block the thriving for which one is reaching out. Encounters are not, however, predictable—that is, they cannot be entirely calculated in terms of risk. Neither are the encounters that we have studied even or smooth spaces. A trickster figure unexpectedly turns up the volume of what is otherwise silent or silenced (see Chap. 4), walking side by side opens up the bodies of the walkers to each other and to what is around and ahead of them (see Chap. 5), through playing a card game, a momentary affective inhabiting of otherness is opened up (Chaps. 4 and 5). These moments occur both because of organiser scripts and in spite of them; and at times what does happen may be different from what the organisers planned, even if the activity runs according to the script. A shared feature of these moments is that they are open-ended, and therefore might be expansive in the sense that they enhance the capacity to affect and be affected, or perhaps that they redistribute these capacities.

Safe Space The concept of safe space is widely, if differently, used within feminist, queer, and civil-rights movements as well as among educators (Roestone Collective, 2014). Writing from within the field of education, Jessica Harless (2018, p. 334) traces the origins of practices of safe space back to post-World War II US social-psychological laboratories, which were preoccupied with group dynamics and sensitivity. While these laboratories were originally set up for research purposes (under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research and the National Education Association), they quickly developed into training activities, variously named discussion groups, T-groups (training groups), or encounter groups. These training

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activities sought to enhance sensitivity and self-awareness in interactions among participants through activities such as feedback, problem solving, and role-play. Many of the techniques used in T-groups have since been adopted in team-building workshops and corporate-culture initiatives. More generally, they have become part of a widely circulating repertoire of exercises that are employed in any workshop, and indeed also in our organised cultural encounters (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.; Helde, 2012; Nielsen & Kepinski, 2015; see also Wilson, 2017a).4 Harless points out that the concept of safe space was not used in the post-war research laboratories, but argues that “[g]roup members were able to engage deeply because they felt safe to do so within the group and the space” (2018, p. 334). The Roestone Collective, in contrast, restricts its review of safe space to instances (in the USA) where the concept is explicitly used. They argue that safe spaces are normatively messy and rife with problems, but also with possibilities (2014, p.  1348). Under this formulation, safe spaces seem to be rather like contact zones or organised cultural encounters. As the Roestone Collective points out, separate spaces, like lesbian lands, may be inclusive of a particular category of persons and exclusive of others, but it is ultimately impossible to construct a (social) space that is without difference, and negotiations concerning how to guard exclusivity are inevitable. Across the different uses of the term “safe space”, messiness also has to do with how categories of safe and unsafe are socially produced and formed through structures of dominance. Spaces are not universally unsafe (or safe) for everyone, but rather they are unsafe for some bodies more than others, depending on such attributes as gender, sexuality, race, and immigration status. The collective sums up its review as follows: safe spaces have varying temporalities and spatialities. Some have fixed durations (classroom sessions), others are interruptive occurrences (TBTN [Take Back the Night] marches and Clitoral Masses), others are indefinitely long (lesbian lands), and still others have unspecified temporalities (the use of patches and crystals for mitigating environmental illness). Some rely on physical separation (lesbian lands), while others avoid physical separation (the safe space classroom), and still others are intimate interventions into unsafe spaces (TBTN and Clitoral Masses). (2014, p. 1361)

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Given that debates over the safe-space classroom target encounter (i.e. non-separated) situations, this is most immediately relevant in our context, and therefore we draw upon research on these kinds of safe spaces below. But before doing so, we need to briefly revisit Pratt’s university classroom, since safety in her Americas course does not relate to that space, but rather to the “safe house”: The fact that no one was safe made all of us involved in the course appreciate the importance of what we came to call “safe houses”. We used the term to refer to social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression. […] Where there are legacies of subordination, groups need places for healing and mutual recognition, safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, knowledges, claims on the world that they can then bring into the contact zone. (1991, p. 40)

Since the classroom, for Pratt, is in the contact zone, this is by definition not a safe space. In her Americas course, it was not safe for any of the students. The content of the course meant that all students had the world “described with him or her in it” (ibid., p. 39) but also that they were exposed “face-to-face [with] the ignorance and incomprehension, and occasionally the hostility of others” (ibid.). Thus the fact that everyone was unsafe was also associated with a shift in curriculum. The language of safe-space classrooms may have been available to Pratt at the time of writing her keynote address to the Modern Language Association, but the mainstream (US) version, where safety had been equated with neutrality (Roestone Collective, 2014, p. 1354; hooks, 1994), did not resonate with a postcolonial approach or, more specifically, with the conceptualisation of the contact zone. Drawing on Pratt, a field of contact-zone pedagogy has developed, which also works with her notion of safe houses (Canagarajah, 1997). In the critical literature on safe spaces, a number of overlapping issues are debated. The ideal of neutrality (which we might also call colour-­ blindness, gender-blindness, etc.) has been dismissed—the classroom is not a community of equals (Barrett, 2010, pp. 6–7). Arao and Clemens

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(2013) argue that spaces do not become safe through convincing students that risk can be removed from dialogues on diversity, since this involves a silencing of asymmetric power relations. Following the same line of thought, but more radically, Leonardo and Porter (2010) judge the ideal of safe space to be established for the benefit of white students. Thus, what is questioned may be formulated in terms of: what should students be safe from, whose safety is taken into account (who is a space safe for), and what should students be safe to do? The last question is posed from the point of view of learning as based in challenges—if safety is the same as being free from discomfort, how may learning (or, in our encounters, transformation) then be promoted? (Arao & Clemens, 2013; Barrett, 2010; Harless, 2018; Stengel, 2010). The dictionary definition of safety in terms of excessive caution is not helpful when it comes to transformative learning. Danish in Tanzania (see Chap. 3, and Box 3.5, p. 93) is, according to the director, “a safe space where basic needs were met, but luxuries were not available, allowing for both high-profile experts and young activists to be safe” (Lene Bull Christiansen, fieldnotes). In this statement, safety relates to basic needs like food and shelter, but in addition it is constructed through the absence of excessive comfort, and this makes the space equally accommodating (or perhaps equally challenging) to both experts and activists. The director does not mention the fact that Danish is a guarded compound—and thus secure in a separate and secluded, physical sense. Another aspect of equality—gender equality—is actively promoted through the basic functionalities of the centre. The director’s welcome speech aimed to present the centre as both safe and challenging to the various people who were participating in activities during that particular period. For the Danish senior citizens who participated in the Global Citizenship training, however, the centre did not present any challenges because the place and its functionalities were too safe. They were not pushed towards considering or reconsidering their own positionality. This might be related to the fact that these Danish senior citizens fall outside the primary target groups of the centre. This is, however, only part of the story, since the comfort of this group of participants reveals how “Danish” stays true to its local nickname: the atmosphere simply folds nicely around these particular bodies, despite all the changes

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in the rationalities of development work. The centre was established for the Danish senior citizens or, more precisely, for their younger selves. While safety in this case was not, or was no longer, for the Danish participants, it proved to be eminently safe precisely for this group. In fact, it was so safe that it simply provided the comfort of being at ease. No risk; no challenge; no change. The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors (see prelude to Chap. 3) seek through the “today there is no right or wrong” rule to make the participants feel safe enough to voice their (prejudiced, stereotypical) assumptions concerning ethnic minorities. Safety, in this context, becomes safety for the white majority Danish participants to engage in “uncivilised” speech-acts. Thus, safety is not established or promoted out of a concern for the participants’ wellbeing, but rather as a necessary means towards an end. The promise of the “there is no right or wrong” rule is that, no matter what participants choose to say, they will be free from judgement. We argued in Chap. 5 that the suspension of judgement seems to be related to the prevention of speech acts, but also that listening and speech are differentially associated with risk and safety depending on the particulars of the intervention strategy. We return to how this plays out in relation to the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors below. But the question of judgement is also related to the way in which safe space in educational institutions tends to be conventionally regulated. Safe space is commonly grounded in rules or guidelines that should be followed by participants in order to establish trust and safety. Based on their experience as student affairs educators (in the USA) and, more specifically, the development and conduct of a training module on diversity and social justice (at university level), Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens (2013) critically assess these commonly applied rules.5 One of these is “don’t take things personally”, which, according to Arao and Clemens, is closely related to two other rules: “no judgement” and “it is OK to make mistakes” (2013, p. 144). These three rules are intended to ensure that participants become involved. The no judgement rule means that those who are affected by the opinions, statements, assumptions, and so on brought to the table by other participants are required to react in a manner “that does not imply negative judgement of the participant who has caused the impact, lest that person be shamed into silence” (ibid., p. 145).

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This amounts to making the person (or group) at the receiving end of a hurtful statement (i.e. mostly the minority, or, in Arao and Clements vocabulary: the target group) responsible for how things may proceed. They are the ones who must become silent and carry the emotional load that has been caused by the interaction. Thus, they become responsible for the preservation of the comfort of “the offender”. In this case, safety becomes safety (if not necessarily in a free-from-discomfort meaning) for the majority. This critique of the way in which safe space is conventionally employed in (North American) educational institutions is shared, as mentioned above, across the critical literature. For instance, following Jeannie Ludlow (2004), Betty J. Barrett argues: that to provide a safe environment for students to freely express thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and attitudes that further their own positions of power and privilege (as is the case when students are granted the safety to express homophobic, racist, sexist, or other derogatory remarks without challenge) is to, simultaneously, further the marginalization and oppression of those who are the target of such remarks. However, to contest such expressions, by definition, contributes to a lack of safety for students making such comments, who are now the objects of judgment and censure. This conundrum, in which safety cannot be simultaneously conferred to both privileged and oppressed students, raises the essential question of who the classroom is intended to be a safe space for. (Barrett, 2010, p. 7)

While this critical stance is a shared concern, it does not imply that the issues that are uneasily brought together under the signifier “safe space” are left behind. But the recommended solutions vary. Arao and Clement suggest what they call a “simple act of using the term brave space” (2013, p. 142), which in their experience opens up a “space for the participants to make their own meaning of brave space, in addition to sharing our own beliefs as facilitators [which] can lead to rich learning in alignment with our justice-related objectives” (ibid.). Barrett (2010, p. 9 ff.) proposes that the preoccupation with safety should be replaced with civility, which in contrast to safety—as she defines it—is enforceable. According to Barrett, safety, as it is conventionally used in relation to safe space,

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denotes a psychological state of feeling safe for the individual student. This interpretation of what safety amounts to is the backdrop for the equation of safety and comfort that is criticised for being at odds with learning, and thus counterproductive. For Barrett, it also presents the educator with an impossible task, since “intrapersonal states” are not necessarily obvious or observable, whereas civility pertains to observable behaviour, since it relates to interpersonal exchanges: Educators may not be able to (nor should they) promise students in good faith that intellectual enterprise and scholarly exchanges are safe and comfortable endeavours. They can, however, promise students that, while they are engaging in such endeavours, that they will not be subjected to certain behaviours on the part of their peers that threaten the social and physical integrity of the learning environment. (2010, p. 10)

In Chap. 4, we have engaged in depth with the regulation of interactions through civility or decorum, as it occurs in some organised cultural encounters—in particular ones where the danger associated with the breakdown of any interaction is manifest. Decorum or civility could be seen as strongly oriented towards sustaining the existing order of things. This, however, depends on the situation, but civility is nevertheless a low-­ key, patient, repetitive, and time-consuming mode of interaction. The participant at the interfaith dialogue workshop in Lebanon, whom we quoted in the prelude to Chap. 4, seems to think of safe space in the terms criticised by Barrett. This participant states that it is important not to feel intimidated,6 and adds that therefore a safe space is necessary. But the participant also hopes that he will push his own limits. The fears or worries of the participant are not formulated in terms of being intimidated—it is not stated in factual language. Related to this, the language is passive; it is not about somebody carrying out an intimidating act; there is no overt agency. Thus, agency seems to pertain to the space of the encounter, rather than to the other participants. If the space is safe, the differences among participants do not feel intimidating. On the other hand, a safe space is one where there is room for different positions and opinions. Therefore, safety aims to secure room for difference; it is

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simultaneously safety from intimidation (in terms of a feeling), and safety to disagree. Barrett’s argument relies upon an idea of “feeling” as an inner psychological state that may be hidden. If we instead read the participant’s anticipation through Ahmed’s notion of affective economies, his statements are suspended between two contradictory economies related to fear (of intimidation) and hope (of pushing limits), respectively. Ahmed argues: Vulnerability involves a particular kind of bodily relation to the world, in which openness itself is read as a site of potential danger, and as demanding evasive action. Emotions may involve readings of such openness, as spaces where bodies and worlds meet and leak into each other. Fear involves reading such openings as dangerous; the openness of the body to the world involves a sense of danger, which is anticipated as a future pain or injury. (2014, p. 69)

The participant’s worries are predicated upon the encounter being read through an economy of fear, where the object, which has become fearsome through the prior circulation of fear, is the other. Thus, and this is what makes fear and other emotions part of a cultural politics, the response of fear depends upon narratives of what and who is fearsome (ibid.), which are in place whether or not the one who is fearful has in fact met the fearsome object/subject. Barbara Stengel (2010) turns to Ahmed in her analysis of safe space. Stengel argues: It is not the case, as we generally assume, that an individual or group feels sui generis “fear” and then expresses or represents that fear through acts of shrinkage, separation and safe space talk. Rather, the act—of calling for safe space construed as separate space—constitutes the associated affect as fear while rendering oneself as fearful and the other as an object of fear. As a result, I maintain, calls for safe space can only be properly interpreted— and responded to—when the political relations of fear are uncovered and deconstructed. (2010, p. 538)

Stengel thus implies that safe-space talk always links up with an economy of fear that constitutes particular relations between those who fear, and those who are feared; with the attendant effect that the space of those

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who are feared becomes reduced; their bodies shrink, so that fear may pass by the ones who fear. While Stengel does not dismiss safety as a relevant consideration in education, she is worried about what the cultural politics of fear does. The problem, however, is that in her analysis Stengel restricts the meaning of safe space to separate spaces. Thus, when the participant in the Lebanon workshop calls for safe space, this call in itself becomes part of the affective economy of fear. The participant has, however, signed up for the workshop, even though he has anticipated that he might be intimidated; and thus he does not shrink away in order to avoid contact. Rather, he also reads the encounter through the hope that he will push his limits. This is a hope that might, in accordance with the argument in the previous section of this chapter, also be a decision to overcome his fears. Hope, as we also argued above, may expand the contours of the body, while fear shrinks it. The encounter, in this reading, becomes located in a contradictory space between hope and fear, and therefore the call for safe space is just as grounded in hope as it is in fear. This can also be argued to be the case when it comes to the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, whom we turn to in the next section. However, they do read the need for a safe space through an economy of fear—the fear of the majority.

We’ve Heard the Worst, So Don’t Be Afraid The “don’t take things personally” and “no judgement” rules that are commonly applied to secure a safe space apply in a somewhat skewed way to the dialogue meetings of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, since they are directed towards the ambassadors themselves. As facilitators, they purposefully take it on themselves to carry the load associated with potentially hurtful statements from the participants. “Don’t be afraid that we will be wounded … it’s why we’re here”, they say, and “We’ve heard the worst, so don’t be afraid”. In this way, the ambassadors clearly read safe space through an economy of fear, and seek to counteract a disengagement (shrinking) of majority bodies, through this particular version of the no judgement rule. We have demonstrated in Chap. 3 that in some cases participants display anger, and in others a kind of non-commitment,

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since they inhabit non-normative bodies themselves and cannot step into the (majority) position they are offered by the ambassadors. In this section, we follow the logic of the ambassadors themselves. Unlike the participant in the workshop analysed by Wilson, who felt personally affected by the stereotypes read out by another participant, even though she had heard them all before, the ambassadors display their bodies as immune to harm, because, they argue, what is going to come their way is a repetition of what they have already heard. It is predictable, we might say. Based on an anticipatory calculation, they choose to step into a risky position, because otherwise they risk that participants will play it safe, and then nothing will change. This calculation comes out clearly in informal conversations between the ambassadors and the researcher and in more formal responses to presentations by the researcher at internal seminars. The ambassadors (and the project leader) seem to be preoccupied with questions concerning whether participants will actually suspend decorum—if the ambassadors are able to convince them that they are not hurt by anything—rather than with questions concerning the hurt they might be on the receiving end of due to the suspension of decorum. One ambassador states in an interview “no-one asks provocative questions. I think this is just something human: you don’t want to harm others”. In the same interview, another ambassador says: Everything boils down to this being a safe dialogue meeting. And how we begin. Often it starts very well. The icebreaker loosens everything up […] after the personal narratives, they often feel more safe and display their emotions […] it’s only one out of a hundred who says: I think you’re all wrong, and dialogue meetings are stupid and things like that. I’ve never met anything like that. The most positive thing is that we undermine prejudice, and we really do […] we get a lot of positive feedback on the evaluation forms. (Interview with Cultural Encounters Ambassador, Helle Bach Riis)

There is a clue in this statement as to why the ambassadors willingly enter into a risky terrain: they feel that they are succeeding in making a difference; and they are praised for their performances. They invest in hope, we might say, and as facilitators they are also repaid with praise.

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At an internal seminar, the researcher presented her observation that participants in dialogue meetings who share minority positionality with the ambassadors seem to be more likely to tune into the attempts to provoke participants; accordingly, they dare to mention such issues as the hijab or skin colour as signs that mark the minority as a minority. Following a conversation in which one of the ambassadors relates that they have played an assumption game within the group of ambassadors, and that they were able to do this because “we are the minority, and we know these prejudices, we meet them every day. The majority don’t meet them in the same way, because it’s everyday life for us, but not for the majority, and therefore it’s risky”. The logic in this statement—in all its perversity—is that, because prejudice is entirely predictable for minorities, their manifestation does not present a risk. On the other hand, since it is the privilege of the majority not to be enrolled in this terrain of prejudice, their manifestation is unpredictable and therefore also risky. In Chap. 3, we argued that the tacit assumption underlying the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors’ script was that the participants were assumed to be majority Danes. We need to modify this interpretation: majority Danes are the target of the intervention, and minority Danes are assumed not to be at risk, because they, like the ambassadors, are not challenged by manifestations of prejudice. They are used to it. Risk is heavily associated with unpredictability here, it seems. And in a puzzling way, the answer to one of the questions we posed at the beginning of this chapter—for whom may unpredictability be anxiety inducing?—is emphatically answered: for the majority, since they as a group are used to a rather stable predictability, whereas the minority is not. The benevolent underlying assumption may be that ideals associated with social justice are a shared concern within an inclusive community, that is, that prejudice against a minority also affects the majority, even if majority persons do not experience it. This tallies with the positioning of the ambassadors in terms of hyphenated Danes. Accordingly, both minority and majority share an investment in, or orientation towards, Danishness, even though that investment might be configured very differently. At the annual seminar, another ambassador argues:

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the reason why it’s a challenge for a group of students to feel safe is also related to who it is that creates this safe space. It’s the minority who does this typically in relation to the majority. We [ambassadors] tell them that we bring in this safe space, we bring along some provocative statements, we challenge you […] if it was you [i.e. the researcher] who facilitated, I don’t think people would be equally politically correct. I believe they would think: this isn’t so risky, because this is a majority who is representing the statements that are voiced […] and therefore as a majority, you [the participants] are more provoked because you [the ambassador] come here as a minority and through the questions you ask tell me that I’m not politically correct, and because you [the ambassador] know that I will answer, or say something that is in fact prejudiced or problematic. (Transcript of a discussion of paper by Helle Bach Riis at the annual seminar of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors)

This is a very complicated evaluation of the interactional dynamics that play out in dialogue meetings. The need to make the space safe for the majority is simultaneously caused and necessitated by the fact that it is minority representatives who seek to establish it. If the researcher—as a representative of the majority—had facilitated the dialogue, a reassurance that this space is safe would not have been necessary, since that would have been taken for granted, and thus it would not have presented a risk to voice “politically incorrect” assumptions. Since the ambassadors/ facilitators represent the minority, this in itself introduces a risk that needs to be strategically downplayed so that participants will say what they would have said, had it been a majority facilitator. The risk identified by the ambassador is related to the prediction of a complicated process of interaction, whereby majority participants become reflexively aware that they are caught in a loop, in which they know that the ambassadors know that they cannot escape from “saying something that is prejudiced”. It is, indeed, the case that the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors take on the responsibility for making the space of their dialogue meetings safe for the majority participants, as Arao and Clemens (2013) argue in relation to the no judgement rule. But they position themselves as open to any hurtful occurrence strategically and through a complicated negotiation of how they may push their participants into discomfort and risk-­ taking. There is a stark contrast between the matter-of-fact realism that

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directs the diagnosis of the current state of affairs, and the investment in a hope which presupposes that minority and majority may share an ideal of an inclusive future. The positive evaluations of their performance that ambassadors receive from participants may be what enables the continuing investment by ambassadors. But perhaps it is more likely that the ambassadors have each other, and their internal seminars can be conceptualised, thinking with Pratt and contact-zone pedagogy, as their safe house. It is, however, not quite a safe house in Pratt’s sense, where this notion refers to a social and intellectual space “where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, [and] shared understandings” (1991, p. 40). In this way, the safe house may be seen as Pratt’s version of strategic essentialism (Spivak & Harasym, 2014). Canagarajah asks: “What is the location of safe houses in relation to the contact zone? Are they outside or inside, linked to or separated from the contact zone?” (1997, p. 175). While we may see safe houses as Pratt’s conceptualisation of a separatist safe space, the ambassador community is of a different kind. The ambassadors share minority positionality, and therefore a measure of shared understanding or experiences with respect to that position, but otherwise they are a heterogeneous group. The latter pertains both to the particular place in the world where they or their parents were born, and to the racialised division between white and non-­ white. In the ambassador project’s self-understanding, the hyphen is what provides the common ground: they are all hyphenated Danes. They represent the cultural encounter, as we have argued in the prelude to Chap. 3. It also implies that, if this is a safe house, it is not outside the contact zone. What emerges from this analysis—and from the other analyses in the book—is that organised cultural encounters are complicated social spaces, both embedded within and abstracted from everyday life in the contact zone. As genres of intervention, organised cultural encounters are certainly productive or performative, but not always in accordance with what the organisers and/or participants expected. Evaluations in terms of success and failure are simultaneously instrumental, rather fictive, and unable to capture the complicated interactions that play out in reality.

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Notes 1. “The most sinister and painful of contemporary troubles can be best collected under the rubric of Unsicherheit—the German term blends together experiences which need three English terms—uncertainty, insecurity and unsafety—to be conveyed.” Thus wrote Zygmunt Bauman (1999, p. 5) two decades ago in his diagnosis of the neoliberal (dis)order of things. In Bauman’s analysis, these three aspects of Unsicherheit in their blending come to displace “the real trouble” of uncertainty and insecurity towards safety; but the institutional measures taken in the name of safety are divisive rather than unifying. We are not so much interested in an overall diagnosis of risk or safety. Instead, we focus on how risk and safety are produced and productive. 2. In this way, risk calculations are based on knowledge of the past. Ben Anderson argues that anticipation of the future in contemporary liberal democracies takes its starting point from risk, in that they seek to imagine the future as distinct from both past and present—and even as something that may never happen. But: “Common to all forms of anticipatory action is a seemingly paradoxical process whereby a future becomes cause and justification for some form of action in the here and now” (2010, p. 778). 3. This is not to be taken as a one-way notion of power. 4. Had we started our “genealogy” (Chap. 2) from safe space instead of interfaith dialogue, these are some of the nodal points we would have explored further. 5. The other rules mentioned are “agree to disagree”, “challenge by choice” (i.e. participants may opt out), “respect”, and “no attacks” (Arao & Clemens, 2013, p. 143). 6. In Danish: forulempe, which is a verb. The noun ulempe can be translated as “disadvantage” or “downside”. We have chosen to translate it as “intimidate”, but forulempe does not carry the additional meaning of “being overwhelmed” that makes intimidate less clearly negative than forulempe. We could also have chosen “harass”, but this is not accurate either.

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Index1

A

B

Affect, 4, 20, 133, 149–183, 190, 196, 198, 199, 206, 209 Ahmed, Sara, 7, 9–11, 60, 61, 70, 88, 97, 98, 144, 153–155, 175, 176, 184n1, 197, 198, 206 Anderson, Ben, 152, 155, 156, 158, 164, 184n1, 189, 212n2 Anticipation, 192–199, 206, 212n2 Atmosphere, vi, 80, 94, 96, 97, 118, 125, 126, 129, 151, 152, 156, 158, 159, 184n1, 189, 202 Attunement, 125, 126, 129, 130, 134, 141, 153, 154, 163, 167, 181, 184n1 Authenticity, 35–39, 48, 85, 141, 178, 179

Bearing witness, 31–39, 50, 151, 176, 178 Bell, Catherine, 108–111, 116, 117, 119, 121, 126, 127, 141 C

Celebration, 111, 126, 127, 131, 135 Community dance, v, 16, 17, 20n3, 28, 164–166, 168–170, 182 Contact zone, 6–9, 13, 16–18, 27, 31, 33, 51, 66, 105, 107, 142, 151, 171, 189–191, 193, 194, 200, 201, 211 Contact-zone pedagogy, 201, 211

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 L. P. Galal, K. Hvenegård-Lassen, Organised Cultural Encounters, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0

217

218 Index

Cultural difference, 1, 2, 7–9, 13, 16, 17, 63, 67, 99, 132, 141, 165, 182, 189 Cultural encounters, v, 1–20, 27–51, 61–64, 73, 75, 77, 78, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 98–100, 105–111, 116, 121, 126, 139, 141–143, 151, 156, 160, 165, 176, 181, 183, 189, 191, 194, 198, 200, 205, 211 Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, v, 20n3, 49, 59–64, 66, 67, 72, 79, 98, 100, 106, 120–122, 139, 140, 142, 176, 180, 198, 203, 207–210 D

Dancing, 20, 149–183 Danish Church, 15–16, 27–32, 35, 43, 44, 46–48, 52n4, 52n5, 73, 89, 90, 162, 177 Decorum, 60, 63, 86, 111–116, 119–124, 126, 135, 137, 138, 141–144, 190, 205, 208 Diversity management, v, 20n3 Diversity training, 28, 84 E

Encounters, 1–20, 28, 60, 105, 107–112, 149–183, 189

G

Geography of encounters, 11, 12 Goffman, Erving, 10, 19, 60, 62–64, 69, 70, 75, 76, 78, 79, 86, 99, 100n2, 108, 110, 119 H

Hope, 11, 20, 105, 154, 184n2, 196–199, 205–208, 211 I

Intercultural competence, 4, 66, 67, 69, 71, 76, 122, 131, 173–175 Interfaith dialogue, v, 16, 20n3, 28, 32–35, 37–40, 46, 47, 49, 52n8, 62, 86, 87, 105–107, 112–115, 136, 137, 142, 149, 150, 196, 205, 212n4 Interfaith encounters, vii, 15, 28–32, 37–40, 46–49, 51, 52n6, 84, 92, 106, 110, 116, 124, 158, 160, 176, 198 Interfaith work, 8, 15, 16, 19, 20n3, 28–32, 36, 38, 48–50, 87, 88 Intervention, 1, 3–12, 14, 17, 18, 27, 28, 30, 32, 34, 47, 62, 77, 83, 84, 92, 105, 109, 154, 155, 160, 161, 176, 180, 181, 184n4, 189, 200, 203, 209, 211 L

F

Fear, 12, 32, 100, 105, 107, 196, 197, 205–207

Listening, 20, 72, 143, 149–183, 184n2, 185n5, 185n7, 191, 197, 203

 Index 

219

M

S

Man’s project, 41, 49–51, 199 Mission, 8, 28, 29, 31–39, 41, 51, 71, 112

Script, 5, 12–14, 17–19, 27, 59–62, 64–88, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101n2, 107, 110, 111, 116, 117, 120–122, 135, 136, 139, 140, 143, 151, 152, 158, 167, 173, 184n3, 190, 191, 199, 209 Social practice, 3, 5–7, 11 Subject positioning, 20, 65–77

P

Peoplehood, 31, 39, 40, 44, 46–48, 71 Performative/performativity, 4–6, 10, 11, 20, 37, 51, 91, 108–111, 113, 116, 118, 126, 127, 134, 135, 138, 139, 141, 153, 211 Place-making, 64, 88–98, 159 Pratt, Mary Louise, 6–9, 13, 17, 51, 105, 189, 201, 211 R

Racialization/racialisation, 8, 51 Resistance, 33, 60, 62, 64, 77–85, 121, 127, 190 Risk and safety, 6, 14, 16–18, 20, 100, 107–109, 111, 141, 179–181, 190–199, 203, 212n1 Ritual studies, 15, 18, 108, 109, 122, 190 Rules of irrelevance, 63, 64, 69, 75–78, 83–85

T

Transformation, 2, 3, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 27–32, 36, 37, 50, 59, 64, 79, 90, 93, 105–111, 115, 118, 131, 139, 151, 153, 178, 183, 194, 202 Trickster, 111, 121, 135–142, 199 Trust, 11, 92, 106, 163, 168, 196, 197, 201, 203, 211 W

Walking, 20, 92, 136, 149–183, 184n4, 199 Whiteness, 70 Wilson, Helen, 8, 9, 11–13, 17, 18, 153–155, 169, 180, 181, 183, 189, 196–198, 200, 208