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Narrated identities.Intersections of religion, gender, nation, locality and ethnicity in the narrations of Jews’ and Muslims’ identities in Sweden 1933-2008
| We would like to present and discuss our new project. The project will investigate individual negotiations of how national, local, gendered and religious identities interplay with each other in case of Swedish identity in different social, political and historical contexts and local communities.
Focusing on a comparison of religious identities, Jews and Muslims, we will investigate
underlying concepts of ’normality’ starting from the concept of intersectionality and
oral history. What kinds of concepts of religion and the interplay of religious and
Swedish national are being re/produced in various situations and settings at different points in time (1933 up until today)? How is Sweden as a cultural space negotiated in individual perceptions? Do different categories of identity replace each other in some contexts and how are they hierarchically organized?
Operating within a constructivist frame, the project combines research questions,
theories and methodologies of several disciplines (linguistics, historical and cultural
studies).
The project’s main research interest is to investigate how identity categories are interwoven with and dependent on each other. In addition, we would like to investigate how different categories replace each other in some contexts and how they are hierarchically organized in different and important ways. We are focusing on the construction of normality besides, by way of and in addition to processes of othering. In other words: What kind of silent knowledge is implicitly constructed in processes of interactive identity formation regarding the interplay of religious, national, local, ethnic and gendered identities? By examining individual utterances, it becomes possible to analyze underlying concepts of normality which are not normally voiced explicitly: how is the own identity being constructed by othering others?
Our main methodology is a narrative approach from a multidisciplinary background (historical studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic discourse analysis and ethnology). Our project positions and develops oral history within a discourse analysis frame . Our analyses will consider and compare how people from different backgrounds in different communities narrate and negotiate their individual identities. We also want to discuss what narrations and of different religious groups have in common. What differences and similarities can be found with regard to constructions of religious identities, local identities, gender and status over time? How are identities changing in the individuals’ own perceptions and narrations, in different situations and over a period of time?
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