Maja Gildin Zuckerman
Broadening Home: The Emergence of Danish Zionism and its Topological Expansion of Danish Jewishness, 1897-1914
Abstract:
This dissertation deals with the changes that Danish Jewishness underwent from the end of the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I by following the dissemination and evocation of Zionism among Danish Jews. The study unfolds how Danish Jewishness changed its expression, organisation, and orientation towards the wider Jewish world in significant ways. I put my focus on four practices through which the first chairman of Dansk Zionistforening, Louis Frænkel, associated Zionist assumptions about Jewish collectivity and national belonging with Danish Jewishness: traveling, lecturing, journal-making, and relief work. Through tracing the constituent elements of these practices, I show the networks in which Danish Zionism and Jewishness gradually became more entangled until their positions seemed to converge, and Zionist assumptions became calibrated into the core of Danish Jewishness. I argue that Zionist emergence facilitated Danish Jewry to gradually becoming more linked to a global project of Jewish collectivity. This was done through practices that concurrently emphasized the importance of deterritorialized Jewish solidarity and unity and also regional features of Jewish nationhood. What I conclude is that this broadening of boundaries in fact became a strengthening of local Danish Jewish self-assertion as emphatically Danish and Jewish at once.
Martin Ledstrup
Oscillations of Nationhood: A Sociology of In-betweenness in the United Arab Emirates
Abstract:
This project explores the sense of in-betweenness in modern nationhood. It investigates national belonging, global interconnectedness and individual interaction, particularly among nationals and non-nationals in the United Arab Emirates. Specifically, the empirical field is constituted by processes of nearness and distance between nationals and non-nationals, or what is within social science most often referred to as strangerhood as a social form of interaction. At the same time, the project speaks to a dialogue between general nationalism studies and classical sociology. It makes sense of nationhood and in-betweenness by revisiting the social theory of Georg Simmel as a way of looking at modernity. If contemporary scholarship has it that the in-betweenness of nationhood, globalization and individualization are all here to stay, the project argues that the example of Georg Simmel equips us with a classical precedent for talking about it beyond groupist assumptions and as an integral part of modernity.
Rune Andersen
Turisme – baggrund og betydning. En undersøgelse af guidebogslitteraturen om Ægypten i det 19. århundrede (vejleder: Peter Seeberg)
I min ph.d.-afhandling er det målsætningen at undersøge produktionen af rejsejournalistiske og turistiske aktiviteter i Mellemøsten mellem 1922-1945 med særligt henblik på den diskursive fremstilling af det ”fremmede”. Det vil sige et indblik i, hvorledes turisme og rejsejournalistik, som to gensidigt supplerende konstruktører og bærere af kulturelt indhold, har haft latent indflydelse på konstitueringen af periodens identitets- og kulturgeografiske normer. Sigtet er både at tilføre ny indsigt i fortidens hændelser, men også at bidrage til diskussionen om det moderne Mellemøstens kulturelle geografi og etablerede kulturelle identiteter set i et nutidigt perspektiv.