Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

a Tanzanian/Danish educational encounter, which is facilitated by the Danish NGO Action Aid Denmark at
the organization’s training center in Arusha Tanzania. The focus of the analysis will be on expectations and
performances of cultural difference by teachers and students during classroom lessons in Tanzanian culture,
politics and society.
Lise Paulsen Galal
Becoming more tolerant
Interfaith dialogue initiatives have in Denmark become a popular response to current conflicts connected
with migration and religious differences. Particularly Christian religious actors and organizations take the
lead in orchestrating interfaith dialogue as a way to become more tolerant towards cultural and religious
Others. In this paper, I explore how diverse ritual practices and ideas of a common humanity legitimized by
Christianity define the setting and subjectivities of the participants in interfaith dialogue. The aim is to
analyze how ritual becomes a vehicle for change and how the aim of transformation into a more tolerant
human being of a particular – Christian – kind encourages specific technologies of self.
Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen
Moving the Elephant
Diversity management training is a widespread activity that aims at educating facilitators of intercultural
encounters or, in other cases, at producing interculturally competent leaders, professionals or citizens.
Organizers of diversity management activities may be consultancies, NGOs, HR-departments in private and
public companies or multinational chains with each their particular and often copy-righted models of
intervention. Across the spectrum, diversity management training share ideas of diversity as a force that is
both potentially disruptive and beneficial. In this paper, I discuss how training taps into an affective modality
or register in order to move the participants. The production of reformed subjectivities seems to be (among
other) dependent on the creation of threshold experiences of heightened affective intensity.
8D
Dismantling the common good: work, health, and community (Chair, Maria Giannacopoulos)
Niamh Stephenson
vulnerability, security
The role of catastrophe simulation in struggles within public health over inequality,
Public health’s attentiveness to populations can foreground social inequalities. It can also create inroads for
people to make demands on government. However, the recent securitisation of public health threatens to
undermine public health’s familiar modes of attentiveness to its populations; in place of “the health of the
population” interest turns to infrastructures deemed key to governance. Questions of inequality are
increasingly refigured as concerns about “vulnerability”, and vulnerability demands governing so as to
maintain security. Through an analysis of interviews with public health actors, this paper examines struggles
within public health over the role of infectious disease modelling in securitisation. Whilst modelling has been
key to disease securitisation, it is also being cast as potentially “devaluing the currency” of public health. The
paper asks how inequalities are being reworked in this struggle over the normative political visions at work
in public health.
Elisabetta Magnani
Finance, labour, and the future of work
In times that witnessed a staggering rise in income and wealth inequality, finance and labour have been
separate crucial sites of empirical and theoretical investigation in a number of disciplines. Particularly since
the GFC they have become sites of intensified political investment, thus challenging the often rigid
conceptual separation between the economic and the political. As we emerge from a crisis of belief that
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