Margareta Dancus
Teaching & Learning with HECUA Students
The Scandinavian Urban Studies Term (SUST) and Divided States of Europe (DSE) programs give me the unique opportunity to integrate my passion for teaching with my strong belief in the relevance of the Scandinavian model for the international community and my commitment for situated, participant, and self-reflective scholarship. I am very excited to discover another Scandinavia and Eastern Europe through the eyes of HECUA students and to participate in what philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has called “the revolution of the everyday life.” In The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis (1987) argues that autonomous societies habitually call into questions their own institutions and representations and the social imaginary that underwrites them. On the one hand, they reflect on and interrogate the “givenness” of symbols, myths, legends, and norms that secure their unity and identity. On the other hand, they engage in the democratic praxis of challenging the legitimacy of the institutions that embody those significances. The HECUA classroom is a productive site where readings and practice are integrated in ways that encourage both myself and the students to constantly call into question the American, Scandinavian, and my own Romanian social imaginary and to foster a laboratory of new ideas that make the revolution of the everyday life happen.
My Research and Current Projects
The broad question that has motivated my research in the last five years is the following: what is the ultimate matrix that frames Norwegianness and the debates on the future of the Norwegian social democracy? In my dissertation Screening the Norwegian Heart: The Cultural Politics and Aesthetics of the Emotions in Norwegian Cinema 2000-2008, I argue that it is not capital (Marxism), institutions (governmentality), or rationality (critical theory), but affect and the emotions. Norwegian popular films produced in the last decade use affect and the emotions to stage, reproduce, and contest conventional understandings of Norwegianness. Four emotions are particularly important: compassion, love of nation, nostalgia, and racial melancholia. Screening the Norwegian Heart argues that the reworking of these emotions through cinematic representation has reconstructed the attachments constituting the Norwegian public sphere. This shift makes Norwegian cinema an interesting instance for comparison to other national cinemas, but also a relevant case to theorists of the cultural politics of the emotions, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars. In the near future, I plan to revise my dissertation into a book. I also want to initiate a comparative frame for analyzing state emotionalisms by looking closer at the Romanian cinema in the post-Communist era. My work on both Norway and Romania will help us map the affective scapes or what I would like to call “the pathoscapes” of the late modern West. It will also reveal that power is not only ideological, but also affective and it operates in new ways as global cultural flows occur at unprecedented rates and speeds.
Presentations and Publications
Co-Authored Peer-Reviewed Journal Article
“Sammenlikningskonstruksjoner med enn som eller bare som etter komparativ og annen i norske dialekter.” Co-author Endre Mørck. Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift no. 26 (2008): 13-36.
Dissemination
“Civil Society: The Renegade Child of Neoliberalism- A Study of Norwegian Fisheries,” Minerva Nettugaven, March, 2009.
Resume / CV
