Salla Aldrin Salskov

This chapter presents philosophical reflections on self-reflexivity and the potential of encountering 'the other', in conducting research on actors involved in polarised societal conflict. Haraway (1988) suggests that acknowledging one's "situated knowledges" and "partial perspectives" is pivotal to doing scientific research, attending especially to the power relations that saturate it. In this article we draw on Haraway's work to discuss an approach that we term engaged dialogue that refers to a specific conception of the nature of critical self-reflexivity in research focusing on the constraints and possibilities of the researcher's position in relation to those studied. Discussing one's own positionality in relation to the research one conducts and the subjects studied is an indispensable part of critical discursive psychology drawing on post-structuralist analyses of power relations and of research that engages in societal and political questions and conflicts, for example concerning gender, racialization, and nationalism. We analyze instances from our own research of engaging in dialogues with populist to far-right nationalist actors and persons perceived as such, and others who have a stake in the conflicts surrounding nationalism, multiculturalism and polarization in the Finnish context. Our empirical material is ethnographic and autoethnographic in nature .

In this article, I suggest Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts challenges "epistemic habits" in contemporary critical thought on gender, politics, sexuality, intimacy, identity, and love. In particular, I focus on how Nelson through descriptions of queer life, love, and kinship articulates moral-existential and queer-philosophical perspectives on everyday life by bringing the "I-You" relationship to the fore of feminist and queer theoretical concerns. By reading Nelson with the philosophy of Wittgenstein, I discuss how love is related to views on language and what it means to say that one can have, as well as lack a faith in words, other people and linguistic meaning. The Argonauts, I argue, shows us the importance of acknowledging moral-existential perspectives of gender and identity and their role in I-You relations. The article raises questions of how to understand the relationship between theory, philosophy, and ordinary language in relation to cultural critique and criticism (Butler 1990; Sedgwick 2003). It also discusses love as a perspective one might take and have in life and to other people in general, not exclusively as romantic love, but as a philosophical perspective in thinking about gender, identity, politics, love, and intimacy.

Gay-friendliness and gender equality have been taken as signs of modern Western superiority over other cultural spheres and geographical spaces, particularly those of the Muslim world. In a similar manner, the promotion and defense of gay rights has become the crucible of othering discourses in relation to Africa. Across different cultural and national spaces, the
meanings of citizenship, nationalism, modernity, colonial- ism and sovereignty are being negotiated in debates about anti-homosexuality on the continent. The focus of this article is the politics of mapping anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa in Swedish daily newspapers.
Drawing on the work of Jasbir Puar and other feminist and queer scholars theorizing race and sexuality in relation to processes of nation-building, the authors analyze the mapping of the regulation of homosexuality in Africa as an instance of imaginative geographies. They investigate how journalistic rhetoric about homophobia on the African continent in Swedish daily newspapers relies on a politics of homonationalism and sexual exceptionalism in ‘gay liberation’ discourses.

Across different cultural and national spaces, the meanings of citizenship, nationalism, modernity, colonialism, and sovereignty are being negotiated in debates about antihomosexuality in Europe. In this text we analyze and discuss a poster campaign aimed at youth produced by the national lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersexual (LGBTI) rights organization in Finland (Seta), and a discussion at a seminar on rainbow youth, where the poster was addressed. We pay close attention to one poster in particular, which displays an image of a woman, who is marked as Muslim, kissing
another woman who is marked as Finnish. The image conveys a colonialist savior motif whereby European patriarchy shows itself saving a brown woman from brown hetero-patriarchal masculinity. Spivak’s postcolonial deconstructive approach implies a critique of certain forms of masculinity studies which are blind to the ways in which rescue narratives may be racist.