Compulsory registration

Navigating Colour-Blind Societies: Racial Governance and Urban Erasure in Denmark’s Ghetto Policies

This talk builds on my recently published book Navigating Colour-Blind Societies, a comparative ethnography of young urban Muslims coming of age in Copenhagen and Montreal in the decade after 9/11. Through personal narratives and urban ethnography, the book highlights how racialisation and spatialisation are interconnected—shaping who belongs where, whose presence is questioned, and how urban life is structured by racial, classed, and gendered hierarchies.

Extending these insights, my recent research examines Denmark’s 2018 public housing—or “ghetto”—policies as mechanisms of racial governance aimed at managing and erasing Muslim communities. Drawing on ethnographic work in Aarhus, Odense, and Copenhagen, it analyses how these policies operate through the logics of coloniality, framing Muslims as threats to Danish social cohesion. The experiences of residents in targeted estates reveal the importance of community care, intergenerational ties, and informal support networks.

Together, the book and this newer research show how racial governance and urban erasure intertwine in Denmark’s colour-blind context, shaping both national imaginaries and everyday life in racialised neighbourhoods.

Speaker:

Amani Hassani is a Lecturer in Sociology at Brunel University London. She leads the research project “The Other’s Right to the City,” funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project examines Denmark’s ghetto policies and their impact on racialized residents. As an urban ethnographer working across sociology, anthropology, and human geography, she critically engages with racialisation, Islamophobia, and social justice in urban contexts. Her previous work has focused on Muslim urban life in Denmark and Canada, exploring questions of class, gender, and racialisation through ethnographic methods and critical interdisciplinary approaches.

Discussant: Tommaso Vitale, Full Professor of Sociology, CEE, Sciences Po & Dean of Sciences Po Urban School

Subscribe to our mailing list | For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr