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This article draws on two in-depth stories of an Arab-Danish Muslim woman and an Arab-Danish Muslim man to explore how they 'do gender' when 'doing care' for their elderly parents in their everyday lives. Analysis of ethnographic material reveals that for the Arab-Danish Muslim woman, 'doing care' is regarded as a right which provides her with the opportunity to become irreplaceable and enables her to realize herself. In her self-realization, it is argued, lies a reproduction of gendered understanding of caregiving that seems to prevent the Muslim man from performing the desired role as caregiver, leaving him to struggle with the entrenched gender norms and structured ideals of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimism that accompanies the voyage into social science-related fieldwork is sometimes confronted by the 'unanticipated' of the field, which surges out of a perceived (in)congruence between the researcher and the settings of the site of fieldwork. Using theoretical framings from Pierre Bourdieu, I show how my habitus as a 'Black African Male' was perceived in a field of research that is both racialized and gendered, accounting for the several surprising and awkward moments that marked my fieldwork in Denmark and New Zealand. I begin by showing how the origins of migration studies effected the racialized composition of this field of scholarship, as well as its subsequent gendered turn. I then present my sites of fieldwork and the several encounters of the 'unanticipated' that engendered fieldwork reflexivity, especially as regards the unequal power relations existing in various sites of research engagements. I suggest a few fieldwork navigation strategies for researchers with comparable identities and lastly recommend that fieldwork's awkward moments engendered by stereotypes of race and gender be made productive by way of 'creative confrontations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how municipal care managers negotiate tensions in policy logics and state discourses in encounters with ethnic minority families in Denmark. It focuses on the "self-appointed helper arrangement", an option in the Danish Social Service Act under which municipalities can employ family members to care for older citizen at home. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the consequences of this care arrangement from the perspective of care managers, focusing on gender dynamics and state-family divides in need assessments and care provision. I demonstrate how care managers slip in and out of their roles as administrators, health professionals and morally concerned citizens in encounters with different caregivers. While they focus mainly on equal access to care for all older citizens, sometimes they shift perspective and focus more on the wellbeing of the self-appointed helper in question. These shifts in moral registers are triggered by empathetic encounters with young ethnic minority women. However, care managers' empathy is double-sided and ambivalent. Although striving to undo difference and include these women in a community of independent Danish female citizens, they also tend to place them and their families in a different category than the majority population and thus risk further marginalizing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nordic universalist welfare states place great value on promoting gender equality among immigrant minorities. Yet, as this article demonstrates, there is a tension in the Danish asylum regime between the gender mainstreaming objective that is prominent in the integration discourse and policy and the actual practices of migrant camp employees tasked with activation and preparing asylum seekers for integration into Denmark. Based on four extracts from a qualitative study of the Danish 'activation' program for adult asylum seekers, this study identifies the lack of structural and social support for familial care work as the main barrier to the equal access of women to the program's activities (education and vocational training). I find that the objective of gender equality is thwarted by two primary frames: exceptionalism and bureaucratization. These intersect to reinforce 'traditional' gender roles and exclude asylum-seeking women with dependent relatives from out-of-home activities. The findings add to our understanding of how migrant women are excluded from citizenship through subtle and complex forms of power at play in cross-cultural encounters between migrant women and welfare state employees who are individualizing the responsibility for women's success or failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a study examining the self-perceived roles of journalists covering the #MeToo movement in Denmark and Sweden. Drawing on qualitative interviews with journalists, editors and activists (N = 20) and participant observation at various #MeToo events, we examine the professional journalism cultures underpinning differences in the coverage and the broader public debate spurred by the movement in the two countries. The analysis is informed by the theoretical framework of role performance [Mellado, C. 2015. "Professional Roles in News Content: Six Dimensions of Journalistic Role Performance". Journalism Studies. ; Mellado, C., L. Hellmueller, and W. Donsbach. 2016. Journalistic Role Performance Concepts, Contexts, and Methods. Routledge) in combination with Tuchman's (1972. "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual". American Journal of Sociology 77 (4): 660–679) seminal work on "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual". This combined framework enables an analysis of how journalists negotiate ideals of objective reporting and activist imperatives when covering the movement and issues of gender (in)equality more broadly. Our study shows that journalists, to a varying degree, felt torn between ideals of impartiality and objectivity and ideals of active reporting oriented towards action and problem-solving but that these experiences differed between the two countries and between newsrooms. We discuss these findings in light of differences in the political climates around issues related to gender in the two countries and partially diverging normative ideals and professional journalistic cultures regarding the extent to which journalism and activism can and should be combined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]