Title dissertation:
Becoming Spectral: A Decolonial Feminist Archive of Aesthesis, Resistance and Relationality
Topic trial lecture:
Gendered racism – the hauntology of racism?
Time for trial lecture: 10:15 – 11:15
Time for public defence: 12:15 – 15:30
Place: Bodø, A13 Elias Blix
Chair of defence: Vice-dean Janne Paulsen Breimo
Assessment committee:
- Associate Professor Iram Khawaja, Aarhus University
- Associate Professor Paula Mulinari, Malmö University
- Associate Professor Guilherme Da Silva, Nord University
Supervisors:
- Main supervisor: Professor Astri Dankertsen, Nord University
- Internal co-supervisor: Associate Professor Ann-Torill Tørrisplass, Nord University
- External co-supervisor: Professor Lene Myong, UiS
The thesis is available for viewing by contacting Anneli Watterud, anneli.m.watterud@nord.no.
About the thesis:
This dissertation investigates the affective and emotional dimensions of racialization as experienced by Muslim immigrant women in Norway, situating these experiences within broader structures of coloniality. It asks how racialization is affectively and emotionally lived by Muslim immigrant women and examines how they navigate a societal landscape in which they are rendered hypervisible in public debates on integration, religion, secularism, and gender, while being ontologically excluded from recognition as complex, feeling, and knowing subjects. Their ways of being and knowing are often unacknowledged within dominant epistemic frameworks, producing a paradoxical condition of presence and absence shaped by structural erasure rather than chosen opacity.
Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship on aesthesis, affect, and emotions, the dissertation approaches racialization as a deeply embodied and sensory experience.
Aesthesis, the capacity to perceive and sense the world, is mobilized as a critical lens to examine how colonial histories shape affective orientations in the present. Central to the analysis is the concept of spectrality, understood as a manifestation of hauntology, through which the dissertation explores how Muslim immigrant women’s bodies emerge as haunted by histories of imperial colonial violence, racial capitalism, and epistemic erasure. These histories persist in the present, shaping everyday encounters, modes of belonging, and technologies of exclusion. In the Norwegian context, Muslim immigrant women’s hypervisibility disrupts narratives of Nordic exceptionalism, revealing how coloniality continues to structure perception, normativity, and exclusion, even as it is disavowed.
A key contribution of the dissertation is the development of a decolonial feminist archive of aesthesis that centers Muslim immigrant women’s lived experiences as
sources of knowledge. By doing so, it challenges dominant Nordic narratives of diversity and equality, demonstrating how inclusion is often framed as conditional
upon assimilation to secular and gendered norms. In response, the dissertation calls for a rethinking of knowledge production, foregrounding refusal, opacity, spectrality,
relationality, and epistemic resistance as critical modes of decolonial critique.
