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Contribution short abstract

I analyze Norway’s pre‑vaccination COVID debate to show how “culture” marked racialized minorities as risky while majority infections stayed unmarked. I trace how “trust” and mediated voice shaped care, blame, and refusal.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on how race, affect, and (in)communicability were configured in Norway’s public debate on COVID-19 before mass vaccination. In this unsettled moment, “culture” and “trust” became key political idioms for explaining unequal infection burdens and for sorting who counted as responsible, intelligible, and care-worthy. Building on prior collaborative work, I argue that “culture” was mobilized asymmetrically. When attached to immigrants and racialized minorities, culture was repeatedly treated as a bounded collective property that predisposed groups to risk, and non-compliance. By contrast, majority infections were framed as universal biomedical events—even when linked to culturally patterned practices such as ski holidays, Easter travel, or Christmas gatherings. This uneven marking of some lives as culturally “risky” while others remain unmarked enables moral economies of predation and appropriation: statistical “overrepresentation” becomes readable as cultural deficiency, while majority practices retain epistemic innocence. At the same time, “trust” is elevated as a distinctive majority affect, figured as the precondition for collective compliance. I then attend to communicative infrastructures: who is authorized to speak, who is heard, and how speech travels. Majority subjects are commonly individualized and permitted to speak for themselves, with transgressions framed as personal lapses. Minority speech more often moves through spokespersons and community leaders and is interpreted through idioms of lack (language, health literacy, trust). In this mediated economy, “lack” functions as a racialized affective diagnosis that can legitimate intensified surveillance, behavioral correction, and selective withholding of solidarity.