Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Through 14 months of ethnography in the City of Oslo, I trace how colorblind “for everyone” policies and geography‑based interventions in public health governance organize the everyday workings of Institutional Whiteness, reproducing a white, middle‑class norm of health.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an ethnography of the everyday workings of Institutional Whiteness in a Nordic welfare state, specifically how it is reproduced through public health governance in the City of Oslo. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork with civil servants and politicians as they negotiated and crafted a ten‑year strategy to reduce “social inequality in health,” I approach the City of Oslo as a site where bureaucratic routines and moral imaginaries intersect.

The City of Oslo does not systematically collect health data by race or ethnicity. Instead, health inequity is rendered through predominantly socioeconomic “gradients” and area‑based urban policies. Policymakers acknowledge that references to geography carry racialized undertones, yet worry that naming race will fuel division or reify stereotypes. Policy targets are formulated around “alle” (everyone), and interventions are justified through place rather than racialized categories. Drawing on meetings, workshops, consultation processes, interviews and strategy documents, I show how colorblind universalism organizes the everyday workings of Whiteness (Ahmed 2012), making a white norm operative yet difficult to name.

Building on Nancy Krieger’s notion of the “two‑edged sword” of data and Anouk de Koning’s concept of the haunted universal, I argue that the City of Oslo’s universalism is similarly double‑edged. It camouflages racialized hierarchies by collapsing multiple axes of oppression into class, measured through socioeconomic status, even as policymakers prefigure welfare futures where “everyone” is imagined to flourish.

The paper situates Nordic welfare universalism as a key site for ethnographic study of Institutional Whiteness in contemporary European state practice.