Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore virtual interactions between Norwegian students and their contacts in Nairobi, Kenya. I ask whether Norway’s international partnerships in education achieve equality more broadly or reinforce differences between Norwegians and their “partners” outside of Norway's borders.

Paper long abstract:

While Scandinavian societies have been broadly characterized as egalitarian, Marianne Gullestad suggested that Norwegians are more concerned with making each other the same than achieving equality. In this paper, I explore how Norwegian conceptions of sameness, difference, and (in)equality emerged during a virtual live-stream video I observed between Norwegian folk high school students and their contacts in a slum community in Nairobi, Kenya. Folk high schools, funded in part by the state, offer young adult students “gap years” where they can develop social skills and explore their interests before pursuing higher education or entering the workforce. In addition to coursework relating to sports, service projects, and travel, contemporary folk high schools are designed to promote values relating to democracy, equality, and cooperation both in Norway and abroad. Through fifteen months of ethnographic work at a folk high school in south-eastern Norway, I argue that these values were possible to achieve among Norwegian students on campus but disintegrated in the relationships students had with contacts outside of Norway’s borders. I suggest that this problem reflects broader tensions between Norway’s state-sanctioned programs that promote global solidarity, and the social inequality perpetuated by Norway’s lucrative oil industry and subsequent “green” initiatives in the Global South. By taking egalitarianism as an analytic, I ask whether Norway’s international development projects, like those found in folk high school education, achieve equality on a broader scale or serve to reinforce the sameness Norwegians share and the differences that exist between them and their “partners” outside of Norway.