Every fall semester I teach one of my classes in English, with about 20-30 foreign students visiting our university for a semester. We had our first meeting yesterday. And as always I wonder before class starts whether there is enough in the chosen lecture theme to get them out there on the floor, debating. They need to. A class with 55-60 students total and where no one talks for an entire semester is a failure. Have I hit the right buttons in my preparations? I was thinking that question to myself yesterday morning.
But I was worried for no reason at all. One photo goes up on the screen, and the first hand is there — it took about 5 minutes, including the three minutes it also took to introduce myself and say that I always welcome student engagement. She was French. And I asked her her name — she told us, and I tolk her she had set the standard. I had a room full of hands — except for a few Norwegians who came up to me in the break to tell me that under no circumstance would they speak in English in front of the class.
We´ll see. There´s always that – every semester. Borders and thresholds are real.
The photo is a familiar one: A woman sitting on a beach somewhere in South France, with three police officers hovering over her. Around the world, we all know what was being said — the news reports were fairly identical. And they stirred reaction. That is in itself an aspect of a discussion that would be interesting: the fact of the media and the story going viral.
The woman was asked to remove some of her clothing, in the name of secularism and public propriety – whatever that is.
To be precise — it happened in Nice, close by the truck-terrorist attack a few weeks before. She was asked to remove her burkini –– a word that only recently has come to be a household word, the garment a recent invention. Against the backdrop of a beach full of people catching sun in swimsuits, shorts and bikinis, the woman stuck out. Then she was fined. By the police. And as we have come to know, the prohibition laws passed in Nice and Cannes prompting these police officers to do what they did, were revoked in a national over-turning. News coverage reflects a country struggling to make sense of its own multicultural heritage — a legacy of colonialism, not the least. And certainly neither a new nor an unfamiliar legacy.
The incident prompted the New York Times and other leading news media to stick in a reminder of how recent it was — in afterthought — since the bikini was introduced; some 50-60 years ago. And the public definition of borders between propriety and shame, being pushed — then as now. Politics of identity with a strong component of gender ideology and show of power, to be plain.
The image of the beach and the event is hard to forget. It is more than a photo and more than a sensation of underlying risk, uncertainty, or fear of a Europe beyond recognition — for some people. As our class got under way I realized I was not the only one with thoughts and mixed emotions about the photo and what it represents as cultural phenomenon, political fact and also news coverage. One student reflection came out after the other — for the better part of an hour. Strikingly (it was our first lecture) students from France, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Norway, UK and more all got engaged in discussions about the current turbulence in Europe — the BREXIT surprise, the terrorist attacks, the refugee issues – and more.
It is also a reminder that in a small city like our own, the cityscape is changing — it is plain when walking down the main street. What used to be a homogeneous city, no longer is. What used to be variety and heterogeneity during a few short summer weeks of tourism, no longer is a short summer season. This year, we greeted 15 000 students at our university. I am one of those who cling to the belief that education in the long run is the great change-maker, a fortress of rationality in an age of turbulence.
Accordingly, one would assume that our news media — in Norway and beyond – as educational media besides their information mandate – would reflect these changing cities, these changing nation-states and these changing conditions of contact among countries and cultures — not only from the point of view of confrontations, but perhaps also from the point of view of the mundane, everyday life that we live. And who knows — perhaps they do? Maybe it is a call to us in this class to look carefully, beyond those situations of extraordinary interest — to the everyday life also of the media.
By the end of the semester we may conclude that this monitoring of the changing everyday life in formerly homogeneous societies is in fact what the news media do. The story from Nice strikes a chord — a 4th estate voicing concerns that somethings need to be set straight. After all — it´s been four-five generations since immigration began to accelerate — in France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, UK, Denmark, Spain, and so on. This year, in 2016, borders are being tested, borders are being defined, borders are being redefined — and some of them in our heads, rather than in our political geography.
What I know for a fact already now is that we are in for another semester of interesting comparative evaluations by students coming from almost a dozen different countries. Students who by the end of the semester will have learned to critique the news media, praise good journalism, and also better understand the globalizing force that communication technology is: I asked my students how many had gotten their first version of this story on Facebook. It was practically all of them.
Looking forward to the semester.
Story from the Independent. The story from the New York Times. Invention of the burkini — New York Times. Also an insightful story from Al Jazeera – see below.