It Doesn’t Matter if You’re Black or White: Negotiating Identity and Danishness in Intercultural Dialogue Meetings

This article presents an analysis of the empirical case ‘The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors’ (CEA). The CEA project attempts, through what it calls dialogue meetings, to promote ‘positive’ cultural encounters in order to strengthen social cohesion and create an inclusive Danish society. The analysis focuses on the design of the dialogue meeting, in particular, the way in which the project mixes the ambassadors in teams of so-called visible and invisible minorities. This is a key feature of the design and is thought to be essential in supporting the project’s message that national identities are constructions. The analysis draws on participant observations and interviews, and uses Judith Butler’s concepts of subjectification and performativity to uncover ambiguous incidents in the dialogue meetings and the citational practice during which, for example, the mix of visible and invisible ambassadors seems to reinforce difference in unintended ways.