This article explores how a group of Palestinian families perceive and cope with urban regeneration in Denmark's largest public housing project, Gellerupparken. The neighborhood is publicly known as a criminal hotspot, politically defined as a migrant “ghetto”, and targeted by state policies as the other in need of change. The aim of the article is to show how urban regeneration is broader than the transformation of physical space and includes the perceived need to reform residents through a host of biopolitical interventions. While most policy work aim at establishing trusting and collaborative state-citizen relations, the perspective of the residents in Gellerupparken illuminate that the social effects of urban regeneration can be seen as paradoxical ones. Although Danish gentrification policies resonate with some sections of the residents, and can even count on the active participation of many residents in the self-administration of their neighborhood, the state's interventions only seem to strengthen its conflicts with other residents, as well as enhance the distance between resident groups. In this way, the article explores what we call the limits to integration as the practices of the families in our study run counter to embodied notions of Danishness within the welfare state.

This article explores how a group of immigrant parents in Denmark’s largest social housing project, Gellerupparken, are caught in a chronic double-bind position. The parents are straddling two sets of social norms and rationalities on proper parenting—that of the Danish welfare state and that of the local immigrant community—and their success of becoming attuned to the social norms of one particular relationship inevitably leads to their experience of radical othering in another relationship. This places them in a doubly marginal position and makes their parenting practices fraught with dilemmas and anxieties. I argue that the notion of the double-bind provides us with a heuristic for understanding the parents’ everyday experiences of marginality, stressing that marginalization is not only to be understood as produced by and productive of the state, but by the interface between the state and vitally important actors in the immigrant community and family.

This article offers a theoretical and ethnographic account of what I term “epidemic policing.” The article introduces the notion of epidemic policing to show how Danish measures for countering violent extremism are based on an epidemiological approach resembling the World Health Organization public health rationale, and how the field of countering violent extremism policing is itself expanding in epidemic ways. With an empirical starting point in ethnographic fieldwork among the police in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, the article ponders the intersection between crime prevention and countering violent extremism in urban policing. The article shows that while traditional Danish crime prevention has been marked by conventional processes of securitization and topographical forms of policing, a particular form of topological policing is implied in the security logics of countering violent extremism. This new form of policing entails a reconfiguration of the epidemiological approach, including a diffusion of encoded risk categories, an expansion of institutional security infrastructures, and a de-territorialization of the space that is being policed. The article argues that this reconfiguration of Danish urban policing is a highly spatialized process, which has resulted in the co-production of intensified territorial control and an inert potentiality of policing everywhere in the city.

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Moral outrage has until now been conceptualized as a call to action, a reaction to injustice and transgressions, and a forceful motor for democratic participation, acts of civil disobedience, and violent and illicit action. This introduction goes beyond linear causality between trigger events, political emotions, and actions to explore moral outrage as it is experienced and expressed in contexts of political violence, providing a better understanding of that emotion’s generic power. Moral outrage is here understood as a multidimensional emotion that may occur momentarily and instantly, and exist as an enduring process and being-in-the-world, based on intergenerational experiences of violence, state histories, or local contexts of fear and anxiety. Because it appears in the intersubjective field, moral outrage is central for identity politics and social positioning, so we show how moral outrage may be a prism to investigate and understand social processes such as mobilization, collectivities, moral positioning and responsiveness, and political violence.