ABSTRACT
It is with a touch of ambivalence that I start writing this ‘country report’ on social and cultural geography in Denmark. In the light of recent discussions on Anglo-American and English-language hegemony in ‘international’ geographic writing spaces (see, e.g., Berg and Kearns 1998; Gregson, Simonsen and Vaiou, forthcoming; Minca 2000), I welcome the initiative by Social & Cultural Geography as a strategy seeking to address and work against this hegemony. On the other hand, however, this strategy carries the danger of casting the writer as an unproblematized translator who—by way of a dual and ambiguous position between discourses—mediates the otherwise unknown and inaccessible ‘other’ to the powerful inhabitants of the ‘centre’ (Gregson, Simonsen and Vaiou, forthcoming). Like any other ‘map’ of an intellectual landscape, a ‘country report’ is a social construction, a narrative construed by a writer who is ambiguously positioned in the very field she is trying to describe. This should not be seen as a confession, nor as a way to disclaim the responsibility for the story to come, but rather as a problematization of the very notion of ‘country reports’ suggesting that, like all other practices of representation, they are necessarily situated, embodied and partial.
