ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces two research fields in Denmark and the Nordics that the book is in dialogue with. The first research field is welfare and integration studies related to immigrants and refugees and it is preoccupied with exploring how the nation state through welfare policies seeks to remake itself by means of integration. Furthermore, migration in welfare work is considered an anomaly and migrants as perpetual strangers to the nation. Lastly, research has inspected the epistemology of integration and found that it presupposes and reproduces segregation to make sense. The second research field is race, racism and racialisation studies, which is a rather new field of research within the Nordics. It is characterised by the expositions of racialised structures within the Nordic welfare regime, a conceptual interest in how to theorise race and in which contexts, and empirical interest in describing racialising representations in media, culture and everyday life, including attention to how whiteness function in the Nordic region. The chapter closes by summarising how this book conceptualises racialisation as producer of race when welfare is provided for racialised groups.
