The issue of human migration and cultural differences is highly politicised, polarized and contested. Cultural distinctions are constituted in encounters between migrants and host countries and enforced and institutionalised through politics and practises of integration and ideologies of self-glorifying cultural essentialism. Persons, practices and things are readily slotted into and explained by the category of culture, at the expense of more universalistic perspectives on human beings and culture. Once constituted as a social fact, culture differences are employed, negotiated and contested in the public and by the states in the distribution of rights and resources, fuelling the current wrath of cultural identity politics. These uses of cultural differences diverge radically from the comparative project of anthropology, which explores similarities as well as differences of the human condition.

Cosmopolitan Trondheim is a research program and an umbrella for studies of cultural diversity in the city of Trondheim, carried out by staff and students alike. The main aim of the program is to provide through ethnographic field research an alternative view of Trondheim based on the experiences of migrants and the ways in which migrants and mobile persons interact across boundaries, recognizing commonalities and forging a sense of humanistic sensibility and moral responsibility beyond the local, while at the same time recognizing differences.

Research output

Kochaniewicz, A. (2021) Time and friendship in the Corona pandemic: Relationship-making between middle-class migrant women in Norway. Studia Migracyjne - Przegląd Polonijny. Vol. 3 (181), 211-236. 

Growing up cosmopolitan? Diversity in the classroom and the schoolyard
Fride Josøk, Graduate, Department of Social Anthropology

How to become a “foreigner” in Norway
Elizabeth Bristow, Graduate, Department of Social Anthropology

To be or not to be – The question of capital young adults negotiating a sense of belonging in a Norwegian national space
Nina Helen Amundsen, Graduate, Department of Social Anthropology