Denmark: Identity, Segregation, and Social Cohesion centers one school community whose reality is emblematic of Scandinavian integration challenges yet often misrepresented by vitriolic political discourse.
Denmark's hard-line shift on immigration in recent years has received international criticism, chiefly for its efforts to clamp down on the people the government calls "non-Western" residents. For the first time, the country now plans to address school segregation—by tasking schools with students of so-called "non-Western" origin to attract "Western" students. But beyond the political talking points and broad policy goal to rid the country of "parallel societies" lies the country's next generation, the youth whose identities are being forged, and effaced, along the way.
