Welcome
I am a social anthropologist and an associate professor of social science at VID Specialized University in Oslo, Norway. My research and teaching spans the sociology of religion, youth research, and social work.
I am currently engaged as a postdoctoral researcher in a project on religion and Roma social inclusion in Romania and Norway. Previously, I have conducted research on religion and youth in Nordic and African countries. My research is published and forthcoming in peer reviewed journals and edited volumes, and I have also presented my work at international conferences and seminars.
I teach the social sciences and a course called Worldviews, Values and Relations in Professional Practice for social work students at VID. I also supervise students writing bachelor, master, and PhD theses on different topics.
Research
I am currently engaged in an EEA funded research project on religion and Roma social inclusion in Romania and Norway. Previously, I have conducted research on religion and youth in Nordic and African countries. My most recently completed research project was a desk study on the The Islamic Council of Norway’s coronavirus information material. I have also conducted fieldwork with local youth and religious organisations in suburban Oslo and at an elite boarding school in Kenya. This is a list of forthcoming, published, and completed research output.
Articles and book chapters
Four co-authored chapters on youth marginalisation and faith-based organisations in Finland, Norway and South Africa
In Stuck in the Margins? Young people and faith-based organisations in South African and Nordic localities, edited by I. Swart, A. Vähäkangas, M. Rabe and A. Leis-Peters. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, forthcoming.
Details
This edited volume is the main result of Youth at the Margins (YOMA), a Nordic-South African research project on marginalised youth and faith-based organisations. The volume features theoretical background chapters, empirical case studies from Finland, Norway, and South Africa, and chapters engaging in comparative analysis of the case studies. I have contributed to four chapters on NEET as a comparative conceptualisation of youth marginalisation (Chapter 2), the contexts of youths’ lives in South Africa and the Nordic countries (Chapter 3), youth marginalisation and faith-based organisations in Søndre Nordstrand in Oslo (Chapter 7), and comparative reflections on youth marginalisation in South Africa and the Nordic countries (Chapter 12).
Expected publication in mid 2021. Please check back later for access details.
Aalan’s story: Waithood, capital, and categories of youth research and policy in young people’s lives
B. H. Holte
In Journal of Applied Youth Studies 4(2): 185-200, 2021.
Abstract
This article presents a young man living in Oslo, Norway, who had been a street youth, a youth at risk, and a young man not in education, employment, or training (NEET). The young man himself did not use any of these categories when he told me his story; he used other words. The article analyses his story by drawing on approaches to time, life story, and biography in youth research; the distinction between different forms of capital; and the concepts waithood and waiting from the research on youth in African countries. Thus, the article illustrates how concepts such as waithood and waiting can contribute to analyses that are sensitive to young people’s situations and the solutions they devise, especially when coupled with attention to the often limited capital available to individual young people. The discussion compares the categories the young man used with the relevant categories of youth research and policy. Thus, the article shows how the young man shifted from being part of a hyper-visible category of youth at risk to being part of an invisible category of NEET young people, with consequences for his access to benefits and services from the welfare state. The article shows how categories of youth research and policy can impact young people’s lives even when they do not use those categories themselves. This points towards a need to understand how categories of youth research and policy interact with the categories young people use and other factors to shape their stories and lives.
Go to the journal’s website to access the published version, read an open view-only version, or download the author’s accepted manuscript from this website.
Covid-19 and The Islamic Council of Norway: The Social Role of Religious Organizations
B. H. Holte
In Diaconia 11(1): 51-70, 2021.
Abstract
The new coronavirus came to Norway along with vacationers returning from Italy and Austria in February 2020. In less than a month, the demographic profile of the individuals infected by the virus changed from the privileged to the less privileged and from people born in Norway to immigrants from certain mostly Muslim-majority countries. This article presents how The Islamic Council of Norway (ICN) produced and distributed information material about the coronavirus in the early phase of the pandemic in Norway. Further, it examines how the ICN’s informational material reflects particular ideas about the social role of religious organizations. The empirical material analyzed in the article stems from media reports, government press releases, and information material published online; the analysis is inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society. The results show dedifferentiation occurring as the ICN linked religion to politics and health as well as how the ICN links the Norwegian national public with a transnational Muslim public. Thus, this article shows how different ideas of the religious and the secular as well as of the national and the transnational coexist in Norway. The discussion relates this to theories about the social role of religion and religious organizations, focusing particularly on the concept of religious organizations as public spaces. The article contributes to a metatheoretical reflection on religious social practice. It also employs and tests alternative theoretical understandings of integration and social cohesion. The results are relevant for practitioners and analysts of religious social practice in modern, secular, and diverse social contexts.
Go to the journal’s website to access the published version of the article. The article is open access.
Religion and integration: Religious organisations’ communication in a diverse city district of Oslo, Norway
B. H. Holte
In Journal of Contemporary Religion 35(3): 449-468, 2020.
Abstract
This article asks whether and how religious organisations contribute to integration in a diverse city district of Oslo. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society and his work on religion, it argues that the question requires an analysis of how the religious organisations are integrated into different social systems, as well as of how people are included in them. With regards to the inclusion of people, the article suggests that not more than half of the city district’s population were members in local religious organisations and that the religious organisations may not have targeted excluded groups, as Luhmann suggested they might. Focusing on how the religious organisations were integrated into different social systems, the article finds that the religious organisations were engaged in local communities within the city district, with local public authorities and welfare service providers, and in religious networks that spanned the city, the country, and the world. The article concludes that the religious organisations in the city district were part of a global religious system and mostly communicated in non-religious ways locally. The religious organisations’ contribution to integration must be understood in relation to communication on a global scale and across the secular/religious divide.
Go to the journal’s website to access the published version of the article.
The NEET concept in comparative youth research: The Nordic countries and South Africa
B. H. Holte, I. Swart and H. Hiilamo
In Journal of Youth Studies 22(2): 256-272, 2019.
Abstract
The NEET concept has become widely used internationally since its emergence in the UK almost two decades ago. This article reviews the adoption of the concept in two extreme contexts in terms of NEET rates, youth opportunities and youth welfare: the Nordic countries and South Africa. The article discusses the situations of NEET young people in the two contexts, and how the concept is used in the wealthy and relatively homogenous Nordic welfare states and in relatively poorer and racially divided South Africa. While the concept has been problematised in different ways in Nordic youth research, it has been more readily accepted by South African researchers. We argue that, in both contexts, the NEET concept can be taken as an invitation to look beyond individual life situations and biographies, and to focus on how structural forces such as the political economy shape young people’s lives. The NEET concept provides a way of discussing changing opportunity structures and how global social forces such as globalisation and neoliberalisation shape young people’s lives in different contexts. The NEET concept is useful in comparative youth research.
Go to the journal’s website to access the published version or download the author’s accepted manuscript from this website.
Counting and Meeting NEET Young People: Methodology, perspective, and meaning in research on marginalized youth
B. H. Holte
In YOUNG 26(1): 1-16, 2018.
Abstract
The concept of ‘not in education, employment, or training’ (NEET) has gained wide usage in youth research over the last two decades. This article reviews the concept’s background and discusses how it is linked to population statistics. Drawing on literature within the fields of anthropology, sociology, and educational research, as well as field research conducted in Norway, the article discusses how, by meeting young people categorized as NEET for interviews and participant observation, researchers can address other aspects of their lives than have been counted. Researchers who meet young people find that the concept means different things in everyday speech than in published research. The article concludes by suggesting how research based on meeting young people categorized as NEET can contribute to a body of knowledge that has mainly been produced by counting NEET young people.
Go to the journal’s website to access the published version or download the author’s accepted manuscript from this website.
A third mode of engagement with the excluded other: Student volunteers from an elite boarding school in Kenya
B. H. Holte
In Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa, edited by R. Prince and H. Brown. James Currey, 2016.
Summary
This chapter is based on ethnographic research among students from an international boarding school in Kenya who volunteer at a Bible Club for children from poor families. I show how volunteering as encounters across vast socioeconomic differences feeds into the formation of the students as privileged subjects. I understand volunteering in relation to two other modes of engagement with the ‘people outside the gates’ of the school that are commonly portrayed in the anthropological literature on gated communities: their exclusion as peril and their inclusion as labour. Volunteering works to a very different effect from these. While volunteering, the students relate to the children as members of a public towards which they have responsibilities but of which they are not themselves part. Volunteering thereby affirms the students’ privilege and instils dispositions for loving and responsible exercise of it in them.
Go to the publisher’s website or JSTOR for access options.
Presentations
Covid-19 and The Islamic Council of Norway: The Social Role of Religious Organisations
B. H. Holte
At The 8th Conference for Research in Diaconia and Christian Social Practice (ReDi): Diaconia as Gamechanger? Leadership of Service in Times of Crisis, Complexity and Transformation. VID Specialized University, Oslo, 17 September 2020.
COVID-19 and Immigrants in Norway: The role of religious organisations
B. H. Holte
At 3IN Alliance online conference: Responses to COVID-19 – a Transnational View. University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, 15 May 2020.
The meaning, identities and inclusion of NEET young people in Norway
B. H. Holte
At International Seminar: Young NEETs and the Youth Guarantee Program. Social Sciences Institute, University of Lisbon, 18 June 2018.
Religious organizations’ role for marginalized youth in South Africa
B. H. Holte
At Workshop on African Initiated Churches and Sustainable Development. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 6 June 2017.
Religious organizations and social integration
B. H. Holte
At Department of Sociology, UNISA, Pretoria, 28 March 2017.
Understanding youth marginalisation through NEET: A South African – Nordic European exchange of perspectives
I. Swart and B. H. Holte
At ReDi Biannual Conference. Diak, Helsinki, 16 September 2016.
Them and us. Reflections about how religious organizations perceive young people at the margins in a multi-cultural city district of Oslo
B. H. Holte and K. K. Korslien
At ReDi Biannual Conference. Diak, Helsinki, 16 September 2016.
Religion as communication
B. H. Holte
At Socrel Annual Conference. Lancaster University, 13 July 2016.
Theses
Religion and social cohesion: Youth exclusion and religious organisations in a super-diverse city district of Oslo, Norway
B. H. Holte
Doctoral thesis no. 11. VID Specialized University, 2018.
Abstract
The thesis reviews and problematises how social scientists have understood social cohesion. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society, the thesis proposes ‘communicational permeability’ as an alternative definition and conceptualisation of social cohesion. This concept is used to discuss empirical research from Oslo, asking how the religious organisations’ activities and engagements for youth in a super-diverse city district contribute to social cohesion as communicational permeability. The thesis discusses this in relation to Luhmann’s work on religion and the work of José Casanova and Peter Beyer, as well as recent research on religious organisations’ social role in the Nordic countries.
The thesis is available from VID:Open.
St. Andrew's, Turi: Forming Subjects and Affects for Privilege in Kenya
B. H. Holte
Master thesis. University of Oslo, 2013.
Abstract
This thesis is based on six months of fieldwork at and near St. Andrew's School in the Rift Valley in Kenya from January to July 2012. The ethnographic material that I present and my analyses both concern two related topics.
The first topic is the production and reproduction of social differences in Kenya. A private, formerly racially exclusive European school, St. Andrew's has been a domain of privilege since it was opened in 1931. I first present a historical ethnography of how children of (mostly) propertied European parents in colonial East Africa were separated from the children of poor Europeans as well as Africans in early colonial Kenya. I then comment on how this has changed over the passage of time and provide a detailed ethnographic description of the current practices of separation. I address both spatial and social separation in the form of enclaving and discursive practices that construct others as different.
The second main topic of this thesis is the effect on the students at St. Andrew's of being raised and educated in this context: the processes of subject formation at St. Andrew's. I approach this through a Foucaultian anthropology of ethics and recent anthropological theory on affects. I suggest that this must be understood in relation to the vast differences in lifestyle and income between the students families and other Kenyans, and my analysis shows how the students at St. Andrew's are physically and socially removed from the Kenyan national public to be integrated into a partial and hierarchical alternative public through practices such as volunteering.
In my conclusion, I indicate how the two topics can be merged to address how the history of St. Andrew's influences the current student as the inheritors of Kenyan privilege.
The thesis is available from UiO DUO.
Reviews
T. Vold. 2019. Å lese verden. Fra imperieblikk og postkolonialisme til verdenslitteratur og økokritikk
B. H. Holte
In Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift 31(1): 147-150, 2020.
Go to the journal’s website to read the review (in Norwegian). The review is open access.
Peer Reviews
I do peer reviews for academic journals and publishers. I have reviewed manuscripts for Young, Journal of Youth Studies, Journal of Applied Youth Studies, PLOS One, Religion & Development, and Review of Development Economics, as well as other journals and edited volumes.
Teaching
Since 2018, I have taught at the Faculty of Socil Studies at VID Specialized University in Oslo. I teach the social sciences at the bachelor programme in social work and a course called Worldviews, Values and Relations in Professional Practice at the master programme in social work. I also supervise students writing bachelor, master, and PhD theses on different topics.
I am an international coordinator at the Faculty of Social Studies at VID, in which capacity I am involved in the 3IN Alliance of European higher education institutions. (You can read about one of our projects on the 3IN blog.)
Earlier teaching
In 2020, I contributed to planning and teaching a seminar on The Joys and Woes of Interdisciplinary Research for PhD students in The Research School Religion Values Society, a researcher school funded by the Research Council of Norway.
In addition to teaching and supervising social work students, I taught and supervised students at the bachelor programme in social studies and the master programmes in intercultural work and global studies at VID Specialized University through 2018. My first teaching experience was as a seminar tutor in development studies and social anthropology at the University of Oslo in 2011-2013.
I have also held guest lectures at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord (2021), MF Norwegian School of Theology (2017) and the University of Pretoria (2017).
