Constructing the ‘Diversity Problem'

Policy Evolution and Educational Approaches in Norwegian Immigration Discourse (2015-2025)

Abstract

This article examines how Norwegian governmental discourse constructs diversity as a policy problem across immigration, integration, and educational domains, revealing fundamental contradictions that position teachers as “unwilling mitigators” of state-produced tensions between inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on Bacchi's (2009) "What's the Problem Represented to Be?" (WPR) framework and Povinelli's (2011) theory of late liberal governance, I analyze eight policy documents and one government webpage published between 2015 and 2025, including government white papers, integration policy, the core curriculum, and action plans against antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism. The analysis reveals how the same government simultaneously mandates that teachers support students as they maintain and build on their identities within inclusive and diverse environments while also requiring students to conform to Norwegian values – including implicitly held social norms – within a society to which they do not yet fully belong. This contradiction intensifies when examining how the government produces racialized welfare stigma while mandating teachers combat racism. I argue that this is not policy incoherence but rather a constitutive feature of late liberal governance (Povinelli, 2011), where Norway's "peace nation" identity and generous welfare state depend on restrictive immigration policy and exclusionary discourse toward non-citizens. Teachers, positioned at the structural hinge between visible inclusion and hidden exclusion, cannot resolve contradictions they did not create and are not given the language to name. The article contributes to understanding how democratic education becomes structurally impossible when immigration policy produces the very prejudices educational mandates charge teachers with dismantling.