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The goal of this special issue of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research is to provide insights into the ways in which visibility and invisibility of migrants (or those perceived as migrants) to and from the Nordic countries can be understood theoretically and empirically. Scholars studying migrants and minorities have employed the terms “visible” and “invisible” in a variety of ways. In the North American context, researchers often use the terms in a descriptive manner (in contrast to an analytical use) when referring to various groups of ethnic or racial minorities or persons of migrant background. In the European context, on the other hand, the concepts of “visibility” and “invisibility” are more rarely employed by scholars, who are more inclined to use terms such as “ethnicity”, “nationality” or “culture” when making distinctions between groups of people based on their (supposed) origins. Nevertheless, European scholars – and to a lesser degree, Nordic scholars – have also utilized the vocabulary of in/visibility in different contexts, as we will show in this introduction. What seems to be missing, however, is a broader theoretical consideration of the usefulness of the term in/visibility when researching migrants and minority groups. We wish to contribute to this discussion in this special issue, focusing on the Nordic context. Not only are the terms “visible” and “invisible” used varyingly in different scholarly traditions, but state institutions and the media also make frequent use of the terms, albeit mainly in the North American context. The diffuse use of the term makes the task of defining in/visibility in a comprehensive manner rather challenging, perhaps even impossible, not least because the words carry different meanings and connotations in different national and linguistic settings. Nevertheless, we argue that an analytical focus on how certain groups and individuals become “visible” or “invisible”, for example in daily encounters with persons representing the “majority”, can shed light on processes of racialization in the Nordic context. Following Miles (1994: 109–114), we understand racialization as a social process through which (real or imagined) embodied and biological features become associated with certain meanings and values. This process results in individuals and groups being assigned to certain identity categories, which mark them as different from the “majority” and influence their everyday life in society. This special issue aims to critically assess the analytical purchase of the term in/visibility in understanding migration-related phenomena in the Nordic context. We argue that the focus on in/ visibility can help analyse how various processes of racialization and practices of “othering” come about and manifest themselves in Nordic societies. The four articles examine in/visibility in different realms: in personal relationships and everyday encounters between individuals (Guðjonsdottir 2014; Toivanen 2014), in events organized in the public sphere (Juul 2014) and at the level of media debates (Huhta 2014). By looking at these various realms, the special issue highlights how racialization is a significant mechanism through which certain groups of people are rendered more or less in/visible. This applies also to the Nordic context, where “race” has been a sensitive topic in scholarship on migration, as the recent debate between Annika Rabo and Rikke Andreassen in the Nordic Journal of Migration Research (2014) testifies. Following Andreassen, we maintain that a focus on “ethnicity” or “culture” fails to explain the social realities and inequities that many groups of migrants and minorities face in the contemporary Nordic region. Our focus on in/visibility will illuminate how “race”, understood as a socially constructed category, influences group position in Nordic societies in a forceful way – both in the case of groups that are racialized as visible (Toivanen 2014) and in the case of privileged individuals who due to their “whiteness” can pass as “one of us” in everyday interactions (Guðjonsdottir 2014). While we highlight the importance of analysing how individuals’ physical characteristics – or, to be more precise, the values and meanings associated with these characteristics – influence their Received 4 March 2014; Accepted 18 September 2014

Researching In/Visibility in the Nordic Context: <i>Theoretical and empirical views</i>