Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a new scholarly outlet that seeks to bring together innovative work on the topic of mixed race in the United States and abroad.

Numerous scholarly works have been published on the topic of multiraciality and mixed-race experiences in the United States and Great Britain. There has historically been limited research on Nordic Europe. This analysis contextualizes the importance of the articles in this special issue, which seek to help further research on Nordic Europe in terms of critical mixed race studies.

In March of 2016, German right-wing nationalist-populist political party Alternative für Deutschland took the second and third largest seat shares across three state-level elections. These electoral successes, in combination with the rise of anti-immigrant groups such as PEGIDA, have prompted a renewal of public discussion about what constitutes Germanness and who can really be German. This thesis engages with these two questions formulated thusly: (1) what does it mean to be a German national, and (2) to what extent do German citizenship and naturalization policies promote national exclusion? Drawing on the literature on nation and citizenship, this thesis takes a comparative historical approach to understanding German national exclusion by examining changes to the German national over time as well as taking a cross-sectional approach to contemporary legal developments. The first section draws on citizenship law in combination with popular debates over the content of the German national in order to construct an understanding of what it means to be German and how citizenship law produced and maintained legal boundaries around the national community. Further data includes analysis of the content of the citizenship test, which was introduced in 2007, and workbooks used in integration courses, introduced in 2004, both of which contribute to understanding how Ausländer are expected to “integrate.” The consensus understanding of the German nation and nationalism is currently that Germany is a nation-state that established itself through ethnic nationalism that has been shifting more towards civic nationalism. Ultimately, this study finds support, however, for the presence of longstanding barriers to citizenship predicated on being culturally national. Most notably, this study finds that what it means to be national is now cast in terms of Western liberal-democratic norms, which allows for and encourages essentialist distinctions between Occident and Orient.

Astrology has persisted in social life for nearly 5,000 years. It involves a variety of practices and philosophies and has a deep history. Yet, in popular and academic discourse, the conversation typically revolves around scientific veracity and belief. However, using a grounded theory methodology, i.e. 20 semi-structured interviews with casual astrology participants and survey data from over 300 people, this study found the main driver of engagement towards astrology was gender. In short, participants identified “women”, “girls”, “females” and/or “ladies” as those who (and thus implicitly why) engage in astrology most often. This finding was born out not only in interviews but via data collection as well as in the literature. However powerful a finding though, such a fact flies in the face of 4,000 - 5,000 years of astrological practitioners who appear to be almost all male. Therefore, the question becomes what precipitated such a massive sea change in astrological culture? Through a review of the extant literature in astrology and gender, it appears that women into psychology and the popularity of astrology crossed paths at the fringes during their development around the turn of the 20th century. This appears to be the beginning of such a formulation of astrology as a female interest. By following these threads, this thesis submits that astrology became a female (read as: “feminine”) interest because it became intrinsically tied to introspective psychology through legal forces, societal pressures catalyzed by an assertive masculinity paradigm. This in addition to the rise of the first famous US astrologer who just so happened to be a woman - Evangeline Adams. Later in the 20th century, we see the concretization of astrology as a female interest in popular culture through New Age ideas, books and in academic literature. In our contemporary moment, the conversation about astrology and gender is ongoing but no historical contextualization in any of these regards is given. This project attempts to fill the lacuna from which everyone talks of but no one identifies - astrology as a gendered and social phenomenon. In the end, I propose a new field of study - the sociology of astrology - which minimizes the role of belief and scientific accuracy and highlights the social relationships to a phenomenon that has persisted for millennia and feels to be currently rising in popularity once more.