This lecture examines how credibility is assigned in Nordic cultural spaces through tone expectations, demands for legibility, and institutional neutrality as performance. It maps how professionalism operates as a racialised sorting mechanism and offers a framework for recognising extraction disguised as interpretation.
The lecture will be held in English. The event is free and open for all, no pre-registration needed.
Lovette Jallow is a two-time author and nine-time award-winning speaker, strategist, and advisor based in Stockholm. Published by Norstedts and Bonnier, her writing focuses on Scandinavia and Blackness, including how Nordic institutions assign credibility, belonging, and legibility to Black people and communities. She is the Founder and Chair of Action for Humanity Sweden, providing activist and organisational leadership grounded in structural accountability. Her work spans Black cultural analysis, neurodivergence, institutional accountability, and narrative power across public education, policy, corporate advisory, and arts programming. Her current research examines precolonial African epistemologies, griot knowledge systems, and the historical framing of disability and neurodivergence, connecting these lineages to present-day Nordic institutions and the politics of credibility in Scandinavia.
This event is part of the June Exhibition 2026: Shifting Coordinates, a month-long institutional takeover transforming Kunstnerforbundet into a discursive platform centering Black Nordic artistic production across visual art, writing, film, and workshops. Shifting Coordinates is curated by the collective Peer Review, a collective platform for cultural analysis across Black visual culture for and by Africans and its diaspora in Oslo, established in 2024. Read more about the exhibition here.
Image: Lovette Jallow. Photo: King Kunta © Lovette Jallow
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Shifting Coordinates has received support from the Norwegian Visual Artists Fund (BKV), The City of Oslo, Balansekunst – Balansepotten, The Finnish-Norwegian Cultural Institute (FINNO), The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, Talent Norway, and the Fritt Ord Foundation.
