Mette Evelyn Bjerre
Eve is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity and the Institute for Latino Studies. Eve is also a 2020-21 Dissertation Fellow with the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Eve joined the Department after receiving her MA in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2014. She earned her BA in Politics and International Studies with a minor in Race and Culture from Middlesex University and an MSc in Global Politics from Birkbeck, University of London.
One strand of Eve’s work focuses on the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM college majors. She has used qualitative methods to examine the barriers to developing a science identity among multiracial students, the importance of career perceptions and aspirations for completion of STEM degrees, and on expressions of colour-blind ideology and belief in a meritocracy in STEM college majors.
Eve’s dissertation research focuses on racialisation processes and multiracial identities in Denmark. Historically, Nordic Europe has been overwhelmingly white but undergone significant demographic changes due to immigration from the European Union (EU), non-European countries, and increasing intermarriage rates during the last four decades. In response to increasing diversity, Denmark now has the most punitive immigration laws in the EU and a decidedly anti-immigration socio-political climate and public discourse. Despite the increase in racial diversity, race is notably absent from the public discourse.
In place of a racial vocabulary, politicians and scholars substitute talking about race with ‘colour-blind’ and ‘race-neutral’ language, which result in a public discourse where the corporeality or race goes unrecognised. Taking these factors into account, Eve investigates how an increasing population of Ethnic-Danes with one immigrant parent come to embody a racial identity by way of navigating their mixed identity in a socio-political context where race is not a recognised social category.
