Resisting (Un)Accountability: Rhetorical Strategies of Forgetting Denmark’s IUD Campaign in Greenland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how colonial amnesia manifests rhetorically in media representations and public discourse about Denmark’s IUD campaign in Greenland. Beginning in the mid-1960s, this state-led initiative systematically targeted Greenlandic Inuit girls and women, fitting them with IUDs as part of a nationwide birth control campaign, some without their consent or knowledge. During the campaign’s most intensive years from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, approximately 4,500 girls and women – half of the fertile female population – were subjected to this reproductive violence. The spiral campaign was largely forgotten by the Danish public until an investigative podcast, Spiralkampagnen, brought it to public attention in May 2022. Over five episodes, two Danish journalists narrate the campaign’s violence, drawing on archival materials and interviews with Greenlandic Inuit women. Through a rhetorical analysis of the podcast Spiralkampagnen and the public discourse that followed its release, I identify multiple rhetorical strategies of “forgetting” that sustain Denmark’s colonial amnesia by obscuring the campaign’s colonial underpinnings. This amnesia, I argue, is both enabled by and reinforces the national-sentimental narrative of Denmark as a benevolent colonial caretaker – a story that continues to shape the Danish public imagination. These rhetorical strategies, regardless of intent, downplay the colonial logics that enabled the campaign and allow the state to evade accountability for its enduring consequences. By tracing how colonial amnesia manifests in discourse, this thesis shows how contemporary framings of the spiral campaign both reflect and reinforce dominant narratives of national innocence, hindering efforts to confront colonial legacies and address their ongoing impacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".