Ekern's latest publication is the concluding chapter in an anthology called "Norge i Latin-Amerika. Forbindelser og forestillinger" and was written in collaboration with Jemima García-Godos, formerly at NCHR, now at the Department of Human Geography and Sociology. The chapter is called "Norske bilder av Latin-Amerika: Kan stereotypier overvinnes?".
As the title suggests, it is an analysis of the popular images about Latin America that circulate in Norwegian discourse about Latin America. We point to how pictures of deep inequalities, widespread poverty and authoritarian rulers, always in the shadow of US imperialism, remain surprisingly stable even as the region go through profound political change. To explain this stability we use an analogue idea from cognitive psychology about how the brain operates when recognizing fixed patterns. New research on the Rorschach test indicates how the degree of detail is decisive for what a person "sees" when confronted with a Rorschach inkblot. We do not need to see more than what is necessary in order to handle a situation. Latin America is so far from Norway that we do not really need more than rather generalized or vaguely contoured ideas about what is going in order to be "in control" of a relatively unimportant place. The lasting stereotypes in question are at this level of detail. In order to overcome them, either more detail or less detail would be needed in e.g. Norwegian media coverage of the continent.