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Photographs of the German and Soviet pavilions facing off at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 offer an iconic image of the interwar period, and with good reason. This image captures the interwar period's great conflict of ideologies, the international interconnectedness of the age and the aestheticisation of political and ideological conflict in the age of mass media and mass spectacle. [Figure 1] Last but not least, it captures the importance in the 1930s of what we now call cultural diplomacy. Both pavilions - Germany's, in Albert Speer's neo-classical tower bloc crowned with a giant swastika, and the Soviet Union's, housed in Boris Iofan's forward-thrusting structure topped by Vera Mukhina's monumental sculptural group - represented the outcome of a large-scale collaboration between political leaders and architects, artists, intellectuals and graphic and industrial designers seeking to present their country to foreign visitors in a manner designed to advance the country's interests in the international arena. Each pavilion, that is, made an outreach that was diplomatic - in the sense that it sought to mediate between distinct polities - using means that were cultural - in the sense that they deployed refined aesthetic practices (like the arts and architecture) and in the sense that they highlighted the distinctive features, or 'culture', of a particular group (like the German nation or the Soviet state).

From texts first published in 1972 up to her most recent work, this volume consists of seven articles that discuss Martha Nussbaum's work focusing on her treatments of ancient philosophy, civic education and liberal humanism. The volume provides a general overview of these three aspects of Nussbaum's philosophy and raises some concerns and critical questions about specific parts of her work. In addition, the volume is thematically organized; some articles deal with Nussbaum's readings and uses of ancient philosophers—specifically, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, respectively—while the others examine her views on liberal education, cosmopolitanism, human rights and aging. As one of our time's most influential philosophers, Martha Nussbaum displays the relevance of philosophy for contemporary political and ethical concerns. Engaging with her philosophical work brings to light some of the most pressing questions of our time.

This article explores some conditions and effects of the publishing of Lennart Nilsson's photographs of embryos and fetuses in magazines and other media. It looks especially at how these images related to the abortion controversies in Sweden in the wake of the first Abortion Act in 1938 and up to the second and still current legislation in 1974. During the period Nilsson contributed photographs to anti-abortion campaigns led by prominent doctors and supported by editors in the popular press. The embryos and fetuses depicted in the images were increasingly aestheticised and their human traits emphasised. After the 1965 publication of 'Drama of Life before Birth' in Life magazine and A Child is Born, however, his photo essays started to express a more positive view of abortion on demand. It is suggested that these shifting strategies and visual styles can be connected to the various interests of Nilsson and his collaborators. ; Medicine at the borders of life: Fetal research and the emergence of ethical controversy in Sweden

Since Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch in the 1920s, Hegelian Marxism has played a prominent role as a radical intellectual tradition in modern political theory. This anthology investigates how these Hegelian Marxists, in different historical, political and intellectual contexts during the last century, have employed Hegel's philosophy with the aim of developing and renewing Marxist theory. Besides Lukács and Korsch the volume includes articles dealing with the thoughts of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Evald Ilyenkov, Lucio Colletti and Slavoj Žižek. The overall purpose is to investigate if, and the degree to which, these thinkers could be interpreted as Hegelian Marxists, and how they use the Hegelian philosophy to better understand their own current society as well as situate themselves in relation to orthodox forms of Marxism. Taken together, the articles can hopefully contribute to an intensification of discussions about the critical and self-criticalphilosophy of Marxism today.

Vilka frågor inställer sig för den som vill närma sig fenomenet nationell identitet i ett långt historiskt perspektiv? Kanske en fråga om hur territoriell tillhörighet förstods före nationalstaten? Eller om hur gemenskap och samhörighet skapades och definierades i stadsstater respektive imperier? Hur rimligt är det rådande synsättet inom delar av forskarsamhället att nationalism och nationalkänsla i första hand är 1800-talsfenomen? Kan tvärvetenskapliga utgångspunkter bidra till förståelse av människans relation till gräns och territorium och av hennes behov av gemenskap? Sjutton i huvudsak doktorander i ämnena historia, idé- och lärdomshistoria, litteraturvetenskap och statsvetenskap närmar sig frågekomplexet i föreliggande essäer

Provenance – an object's history of ownership – is a historically contingent concept and research practice that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe. In a novel project examining the cases of Beda Dudík (Moravia/Austria), Carl Schirren (Livonia/Russia), and Franz Hipler (Warmia/East Prussia) ca. 1850–1900 I argue that, while the art market and nationalism are important, scholars representing regions with a suppressed past and present are key to understanding the relevance of provenance. Due to seventeenth-century plundering, these scholars were dependent on foreign archives and libraries when researching their regions' history. Their publications describing provenance research are the project's main sources. The analysis of these publications targets practices such as classification, a crucial tool as determined provenance equaled historical existence. Merging regional inferiority and transnational dependencies, diverse institutional settings, and political, religious, and scholarly ambitions, scrutinizing these cases reveals the needs and encounters that explain the rise of provenance. ; CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Background: The founders of Hereditas envisioned that race biology would be a major subject that had social applications with utmost importance in the near future. Anthropometrics was in this context understood to be the pure and eugenics the applied science. Sweden had a long tradition in physical anthropometry. Herman Lundborg, member of the advisory board of Hereditas, united the anthropometric and eugenic approaches in a synthesis. He was the first head of the Institute for Race Biology in Sweden. The contents of Hereditas reflect the development of race biology in the Nordic countries. Conclusions: The initial enthusiasm for applied race biology did not last long. In the 1920's Hereditas carried papers on both physical anthropology and eugenics. Most paper dealt, however, with human genetics without eugenic content. Two papers, published in 1921 and 1939 show how the intellectual climate had changed from positive to negative. Finally only human genetics prevailed as the legitimate study of the human race or humankind. A belated defense of eugenics published in 1951 did not help; geneticists had abandoned anthropometrics for good around the year 1940 and eugenics about a decade later. In spite of that, eugenic legislation was amended astonishingly late, in the 1970's. The development was essentially similar in all Nordic countries.

This paper aims to reflect on the special character of the cultural field in relation to politics, policies and the political system. We usually talk about the notion of "autonomy" as one decisive feature in this relation. But what exactly does that mean? The fundamental research question may be posed thus; why is cultural policy such an awkward matter for the politicians?Drawing in the Swedish experience from the 1960´s and on this paper will try to rethink the relationship and to dig further into this problematic issue. The history of the Swedish cultural policy discourse will provide empirical input for a more principal and theoretical discussion.I am now in the process of finalizing an update of my book from 2005; Kulturen som kulturpolitikens stora problem [Culture as the big problem of cultural policy]. The update is caused by the fact that a new parliamentary decision on Swedish cultural policy was taken in December 2009. It is, therefore, high time to add a chapter on the period from 1996, when my first book stopped. The events during this last period make good reasons to rethink and reflect on what kind of difficult matter "culture" is for politicians and the political system, as compared to, e g infrastructure or economic policies.Several questions will be addressed. Cultural policy is very slowly changed. Why is that? Are there special circumstances regarding the special case of the Swedish welfare state model? Or is this inertia to be accounted for by the "autonomy"? Can it be so, that there is a fundamental unruliness in the activities of the cultural field that makes it difficult for politicians to act? We have also the diverse and contested character of the concept of culture itself to reckon with in this context.The research method applied in the paper rests on a thorough empirical investigation into the Swedish discourse on cultural policy during the last century (from my 2005-book and from the research done for the update). Obviously these empirical data will only provide the basis for a more abstract discussion in the paper per se which will be utilizing adequate and relevant theoretical concepts.Hopefully this will lead to some new thoughts and ideas about this sometimes a bit precarious relation.

During today's crisis in Turkey, victimhood authorises oppression, oppressors see themselves as victims and the oppressed are not only the poor, but educated middle classes. Citizen and state are imbricated in the same political and discursive fields where people mobilise against one another, some moving up and others down, creating unexpected landscapes of victimisation and oppression that do not fit comfortably in literature that analyses 'politics from below'. How do we conceptualise this in a way that respects people's understanding of their coordinates in a complex landscape of power? This article interrogates some basic assumptions of this literature, including the impact of the observer's position and the oppression/resistance framework, replacing it with a model of politics as a shared horizontal topography of action across a terrain of values.