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There is a strong narrative on how the humanities were marginalized in postwar Sweden: in the land of engineers, technocrats and social scientists, there was no room for erudition, philosophy and history. This book challenges such a notion and shows how clearly the humanities were present in the public sphere of the time. By applying perspectives from the history of knowledge, the authors illustrate how humanists were key figures in the welfare society's culture and politics, media and book market, education and intellectual debate.
At the heart of the book is the public sphere of the 1960s and 1970s. In a first part, the authors highlight how humanists played a decisive role in the young television's educational program as well as in the popular science paperback publishing of the time and on the essay pages in the newspapers. In a second part, attention is drawn to the humanities' place in the Christian cultural sphere, the labour movement's education work and the New Left's book cafés. We meet people like Per I. Gedin, Gunnel Vallquist and Jan-Öjvind Swahn, but also TV producers, study circle organizers, translators of radical non-fiction and many others. They all helped to set humanistic knowledge in motion during the postwar decades.
Against an international background, the image of a humanistic knowledge system with deep roots and wide connections in Swedish society emerges. It is about these actors and arenas of knowledge that this book is about.

Today's society is often characterized as a knowledge society, in contrast to the earlier industrial society. Historians however know that all societies are and have been knowledge societies. Without the ability to create, transfer, and use knowledge, between individuals and groups, power areas would neither have been built nor maintained. This edited volume reflects how historical actors, both those in power as well as laymen and officials, have produced and utilised information and knowledge from the Middle Ages until today. It acommodates research into census, urbanisation, history of kings and queens, exercise of public authority, social and political movements, disciplining and formation of opinion.
In Kunskapens tider. Historiska perspektiv på kunskapssamhället ("The knowledge society. A historical perspective") nine researchers from the Department of History at Stockholm University contribute with examples of the need for and use of knowledge, in different historical situations and periods. - Dagens samhälle karaktäriseras ofta som kunskapssamhället, till skillnad från det tidigare industrisamhället. Historiker vet dock att alla samhällen är och har varit kunskapssamhällen: Utan möjligheter att skapa, överföra och använda kunskap, såväl individer som grupper emellan, hade maktområden varken kunnat byggas eller vidmakthållas. Antologin speglar hur historiska aktörer, såväl makthavare som lekmän och tjänstemän, har producerat och utnyttjat information och kunskap från medeltiden till idag. Här ryms forskning om folkräkning, urbanisering, kungars historieskrivning, myndighetsutövning, sociala och politiska rörelser, disciplinering och opinionsbildning.
I Kunskapens tider bidrar nio medarbetare från Historiska institutionen vid Stockholms universitet med exempel på hur behovet och användandet av kunskap sett ut i olika historiska situationer och tidsperioder.

It is well known that Sweden once had a state institute for racial biology, as well as that extensive racial research was conducted in Sweden during the first decades of the 20th century. But what actually happened to Swedish race research after the 1930s - did it just disappear? In The science that disappeared? historian Martin Ericsson conducts the first systematic survey of Swedish race research from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s. It is a story of a racial science that survived the horrors of World War II and endured longer than we might like to believe as criticism grew in the post-war period. And about the Norwegian Institute for Racial Biology, which was never shut down, but lived on in a different form and under a different name. Ericsson shows that there was not a single Swedish racial research tradition, but two. One was based on the first director of the Institute of Racial Biology, Herman Lundborg, and had clear connections to Nazism and other extreme right-wing movements. The second can be said to be based on Lundborg's successor Gunnar Dahlberg and was instead anti-Nazi and in some cases even anti-racist. But both traditions agreed that there were different human races and that it made sense to try to measure differences between them. By following the Swedish race research until the end of the 20th century, the book also raises important questions about our own time and its interest in ""origin"" and ""descent"". How fundamentally different are today's dna analyzes from the old racial research traditions? What if we risk asking the same questions as 1930s racial biology stuck with new techniques?

The thesis of this article is that logic/science does not exclude but requires knowledge of rhetoric. Rhetoric is not merely a technique for persuasion but, more importantly, a science of how we structure our knowledge through language. Logic & science are nothing but instruments that natural language constructs to handle observable factual circumstances, something that became possible with the invention of the alphabet & written language. A positivistic, reductive science is suitable only by research on given facts. Alongside the knowledge of facts, we must also handle the knowledge of action, which is impossible to do only with the positivistic methods of conventional social science. Drawing on his personal experiences of municipal politics & communal planning the author suggests that rhetorical conceptions & methods of research can play a big role in community planning research & in sciences of man, which necessarily brings facts & actions together. The article refers to a rhetorical based theory called 'human-scientific theory of action.' While science helps us to know (knowledge of causes), rhetoric helps us to understand (knowledge of intentions & meanings). 40 References. Adapted from the source document.

Confidence and corruption in Swedish municipalities Corruption in public institutions can seriously undermine trust and cooperation. Corruption prevention requires an understanding of the mechanisms which cause individuals to engage in corrupt behavior. Against this background there is a need to determine which types of institutions can stop confidence and cooperation from degenerating into distrust and corruption. Traditionally Sweden and its institutions have been seen as relatively free of corruption. In recent years, increasing media coverage and expert reports suggest that corruption in Sweden is increasing, but how accurate is this perception? Greater empirical knowledge is needed concerning the scope and nature of corruption as well as the extent, if at all, it is increasing. Many corruption studies have focused on countries in transition from a non-democratic to a democratic form of government. Literature has therefore focused on how trust and cooperation can arise out of situations characterized by the opposite. However, a useful corruption theory ought to be able to account for how corrupt behavior can vary over time. It has been pointed out that researchers lack a commonly accepted theory that would explain both how trust and cooperation arise and how they break down. The article's authors describe how, in their upcoming project, they propose to address this question. Adapted from the source document.

This thesis is about Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) practice in Sweden. Impact Assessment (IA) is expected to play a crucial role in enabling democratic and enlightened decision making. EIA practice seems however not to be in accordance with best IA practice norms and legislation in many countries. We therefore need a more thorough understanding of IA practice and its outcomes and about what is gained through EIA and thus also be able to suggest, on a more profound basis, how the practice can be improved. This thesis presents an analysis of the two cases EIA practice on cumulative effects and the final disposal for spent nuclear fuel. The methods and approaches used are qualitatively and include literature review, document analysis, individual interviews and focus group interviews. The results were analysed using social psychology theory and community of practice theory. The case of cumulative effects clearly demonstrated that a positive attitude towards including cumulative effects was in place, but the conditions to change the knowledge base were not. In the investigated case for a final disposal for spent nuclear fuel it was revealed that a shared practice and social learning over time might result in difficulties for the authority in mapping out a clear role and identity for itself in relation to the proponent. It also showed that the shared practice that has developed between the industry, and the competent authorities, has over time resulted in the adoption of a shared understanding and similar perspectives, concerning at least two points. The first concerns downgrading the need to more thoroughly investigate alternate technical methods to the main alternative, while the second concerns the need to avoid delays in the planning process. Communication and the shared practice that has developed over a long period of time, can have a significant and not necessarily positive impact on power relations and thus hamper knowledge production, diffusion of roles and identities.

The Stockholm Conference 1972 drew the world's attention to the global environmental crisis. To the inhabitants of Sweden, however, this threat to the planet and to humanity was nothing new. Anyone who regularly read newspapers, listened to the radio, or watched the television news would have encountered the issues. Five years earlier, in the summer of 1967, things were very different. At that time, it was not at all self-evident that humans were in the process of destroying their own living environment. Hence, in a short period of time, a radical change took place: an 'environmental turn'. It had major and far-reaching consequences. But what was it that opened people's eyes to the environmental crisis? When did it happen? Who set the ball rolling? And what does this historical process mean for us today? David Larsson Heidenblad's book sheds new light on the emergence of modern environmentalism in Sweden and provides fresh insight to challenges that concerns us all.

Is it really meaningful to talk about "good" science? We hesitate. We desire good (state) science stumbling near a positivist scientific view. We wish for political science theory -- and practice as much as possible to emulate natural science theory and methodology -- to be objective, to look for hard facts, causal relationships, universal laws, and by using the "right" methods to reach the "right" or "true" knowledge and thus make us the "real" knowledge producers. At the same time we believe it is important to keep the discussion on good science not only alive but also always ongoing. Perhaps this is an ongoing discussion about our research efforts and research ideals of what constitutes good science? It is our guiding principle when we formulated the following manifesto for the good of science. Adapted from the source document.

In a world of permanent change, traditional language teaching methods do not solve the communicative needs in foreign languages ​​that favor knowledge and adaptation to changing educational contexts. The CLIL method is widely used to develop skills both in the learning language and in other areas of knowledge, it allows for the strengthening of teaching capacities to assume the teaching of contents of the different subjects in a foreign language. The objective of this bibliographic review is to collect significant and existing information on the CLIL method and contribution of this method in the educational field. The documentary descriptive approach of recent research related to the subject of study is used, based on the theoretical foundations of bilingual education. The literature review shows that by teaching the foreign language as a vehicle to instruct content from other subjects, students understand the need to learn the language to seize the knowledge of the subject and allows teachers to explore their own teaching context, reflect and identify factors that can improve their teaching practice, especially in the inclusion of writing activities in English.

Public catering can have a considerable environmental and educational impact. A scenario of more legume and less meat consumption in Sweden was in the present study used as a tool to explore the possibilities of Swedish public school meals to become more sustainable. Strong structuration theory provided a focus on organisational structure and stakeholder influence, enabling a holistic view of the issue at hand. A literature review, on the topics of successful implementation of sustainability projects within public catering and individual agency within school meals, provided a knowledge base from which an online survey and a guide for complementary interviews were built. The survey was aimed at municipal dietary managers and assessed their experiences of working with sustainable school meals and their attitudes towards the dietary scenario. Furthermore, the survey tried out a way of measuring how much legumes and meat are served in school canteens. The complementary interviews focused on individual actors' perceived agency to act for sustainable change. The results suggest that the study participants in general have both the knowledge and interest to make school meals more sustainable. They also saw the more legumes dietary scenario as desirable. Complicating factors are that the priorities of catering organisations and schools are often not well aligned, and resources are lacking to work on collaborations to improve this. It is also often unclear who has the responsibility to make sure teaching on sustainability is carried over from the classroom to the canteen. Individual agents with a high motivation to make positive change can be important drivers of sustainability projects, but for a change such as significantly greener school meals to take place, a whole food culture needs to change. Educational efforts and finding ways of engaging multiple stakeholders in the decisions are needed to this end. Unambiguous political goals, with adequate action plans, would give structure to the work on more sustainable school meals. Finding ways of quantifying and comparing sustainability efforts between municipalities would draw attention to the importance of the matter. The approach that was tried out in the present study however proved to be too impractical to use.