Suchergebnisse

In the book Anti-Racisms and Anti-Racists. Realistic utopias, tensions and everyday experiences, 24 researchers explore how resistance to various forms of racism is pursued and embodied among groups of people who dream beyond racism in a variety of ways, often contradictory, rarely successful, but always stubborn and forward-looking. The anthology illustrates the breadth of anti-racism, but also analyses its problems and weaknesses.
Inspired by anti-, post- and decolonial traditions, among others, together with social movement perspectives, the anthology challenges a static and essentialising approach found in research and policy that tends to emphasise the stability and immutability of inequality, even in the case of racism.
In addition to a variety of concrete analyses and descriptions of historical and contemporary activism, the various authors also show the possibilities of anti-racism and can thus provide some hope, in these dark times, for those who want a society without racism.
Academic co-ordinator is Mattias Gardell, Uppsala universitet.

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?

When Anna Johanna Grill travelled from Sweden to England in 1788, she was impressed by the vast array of consumer goods in shops. In her travel diary, she writes how the shopkeepers displayed goods in myriad of ways that fooled people into shopping. How did shops look like in Anna Johanna Grill's hometown Stockholm in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century? Were there distinctive shopping streets? Who sold goods, who shopped them and what goods were available? How were goods displayed in shops and marketed? How households act in organising their purchases and consumption?
From a microhistorical case studies, this richly illustrated anthology widens the perspective to social, economic and cultural practices in everyday urban life. The chapters demonstrate how shopping streets and shops with their range of silk fabrics, accessories, fashion plates, blacksmithing, wigs and hair pomades not only met the desires of consumers, but also enabled dreams of novel identities and social accession for themselves and their families.

Among the literature aimed at students of art science and other image-interpreting sciences are a number of texts that deal with theories and theoretical concepts. However, what is largely missing, and which students often call for, are texts in Swedish that show how theories and concepts can be applied in concrete interpretation situations. The series Theoretical applications in art science aims to fill that gap, with the book Materiality being the fourth in the series.
The book introduces and activates a concept that in recent decades has come to take an increasingly important place in humanistic research. Art scholars - but also archaeologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, ethnologists and other humanistic researchers - are increasingly interested in the material conditions for, and the manifestations of, people's social and cultural life and exchange. But despite its topicality in today's scientific conversation, the concept of materiality can seem elusive and elusive. It moves all the way from the most tangible analyzes of the material components of a cultural artefact, to the somewhat impenetrable theorizations of objectivity, agents and networks that are usually sorted under the label ""new materialism"".
However, the book Materialitet gives concrete examples of how the concept of materiality can open up interpretations of important layers of meaning in works of art and other cultural artifacts. After the initial introduction where different perspectives and conceptualisations of materiality are discussed, six researchers each do their own analysis based on their subject area. The chapters are based on new research and are written specifically for this book. The different chapters together show the multifaceted nature of the concept of materiality, but do not lock it down to a definition, but open the eyes to a number of different interpretive paths.

This book highlights the diverse roles of the humanities in the history of the Swedish welfare society. This society has often been seen as dominated by an instrumental view of knowledge that rewarded the social sciences, natural sciences and technology, but the contributions in this book show the significant role that the humanities played in the Swedish welfare state. Various forms of humanistic knowledge and knowledge actors were part of large networks and left a clear mark on the public sphere and society at large. A narrative of the marginalization and crisis of the humanities in the postwar period must therefore be problematized. This edited volume brings together some twenty scholars from a number of humanities disciplines (history, history of ideas, media history, literary studies, archaeology, education, etc.). Much of the current research on the history of the humanities conducted in Sweden today is brought together here and put in relation to international discussions in fields such as history of humanities, history of knowledge, etc. The book is a sibling to the monograph Humanister i offentligheten, which was published in 2022.

Narratives about northern Sweden are often narratives about nature. This has been true throughout history and is still true today. Different ways of understanding nature have become intertwined with the place and the people who live there. The nature in northern Sweden can be magnificent and impressive, but it can also be desolate, threatening and dangerous. A dominant image of nature in northern Sweden - then as now - is the image of resources, assets.
The overall aim of the study is to shed light on the role of nature in linguistic place-making in northern Sweden with a particular focus on the settler colonization during the 18th and 19th centuries. Through a selection of text sources, nature's central place in the story of the colonization, of the place, its history, change and future is highlighted.
The texts that are analyzed are the two journals in which Petrus Læstadius described his work as a missionary in Lapland, as well as Olov Petter Pettersson's detailed description of the settler colonization in the work Gamla byar i Vilhelmina.
The settler colonization took place in areas with Sami presence and history and this study connects to the research field of Settler Colonial Studies in a critical discussion of the linguistic place-making in the texts.
One of the aims of the study is to also shed light on the connections that exist between the settler colonization depicted in the texts, and the linguistic place-making with nature at the center that is ongoing in northern Sweden today.

During the 1920s and 1930s the wordless novel – stories told in black-and-white wordless woodcuts – was established as a narrative genre. The genre was most popular in Germany, but was as well known in other parts of Europé and in the US. The wordless novel was characterized by the absence of words, the use of woodcut and other relief printing techniques, as well as themes of social critique and serious existential issues.
The purpose of the book is to - through the wordless novels of the 1920s and 30s - explain the uniqueness of the wordless narrative and thus the autonomous narrative possibilities of the image. The method of the examination is a close reading of the German artist Otto Nückel's wordless novel Schicksal (Destiny 1926). A comparative material consists of the Czech artist Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichova's wordless novel Z Mého Dětství (From My Childhood, 1929). Wordlessness is studied through the image's characteristics as an intermediary of messages and narratives and through comparisons with other expressions - the silent film, cirkus, expressionist dance and visual art, as well as medieval woodcuts. Narratives – which are usually put together by verbal communication – are in this project a tool for seeing: the image sequences or the image groups that ""replace"" the words - not as a lack or implied meaning of words, but as a personal visual story.

Homosexuality, bisexuality, transgender and queer have long been a sensitive topic in Christian churches. As society has changed, some denominations have become increasingly affirming, while others see the changes as incompatible with Christian values.
A Conditional Community is based on in-depth interviews with 29 lgbtq Christians and is the first Swedish scientific study on the subject. Using a phenomenological approach, the author investigate how sexuality, intimacy and faith are experienced by the interviewees and how their Christian identity interacts with their identity as lgbtq people.
A Conditional Community is aimed at teachers, researchers and students in fields such as religious studies, sexology, gender studies and psychology. The book is also of interest to professionals who require knowledge on the subject, such as pastors and therapists. Furthermore, it can serve as a basis for discussions and reflection on faith, sexuality and lgbtq in the Free Church contexts.

Servants were for a long time the dominant form of labour in Sweden. To serve, at a farm or at a manor, was ever since the thirteenth century the most common way to make a living, since poor people could by law be forced to accept work for a master. Service hence replaced thraldom in Sweden.
In From slaves to servants, historian Martin Andersson explains how the regulations of the servants' lives were gradually sharpened. Labourers had to become servants under the threats of punishment and forced conscription into the army. Wages were legally reduced, while other forms of making a living were blocked. The master's right to use physical violence was increased, while the servant's duty to obey was expanded.
By the end of the sixteenth century, most farmhands and maids worked at manors or for the richest of the peasantry. They had consequently minimal chances of themselves becoming masters. Through studies of a rich material of regional law codes, court records, fine registers, royal letters and manuals for manor owners, the historian paints a rich picture of the daily lives of servants – a life formed by legal uncertainty, coercion, and poverty.

Cultural heritage is not just something from the past, but always also reflects contemporary needs and desires. In the Traces of the Cold War describes the making of a diverse and innovative Swedish military heritage. The book shows how memories and material remains from a period characterized by fear and geopolitical tensions are infused with new meanings when bunkers, decommissioned military facilities and technology are transformed into luxury housing, attractive tourist destinations and museum exhibitions.
Through field-visits to military heritage sites across Sweden, the authors examine what material objects, narratives and emotions that today represent the Cold War. These examinations show how military structures and equipment from a time associated with threat and danger become captivating elements of the cultural heritage, while also communicating specific ideas regarding security and protection.
In the Traces of the Cold War takes a novel approach to cultural heritage by relating collective memory-making to security policy. Based on theoretical perspectives from critical heritage studies (CHS) and feminist international relations (IR), the analysis focuses on constructions of national belonging and underlines the role of gender and sexuality in narrations of security and protection.
In a democracy, the subject of military violence must always be a matter of ethical and political conversations. Setting out from this assumption, the authors critically discuss how Cold War heritagisation produces militarization as "natural" and necessary. The book invites reflection on how history is written as well as on what the requirements are for a safe and secure society.
In the Traces of the Cold War presents the results from an interdisciplinary research project. The authors are all researchers at Stockholm University and have written the book together.

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.

Military preparedness and war have so far been regarded as the domain of male authors in Swedish literature, especially at the time of the Second World War. But what happens if we turn our attention to the female authors of the 1940s? Kristin Järvstad's study shows how their texts as well focus to a large extent on subjects related to military preparedness and war. A variety of topics can be found in the novels by the female writers, ranging from stories about female air guards who protect the Swedish border to female pacifists who find it necessary to kill for the sake of peace. The soldier figure in these texts also takes a radical stand when he as a deserter lays down his arms to protest against the war. In addition, one of the most charged subjects of the time linked to gender is treated from a unique perspective: the women who consort with the occupying enemy are pictured without the condemning attitude that characterizes the period in general. The most urgent question, however, concerns alienation, linked to race: who is actually included in the Swedish nation? Here, the texts display a scathing critique of the narrow-minded Swedes and the anti-Semitism that flourishes at that time. By analysing female authors' depictions of the 1940s, During Military Preparedness and War deepens the previous picture of this period in Swedish literature. The writers explored in this investigation express a profound and often critical commitment to the issue of war and violence, linked to gender and alienation. The most radical literary message of the period can also be found among their novels: the demand for the dissolution of the militaristic and patriarchal nation which strives to expand its territory without regard for human life.