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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today's mathematics education has an impact even outside the confines of the classroom, not least through the relevance of mathematics in culture, economics, politics and in relation to power. Sociopolitical perspectives in mathematics didactic research provide insights into how education in mathematics is social and political. Research based on these perspectives suggests both critical questioning and not-yet-imagined possibilities for content, teaching, policy and further research. This book introduces, for a larger Swedish audience, the research orientations and strategies that sociopolitical perspectives have to offer. In the book, this is illustrated in several ways. The chapters describe current research on the socio-political challenges of mathematics education in several different contexts, e.g. classrooms, after-school programs, curricula, mathematics teacher education and even mathematics education research. In this way, perspectives are broadened to groups of people, institutions and forces, which constitute a network of mathematics education practice. The chapters present different philosophical and empirical studies, based on theoretical tools from philosophy, social science and cultural studies, critical studies of education and socio-cultural-political studies of mathematics education. Methodological and analytical strategies such as text and discourse analysis and case studies of practice are used. In this way, opportunities to research mathematics education based on socio-political perspectives are illustrated. The chapters use various writing styles which invite the reader into the world of research. Thus, the reader will encounter different ways of thinking about the role of mathematics education in the creation of modern Swedish society.

This book is about the historical sciences' way of producing knowledge by contextualizing. It is aimed primarily at students and researchers in the humanities disciplines who work with historical perspectives. The book's ambition is to bring the reader into the actual making and show how contextualisation is an important element in historical studies at all levels. The book thus hopes to stimulate increased reflection and discussion about how we proceed when we interpret, create or reinterpret historical, cultural and social contexts.
The book firstly provides an introduction to what contextualization can be and do when we encounter the past in the form of texts, images or artifacts. From the very first day at the university, students in historical disciplines end up in such meetings. Therefore, the first four chapters of the book are primarily aimed at students in the introductory semesters. What does it really mean to analyze, synthesize, contextualize or criticize - and how do the ways of working with the past relate to each other? And further, what historical times are we working with: do we read source material from our own horizons or from those of the historical actors? Is the source material part of a long story or a short one? And who decides the answer to such questions?
Secondly, the book provides an in-depth discussion of the role of contextualisation when we create new historical knowledge. The book's later chapters ask questions about how contextualisation relates to historical theory and method, and sheds light on the activity of creating, arguing for, and reconsidering the contexts that give meaning and significance to historical source material.
The most central lesson the book wants to convey is that contextualization is an ongoing activity. Human horizons of understanding are constantly moving in step with contemporary knowledge interests. There will always be new ways of understanding historical expressions, and that is one reason why historical studies form an important part of society's common knowledge base.

How is class depicted in Swedish contemporary literature, and what can it teach us about contemporary society? In Doing Class, literary scholar Åsa Arping tries new pathways into the broad, mainly realistic Swedish novels of recent decades. She finds class-coded actions, thoughts and emotions even outside the traditional working-class literature, and explores how the story of class deepens when it is put into dialogue with other categories, such as gender, age and ethnicity/racialization. Through reflections on the last twenty years of prose publishing, from Torbjörn Flygt's Underdog (2001) to Donia Saleh's Ya Leila (2020), the study shows how literature shapes and discusses the increasingly obscure class concept, where perceptions of work, identity, lifestyle and welfare state are rapidly changing.