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- Geschwind, Britta Zetterström, 1976-
(författare)
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Publika museirum : Materialiseringar av demokratiska ideal på Statens Historiska Museum 1943-2013
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how public spaces in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm have materialized in relation to cultural policy objectives and ideals of a democratic and inclusive museum. The investigated time period spans from 1943 to 2013. The Swedish History Museum is a state-run archaeological museum, where norms and values are expressed through various governmental policy- and control documents. Hence, entering the museum also means entering a symbolic national space. The fact that the museum has been politically regulated throughout the studied period makes it illustrative of changing democratic public ideals in the 20th century.Unlike other similar studies, the empirical focus is not on exhibitions, but on other public spaces that visitors encounter; the entrance, the shop, children’s spaces and the courtyard. These spaces are less invisible in the museum hierarchy. At the same time, they are often central spaces to visitors. The museum building is not as fixed as it might appear to be. Drawing on ideas from Bruno Latour and Doreen Massey – and their perspectives on space, materiality and power – I explore how the social and spatial changes of the museum affect each other. Efforts have continuously been made to alter these public spaces, and the outlines and uses have repeatedly changed.By combining archival materials, interviews and observations, I investigate how democratic ideals have been negotiated in material forms, and what kind of audiences/visitors these spaces have conceptualized over time. Linking different kinds of sources, that speak from various levels and positions, has been an analytically important method.The analysis describes the museum as a meaning producing network that materially embody different, and sometimes conflicting ideologies. The public spaces have been shaped by tensions; between education versus pleasure, collecting versus showing, and by the dichotomy between culture and commerce. What is communicated thorough various materialities and inscriptions in the shop, the entrance, and the spaces for children sometimes contradict perspectives produced in exhibitions and educational programmes. Hierarchies between professional positions and knowledges propagate as social extensions towards the visitors, and sometimes, reproduce structural hierarchies. Museum functions literally “takes place”, depending on how they are valued and assigned meaning. The museum has increasingly included children, while also becoming a space for commerce. Various, and sometimes incompatible ideals on equality and inclusion have been implemented, simultaneously. At the same time, the public spaces carry unique spatial qualities, which can benefit inclusion. Concluding, the dissertation stresses that the entrance, the shop, the children spaces and other public spaces perceived as “peripheral” need to be viewed as central, not as superficial services or add-ons to the “real” museum experience, i.e. the exhibition.
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| 3. |
- Karlsson, Eva M., 1957-
(författare)
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Livet nära döden : Situationer, status och social solidaritet vid vård i livets slutskede
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Palliative home care is largely intended for patients diagnosed as having terminal cancer. The purpose of the care is to alleviate the symptoms and improve the patient’s well-being as life comes to a close. A further objective is to help the patient to die with as much dignity and grace as possible.The aim of this dissertation is to show how palliative home care is shaped, reshaped and linked together through the interactions of the care-related actors, and also to examine how people registered within palliative home care are construed as individuals and patients in the tension between normative conceptions about what a patient is or ought to be and the belief in the individual as an autonomous subject. Empirical data has been collected by means of observations and interviews. During the fieldwork I accompanied the staff on their visits to patients’ homes and took part in different formal and informal staff-related activities.In spite of palliative home care being supposedly based on a holistic ideal, it is clear that it is the medical order that dominates the care. According to this, the medical knowledge of the actors within the caring situation also forms the basis of their hierarchical position.Palliative care’s historiography, descriptions of the good or natural death, formal and informal meetings and the ideology of the good home are all examples of factors involved in the creation and interconnection of palliative home care. Such care is also created in relation to “other care”, where a negative presentation of “other care” serves to highlight palliative home care as “good care”.Ideas of “the good” permeate palliative home care. However, in the staff’s eagerness to do good there is the risk that they will disregard the patient’s will and wishes and instead do what they think is best for the patient.
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| 4. |
- Silvén, Eva, 1949-
(författare)
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Bekänna färg : Modernitet, maskulinitet, professionalitet
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Paint and painting are obvious components of everyday life for those of us who live in contemporary Sweden. In terms of both matter and shade, paint has come to symbolise taste and status as well as having created distinction, defined sex/gender and social position – with the past as a constant sounding board. Paint and painting also have professional and occupational aspects. There are people – usually males – who train to become and earn their living as painters. At the same time, there are many others who are active in the professional production of paint and painting. Furthermore, there is a large amateur sector where “everyone” can paint. Taken together, these form a kind of social field characterised by both conflict and consensus: a field where competence and legitimacy, aesthetics and quality and the right to instruct and assess are questioned. These are the conditions that form the subject of this dissertation. In a wider sense the aim is to illustrate colour, paint and painting as constantly interpreted and reinterpreted material, cultural and social phenomena, with the power to shape and alter people’s circumstances and relationships. For this purpose I have come to use a variety of sources from the 20th century, such as narratives, photographs, advertisements, historical accounts and artefacts. In a more restricted sense, and against this background, the aim is to analyse the house painters’ work on a large-scale renovation project, through comprehensive fieldwork. Being modern is not so much about managing the age in which we live and the future, as managing the past. Although the social field of painting generates a series of contradictory norms and ideals, the historical heritage represents a mutual frame of reference, irrespective of whether the tendency is to integrate, separate or reconstruct the past – different systems or knowledge with normative claims, discourses. In these processes the paint, in terms of both matter and shade, is regarded as a floating signifier, something that people struggle to define, over a period of time. In order to study how this process works, I have made use of three analytical concepts: modernity, masculinity and professionalism. These concepts both act through and are created by what I have chosen to call material, bodily and aesthetic practices. With the help of a relational power-perspective, I have built the main chapters, focused on the renovation project, around a number of such phenomena: rhythm and movement, the material, the performative and the aesthetic, the body, sex/gender, class and pro-fessionalism, as well as the social implications of space and place. It is here that the actors in the field come into contact with each other: modern house painters, decorative painters, antiquarians, architects, paint producers, and others. It is here that insistence on the preferential right of interpretation is at risk and where an image of “the other” is conjured up.The dissertation is concluded by the heading, In the Draught of Discourse, where the painting trade and the work itself is described as transparent and available to “everybody”. Through discourse analysis and fieldwork, it has been possible to illustrate how conditions and possibilities are not only created in the painting field itself, but also in many other sectors of society. To show your colours is to reveal sex/gender, class and nationality, to define continuity and change, the traditional and the modern, to separate amateurs and professionals, the preparative groundwork and the final result. And it is here, at the ambiguous interface that the finished surface represents, that the dissertation is concluded.
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