| 1. |
- Lundquist, Elin, 1986-
(författare)
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Flyktiga möten : Fågelskådning, epistemisk gemenskap och icke-mänsklig karisma
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates birdwatching and focuses on the knowledges, skills and ideas that are obtained and acknowledged among birdwatchers. The aim is to explore how these ways of relating to birds are constituted. Birdwatching is considered as an epistemic practice, which produce and maintain knowledge. Thus, the human participants of these practices are regarded as members of an epistemic community. The overall theoretical framework is based on a material-semiotic perspective: the epistemic community, is viewed as not only made up of human beings, but of a variety of human and nonhuman actors – birds, technologies and landscapes – which altogether co-produce the practices. To investigate how habitual ways of relating to birds are established, the geographer Jamie Lorimer’s theoretical model of non-human charisma is applied to the analysis. The joint ways of relating to and engaging with birds are interpreted in terms of “affective logics” that characterize the epistemic community.The study is based on a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork which took place at different birdwatching spots in Sweden; at birdwatching fairs and on websites where birdwatchers discuss and share information about birds. Furthermore the study is based on interviews with birdwatchers. The methodological approach during the fieldwork as well as in analyzing the research material, is to “follow the object”, or more precisely to follow how birds are acknowledged in these different settings. The ways of relating to birds are interpreted as embodied skills and “knowledge by familiarity” with different species and landscapes. One central affective logic is the “joy of recognition” which motivates birdwatchers to learn how to identify birds in the field.The main method for gathering information in order to make claims about the objects of knowledge, i.e. the birds, within the epistemic community is through these embodied skills.The analysis shows that claims, based on these observations, are undergoing a number of validation processes. This creates a certain type of observer that must be prepared to get their claims reviewed. The methods for establishing claims are however challenged when new technologies, such as DNA-techniques and digital tools, are put to use in the identification processes.The analysis also shows that while all wild birds are potentially interesting as objects of knowledge within the community, not every bird is attended to with the same kind of interest and enthusiasm. Birdwatchers are more devoted to some species of birds, than others, in relation to the spatial and temporal circumstances of the encounters, and in relation to the birdwatcher’s previous experiences of similar encounters. A central theme that characterizes the practices is a negotiation of approximating the birds without disturbing them. This is made possible by the use of various technological extensions, such as binoculars and hides. However the analysis also shows that some of the, rather new, digital tools are acknowledged as potentially causing intrusive behavior.
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| 2. |
- Nystrand von Unge, Elin, 1977-
(författare)
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Samla samtid : Insamlingspraktiker och temporalitet på kulturhistoriska museer i Sverige
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a study of contemporary collecting practices at museums of cultural history in Sweden. The study takes off from two questions: How is this practice of collecting understood at museums of cultural history today, and how are these modes of collecting effected when museums explicitly collect the “present” rather than the “past”? The aim is to examine how the present day has been collected, what modes of ordering were activated, as well as what relational effects contemporary collecting has had on the knowledge-building processes within the practice.The overall theoretical framework of the study primarily stands on sociologist John Law’s understanding of actor network theory. The actor network model is used as a theoretical tool to understand how agency and processes of knowledge production work. In addition, theoretical concepts from memory studies, as well as theories on knowledge building processes, are applied.The empirical material is collected through a combination of interviews and participant observations. Furthermore, archival studies were executed at the Nordiska museet archive.Through four chapters, the modes of ordering the Time, the Collectors, the Objects, and the Ideas are examined. The material analysed shows that the cultural historical “hinterland” that shaped the modern museum have had lasting effects on museum-collecting at large, but also on contemporary collecting practices. However, the reversed is also true: Contemporary collecting often acts as an important tool to make the self-evident position of traditional collecting visible. As the act of collecting activates fundamental ethical and moral questions concerning time, place, and social conditions, the practice has had constant effects on museum work in general. Therefore, without an active and conscious collecting, the content of museum work is in risk of stagnating. It is not only through exhibitions and outreach work that museums should have a contemporary societal awareness, but the collecting practices also deserve a mental presence in public space. Stating this, a continued expansive collecting at museums of cultural history is a necessity, by which the general museum-work is pushed forward and expanded. To collect and record expressions of the same contemporary perspectives is here seen as an active way of dealing with the blinding effects of being in the present.
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| 3. |
- Bjälesjö, Jonas, 1966-
(författare)
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Rock'n'roll i Hultsfred : ungdomar, festival och lokal gemenskap
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- För drygt 30 år sedan samlades några uttråkade ungdomar i Hultsfred, Småland och bildade rockföreningen Rockparty. Föreningen byggde upp en omfattande konsertverksamhet och en stark musikscen på den lilla orten. 1986 startade Hultsfredsfestivalen, vilken utvecklades till ett av Sveriges starkaste varumärken. En festival som i decennier drog till sig inhemska och utländska artister och tusentals besökare varje sommar. I Sverige kom Hultsfred att bli synonymt med ordet festival. I denna avhandling får vi följa Rockpartys verksamhet och festivalens utveckling. Här skildras det fascinerade, symbiotiska förhållandet mellan den annorlunda värld som festivalen innebar och det trygga lokalsamhällets föreningsverksamhet. Platsen och dess människor var avgörande för festivalens tillblivelse. Genom vilda idéer, konflikter och heta diskussioner uppstod en alldeles särskild sorts kreativitet. Och utan det oförtrutna engagemanget från ungdomar, föräldrar, artister, branschfolk, festivalfunktionärer, politiker, musikälskare i alla åldrar, föreningar och lokala företag hade det aldrig blivit någon musikfest och Hultsfred hade aldrig utvecklats till en av de viktigaste platserna i svenskt musikliv på en mängd områden. Genom den föreningsdrivna lokala musikscenen och festivalen etablerades så småningom allt från musikbranschutbildningar till Svenskt Rockarkiv.
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| 4. |
- Fredriksson, Daniel, 1978-
(författare)
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Musiklandskap : musik och kulturpolitik i Dalarna
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis, I study how conditions for music-making can be developed, maintained and challenged through government support processes in the Swedish region Dalarna. The research questions focus on the ways music, policy and governance relate to each other, what kinds of musicians and ways of making music are favored in these relations, and the agency and meaning of place. The study is made through participant observation of musical events, cultural policy meetings, and the everyday practice of cultural policy officials; interviews with musicians, organizers and cultural policy officials; cultural policy documents as well as musicians’ and organizers’ public documents such as concert posters and websites.The musical landscape of Dalarna is summarized as a complex web with pathways that reach far beyond the geographical borders of the region. The cultural cooperation model works as a hierarchy from center to periphery, from the national government, through agencies, regional government, musical institutions and organizers, musicians and audiences. We can analyze all these practices as being part of music, as musicking. But we could also describe them another way, where the practice of cultural policy is dependent on and conditioned by the musical practices it is set to govern. In this way, musicians are always in some way also creating policy.I discuss genre hierarchies and further argue that music can, or should, not always be motivated by its effects on regional development or its social impact, it also needs to be allowed to be unhealthy and unprofitable. When we support music, we should be aware that it can be a hobby as well as a business, a serious artistic endeavor as well as play. And more often than not, music is all of these things at the same time.
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| 5. |
- Jansson, Hanna, 1983-
(författare)
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Drömmen om äventyret : Långfärdsseglares reseberättelser på internet
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the online travel writing of Swedish cruising sailors. The aim is to analyze how crews in online travelogues describe ongoing experiences, and to show how the journeys, the stories and the storytelling are mutually related to one another. As journeys are both the plots of the stories and the contexts for the storytelling, the travelogues in question challenge established narrative definitions. The analysis combines Amy Shuman’s folkloristic research on immediate storytelling with historian Reinhart Kosellecks’ perspectives on time as situated and subjective. Storytelling is thereby understood as a contextual and variable practice: conditioned, enabled and limited by the writers’ current position and point of view, and by a series of practical, technological, narrative and social factors. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork online and offline. The material primarily consists of four crews’ blogs and web pages, written texts, photographs, and readers’ comments. Interviews were conducted with the main informants and an additional fifteen crews in Sweden and in the harbours of Horta and Las Palmas. As the analysis show, the sailors’ write and publish updates from ever-changing positions in time and space, thereby depicting their journeys as a practical and cognitive process. These stories are to a great extent motivated by and directed towards the future, as sailors long for warmer destinations and worry about upcoming passages. The sailors write for a real-time audience partly consisting of families and friends, who anxiously wait for new updates. Writing is therefore sometimes perceived as a work-like task, and the sailors must develop strategies in order to write entertaining and exciting stories without further troubling their readers. The study’s result indicate that online storytelling can be understood as a process, which cannot be separated from the described events, nor from its everyday contexts. Stories, storytelling and experiences are understood as integrated with each other, since the storytelling as a practice become an established part of the everyday life during journeys.
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| 6. |
- Kaijser, Lars
(författare)
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Lanthandlare : en etnologisk undersökning av en ekonomisk verksamhet
- 1999
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This is a study of country shopkeepers in Norra Klarälvsdalen, Värmland, in the early 1990s. The aim of the thesis is to examine how the work of the country shopkeepers is constituted in a field of competing ideas about retail trade. The interest is focused on how the work done by country shopkeepers takes shape and acquires its character in existing circumstances, and also on the extent to which the country shopkeepers themselves are able to shape the circumstances in which they work. The material for the study was collected between 1990 and 1997. The core consists of a field study in Klarälvsdalen, where I did participant work in eight shops. This is supplemented with material from a dozen different periodicals in the trade press from 1991 to 1993, and local newspapers from the same period.In this study I have worked with two overall categories as regards specifying the social circumstances on which the work of the country shopkeepers was based. On the one hand there is the local market, with a clientele with certain wishes and a way of life rooted in the countryside. On the other hand there are the large distribution chains, their range and their ideals of healthy trade. Through their work, the country shopkeepers found themselves mediating between these two domains.Retail trade is provincial in character, and the assessments by which the country shopkeepers perceived the local market had developed as a result of the shopkeepers having lived with and being a part of the local circumstances. The shopkeepers were not passive in relation to their market; instead they were involved in creating their own conditions. With occasional exceptions, they were part of organized retail trade. The distribution chain gave a social affiliation, and the shopkeepers were offered not only goods but also information and know-how in the form of courses and ample printed matter.Organized retail trade furthered healthy trade and competition on equal terms. The engagement comprised both a cultural and an organizational order. The work took place both through public debates and through everyday distinctions, with pleasant shops and correct behaviour being encouraged. For organized trade it was a matter of separating unhealthy trade from healthy trade in the interest of the consumer.In the day-to-day exercise of their profession, the shopkeepers gave a face to the desired qualities that characterize healthy trade. They were close to their employees, their customers, and their shop. It was difficult, however, to run a shop in the countryside, so certain public subsidies were available. This undermined the competition on equal terms that the organized retail trade aspired to. From their point of view, the country shop thus represented healthy trade on unhealthy terms.The country shopkeepers' experience of the local context took shape in a habitus in which one important distinctive feature was a feeling and concern for the preferences and wishes of the customers. The shopkeepers tried to satisfy these, but they did so within the limits of their perception of healthy and proper trade. In this respect the country shopkeeper was not just the intermediary through which goods were channelled, but also a link joining the local market to the value system of retail trade.
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