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- Björkman, John, 1978-
(författare)
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"Må de herrskande klasserna darra" : Radikal retorik och reaktion i Stockholms press, 1848-1851
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores the formation of the modern historiography of class in mid-nineteenth century Sweden by analyzing constitutive rhetoric of class in the Stockholm press from 1848 to 1851. The aim is to study how disparaged workers during the February Revolution in France began to be ascribed a new kind of unified agency, and how workers in Stockholm became recipients of mobilizing appeals from all parts of the political spectrum. To this end the dissertation examines periodical papers representing the three major political positions of the period, i.e. a royalist conservative press, liberal papers in opposition, and a newly emerging socialist press. How were workers described, invoked and addressed as a new kind of community of political interest and action in these publications?Refuting perspectives of socio-economic determinism, this study adopts a conception of belonging and agency that views political communities as discursively produced by the creation of subject positions and the interpellation of individuals to them. The study is also influenced by recent re-evaluations of the category of the event associated with poststructuralism, and analyzes operations of constitutive rhetoric in forming a new symbolic field of class identity and agency in an open-ended and multivalent historical situation.The analysis shows how workers were construed as political agents in the Stockholm press during the mid-nineteenth century turmoil by being described, invoked and addressed within the framework of four main rival narratives. The socialist press tried to evoke a self-organizing working class within a collectivist narrative of labour’s liberation and universal male suffrage. The liberal press interpellated workers to a position aligned with the reformist middle class within a narrative of individual self-determination and gradual improvement. The royalist narrative of reconciliation was aimed at separating the large mass of workers from socialist and communist ideologues, deemed as mischievous outsiders, while at the same time offering them a new-found and prominent role as protectors of social harmony and peace. Only within the royalist narrative of catastrophe were the workers continuously excluded from mobilizing appeals, instead being invoked as the harbingers of an approaching communist revolution, against which all other sections of society should unite.
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| 2. |
- 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. |
- Rossholm, Elisa, 1976-
(författare)
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I väntan på hufvudpersonen : Identitet och identifikation i svensk skämtbild 1870-1900
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the decades around 1900, political and social cartoons flourished in humour and satire magazines in the Swedish capital. The thesis presents a new theoretical start on the nature of humour in cartoons: the idea of the comical is argued as effects of reality notions and bracketing reality notions. The theory is a prerequisite for understanding the mechanisms of the identity play performed in the comic scenes. The thesis pursues a search for the object or the character with whom the intended recipient was expected to identify, referred to as the “the main character”. The analysis is based on a kind of theatrical construction, where the real city, its pleasures, secrets and dangers constitute the material for the image’s scenes. The characters in the scenes act out the dangers and ambiguities that the city’s bourgeois man faced. The material of the study consists of social cartoons from the two Stockholm-based magazines Söndags-Nisse and Kasper between 1870 and 1900. About a hundred of them are reproduced in the thesis. The analysis builds on three theoretical perspectives: theories on images; humour; and identity constructions. By integrating theories on humour with image analysis, the thesis highlights the ambivalence and ambiguity of identity aspects. Relationships and characters explored through the image elements are given as headlines for the chapters: the room; the body; and the act. The study shows how a male and bourgeois hegemony invents image expressions, main characters, and plots that offer the recipient protection against being laughed at and against the danger of mistakes. The analysis shows that four strategies to represent the bourgeois man are frequent: as the “fuzzy man”; as the caricature of the bourgeois man; as the stereotype; and as the “unfettered man”. The various figures offer more or less possibilities of identification versus distancing. The pictures’ expressions of uncertainties – in terms of vague or fuzzy lines; self-irony; or avoiding being singled out – all these means provide distance, in relation to the picture content, the issues that concerned the intended recipient, whether it is about the difficulty of distinguishing the public body from the forbidden, or about general human conditions.
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| 4. |
- Vikström, Emma, 1987-
(författare)
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Skapandet av den nya människan : Eugenik och pedagogik i Ellen Keys författarskap
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Swedish author and educator Ellen Key (1849–1926) became one of the most prominent writers on educational matters in Europe at the turn of the 20th century following the publication of The Century of the Child in 1900. It is less widely known, however, that the pioneer of progressive education and children’s rights also advocated the improvement of humanity through eugenics, and publicly endorsed the foundation of the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in 1921. In previous research, Key’s stance on eugenics has been explained by her evolutionist worldview, influenced by her reading of scientists and philosophers such as Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). But can her support for eugenics solely be reduced to the influence of these and other authors? And what role did eugenics play in her educational thinking?These issues are addressed in this thesis, which aims to show how Key strived to create a new kind of human being by consolidating eugenics and education in her work. The analysis identifies several dichotomies that were vital to Key’s knowledge production on eugenics and education: evolution/degeneration; nature/nurture; body/soul; sense/sensibility; and individual/society. These concepts form the thematic structure of the thesis and point to a central finding; namely, that Key’s desire to dissolve such dichotomous thinking is a crucial component in understanding how she combined eugenics and education, as two means to the end of creating a new kind of human. The analysis also demonstrates that Key did not merely adopt the knowledge of others but developed her own ideas on eugenics that even induced two British eugenicists to consider the importance of love in human betterment. Finally, this study illustrates how eugenics was integrated into Key’s pedagogy as part of her educational aim, proposed learning content and ideas about socialisation. In conclusion, the thesis contributes to a discussion of the aim of the educational endeavour to create a better human and the use of pioneers in educational sciences today.
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| 5. |
- Nilsson Mohammadi, Robert, 1980-
(författare)
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Den stora gruvstrejken i Malmfälten : En muntlig historia
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores how the miners’ strike in the Norrbotten ore fields 1969–70 has been made meaningful. For a long time, this strike has been a centre of debates and reflections on society, culture, and history in Sweden. The popular support for the miners’ strike was high, and a solidarity movement comprising loosely organised individual and collective initiatives was formed. Journalists, documentary film-makers, playwrights, scholars, and others within this movement documented the strike. Following the strike, actors within the solidarity movement expressed concerns that the experiences from the strike would be scattered and forgotten. Therefore, the strike has been depicted many times and in many genres. The authors of these depictions have commonly used the participants’ voices to narrate the strike.Through the miners’ strike, consecutive depictions of it, and memories from its participants, this dissertation studies the relationships between memories from individual actors, shared memory processes on a societal level, and history-writing. The central concept is meaning-making, which in this dissertation stands for people’s ever ongoing work to make themselves, others, and shared situations comprehensible. Meaning-making is studied through the more empirically oriented concepts memory and narrative. A combination of what historian Alistair Thomson has called ‘a popular memory approach to oral history’ and Gérard Genette’s narratology is put to use in the studies. The focus is thus how the participants in the strike and actors in the solidarity movement have made stories out of their memories, and how they then relate to existing accounts. This leads to a discussion on how voices from actors can be used in order to produce knowledge and/or change.On an empirical level, the dissertation contributes with knowledge on how the strike has been made meaningful through time, but also about the strike as an event in the past. The most important material is a new collection of oral history interviews with participants in the strike and people who took part in the solidarity movement, but the dissertation also studies books, articles and dramas that depicts the strike. In the first empirical chapter, constructions and discussions of the miners’ voices in texts by actors within the solidarity movement during the period 1968–2009 is discussed. The second empirical chapter explores how two persons that reported from the strike describes and discusses their journeys to the strike as well as their texts about the strike. The third empirical chapter analyses the different stories about the strike that the collection of oral history interviews contains, and shows how the strike has been made into an event. The fourth empirical chapter shows how participants relate to existing stories about the strike when the mediate their memories of it in the oral history interviews.
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