| 1. |
- Rodéhn, Cecilia, 1977-
(författare)
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Lost in Transformation : A critical study of two South African museums
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this dissertation Transformation, as understood in South Africa, is investigated in the ‘Natal Museum’ and the ‘Msunduzi Museum Incorporating the Voortrekker Complex’ in terms of socio-political structures, the museum as a place, its collections and displays. I have emphasised the ethnographical perspective and analysed it by using key concepts such as new museology, time, space and place. My research focuses on the perception and mediation by museum staff-members of Transformation which is compared and positioned against South African and international museological theoretical discourses. I further explore the political backdrop to Transformation of South African museums and discuss related problems and aspects such as reconciliation, nation-building and the African Renaissance. Socio-political structures, acts, reports and policy documents are analysed over a long temporal sequence, but focus on the period 1980-2007. The long temporal sequence is a tool to capture the development connected to the museums in space and time and aims to compare and present previous developments in order to investigate how Transformation positioned itself as against the past. I hold that Transformation should be treated as an ongoing process connected to other transformation processes across time. I also propose that Transformation started earlier than previously suggested and that it is not a question of one Transformation but of many transformation processes. The urban landscape and the concept of place and name are explored. My research examines the urban landscape from the establishment of Pietermaritzburg to study how the museums were positioned in the landscape and how this has contributed to associated meanings. The museums are treated as demarcated places in the urban landscape which are named and infused with meaning and ownership. The museums are constituted and acted out within specific socio-political structures. The dissertation suggests that the objectives of Transformation reveal themselves through negotiation and alteration of place and name. My research explores the history of the museum collections – how objects were acquired, classified and used to materialise the museums´ institutionalisation of time and what this brought about for heritage production. I investigate what did and did not change when the museums transformed and I deconstruct the new and old objectives and socio-political ideas of collections. I analyse displays as socio-political spaces, the agent’s appropriation, and the discrepancies within dominant socio-political structures. When Transformation materialises in displays it becomes visible for the public to see. The negotiated displays show how the museum tries to visualise Transformation to the public. The discussion analyses the discussed concepts of Transformation, the structures, place, name, display and collection, and relates these to the concept of time, and to how agents create time and make it visual. I also discuss how museological writing and political speeches shape and negotiate Transformation through their articulation and how they sometimes constrain and form discrepancies to actual reality.
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| 2. |
- von der Heiden, Gregor, 1974-
(författare)
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Gespräche in einer Krise : Analyse von Telefonaten mit einem RAF-Mitglied während der Okkupation der westdeutschen Botschaft in Stockholm 1975
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- When crises develop, people are confronted with difficulties beyond those experienced in normal everyday activities. Due to the perceived threats inherent to such situations, familiar behaviors may prove ineffective, and such attempts can pose dangerous and unpredictable risks. Crises are extreme situations, occurring at the very edges of human experience. Oral communication in such situations cannot be casual; the seriousness of the situation demands exceptional communicative performance on the part of the participants. Therefore, certainties about everyday communication conventions are called into question. The following work examines conversations during which the participants were involved in an extreme situation. In this particular crisis, a politically motivated kidnapping, the personal involvement of the interlocutors is substantial. A clear and present fear of the situation escalating and the possibility of a failure to anticipate the resulting reactions from the other party(ies) characterize the communicative acts of those involved. Recorded telephone calls during the occupation of the West German Embassy in Stockholm by members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) on April 24, 1975 comprise the basis for this analysis. One of the occupiers speaks with various interlocutors located in an adjacent embassy building. These interlocutors are relatives of the hostages, the Swedish Minister of Justice, and a German official charged with leading the negotiations. In this study, the communicative processes of the crisis are reconstructed. In order to show how the interlocutors attempt to reach their goals in this tense situation with the resources available to them, as well as what they in fact achieve, ethnographic methods of analysis have been employed. This study shows how, despite strong conflicting interests and motives, a shared reality is built through the actions of the interlocutors. The interaction between two key figures in the early stages of the crisis can even be characterized as a form of coalition building. An explanation as to why this collaboration is not retained in the subsequent course of the events, however, leading to an escalation of the situation, is also presented. Furthermore, the following work sets forth qualities needed to interactively build a coalition in a precarious crisis situation, which has arisen between parties characterized by diametrically opposed aims.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Ekholst, Christine, Fil. Dr.
(författare)
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För varje brottsling ett straff : Föreställningar om kön i de svenska medeltidslagarna
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates concepts of gender in Swedish medieval law. The sources studied are the provincial law codes, the laws of the realm, and the two law codes for cities. The main area of study is the penal codes and especially descriptions of criminal acts and punishments. One objective is to explain the development of female legal responsibility in the Middle Ages. It is argued that a royal initiative lies behind the effort to make women into legal subjects. The other important force behind this movement has been connected to the Church’s emphasis on subjective guilt. The development of female legal responsibility is interpreted as a tendency towards seeing the woman as an autonomous individual.The introduction of female legal responsibility was successive and uneven. This means that the laws also reveal which crimes women were expected to commit. The thesis discusses which crimes were considered typically female and which crimes were considered male. In general, women were expected to act more deceitfully. They were not expected to use violence, though the legislators were not alien to female violence. Men were expected to act openly and with violence. The close link between masculinity and use of violence is indeed apparent.In the laws of the realm women have been integrated as perpetrators. In fact these laws are far more gender neutral; now both men and women are portrayed as potential criminals. It has however become obvious that female legal responsibility was more often emphasized for serious crimes, those crimes leading to the death penalty. While we see an integration of women as possible perpetrators, the genders are separated by the choice of death penalties. Both male and female punishments were used as a determent, but the bodies of the guilty were treated differently. The male body was used as a visible warning sign to others. The female body was completely destroyed. This reflects differences in concepts between the female and male body.
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| 5. |
- Fjæstad, Maja, 1976-
(författare)
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Visionen om outtömlig energi : Bridreaktorn i svensk kärnkraftshistoria 1945–80
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The fast breeder is a type of nuclear reactor that aroused much attention in the 1950s and 60s. Its ability to produce more nuclear fuel than it consumes offered promises of cheap and reliable energy, and thereby connected it to utopian ideas about an eternal supply of energy. Furthermore, the ideas of breeder reactors were a vital part of the post-war visions about the nuclear future. This dissertation investigates the plans for breeder reactors in Sweden, connecting them to the contemporary development of nuclear power with heavy or light water and the discussions of nuclear weapons, as well as to the general visions of a prosperous technological future. The history of the Swedish breeder reactor is traced from high hopes in the beginning, via the fiasco of the Swedish heavy water program, partly focusing on the activities at the company AB Atomenergi and investigating how it planned and argued for its breeder program and how this was received by the politicians. The story continues into the intensive environmental movement in the 1970s, ending with the Swedish referendum on nuclear energy in 1980, which can be seen as the final point for the Swedish breeder. The thesis discusses how the nuclear breeder reactor was transformed from an argument for nuclear power to an argument against it. The breeder began as a part of the vision of a society with abundant energy, but was later seen as a threat against the new sustainable world. The nuclear breeder reactor is an example of a technological vision that did not meet its industrial expectations. But that does not prevent the fact that breeder was an influential technology in an age where import decisions about nuclear energy were made. The thesis argues that important decisions about the contemporary reactors were taken with the idea that they in a foreseeable future would be replaced with the efficient breeder. And the last word on the breeder reactor is not said – today, reactor engineers around the world are showing a renewed interest in this elusive reactor type.
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| 6. |
- Hillerdal, Charlotta, 1976-
(författare)
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People in Between : Ethncity and Material Identity, a New Approach to Deconstructed Concepts
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In questions concerning ethnicity and cultural identity in prehistory, there is a great divide between the conclusions maintained on a theoretical level of discussion and the interpretations given to material remains, when these theories are practiced on the archaeological material. Inherited scientific and political structures, usage and ideas contribute to our understanding of ethnicity and the everyday use of the concept, and influence archaeological interpretations. By illuminating these inherited preconceptions, they can be deconstructed, and a workable definition of the concepts found. A categorical approach to material culture needs to be abandoned, along with the hope of identifying ethnic groups in an archaeological material. Analyses should instead concentrate on the concept of ethnicity, as a relational, situational social identity created in the prehistoric present. The discussion is here approached through case studies set in different contextual situations, displaying great chronological, geographical and political variation, but also revealing some obvious points of contact. Scientific, materialistic, colonial and national perceptions of ethnic groups and ethnicity are penetrated in the case studies of the Varangians in 8th to 10th century Russia, the history of the Métis in Canada from the 18th century till today, and the Swedish speaking population on the island of Ruhnu outside Estonia at the turn of the 20th century. The Varangians are part of the Russian national myth of origin, and have been understood as a Scandinavian people, especially by Scandinavian researchers. Archaeological material of Scandinavian character dating to between the 8th and 11th centuries confirms intense interaction between Russia and Scandinavia in this time period. The Métis trace their roots back to the fur trade era and the encounter between Indian and European traders. Since 1982, they have been recognised as an indigenous people of Canada. The population of Runö was documented as Swedish speaking in the Middle Ages. They were discovered by Swedish ethnography in the 19th century, and interpreted as archaic Swedish. As a consequence of this narrative, the population was evacuated to Sweden in almost its entirety during the Second World War. In these cases, scientific, political and ideological aspects of social practice interface with the everyday practices in communities and influence the outward perception of that group’s identity, as well as the self-perception within the community. It can be concluded that the ideological setting is equally important to a historical development as are economic or geographical circumstances. The final chapter introduces an alternative interpretation to the early Scandinavian towns as a disappearing phenomenon towards the end of the 10th century, deduced from the conclusions made in the previous case studies.
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| 7. |
- Löfgren, Eva, 1971
(författare)
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Rummet och rätten Tingshus som föreställning, byggnad och rum i användning 1734-1970
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- SPACE AND COURT Swedish rural district court-houses 1734-1970; conceived, materialized and used Abstract Although the court of justice is a fundamental institution of our society, the socio-spatial conditions and past of the Swedish district court have rarely been objects of academic research. The aim of this thesis is to examine the design of rural district court-houses from the period of 1734-1970, starting out from the often-assumed causal relation between function and form. Is it possible to understand the design of these buildings by relating to its function? Departing from Henri Lefèbvre’s theory on the social production of space, this thesis deals with the different stages and participants in the building process and describes the court-houses as they were conceived, built and used. The time delimitation corresponds to a legal provision, which stipulated that inhabitants in all judicial districts were responsible for building and maintaining local court-houses. The thesis is in part based on a national survey of law court buildings, but also on four case studies, and alternates between an overview perspective and close-up studies. In the mid-18th century, court-houses did not contain only the court-room and the two chambers that were laid down by the legal provision; they were larger and contained several different rooms. At this early point, the conception of such buildings implied more than a mere court-session-house, as the actual practice included other functions. The study further shows that around year 1800, their design was the result of an already limited number of established conventions of spatial configuration and form, identical to those classicist principles which characterized the residences of local officials. It was not founded on articulated needs; yet, the choice of forms was certainly not arbitrary, since court-houses thus became part of the official architecture. It is further evident that certain participants tried to spatially separate the various activities within the buildings, mainly by modifying the established structure without changing the symmetrical appearance. Nevertheless, as representative as they may have appeared, these buildings were thoroughly integrated into the everyday, agricultural landscape. At the turn of the next century, most layouts still related to the 18th century idea, the principle feature of which was constituted by the large court-room at the centre of the configuration. Although larger in general and with an urban character, the design was poorly adapted to the practices of the now permanent administration, which required large office premises. In parallel to earlier periods, the architecture rather resembled a private mansion, a suitable solution when the second floor of the building formed a spacious flat for the judge. A major change in style and configuration took place after the Second World War, when classicist principles were abandoned and the functions distinctly distributed within the structure and exposed in the exterior. Nevertheless, there was still no court-house architecture and, however radically implemented, the idea of separation was not novel. Indeed, the very wording of the legal provision can be considered a good example of such strivings, as can the attempts by 19th and early 20th century architects to modify conventional structures. The habits of court-house users only gradually concurred with the representations of court-house space. In practice, the buildings were more multi-functional and the social patterns and routines more durable than the conceptions behind new architectural designs had assumed. KEYWORDS: court-house, socio-spatial conditions, function, form, spatial configuration, practice, representation
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| 8. |
- Kjellberg, Joakim, 1976-
(författare)
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Den medeltida stadens dynamik : – urbanitet, sociala praktiker och materiell kultur i Uppsala 1100–1550
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Avhandlingen utforskar arkeologiska källor till sociala praktiker och materiell kultur i det medeltida Uppsala. Ett stort antal föremål som insamlats vid tio av stadens större undersökningar mellan 1975 och 2000 har bearbetats i avhandlingen. Fyndmaterialet ger nya ingångar till förändringar i det urbana rummet och till invånarnas skiftande sociala identiteter. Den materiellakulturen ligger även till grund för en vidare diskussion om centralabegrepp och problem inom historisk arkeologi och stadsarkeologi.Genom ett föreslaget föremålsintegrerat och handlingsteoretiskt perspektivpå urbanisering, urbanism och urbanitet kan via den metod som presenterasi avhandlingen både nya och äldre undersökningsmaterial aktiveras. Därigenom kan också ett mer dynamiskt stadsarkeologiskt narrativ skapas om de medeltida städerna som särskilda rum, mötesplatser och livsmiljöer.
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| 9. |
- Norstedt, Gudrun, 1965-
(författare)
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A land of one's own : Sami resource use in Sweden's boreal landscape under autonomous governance
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Sami dominated large parts of boreal Sweden well into the 18th century, and knowledge of Sami subsistence patterns is therefore a key to the region’s forest history. Although much research has been done on Sami resource use and landscape impact, the context is often vaguely understood.The aim of this thesis is to contribute to a deeper understanding of Sami land use through studies of resource division, use and management. The focus is on the period from the late 1600s to the late 1800s, a period of declining but still existing autonomous Sami resource governance. Various historical and modern sources have been analysed with an array of methods from different academic disciplines.The results show that the forest Sami’s landscape was almost entirely divided into taxlands in the 17th century and that most lands were held by a single Sami household which controlled the land’s resources. Fishing was the main subsistence mode, although it was combined with hunting, reindeer herding and plant gathering in different proportions. Taxlands were most likely created to divide lakes and rivers. Most of the year, households moved between permanent settlements close to fishing sites, and their settlement pattern is best described as semisedentary.Since each household was in control of its own taxland, resources could be used flexibly. In winter, surplus pastures and hunting grounds were leased to reindeer-herding mountain Sami. During the 18th century, the forest Sami increasingly focused more on reindeer herding and less on fish. Summer movements were now performed between settlements installed to meet the needs of the reindeer, but the settlement pattern remained semisedentary. Fences were built in strategic places to control the movements of both own and foreign reindeer.Remains of former Sami resource use are often difficult to detect. Data collected with airborne laser scanning (ALS) can be used to map several kinds of remains, provided that the data is processed in an optimising way as shown in the thesis.In short, the thesis describes former forest Sami resource use as flexible and subject to change, and presents new methods to map cultural remains with maximum coverage.
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| 10. |
- Hjertman, Martina
(författare)
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Afloat and Aflame. Deconstructing the Long 19th century Port City Gothenburg through Newspaper Archaeology
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In line with the international historical-archaeological discipline, this study aims to increase knowledge of marginalising processes and disenfranchised groups in the past and to contribute to the recognised Swedish need to augment the know-how of researching people ‘of little note’ in urban environments. The study aspires a theoretically engaged empirical alternative for developing new knowledge about urban places which are not possible to excavate or where archaeological data is insufficient, while evincing how digitized historical newspapers can step in as a multifaceted historical- archaeological source. By merging historical archaeology with digital history, the study has fashioned a newspaper archaeology, encompassing text-cavation and critical discourse analysis, and applied it to the empirical case, and fringe settlements of the port city Gothenburg, through local newspapers during the long 19th century. The suburbs have been hot topics discussed in, and by newspapers, and furthermore floating (signifiers), variously charged with meaning dependent on situation, correspondent, and text genre. By employing the concept of worldmaking, the study has recognised how inclusion and exclusion of people and spaces through text, encompasses international images, local events, notions of space and architecture, as well as actors − including newspapers and newspaper genres. The concepts of counter-voice and counter-narrative have acknowledged opposing perspectives which have shed light on inequal societal structures and grand narratives and displayed how people ‘of little note’ already from the late 1700s, took part in and reacted to what was printed, and negotiated values. Of the empirical chapters, chapter 6 demonstrates how the name Majorna was geographically floating, but the debate from the 1840s about the suburb Majorna’s integration with the city, anchored the name to a designated space, as well as ushered in a new sense of identity and attempts to fill this location with social meaning. Chapter 7 shows how from around the 1830s, newspaper genres and engaged citizens created in-groups and out-groups through the broadcasting of a mix of internationally spread notions of mariners and workers and bourgeois ideals, and how the space of the port district Majorna from the 1840s, intensifying from the 1860s, was intimately associated with deviant behaviour. Chapter 8 establishes how print representations of urban fires in the fringe had their own worldmaking effects on the creation of communities that bridged geographical and social borders and widened the urban landscape. Chapter 9 evinces how the genre of urban travelogues created othering and typecast representations of the suburb’s built environment and populace, by using internationally known tropes, sensual qualities, semiophores, characters, and narrative techniques, but also was complex and played a less-known role in upholding an informal donation culture. Newspapers as source may carry the only remaining information on erased landscapes, materialities, and social practices and newspaper archaeology can present us with voices from those ‘of little note’ and lesser means. The study demonstrates how newspapers are worldmakers and vehicles in the making of social and spatial inclusion and exclusion, with possibilities of steering debates and halting or accelerating urban change. Consequently, newspapers are not only a pertinent historical-archaeological source, but also affected the very society we study through the newspapers’ contents.
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