| 1. |
- 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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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Landzelius, Michael, 1958
(författare)
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Dis(re)membering Spaces: Swedish Modernism in Law Courts Controversy
- 1999
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation addresses the public controversy, as reflected in newspaper coverage, over the 1936 Law Courts Annex in Göteborg, Sweden. The controversy is conceived as a tension-filled, multi-layered conjuncture of urban rivalry within the nation-state. The politico-differential pair modernism/conservatism and the spatio-differential pair Stockholm/Göteborg are traced out and shown to be formative for subject positions both in the controversy, and in scholarly work during the subsequent six decades.To disentangle the conjuncture, subjects’ spatial sense-making is contextualized with respect to a politicized built environment, and to practices characterized by polysemy, contestation and resemanticization, through which volatile meanings and identity effects are continuously renegotiated. This understanding is elaborated in relation to a notion of power as concerning asymmetries of spatial reach with regard to individuals’ influence and control over practices.From this position, the law courts controversy is unfolded through a multi-factor analysis on several spatial scales, from the nation-state to architectural solutions. It is demonstrated that in the Swedish 1930s, no building but the Law Courts Annex was executed in overt modernism on a site of key symbolico-political significance. The established projection of modernism onto Stockholm and conservatism onto Göteborg is deconstructed. The study shows how the law courts project crystallized into a unique conjuncture entangled in questions of: national and local struggles between fractions of the dominant class; governmental efforts to impose new norms and forms of dwelling and discipline; aesthetic purification and élitism; and conjoined interests of real estate capitalists, functionalist planners, and reformist politicians.The law courts controversy is shown to have been embedded in transpositions of ethics, politics, space and aesthetics. New spaces of commoditized visibility were related to the Law Courts Annex, and a gendered imagery of buildings and female human bodies as homologous were invoked together with notions of sexual and bodily hygiene. The controversy is unfolded as concerned with conditions of identity formation and subjectivity in a space of unseen visibility, and the building is unveiled as a classed and gendered space for the production of humans as mass ornaments with apractic postural models.In conclusion, established scholarly discourse on the Law Courts Annex and the controversy is unveiled as a third-order simulacrum through which the annex since the late 1930s has been produced and preserved as a counterfeit, as a historical simulacrum of the particular imagery of a discourse disconnected from existing traces of the past.
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| 5. |
- 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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| 6. |
- Westin, Jonathan, 1980
(författare)
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Negotiating 'Culture', Assembling a Past: the Visual, the Non-Visual and the Voice of the Silent Actant
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to describe and analyse the processes surrounding the creation of a scientific visual representation, where, both in the practical creation of this visualisation and in the way it is communicated, those actants which amount to what we call ‘culture’ or cultural value, are enrolled or ignored. Trying to answer if a broader set of non-visual cultural properties can be identified and their influence described, and if history can be visualised without displacing our knowledge of the past in favour of a popular representation thereof, I trace the interaction between client, artist, technology and target audience. Although the audience is not permitted to take part in the meetings and walk the floors of the studios, and thus seem to remain silent, I argue nonetheless that their voices are heard during the assembling of a visual representation. Furthermore, offering the audience a tool is not enough to entice them to form their own ideas and exercise influence: although often presented as a visitor-empowering pedagogic technique which invites different interpretations of the material at display, the interactive technology offered by museums and educators is a tool of conformity which disciplines the audience and must therefore be treated as such. An object is not an entity which can be separated into artefact and context, but a hybrid made up of associations spread over both space and time. To describe this, and capture how visual representations can represent ‘culture’, I have developed an analytical vocabulary where the absolute limitations of an artefact or phenomenon is the point of departure. As the vocabulary of limitations demonstrates, limitations constitute the borders of an expression and permit an explanation of how associated actants are shaped by these borders into what we have come to refer to as ‘culture’.
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| 7. |
- Almevik, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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Byggnaden som kunskapskälla : The building as a source of knowledge
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Buildings are indeed mute, yet many historians and architects claim that they can nevertheless speak. The challenge is to understand their language. This thesis examines the building as a source of knowledge. Setting out from a repertoire of historical investigation methods used by professional actors within the field of architectural conservation, the thesis deals with the question of what standard buildings can teach us about the past. What can buildings say, and to whom? The thesis is based on a case study of the national cultural reserve of Örnanäs in the region of Skåne in the south of Sweden. Örnanäs serves as a laboratory for action-based research and involves both conservationists and craftsmen. The unit of analysis is not the site in itself but the context and process of investigation. The process is examined from three perspectives, which correspond to the layout of the thesis: the forensic perspective on material culture, the source pluralism perspective, which refers to the possibility of combining information from multiple sources, and the actor perspective, which sheds light on how the actors involved influence the investigation. A theoretical platform is given by Carlo Ginzburg’s perspectives on diagnosis through clues and Martin Weaver’s approach in ‘forensic conservation’. The results constitute a set of reflections and judgements on a range of different survey methods and sources. In focus are working methods that facilitate an increased exchange between practice-based research and research-based practice. The forensic perspective activates the building as a source of knowledge, and by combining different approaches it is possible to shed light on the history of the building from many different angles. Inquiry of historic construction, material use and signs of toolmarks, tested through processual reconstruction, is a method that has been systematically examined. The conclusion is that this method requires craft skills, yet it also opens up for cross-disciplinary work and thinking. The results articulate the importance of a heuristic approach. As conservationists and architectural historians we need to oscillate back and forth between the details and the whole, between observations and logical reasoning and between a physio-technical and socio-cultural perspective in order to uncover the layers and traces of the history of a building. Keywords: Architectural conservation, historic buildings, building survey, survey methods, historical sources, building documentation, mapping, architectural drawing, architectural analysis, forensic conservation, reconstruction, historical work process, traditional building craft.
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| 8. |
- Bagerius, Henric, 1974-
(författare)
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Mandom och mödom : Sexualitet, homosocialitet och aristokratisk identitet på det senmedeltida Island
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this study is to show how political and sexual strategies interacted when the Icelandic elite was reorganized in the late Middle Ages. During the years 1262 through 1264, the Icelanders agreed to pay tax to the Norwegian king and thus Iceland evolved into a more organized and hierarchical society. Representing the Norwegian crown, the Icelandic chieftains developed a stronger aristocratic identity. Their mutual understanding grew and so did their sense of being members of a chivalry.Emphasizing certain sexual norms was a way for the elite to define its own group and sexuality functioned as an important component when forming an aristocratic self-image. Through analyses of Icelandic romances and other sources, this dissertation shows that sexuality was frequently used to make distinctions of various kinds. Sexuality served as a marker to distinguish the chivalrous from the common, the human from the monstrous and the masculine from the feminine.In the romances, a homosocial pattern emerges, reflecting changing conceptions of male friendship in the aristocracy. In these narratives, it is the friendship between equal knights that matters. Chivalrous men seek each other's company and the strong bond between them often affect the way they act sexually. A chivalrous knight is able to control his sexual desires and he also considers the consequences of his actions. These characteristics distinguish him from other men in the romances. The heathen, for example, acts without respecting the rules of chivalry. He lacks the ability to reason and his urges cannot be subdued. These traits apply to the berserk as well.Sexuality was also important in distinguishing aristocratic women from other women. In the late Middle Ages, Icelandic aristocrats' interest in virginity increased - partially as a result of a stronger patrilineal way of thinking. However, the aristocratic approach to virginity was tinged with ambivalence. In the romances, there is something both enticing and frightening about the sexuality of young women. The maiden is adored because of her chastity and pure thoughts. On the other hand, her lack of sexual experience makes it difficult for her to control her sexual desires and to resist men. In this regard, the maiden is a source of deep worry.
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| 10. |
- 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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