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- Arnshav, Mirja, 1977-
(author)
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De små båtarna och den stora flykten : Arkeologi i spåren av andra världskrigets baltiska flyktbåtar
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were occupied no less than three times during the Second World War. Faced with a reign of terror, the threat of deportation, and compulsory conscription, over 30,000 people fled over the Baltic Sea to Sweden. On their arrival in Sweden, most escape boats were confiscated by the authorities and in 1945 were returned to the Soviet Union.This study, which began as an attempt to find out about the Baltic escape boats that ended up in Sweden, is inspired by a foreign boat in a small fishing harbour on the island of Gotland. My curiosity was piqued when I caught sight of the boat and heard that it had probably been an escape boat.The purpose of this thesis is to establish which, if any, Baltic escape boats survive in Sweden, in which contexts they remain, and to review their state of preservation, as well as to answer the question of their significance for the memory of the escape. It is an archaeology of the escape and its aftermath, based on the surviving escape boats – what the boats say about the escape, what happened to them afterwards, and how people relate to them and their historical legacy today.The study looks at 35 boats that have been described as Baltic escape boats in various contexts. It shows that they are found in a multitude of environments and in a range of different states of preservation. The boats illustrate experiences that few other source materials can convey, in a manner pertinent to the archaeological understanding of flight. In addition, the boats are rare traces of an earlier Estonian coastal culture eradicated by the second Soviet occupation.One of the most important outcomes of the study is the documentation from the survey and examinations carried out. Few of the boats were known outside their local context. A national compilation has been lacking, which has impeded research and ultimately our understanding of the breadth and complexity of the Swedish historical landscape when it comes to ship remains.
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| 2. |
- Nystrand von Unge, Elin, 1977-
(author)
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Samla samtid : Insamlingspraktiker och temporalitet på kulturhistoriska museer i Sverige
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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. |
- Jansson, Hanna, 1983-
(author)
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Drömmen om äventyret : Långfärdsseglares reseberättelser på internet
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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