This essay studies the concept of "livspusslet", a term in swedish that directly translates as "the jigsaw puzzle of life". In recent public debate it has been used to articulate issues concerning the combination of family life and a professional career. The empirical material consists of newspaper articles from nationwide daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet between 2009 and 2011. The concept of "livspusslet" relates to the debate about family values, gender equality and the public view on the issue of combining family life with a career. The widespread use of the concept indicates that the social practices surrounding the debate over family policy is shifting. This essay aims to answer questions of what meanings the concept of "livspusslet" is filled with in the studied articles, who has the legitimacy to articulate the problems surrounding the combination of family life and a career and it what matter the meanings of the concept changes from one article to another.

How can you do a right measurement of culture as well as with other social sectors and with what can culture contribute when it comes to a town´s development? We found out that in Linköping the regional federation Ostsam recently (2005) started mapping the region's creative centers in order to look into the spreading of the culture in the county, and then use the uniqueness of the culture as an advantage in society- planning contexts. The reason was that both municipal - and State directions detected that the culture has a broader importance when it comes to building up society and infrastructure than earlier considered. This is called Cultural planning and is the foundation- method that Östsam used when working with their new projekt The creative sector. The outcome of the Östsam study resulted in an exciting study basis to work further on with and to examine through own demarcations and directions.

This research manages the matter of the creative sector as an extension to the cultural sector. Our aim with this report is to find out the concept of the creative sector, what it stands for, and also to look into how the creative sector runs in practice.

This essay seeks to wean interculturality from its comfort zone of flat substitutability across cultural differences by pushing for the possibility of other ways of thinking about the concept depending on where (the geopolitics of knowledge) and by whom (the bodypolitics of knowledge) it is being articulated. In order to make a case for the importance of always considering the geopolitical and bodypolitical dimension of knowledge production within interculturality, this essay shifts focus away from policies of the European Union and UNESCO to the Andean region of Latin America. In that part of the world the notion of interculturalidad – translation: interculturality – is not only a subject on the educational agenda, it has also become a core component among indigenous social movements in their push for decolonization. With reference points drawn from a decolonial perspective and the concept of “colonial difference”, this essay makes the case that interculturalidad, with its roots in the historical experience of colonialism and in the particular, rather than in assertions of universality, offers another perspective on interculturality bringing into the picture other epistemologies. It concludes by arguing for the requirement to start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

At the centre of Decolonising Intercultural Education is a simple yet fundamental question: is it possible to learn from the Other? This book argues that many recent efforts to theorise interculturality restrict themselves to a variety of interpretations within a Western framework of knowledge, which does not necessarily account for the epistemological diversity of the world.

The book suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, framed not in terms of cultural differences, but in terms of colonial difference. It brings analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad into the picture and explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook, seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

Decolonising Intercultural Education will be of interest to educational practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students in in the areas of education, postcolonial studies, Latin American studies and social sciences.

If the production of knowledge in Latin America has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions —from liberation theology, popular education, participatory action research, alternative communication and critical literacy to postcolonial critique and decolonial options—have sought to shift the geography of reason. The central question to be addressed is how, in times of historical ruptures, political reconstructions and epistemic formations, the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies and realities may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning and knowledge.

An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

This paper scrutinises the ways in which students who have completed a university course on interculturality distinguish between sameness and otherness in attempts to integrate, relate to and build a bridge to those deemed culturally different. It makes use of interviews to analyse the factors that shape the interpretation of otherness and difference in the students’ definitions of interculturality, as well as their statements about the relationships between us and them, and descriptions of instances of learning and teaching that have taken place between parties in different parts of the world. Theoretically, the paper is based on a postcolonial framework, highlighting the continuing influence of colonialism and Eurocentric ways of reasoning inside as well as outside the classroom in today’s society. One of the main conclusions of the paper is that in the process of transferring knowledge, there is a risk that the history of modern Europe will be sanctioned as the historical trajectory for the rest of the world to follow, with the accompanying supposition that this can only be made possible by extending a helping hand to the Other.

Denna rapport är resultatet av ett ettårigt forskningsprojekt som Folkbildningsrådet finansierat. Projektet har genomförts av en grupp forskare vid Linköpings universitet: Lisbeth Eriksson, Martin Lundberg, Thomas Winman och Robert Aman.Forskarna undersöker hur olika religiösa och etniska gruppers skapande av “egna” folkbildande verksamheter kan förstås. I rapporten beskrivs de processer som lett fram till etablerandet av Kista folkhögskola, Agnesbergs folkhögskola, studieförbundet Ibn Rushd samt Samernas utbildningscentrum.

The award-winning Johan Vilde comic series deals with what has been referred to as a concealed part of Swedish history – namely Sweden’s involvement in the slave trade during the seventeenth century. The protagonist is a cabin boy on a Swedish merchant ship who is forced to escape after being accused of mutiny. After jumping ship, he floats ashore in Cabo Corso – located in modern-day Ghana – where he is eventually adopted by a local clan and grows up in an African kingdom. From there, he will go on to witness the harshness and brutality of the slave trade with his own eyes. Comprising four albums published between 1977 and 1982, the comic aligns itself with, and is a prime popular cultural example of, what can be classified in broad terms as a wave of international solidarity movements in Sweden. What this essay discusses is how the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist underpinnings of the Johan Vilde series rekindle a much older Romanticist position. This essay will argue that this well-intended ethically dimension of attempting to subvert the imperially established border between civilisation and where the wild things roam also relies on a position produced by colonial discourse. 

This book is about the Phantom in Sweden, or more correctly: about Sweden in the Phantom. Socialist Superhero uncovers how a peripheral American superhero – created in 1936 by author Lee Falk and artist Ray Moore – that has been accused of both racism and sexism has become a national concern in a country that several researchers have labelled the most antiracial and gender equal in the world. When a group of Swedish creators set up their official production of licensed scripts to The Phantom comic in 1972, the character is redefined through the prism of New Left ideology where the plots, besides aiming to entertain readers, also inform the reader about the righteousness and validity of the dominant ideological doctrine among the Swedish public at the time, which also impacted on the government’s foreign policy.

Through a series of close readings of the comic books, alongside fan writing, cultural criticism, political documents, and interviews with creators and editors of The Phantom comic book, The Phantom Comics and the New Left’s various thematic chapters discuss how topics such as foreign aid and poverty elimination, guerrilla warfare and postcolonialism, socialism and equality are expressed on the pages of the comic book, along with the fight against apartheid, the construction of a cooperative society in the jungle and the Phantom’s self-affirmed role as spokesperson for then Prime Minister Olof Palme. What will be seen is how the common denominator is ideology: the Phantom reflects values, and embodies a dominant political point of view, of how Sweden sees itself and its role in the world.

This essay explores the ways in which boundaries of estrangement are produced in the academic literature assigned for courses on interculturality. As the existence of interculturality is dependent on the ascription of content to culture, since the notion, by definition, always involves more than one singular culture, this essay seeks to provide an answer to the question of what this literature implicitly defines in terms of sameness vis-à-vis otherness and thereby chart the conditions for becoming intercultural. This question is especially important because theself in interculturality has to be, in principle, generalizable: it should be such that it signifies a position available for occupation by anybody with proper training in this approach. Starting from the assumption that different experiences, languages and identities, under the name of culture already intersect, and are contaminated by, one another, and are therefore already intercultural before being subjected to study under the auspices of ‘interculturality’ as an educational topic, the essay goes on toproblematize the way in which interculturality tends to construe sameness and difference along national lines and does little to cater for multiple, as opposed to national, or other unified, identities.

The Phantom, an American comic about a superhero of British heritage set in a fictional African country, is held in highest esteem elsewhere, regarded as a national institution in Australia, New Zealand and much of Scandinavia. Since the early 1960s, officially licensed scripts have been produced by the Swedish-based scriptwriters of ‘Team Fantomen’ who today remain the major suppliers of adventures to the Phantom comics around the world. This essay suggests that this shift in the scripts’ geographical origin also altered the politics of the comic: in the hands of Team Fantomen, the masked hero is instilled with political doctrines reflected in Swedish foreign policy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This ideological shift means that the masked hero moves away from the role of colonialist fantasy prevalent in the American scripts to become a supporter of decolonization, social justice, and equality. The Phantom becomes an avatar of democratic socialist ideology, the episodes offering a direct commentary on Sweden’s perception of its own role in the world as a leading proponent of international solidarity.

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Interculturality is a notion that has come to dominate the debate on cultural diversity among supranational bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO in recent years. The EU goes so far as to identify interculturality as a key cultural and linguistic characteristic of a union which, it argues, acts as an inspiration to other parts of the world. At the same time, the very notion of interculturality is a core component of indigenous movements in the Andean region of Latin America in their struggles for decolonization. Every bit as contingent as any other concept, it is apparent that several translations of interculturality are simultaneously in play. Through interviews with students and teachers in a course on interculturality run by indigenous alliances, my aim in this essay is to study how the notion is translated in the socio-political context of the Andes. With reference points drawn from the works of Walter Mignolo and the concept of delinking, I will engage in a discussion about the potential for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernization, progress, salvation – that lingers on in official memory. Engagement in such an interchange of experiences, memories and significations provides not only recognition of other forms of subjectivity, knowledge systems and visions of the future but also a possible contribution to an understanding of how any attempt to invoke a universal reach for interculturality, as in the case of the EU and UNESCO, risks echoing the imperial order that the notion in another context attempts to overcome. 

Folkbildningen i Sverige har, i en mening, varit oförändrad under lång tid, men som vi ser det sker nu ett trendbrott. Nya intressenter eller nya aktörer börjar ta andelar av den begränsade statsbidragsberättigade folkbildningen. Vad kommer det att leda till? Många inom folkbildningen talar i dag om att folkbildningen är omodern och vi undrar om nyetablerandet av folkbildningsverksamhet är ett tecken på det eller finns det helt andra utgångspunkter för denna (Eriksson, 2008)?

Det övergripande syftet med studien är att få en fördjupad förståelse av vad det är som händer. Vi är intresserade av två olika frågeställningar. Den första handlar om varför. Vad finns det för motiv och bevekelsegrunder bakom olika etniska eller religiösa gruppers skapande av ”egna” folkbildande verksamheter? Vad är det som gör att de väljer en segregerad organisatorisk lösning framför en integrerad sådan?

Den andra frågan rör processen. Vi vill beskriva den process som lett fram till att muslimer, romer och samer agerar på detta sätt. Här är både processen inom grupperna och processen i samhället av intresse. Vi ställer oss frågan om det finns någon relation mellan dessa processer. Finns det företeelser i samhället i stort som kan förklara vad som sker inom folkbildningen och vice versa? Det är också av intresse att se om det finns likheter eller olikheter i de olika gruppernas processer.

Frågorna kan preciseras på följande sätt:

1. Hur kan olika religiösa och etniska gruppers skapande av ”egna” folkbildande verksamheter förstås?
2. Hur kan den process som lett fram till detta beskrivas; dels utifrån vad som skett och sker i samhället, dels utifrån de olika gruppernas perspektiv?

För att kunna besvara dessa frågor har vi studerat fyra olika fall, fyra empiriska exempel. Som vi nämnt tidigare har vi valt att studera det romska initiativet att starta en egen folkhögskola i Agnesberg utanför Göteborg, det muslimska initiativet i Kista utanför Stockholm att göra detsamma samt det muslimska studieförbundet Ibn Rushd. Vi har dessutom valt att studera samernas situation i detta sammanhang.Muslimerna och romerna har valts med anledning av deras initiativ till egen folkbildande verksamhet, medan samerna valts då deras utveckling skulle kunna tolkas som den motsatta. De har tidigare haft en egen folkhögskola som nu avvecklats. Samerna har status av att vara en nationell minoritet, vilket även romerna har, men inte muslimerna.  Muslimer, romer och samer är dock alla tre exempel på  minoritetsgrupper i det svenska samhället. Detta aktualiserar frågor kring mångkultur, integration/segregation och majoritetssamhällets möte med minoritetsgrupper.

After long periods of military dictatorships, civil wars, and economic instability, Latin America has changed face, and become the foremost region for counter-hegemonic processes. This book seeks to address contemporary paradigms of education and learning in Latin America. Although the production of knowledge in the region has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions – from liberation theology, popular education, and critical literacy to postcolonial critique and decolonial options – have sought to shift the geography of reason.

Over the last decades, several Latin American communities have countered this movement by forming some of the most dynamic and organised forms of resistance: from the landless movements in Brazil to the Zapatistas in the Chiapas region of Mexico, from the indigenous social movements in Bolivia to Venezuela’s Chavistas, to mention but a few. The central question to be addressed is how, in times of historical ruptures, political reconstructions, and epistemic formations, the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies, and realities may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning, and knowledge. Consequently, this book transcends disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological boundaries in education and learning by engagement with ‘other’ paradigms. 

RÅPUNK documents the Swedish raw punk scene between 1981 and 1989. Inspired by bands like DISCHARGE, CRASS and DEAD KENNEDYS, the second wave of Swedish punk bands launched a furious, unique musical and visual onslaught that still affects and influences punk fans worldwide.The book captures the spirit of this era by featuring rare and never before seen photos of bands like ANTI-CIMEX, ASOCIAL, AVSKUM, DISARM, HUVUDTVÄTT/HEADCLEANERS, MISSBRUKARNA, MOB 47, MODERAT LIKVIDATION, RAPED TEENAGERS, RÖVSVETT,SKITSLICKERS, SVART PARAD, SVART SNÖ, SWANKERS PMS, TOTALITÄR and many, many more. It also documents the people — who by going to gigs, organising demonstrations, producing fanzines and releasing tapes and records — all represented different creative and ideological but equally important parts of the scene. RÅPUNK also features a great number of fanzines, posters, record and cassette artwork — all representing and encapsulating the scene’s raw, expressive and important Do It Yourself design aspect. Written by DAVID ANDERSSON — a member of the scene as singer of the band IDENTITY and zine maker of BUBBEL-BAD. Foreword by legendary ex-NAPALM DEATH singer LEE DORRIAN, who toured Sweden at the time, and was one of the few promoters to bring Swedish raw punk bandsto the UK. The book fills a previously blank area on the map as this is the first time the Swedish raw punk scene of the 1980s gets a visual documentation in book form.

Cultural heritage sites can be looked at differently by different people. These sites also carry collective understandings of how they should be understood. Between these two outsets there are negotiations of the sites’ meaning and value. The aim of this thesis is to understand how a place, institutionally pointed out as cultural heritage, is used and staged through diverse and intersecting practices, both through media and on the heri-tage site.

Two differently oriented cases are researched within Swedish cultural heritage preservation: one the birthplace of Carolus Linnaeus, the botanist, which is a cultural reservation located at Råshult in the south of Sweden, and the other a commissioned archaeological project called Slättbygdsprojektet in Östergötland in mid Sweden. The questions concern on what arenas the mediation happens, its theme/content, the staging of the cultural heritage, as well as the visitors’ experiences and the strategic actors’ visions of the site. Methodically I follow both a fictive visitor’s way to the heritage site and actual visitors on site.

Both in Slättbygdsprojektet and at Linnés Råshult the collective understandings of the sites are mainly viewed as a place for scientific study and a treasure chamber for especially valuable objects. The visitors especially highlight the social aspects of their visit. The visitors’ interpretation exists and competes with other images. However, there are no arenas that can make them visible, to put them in relation with the strategic actors, despite much public speech in recent years about democratizing cultural heri-tage processes. Images of different researched materials of the site have been juxta-posed to make visible the dynamic, negotiations, competition and lack of dialogue about cultural heritage sites.

Detta är ett examensarbete av undersökande karaktär för att se i vilken riktning man kan gå när man utformar mötesplatser i det offentliga rummet i nya stadsdelar. Utgångspunkten för detta arbete är den nya stadsdelen Ebbepark som håller på att byggas i Linköping i Östergötland. I Ebbepark kommer människor båda att bo och jobba. I studien undersöks om det finns några gemensamma nämnare mellan dessa två grupper (boende och anställda på företag i Linköping) och hur de idag träffar andra människor i sin närhet. Vad som även undersöks är hur de tänker kring hur dessa mötesplatser skulle kunna utformas och vad man skulle kunna göra på en sådan mötesplats. De två undersökta grupperna får även möjligheten att reflektera över om urbana odlingar skulle kunna vara ett inslag i dessa mötesplatser och vad de tror att urbana odlingar skulle kunna bidra med för dem. Från resultaten av den enkätundersökning som har genomförts har det visat sig att det inte återfinns någon signifikant skillnad på någon av frågorna mellan de två olika grupperna i studien. Att det inte finns någon signifikant skillnad mellan grupperna leder till att man enklare kan se i vilken riktning som mötesplatserna kan utformas. Detta kan man då göra genom att studera medelvärden för respektive kvantitativ fråga i enkäten. Det blir även intressant att studera de identifierade teman från en tematisk analys på den kvalitativa delen av enkäten. Detta för att erhålla en djupare förståelse för hur respektive enskild individ resonerar. Från de kvantitativa resultaten ser man att deltagarna överlag ställer sig positivt till växter i närheten av där de jobbar och bor. Det framkommer även att det redan finns några mötesplatser där deltagarna jobbar respektive bor men att de skulle kunna tänka sig fler. Vidare anser de att det finns en poäng med att boende och de arbetande i samma område beblandas och umgås med varandra. Från den tematiska analysen framkom att en mötesplats för de tillfrågade försöksdeltagarna antingen var en plats där man bara kunde vara, umgås och prata med andra människor. Det andra identifierade temat var att man på en mötesplats samlas kring någon form av aktivitet. Dessa två identifierade teman pekar antingen på lågintensiva eller högintensiva mötesplatser. När man vidare studerar fler av de teman som uppkom i analysen så träffades människor ofta i samband med måltider. När de tillfrågades vad man kunde göra på en mötesplats så menade flera personer att de ville prata med andra människor och ville gärna fika. Detta är mer i linje med de lågintensiva mötesplatserna där man inte behöver träffas kring en given aktivitet. Denna kandidatuppsats är ett examensarbete som har genomförts tillsammans med Vissheim och Sankt Kors Fastighets AB. Vissheim är ett nystartat företag som har tagit fram en lösning för autonom odling. Sankt Kors är det företag som driver byggnationen av den nya stadsdelen Ebbepark i Linköping, Östergötland.

The article sets out to define the need for comparing national museums as complex cultural processes. To do this questions are developed that concern the workings of institutions as arenas for cultural policy and identity politics in relation to central fields of knowledge. Methodological considerations for designing a comparative project are presented; and finally four fields of comparative endeavours related to different sets of state-making processes are presented:

An all-encompassing European comparison (including colonial endeavours) on the path taken by various nations to establish the place of national museums and the role they play in the creation of community.

An in-depth study of how the national display in a selection of countries creates visions of cultural community. How do they deal with differences and belongings on a super-national level and how do they relate to regional differences?

From a citizens’ perspective the intentions of cultural policy or institutional ambitions might be of little importance. This part will simulate visitor experience of national narratives in a comparative selection of capitals from project one; in order to develop an understanding of how citizen experience relates to the more structural findings in the other sub-projects and hence map in what directions citizenship and community are moving through contemporary displays of national community.

The place of national museums in changing knowledge regimes.

This chapter aims to set the theoretical framework for this collection by challenging the established, liberal understanding of property. Second, it presents a theoretical overview of piracy. The chapter addresses how a better understanding of the commons allows to problematise the concept of property, which, as this collection highlights, is continuously destabilised through acts of 'piracy'. It discusses the process of enclosure not as an isolated act, but as part of an ideology that prioritises private ownership over the common good. The concept of the commons can be traced back to ancient Rome with discussions of the Res Communes. The immaterial conceptualisation spreads into the 'information commons' that has had a particular political impact in the copyright debates that emerged since the late 1990s. In response to the invisible and 'natural' processes of enclosure, the chpater debates that both the existence and reciprocated exchange of the commons is fundamental in the functioning of authentic and vibrant communities.

Over the last decade piracy has emerged as a growing field of research covering a wide range of different phenomena, from fashion counterfeits and media piracy, through to 17th century buccaneers and present-day pirates off the coast of Somalia. In many cases piracy can be a metaphor or an analytical perspective to understand conflicts and social change. This article relates this fascination with piracy as a practice and a metaphor to academia and asks what a pirate methodology of knowledge production could be: how, in other words, researchers and educators can be understood as ‘pirates’ to the corporate university. Drawing on the history of maritime piracy as well as on a discussion on contemporary pirate libraries that disrupt proprietary publishing, the article explores the possibility of a pirate methodology as a way of acting as a researcher and relating to existing norms of knowledge production. The methodology of piratical scholarship involves exploiting the grey zones and loopholes of contemporary academia. It is a tactical intervention that exploits short term opportunities that arise in the machinery of academia to the strategic end of turning a limiting structure into an enabling field of opportunities. We hope that such a concept of pirate methodologies may help us reflect on how sustainable and constructive approaches to knowledge production emerge in the context of a critique of the corporate university. 

This research investigated whether belief in truth relativism yields higher receptivity to misinformation. Two studies with representative samples from Sweden (Study 1, N = 1005) and the UK (Study 2, N = 417) disentangled two forms of truth relativism: subjectivism (truth is relative to subjective intuitions) and cultural relativism (truth is relative to cultural context). In Study 1, subjectivism was more strongly associated with receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit and conspiracy theories than cultural relativism was. In Study 2 (preregistered), subjectivism predicted higher receptivity to both forms of misinformation over and above effects of analytical and actively open-minded thinking, profoundness receptivity, ideology, and demographics; the unique effects of cultural relativism were in the opposite direction (Study 1) or non-significant (Study 2).

Picture books are a frequent element of daily preschool activities (Damber, Nilsson & Ohlsson, 2013; Simonsson, 2004; SOU 2006:75). They are important pedagogical tools that can help children acquire an understanding of the everyday technology they come in contact with, as well as the human application of technology (Axell, 2015; Axell & Boström, 2015). These are skills that are emphasised in the Swedish preschool curriculum. In the curriculum it is also stated that the preschool should counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles (Skolverket, 2010). However, an investigation of a selection of picture books aimed at preschool children shows that the books content is somewhat problematic. Many of the picture books provide a focus on the function of separate artefacts without any sort of context or explanation of their implications in a societal context. There also tends to be an emphasis on traditional masculine-coded technology in the books. Building and making and working with machines is depicted as a male activity. The male stereotype is essentially connected with different kinds of vehicles like cars, airplanes, motorbikes, tractors etc. (Axell & Boström, 2015; See also Holbrok, 2008). Based on these previous findings, the aim of this pilot study was to obtain an initial concept about how children’s literature may influence preschool children’s view on technological artefacts. The study was conducted through semi-structured interviews with four five-year-olds, two girls and two boys. Through a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) three overarching themes were identified: The relationship between design and function, anthropomorphic animals as users of artefacts, and gender and artefacts. Some of the key findings were that the 5-year-olds did not know what “technology” is, but had good knowledge about tools. Additionally, they did not genderise any of the artefacts included in the study.

The overall aim of this project was to develop arts-based research involving, in various ways, urban space and its inhabitants. The project title — ‘art through city space’ — suggests movement and flow, as well as a perspective. Thus, the space of the city provided a conceptual framework for developing works that engaged with far larger issues than those conventionally associated with art in public space. The project participants were Johan Berglund, Jonas Dahlberg, Göran Dahlberg and Esther Shalev-Gerz, as well as researchers Bodil Axelsson and Karin Becker.  As initially formulated, ‘Art through City Space’ was to address issues concerning the place of art in contemporary urban space. The idea was that the work developed in the project would, in one way or another, be ‘public art’ even as it was expected to challenge and contest traditional views of the place of art in public space. Through the process and the artworks that were realised over the three-year period, the artistic research process led the project group into a range of other questions and practices central to contemporary urban life.

This chapter analyses the manifestations and operations of curatorial agency on the content-sharing platform Pinterest. While the manifestations of curatorial agency are explored through an analysis of the recontextualisations of museum digitisations of jewellery associated with the Viking Age in user-made collections, its operations are investigated through a long-term engagement with the platform’s employment of machine learning models to select and display images in line with its business model. On Pinterest, museum digitisations take on a transnational and dispersed life as inspiration for historical imagination and craft, as well as for contemporary fashion. Due to the complexity of machine learning models, the politics of curatorial agency becomes a delicate issue to locate as it morphs between human and machinic forms of intelligence.

This internet publication shows extracts from four works that interrogate and engage the space of the city. The publication also present participant’s reflections over the evolvement of their work, and where it landed. Two researchers, two artists, a photographer and a writer participate. The overall project – Art through City Space – suggests movement and flow, as well as a perspective, leading the artists, and the project participants into a range of questions and practices central to contemporary urban life.

Click on the titles placed upon the image to navigate between texts and artistic works. 

This open access book explores the multiple forms of curatorial agencies that develop when museum collection digitisations, narratives and new research findings circulate online. Focusing on Viking Age objects, it tracks the effects of antagonistic debates on discussion forums and the consequences of search engines, personalisation, and machine learning on American-based online platforms. Furthermore, it considers eco-systemic processes comprising computation, rare-earth minerals, electrical currents and data centres and cables as novel forms of curatorial actions. Thus, it explores curatorial agency as social constructivist, semiotic, algorithmic, and material. This book is of interest to scholars and students in the fields of museum studies, cultural heritage and media studies. It also appeals to museum practitioners concerned with curatorial innovation at the intersection of humanist interpretations and new materialist and more-than-human frameworks.

All over Europe, the founding of new history museums brings to the fore questions as to which stories should be told, which objects should be put on display, for what audiences and with what results and future possibilities. This collection of papers brings together reflections on the nature and roles of history museums on a general level with reports from case studies in Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw and Paris. The cases dwell on the challenges and negotiations of collections, communities and citizenship that arise when polities create new museums. How to balance political and intellectual concerns? The report starts out with the intersection between policy and research, including interventions from the European Commission and reflections on the balancing acts involved in producing research with policy relevance. The conference and the report were co-produced by EuNaMus and the House of European History.

The conference proceedings are produced within the three-year research programme EuNaMus – European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, coordinated at Tema Q at Linköping University (www.eunamus.eu). EuNaMus explores the creation and power of the heritage created and presented by European national museums to the world, Europe and its states, as an unsurpassable institution in contemporary society. National museums are defined and explored as processes of institutionalized negotiations where material collections and displays make claims and are recognized as articulating and representing national values and realities. Questions asked in the project are why, by whom, when, with what material, with what result and future possibilities are this museums shaped.

In a SweClarin cooperation project we apply topic modelling to the texts found with pins in Pin-terest boards. The data in focus are digitisations of Viking Age finds from the Swedish History Museum and the underlying research question is how they are given new contextual meanings in boards. We illustrate how topic modelling can support interpretation of polysemy and culturally situated meanings. It expands on the employment of topic modelling by accentuating the necessity of interpretation in every step of the process from capturing and cleaning the data, to modelling and visualisation. The paper concludes that the national context of digitisations of Viking Age jewellery in the Swedish History Museum’s collection management system is re-placed by several transnational contexts in which Viking Age jewellery is appreciated for its symbolical meanings and decorative functions in contemporary genres for re-imagining, relivingand performing European pasts and mythologies. The emerging contexts on Pinterest also high-light the business opportunities involved in genres such as reenactment, neo-paganism, lajv and fantasy. The boards are clues to how digitisations serve as prototypes for replicas.

In this chapter, we use the competing narratives and performances of four guided walks as the basis for a discussion of heritage in the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in the urban landscape of Norrköping, Sweden. Three of the walks focus on the life of straight, white, working-class women, while one offers a lesbian narrative thus disrupting the other walks. All the walks dealt with are part of recent projects to render female experiences visible so as to connect to current agendas and include them in the heritage for the future. They also testify to the difficulties of incorporating social complexity and intersectionality in heritage productions such as city walks.

Kapitlet ger en översikt av kulturbegreppets olika innebörder och användning med utgångspunkt från den historiska utvecklingen av begreppet sedan 1600-talet. Ursprunget finns det latinska ordet för odling. Det mycket varierade språkbruket "kultur" kan väsentligen återföras på fyra delvis överlappande huvudbetydelser av begreppet (1) det skönandliga eller civilisatoriska (2) det antropologiska (3) det artefaktiska och (4) det sektorsinriktade. Idéhistoriskt har begreppen etablerats i denna ordning. Kultur i betydelsen andlig odling - estetisk, vetenskaplig och intellektuell - eller ("finkultur") etableras under 1600-talet i Europa. Kultur i betydelsen av en sektor av samhället dyker upp först på 1900-talet. Kapitlet belyser hur kulturbegreppets olika huvudbetydelser avspeglas i samband med turism och hur man kan utnyttja begreppet för analys av turism. 

This essay aims to shed light on the interplay between leaders and politicians at Åtvidabergs municipality, where they have a system of rotating leadership which consists of a group of five leaders where one at the time holds the position of the formal leader at two months intervals. The essay is based on qualitative interviews with both municipality leaders and politicians working in Åtvidaberg. We implement a perspective of power when we analyze our informants statements, especially by relating those to Dennis H. Wrongs forms of power.

How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present.

I artikeln urskiljs, utifrån en estetisk synvinkel, hur den svenska kulturpolitiken när den förnyades under övergången från 1960- till 70-talet övergav det bildningsestetiska synsätt som tidigare låg till grund för den, under vad som här betecknas som dess förexplicitgjorda fas. Rötterna till och utvecklingen av detta bildningsestetiska synsätt härleds till tiden för estetikbegreppets introduktion i filosofin under 1700-talet, och framför allt till Kants och Schillers analyser av det estetiska omdömet respektive estetisk fostran, och hur dessa efterhand kombinerades med 1800-talets bildningstänkande. Denna bildningsestetik låg under 1900-talet till grund för den bildningspolitik som framträder tydligt i statliga utredningar, betänkanden och propositioner ända fram till dess att den nya kulturpolitiken sjösätts under övergången från 1960- till 70-talet. Denna förnyelse lämnade inte bara bildningsestetiken bakom sig, utan tonade överhuvudtaget ner och fasade ut estetiska synsätt som grund för kulturpolitiken. Den nya kulturpolitiken har dock ställts inför samma problem och svårigheter som den som vilade på ett bildningsestetiskt synsätt i fråga om att hantera estetiska kvalitetsbedömningar och -skillnader, inklusive de estetiska omdömen som dessa i någon form alltid faller tillbaka på. I artikeln urskiljs tre sådana former av estetiska omdömen, subjektiva, intersubjektiva och institutionaliserade, och som förstås som en triangulering av det estetiska omdöme vars bestämningsgrund enligt Kant inte kan vara annat än subjektiv. 

Although aesthetics, primarily in the shape of the arts, can be seen as the raison d’etreof cultural policy, it is seldom in the forefront of cultural policy research. This article focuses on the aesthetics of Concerts Sweden, which was founded in 1968 and closed down in 2010. With the aim to give high quality music to all citizens around the country and its concentration on mobile concerts and the production of records, Concerts Sweden initially rested on a Bildung aesthetics thoroughly elaborated in the white papers underlying its foundation. This Bildung aesthetics was based on classical views on Bildung and the emergence of modern theories of aesthetics, from the late eighteenth century by foremost Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller. Kant changed the way of looking at aesthetics, but in the 20th century his view on the a priori based universal character of aesthetical judgment lost its prior credibility. This is also reflected in the restricted aesthetic claims of most national cultural policies during the century, and in the history of Concerts Sweden (Svenska Rikskonserter), which musical-aesthetic platform changed when the aim to “counteract the negative effects of commercialism” was introduced as one of the goals of the new Swedish national cultural policy in 1974. With the support of this goal Concerts Sweden drifted away from the Bildung aesthetics prescribed for it in the white papers when it was founded, but without explicitly abandoning it. The history of Concerts Sweden shows that aesthetics had a stronger position in Swedish cultural policy prior to its reorganization in the 1970s, when it became more subordinated to political viewpoints. From this point of view, the Swedish cultural policy of music successively takes on a post-aesthetic character from the 1970s, in the sense that it no longer takes principle stands in matters of aesthetics, except in pragmatic ways, as when it for example comes to the assignment of subsidies based on judgments of aesthetical values or qualities.