This is the summary policy report of the Eunamus project. Drawing together findings from all of the other project reports and conferences, it reflects upon the way histories are constructed and deployed in Europe’s national museums. It sets out to address two questions: In what ways do national museums, and the histories they display, contribute to social division and cohesion? How might national museums be a force for greater social cohesion in Europe in the future? The report discusses how national museums perform, interpret and narrate meaningful pasts and how these acts of communication are perceived by visitors and citizens. The report concludes with eight policy implications:

• National museums need to be autonomous creative institutions
• National museums need to understand and be open about their performances
• National museums need to overcome national constraints
• National museums need to develop and share tools for establishing bridge-building narratives
• National museums need to review their impact on perceptions of citizenship
• National museums need to reach new audiences
• Regional and local museums hold great potential for international bridge building
• National museums can act as forums for contested issues

The three-year research programme, EuNaMus – European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, is coordinated at Tema Q at Linköping University (www.eunamus. eu). EuNaMus explores the creation and power of the heritage created and presented at 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 these museums shaped.

n/a

The Samdok network has since the 1970s connected cultural historical museums in Sweden in a joint effort to collect and record the contemporary nation. Together the local, regional, special and central museums joining in on Samdok, form a networked museumscape in which Nordiska Museet act as a central node. This paper will look into Samdok’s presentation of itself in books, reports and its regularly distributed periodical to understand how this network represents and materialises Sweden. It will tentatively argue that Samdok promotes societal and cultural, as well as scholarly and disciplinary, ideals of transformation and change. The network has re-invented itself over the years in order to keep up with transformations in the wider society such as globalisation, migration, and the move from industrialism to consumerism with the rise of the service sector. It has reinvented itself in terms of directions for collecting, and it has reinvented itself in terms of how it looks upon itself as an organisation by shifting from ideals of scientifc rationality to reflexive cultural analysis. As a consequence, looking at Sweden from within Samdok, means looking at a nation and a network in perpetual change.

I augusti 2004 arrangerade Tema Kultur och Samhälle (Tema Q) en nationell konferens under rubriken Kulturarvens dynamik: Det institutionaliserade kulturarvets förändringar. Konferensen syftade i främsta rummet till att lägga grunden för en nationell forskningsöversikt över ett växande akademiskt fält: forskning om kulturarv och historiebruk. Medan en sådan översikt i 1990-talets början inte hade tagit lång tid i anspråk är situationen en bit in på det nya seklet en annan. Idag är många forskare inom skilda discipliner eller tvärvetenskapliga miljöer sysselsatta med frågeställningar som kretsar kring den sammanvävda relationen mellan konstruktionen och användningen av historia. Föreliggande antologi innehåller artiklar skrivna av konferensens deltagare. Vår förhoppning är att den kan fungera dels som en introduktion till den nationella kulturarvs- och historiebruksforskningen, dels som en utgångspunkt för diskussioner om vilka viktiga frågor som ännu inte har blivit ställda.

Konferensen Kulturarvens dynamik: Det institutionaliserade kulturarvets förändringar arrangerades i samråd med Museivetenskapliga rådet och finansierades av Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Härmed fångade den också upp viktiga initiativ som tagits för att utveckla och fördjupa forskningen kring kulturarv och historiebruk. Vid Linköpings universitet har tematisk och tvärvetenskaplig forskning om kulturarv bedrivits sedan ett femtontal år, bland annat inom det av Forskningsrådsnämnden finansierade projektet ”Modernisering och kulturarv”. Tillkomsten av Tema Kultur och samhälle (Tema Q) har inneburit att kulturarvsforskningen vid Linköpings universitet har förstärkts. Museivetenskapliga rådet har under en lång tid strävat efter att få till stånd en bred institutionshistorik över museerna, och på andra sätt försökt stimulera museivetenskaplig forskning. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, slutligen, har på olika sätt försökt främja forskning om kulturarv och museer, bland annat genom konferensen Kulturarvet, museerna och forskningen, som genomfördes i samarbete med Forskningsrådsnämnden och Tema Teknik och social förändring 1997.

This article explores how the low of the popular and the high of history intersect to negotiate masculinities in the nexus of politics and war in a Swedish history magazine. It investigates the content of the magazine’s form and argues that it produces a kaleidoscopic take on the past which begs the reader to go along with the ads to buy another book, travel to one more historical site, buy a DVD or go to the movies, to turn the page, or to buy another issue of the magazine. Two articles, biographical in their outset, provide the basis for an analysis on how masculinities are negotiated by displaying political and military leaders in contradictory ways and enabling multiple entrance points for the contemporary reader and spectator. Articles on great men produce cultural imaginaries of warlords and political leaders by drawing on layers of historically contingent ways for men to act in public and private spheres and connecting late modern visual celebrity culture to the cults of fame in earlier centuries.

This chapter examines how one particular museum deals with new media by investigating the ways in which politics of participation are conveyed through two websites. It begins with the proposition that it is neither the museum nor the media per se that sets the conditions for participation, but the socio-technical arrangements they form. Software that provides for discussions among people who share the same interest seems to be congenial to experience-centered hobbies like living history and re-enactment, wheras an interface set up for hypertextual navigation within a set of pre-provided information might be more appropriate for an institution intent on educating the general public. It is argued that both the museum's main website and the investigated on-line forum for historical re-enactors are closed for the airing of contentious political issues. However the internet policy of the media department became a political issue at the museum.   

Den här rapporten har två delar. Första delen är mer teoretisk och resonerar kring minnesinstitutionernas uppdrag i en digitaliserad värld. Rapporten startar i hur den statliga digitaliseringspolitiken riktar uppdraget till att öka tillgänglighet och sökbarhet i digitala databaser. Det uppdraget problematiseras genom att ställas i relation till kulturarvsteori och minnesskapande i sociala medier.Rapportens andra del tar sin utgångspunkt i utvecklingsprojekt där institutioner prövar olika tekniker och samarbetsformer. Den presenterar konkreta tillvägagångssätt att öka delaktigheten och skapa engagemang för kulturarv.

The major objective of this thesis is to study the processes of traditionalisation that are being enacted in relation to both the external and internal production of the play "The Power and the Glory" that has been performed in Alvastra Abbey ruin since 1988. During three weeks in July the ruins and their environs are transformed into a rehearsal area, and a live stage, with lay actors performing different roles, a supporting staff and an audience. The thesis asks questions about how the staging of the play is impacted by a politics of culture, why this particular site or topography can be read as a story about a nation, what mediating connections there are between the yearly productions and, finally, how the rehearsals activate and reproduce the accumulated memory of the play and the place.

The thesis connects with discussions on how "space" is charged with symbolic and cultural meanings, the use of history and cultural heritage, and story-telling. These approaches are combined with analysis of how participants in interaction use multiple resources (talk, spatial organisation, gestures, gazes, movements and postures) to invokethe spatial aspects of the play as well as to put the story of the play in place. The methodological approach of the thesis combines fieldwork (personal observations, videotaping and audio-recordings) with analysis of written material, press cuttings, archival material, and books and illustrations about the area and its history.

In conclusion, this dissertation makes visible how Alvastra Abbey is associated with imagined cultural, political and social entities such as a nation, a province, and a local community. "The Power and the Glory", it appears, constitutes one agent among others in a long term meaning making process. One point made in this book is that although the story of the play is legitimised through references to a past that already has become meaningful in earlier processes of traditionalisation, the work of the Association of Alvastra Chronicle Play and the rehearsal process also creates a traditionalisation process of its own.

This chapter evolves through critical reviews of two strategic examples of museums that have reformed their collection databases with the aim of providing new modes of audience engagement. The goal of this discussion is to point out some implications that the two cases studies have for critical studies of online databases. The Swedish museum agency LSH and Rijksmuseum represent two main takes on how to navigate online databases: Text-based search and discovery-based navigation. Their databases mirror the challenges museums’ face on how to balance educational values with pressures to adapt to the effects of consumer markets. The chapter points to the need to locate curatorial agency in how algorithms and protocols interact with human curatorial agency, as well as copyright issues, and institutional histories.

Under de senaste tjugo åren har det varit en historiekulturell boom. Böcker om historia händelser, skeenden och händelser säljer bra och de filmer och tv-program med historiskt innehåll som produceras för en internationell publik finner distributörer och publik i Sverige. Här finns inte mindre än tre konkurrerande tidskrifter som särskilt inriktar sig på historia liksom nischade resebyråer och bokklubbar. Man kan säga att det vuxit fram ett populärhistoriskt landskap där konsumenter och producenter möter varandra. 108I det här konferensbidraget vill jag resonera kring hur det här populärhistoriska landskapet samkonstitueras genom produktion och konsumtion. Detta sker genom en samläsning av å ena sidan hur historieläsare resonerar kring hur de orienterar sig mellan, och värderar, olika medieformer och genrer, och å den andra sidan hur tidskrifter och bokklubbar kultiverar det konsumtions-landskap som läsarna strövar genom. Särskilt kommer konferensbidraget inriktas på medieföretagens gester att göra historia populärt, det vill säga deras strategier för att skapa ett så stort intresse som möjligt för skildringar av det förflutna. Till de strategier som diskuteras hör täta förbindelser mellan redaktion-ellt material och annonser; hur medieföretag, som i vissa avseenden konkurrerar med varandra, korslänkar sina produkter; och hur chefredaktörer och bok-klubbschefer skapar närhet mellan producenter och konsumenter genom att anspela på likhet och föreställda gemenskaper.

This article brings together theories on copyright, information commons and political economy to discuss the implications of memory institutions’ convergence with informational capitalism. The imperatives of sharing and participating prompt memory institutions to deal with their holdings in terms of property, and they invest time and resources in rights clearances, licensing procedures and in marking up works and artefacts as belonging to the public domain. This situation also compels them to allocate working hours to interaction on platforms owned and controlled by global media companies. Viewed through the lens of political economy, sharing and participation become gifts, not only to the public, but also to social media businesses when data traces are turned into private goods of value in informational capitalism. In return for their gifts, memory institutions fulfil democratic missions and gain reputation. However, data mining and the strategic placement of information which this allows for, run the risk of supporting populist misappropriation of heritage.

Internationellt har Samdoks modell inspirerat många efterföljare. Samtidigt har Samdok under de senaste åren fått allt svårare att legitimera sig, både gentemot de egna medlemsinstitutionerna och i relation till nationella svenska kulturpolitiska riktlinjer. I den här artikeln resonerar jag kring hur fl exibilitet men även en viss obestämbarhet i Samdoks position bidragit till att organisationen har kunnat vara nyskapande, men också till hur den har tappat mark.

Runt om i Sverige spelades sommaren 2004 ett sextiotal teateruppsättningar som berättade om händelser i det förflutna med anknytning till platsen därde spelades. I den här texten avser jag att diskutera komplicerade relationer mellan olika föreställningar om folk, folklighet och rumslig gemenskap med huvudsaklig utgångspunkt i en av dessa sommarteaterföreställningar, Alvastra krönikespel ”Makten och härligheten” i Ödeshögs kommun. En utgångspunkt för mitt resonemang är att politisk gemenskap byggs upp kring kombinationer av reella möten mellan människor och föreställningar om symbolisk gemenskap, exempelvis av den typ som skapas utifrån idékomplex kring samband mellan nation, folk och demokrati.1 Folket kan vara nationens folk, men också bygdens folk, eller folkrörelsernas folk i kamp mot överhögheter av olika slag. Jag kommer därför att relatera krönikespelet i Alvastra både till kulturpolitisk ansvarsfördelning på ett nationellt plan och till sommarteaterns historiska framväxt.

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.

Kulturstudier är ett ämne där många olika perspektiv på kulturella fenomen i samhället kan mötas. I dagens Sverige är detta tvärvetenskapliga fält livligt och aktivt. I den här boken presenteras aktuella frågor inom den gränsöverskridande forskningen. I överblickar tecknas bilden av kulturforskningens utveckling, såväl globalt som lokalt. Dessutom porträtteras en rad delområden, från undersökningar om urbanitet och intersektionalitet till studier av mode och visuell kultur. Begrepp som kritik och konstruktion sätts under luppen, och kulturstudiernas framtid diskuteras. Boken vänder sig till studenter och forskare på området. Den fungerar både som översiktlig introduktion till vår tids svenska kulturstudier och som fördjupande exemplifiering av hur kulturella fenomen kan förstås.

Between 1977 and 2011 the Swedish organization Samdok presented a nationwide programme for contemporary museum collecting, including an increasingly flexible intellectual and methodological framework. This article considers Samdok, its evolving programmes and self-presentations. It suggests that Samdok.s selfimage was one of inclusive progressiveness, social engagement and equality. It also suggests that they display four major rhetorical shifts: from an economic rationale to a social and cultural approach; from studies of a welfare state based´on industrial production to fieldwork concerning the adaptation to a postindustrial economy; from modern to post-modern epistemologies; and finally from engineering collecting to networking collecting, connecting contemporary collecting in Sweden to a transnational professional community. It is suggested that the case of Samdok casts light on the ways in which museums negotiate managerial issues, professional values and needs for inspiration and friendship.

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. 

Late modern reflexions: Festschrift for Johan Fornäs is an anthology of more than twenty essays dedicated to Johan Fornäs on his 60th birthday 7th of mars 2012. Several of the articles included take Johan Fornäs’ books as their starting point, while others are related, in different ways, to his wide and diverse interests. The book is divided into four thematic parts, dealing with "Theoretical Practices", “Medial Practices”. “Aesthetic Practices” and “Literary Practices”. Articles included under ”Theoretical Practices” discuss different aspects of hermenutics, culturalization, and cultural capital. ”Medial Practices” offers studies of contemporary media phenomena, relating them to questions of democracy and politics.”Aesthetic Practices” include contributions that discuss the function of different cultural practices in the public sphere. The last section, ”Literary Practices”, takes a closer look at both select literary texts and the discourses surrounding them. Most of the Articles are written in Swedish, with the exception of three articles in English.

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.

Kulturstudier är ett ämne där många olika perspektiv på kulturella fenomen i samhället kan mötas. I dagens Sverige är detta tvärvetenskapliga fält livligt och aktivt. I den här boken presenteras aktuella frågor inom den gränsöverskridande forskningen. I överblickar tecknas bilden av kulturforskningens utveckling, såväl globalt som lokalt. Dessutom porträtteras en rad delområden, från undersökningar om urbanitet och intersektionalitet till studier av mode och visuell kultur. Begrepp som kritik och konstruktion sätts under luppen, och kulturstudiernas framtid diskuteras. Boken vänder sig till studenter och forskare på området. Den fungerar både som översiktlig introduktion till vår tids svenska kulturstudier och som fördjupande exemplifiering av hur kulturella fenomen kan förstås.

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.

Intersections and gaps in linked, shared and networked heritage One of the key questions archives, libraries and museums face today is how to deal with blurring boundaries between different institutions as well as between institutions and people’s everyday life as digital environments have become increasingly important for how people, material culture and heritage practices links. This project studies current intersections and gaps between heritage authorities and political cultural identity work among people in place-based communities as well as among those who are united by disability, sexuality and gender expression, ethnicity or religion.

Todaymuseums strive to include LHBTQI perspectives in exhibitions and audiencedevelopment, as well as in the collections. This articleis an attempt to explore three cases of archiving LHBTQI memories andexperiences. We use a broad definition of “archiving” to also include digitalcollections, exhibitions and social media so as to investigate differentapproaches. The first case we approach is the website Unstraight Museum wherewe bring to the surface the ways in which its digital collection creates acollective memory, makes LHBTQI experiences visible and queer the officialheritage. Our second case is the Museum of World Culture’s exhibition Playground. Here we bring the attentionto the ways in which curatorial themes such as love and family invite straightpeople to identify with unstraight experiences. Our last case is activists’ blogs at the webplatform Tumblr, which we here view as an archive, waiting to be explored bycultural historians. For now it is temporary and ephemeral, in two respects. Firstly,the flowsare constantly updated and thereby changing. Secondly, there is no guaranteethat posts and accounts will be saved for the future.

This paper explores the ontological politics and practices of handwashing using hot tap water during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden through attending to how handwashing was performed, what thoughts and emotions handwashing practices evoked, and reflections about why these thoughts and emotions emerged. In analyses based on written diaries, stories, digital photos, and videos from the private sphere of the home, we show how the concepts of humans, non-humans, childhood, economy, ethics, infrastructure, and nature – together with public health organizations’ promotions of handwashing recommendations – are enacted and woven into the fabric of hot tap water use. Hot tap water emerged as an ambiguous commodity, differently shaped depending on past experiences and how messages from authorities were received. The politics of the seemingly mundane activity of washing hands (especially prior to the COVID-19 pandemic) consists of connectivities and relationships between various phenomena in fluid space, and blurs the boundaries between local and global, past and present. Thrifty handwashing practices previously established in the private sphere were challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic, as popular versions of surgical scrubbing were promoted. These versions were sometimes challenged when the inclusion of hot water was questioned at home and in public debate.

Domestic use of hot water has been identified as an urgent energy issue to address. In this paper, results from focus group interviews, with both residents and staff members, are presented. Results show that hot tap water use is differently shaped depending on whether you are a resident or a staff member. One thing in common was that in the focus groups it was difficult to separate hot tap water use from water use in general. Hot tap water use was not distinguished from use of cold tap water. To explore the issue further, the research on hot water was taken to residents’ homes and through more in-depth qualitative methods by an artist a formation process was started. Residents started to share more detailed stories about how they lived their everyday life in kitchens and bathrooms. These stories contain childhood memories and how past experience has shaped their water use and consequently their energy use patterns. The formation of this topic continued and in the artist’s interpretation of the data, three different artefacts became important: the sink, tub and toilet. These artefacts were placed in a river in the centre of a city as part of an audio walk with voices from the residents talking about their use of water. The exhibition was available during summer 2016 and the audio walk with the voices are planned to be reused and part of an exhibition in 2017.

This is a collaboration between artist Hasti Radpour, an art curator and researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

Theoretically our study has found inspirations from concepts such as everyday life practices, ethical dimensions and moral terrains in the use of hot tap water in homes, and includes an exploration of complex intersections between age, class, ethnicity and gender, and how it is interlaced with practices of washing hands, bathing, taking a shower and washing up the dishes.

An overall aim of the project is to contribute with new understandings of resource use in intimate spheres. We are particularly interested in embodied experiences, emotions, performative habits and memories and how these might influence hot water use.  

Currently we are exploring socio-cultural sensitive and ethical methods to understand how hot tap water comes to matter in everyday life. Our ongoing work includes a qualitative iterative research process with collecting narratives of hot tap water practices, thoughts and emotions that are associated with routines in washing hands, showering, bathing and washing up the dishes.

In our planned future work, when we are able to visit people’s homes again, researchers and artist will collaborate in home visits and ask questions about people’s practices: how they use hot tap water; and their thoughts and feelings; and why they think they have these thoughts and feelings related to their use of hot tap water.

This publication is 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.

This Open Access publication presents key findings of research undertaken by the Eunamus consortium in its attempts to understand the ‘museology of Europe’. This notion is used here to describe activities which are peculiar to museums and which result from the manner in which museums assemble and deploy objects. This idea can also be used to understand the museological aspects of the city, in which architecture, buildings, monuments, parks, piazzas and boulevards become curated objects. The museological aspect explored here also acts as a counterpoint to the narrative tradition in museums, explored elsewhere in the work of Eunamus. This research investigated the ways in which the city, online museum-like spaces, and national, regional and local museums produce opportunities for connecting identities. A study of national art museums and capital cities, for example, sought to understand how acts of nation making also produced a sense of Europe and of a shared European identity. This aim addressed a central purpose of Eunamus research: to understand how the portrayal of history in national museums could contribute to greater European social cohesion.

Studien "Guiderna och kulturarvssektorn" analyserar (1) hur guider visar kulturhistoriska miljöer, (2) vad guider talar om när de visar kulturhistoriska miljöer, och (3) hur guider är organiserade. Studien baseras på observationer av guidade visningar i ett stort antal kulturhistoriska miljöer, intervjuer med guider, samt analys av guideföreningars arkivhandlingar. Teoretiskt används begreppen plats, rum, berättelse, identitet och professionalisering.

Viktiga resultat: Guider visar kulturmiljöer med hjälp av en specifik guidekompetens. Formmässigt präglas guidade visningar av guidens personliga uttryck, av relativt stor variation i framställningen med inslag av humor, anekdoter, berättelser och korta informationstäta partier, av dialogiska inslag och av en (potentiell) förhandling om guidens auktoritet. Innehållsligt utmärks guidegenren av att innehållet förankras på platsen där guide och besökare rör sig. Innehållet är mer skiftande än i många andra genrer. Här samsas akademisk, saklig kunskap med mer underhållande inslag. Många guider i Sverige har sedan 1980-talet varit organiserade i guideföreningar och med den nationella paraplyorganisationen SveGuide. Guideorganisationerna har arbetat för en professionalisering av guidegruppen och har varit inflytelserika i sitt arbete för längre guideutbildningar. Ambitionen att få erkännande som en specialiserad yrkesgrupp har varit svårare och det är först 2016 som man nått fram till en nationell auktorisation av guider. Det stora flertalet guider har guideverksamheten som en bisyssla vilket bidrar till att förklara guidernas ganska svaga ställning.