Drawing from literature on transition governance and municipal wind power governance, the paper investigates local administrations’ experiences of a decade of wind power expansion in six Swedish municipalities with resource industry legacies. We use semi-structured interviews with local politicians and planners and narrative analysis to interrogate the role of resource legacies in how memories of wind power expansion and local transition trajectories for the future are forged. Memories of wind power in the local administrations are used to bridge resource legacies with the future, as the local administrations have embarked on a process of reassessing the costs and benefits of wind power developments in light of recent experiences. A common narrative of previous sacrifice and wanting to avoid being trapped in energy peripheralisation is identified, signalling an end to a prominent narrative of wind power’s inevitable expansion. That strive, however, result in different local governance paths, ranging from refusal to proactive planning for significant local wind power expansion. The paper answers to calls to investigate variegated temporalities and the role of local authorities in transition governance, to highlight slowdowns as well as accelerations, and to gain better knowledge not only of resistance but also proactive planning for wind power

In the aftermath of the Second World War, effective handling of scientific information was identified as crucial for advancement and international competitiveness. Here, we study how the Soviet Union, through the founding of The All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), developed its own grandiose system which served researchers and engineers throughout the USSR. By studying its inception, the way it was structured, and how it relates to similar grand visions of how to organise knowledge, we provide rare insights into a partly alternative history of how scientific information was organised in the latter half of the 20th century. Based on available sources in English and Russian, we consider the ideas behind this grand initiative for acquiring international literature, as well as how it was received and presented to a foreign audience. In this effort, we put particular emphasis on the first 25 years of VINITI (1952–1977) while at the same time focusing on central ideas in its organisation such as “enrichment”, “abstracting” and “pre-printing”. A key principle emerging from our analysis is how the notion of concentration becomes a fundamental principle for its operations. Overall, the activities of VINITI can today appear as both old-fashioned, bordering on the utopian, and as visionary and modern in its abandonment of journals and traditional forms of peer review.

Known as a pioneer of electronic music, Lev Theremin (1896–1993) had a career as an inventor which stretched the entire span of the Soviet Union’s existence. He witnessed the upheavals of war, terror and revolution firsthand but also tried his luck as an inventor in the United States. With an emphasis on the Soviet Union, this paper uses the case of Theremin – including the years he spent in the United States – as a lens through which intellectual property can be analysed. Soviet attempts to control and reward inventors, inventions and inventiveness to a large extent took place outside the formal legal framework. Theremin’s inventive career embodied the contradictions and tensions of intellectual property politics and its attempts to encourage, reward and control both inventions and inventors. As the case of Theremin will show, many of the dealings between inventor and state were classified and unrecognized, shaped by both voluntary cooperation and force. Using the methodological approach of the meta-archive, this paper traces the overarching structural context for owning and controlling knowledge and ideas through the personal trajectory of Theremin.

Planerna på en järnmalmsgruva i Kallak utanför Jokkmokk i Norrbottens län har mött stortmotstånd, men har också ivriga förespråkare. Denna artikel analyserar de kontroversiellaplanerna genom att studera handläggningen av ansökan om bearbetningskoncession.Ärendet har handlagts i flera omgångar och två gånger hänskjutits till regeringen för beslut. Iskrivande stund, åtta år efter att ansökan gjordes, saknas ännu beslut i ärendet. Genom endiskussion av fallet Kallak vill jag belysa hur djupt politiska grundantaganden kommer in iförvaltningsprocessen och påverkar hur olika instanser agerar i ärendet. Artikeln bygger påen analys av material som har producerats och inkommit i processen i form av skrivelser ochyttranden. Handläggningsprocessen visar att frågan om att bevilja en bearbetningskoncessionär svåravgränsad och knuten till ett antal andra överlappande problemområden.Med den här artikeln vill jag bidra med förståelse för hur handläggningen i det här fallet intealls är konsensusdriven, teknisk fråga, utan hur konflikter mellan olika preferenser, värdenoch världsbilder kommer till uttryck i beslutsprocessen.

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn made famous the image of the Soviet prison system Gulag as an archipelago. In this paper, Solzhenitsyn’s idea of the Gulag archipelago is juxtaposed with French Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s notion of archipelagic thinking. The focus is on the mining city Norilsk in Northern Siberia, one of the “islands” in this penal geography, a city that was largely built using forced labour. It is a long way from the Caribbean to Siberia, but both archipelagos (real and conceptual) share a history that can be termed colonial. While the system that created this penal archipelago of the Gulag was, in Glissant’s terms, a manifestation of thoroughly continental thinking, complete with grand, universalizing tendencies, it may also be possible to sense the diversity and interconnectedness that he attributed to the archipelago. The case of Norilsk is examined through the 2017 documentary A Moon of Nickel and Ice by Canadian film-maker Françoise Jacob. Glissant’s ideas are used to open up and pose questions, rather than to provide definitive answers. 

This chapter describes the search for lost soldiers as an affective practice, which, following Margaret Wetherell. It shows that how discourse and physical work are entangled, and how emotion and affect play roles in the actual work and when the work is displayed. The goal of the activity is to find, identify and bury soldiers, but also to spread knowledge of the war. The search for lost soldiers is perhaps first and foremost hard work. The Russia-wide voluntary search movement carries out search work through relatively autonomous units in all areas of the country that saw direct fighting. The prominence of the war memory in contemporary Russia is an important background for the search movement. In an album called 'The Price of Victory' on a social network site, A. has posted pictures from the search, including unusually explicit photos of human remains.

Millions of soldiers are still lying unburied on the Russian battlefields from the Second World War. Voluntary search units are trying to find and bury the remains of these soldiers and, if possible, identify them. Speaking about the war in the present tense when referring to the battlefields, this movement attempts to bring closure to the war seventy years after its end. The prime means to achieve this end is a proper burial. The search units spend extended amounts of time on the battlefields and build intimate knowledge of the area. The search units acts as both visitors and hosts of the battlefields, inviting others to come and see for themselves. The visitors they hosts fall into two major categories, relatives of fallen soldiers and tour participants. The act of visiting and spending time on the battlefields is part of connecting past and present, but the unfished business of unburied remains also makes the movement consider the past as present. All types of visits have a strong emphasis on commemoration and a ritual dimension, which links this practice to other practices termed pilgrimage.

This article discusses duty in relation to the past, focusing on Russia’s nationwide Search Movement (Poiskovoe dvizhenie). This civil movement of volunteers searches for the remains of fallen soldiers left on the battlefields of World War II all over Russia and has young people as its main target group. Despite in many ways being critical of the state, the Search Movement explicitly wants to make a contribution to the patriotic upbringing of Russian youth. In its work, the movement relates to the official government plans for patriotic education. Several obligations are central to the notion of patriotism: for the Search Movement, an obligation to the past, to remember, is the most important. In this article I will examine how the malleable concept of duty allows the Search Movement to carry out work implicitly critical of state failings in the name of patriotism.