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In this article, we present ongoing archaeological research into Scandinavia's forested inland region, suggesting that its people and communities were socially and economically integrated into systems of trade and in close interaction with the worlds outside, as early as the first centuries of the Common Era. The article presents a range of archaeological evidence, from ca. 500 to 1400 CE, for processes of ecological globalization, manifested by the exploitation of local landscapes and the extraction of valued products that could be transformed into commodities through crafts and trade. These forested landscapes were reliant on—and also shaped by—complex social and economic relations reflecting interrelated socio-economic systems of extraction, production, and consumption. Our main argument is that these landscapes are crucial to identifying and understanding the contours of the premodern global North. UTMA

Abstract This essay charts the German eighteenth-century physician and writer Johann Georg Zimmermann’s monumental work on solitude. The essay draws on but also challenges recent historiography on two counts. First, it situates Zimmermann’s discourse on solitude in the context of the early modern cultura animi tradition, in which philosophy provided a cure for a soul perceived as diseased and perturbed by passion and desire. Placed in this context, solitude comes into view not primarily as a passive state of rest and tranquillity connected to the rural life, but as active, therapeutic and exercise-oriented work on the self. Second, it argues that Zimmermann also shaped his discourse in relation to the increasingly radical late eighteenth-century exploration of subjectivity and selfhood, an exploration that reflects the emergence of the modern conception of the unique individual and autonomous self.

Abstract Through the analysis of an extensive biographical source material – the life description of Swedish clergyman Pehr Stenberg – this article examines how love was framed as a cause of illness in everyday contexts in late eighteenth-century Sweden. Love was perceived as an emotion that could cause both physical and mental forms of illness. Although lovesickness has been regarded as an illness that could be used by afflicted individuals to communicate emotions, this source material indicates that illnesses caused by love were regarded as actual afflictions. In the framing of these illnesses, conceptions of female fragility were reinforced as love was perceived to have a particularly destabilising power on women.

This article deals with Rabbi Meir Kahane’s assimilation doctrine, an under-studied aspect of previous published research on Kahane. The present study suggests that this doctrine is catalysed by a palingenetic myth of decline and rebirth, which also catalyses Kahane’s ideology. By proposing this, this article aims to offer a new perspective on the understanding of what drives Kahane’s ideology. It is further suggested that Kahane’s palingenetic myth is in part built around a myth of ‘intraracial antagonism’ between the American Jewish Establishment (AJE) and the ‘common Jew’. Following Bruce Lincoln’s theory of myth, it is here contended that Kahane’s assimilation doctrine is presented as ‘ideology in narrative form’. The study surveys the alleged causes and effects of assimilation, and what solutions Kahane presents to put an end to it. Among the alleged causes, Kahane singles out the AJE’s purported gutting of Jewish religious education, which is said to have alienated Jewish youth from their religion. Aside from curtailing Jewish continuity, Kahane for example identifies Jews engaging in social causes that allegedly run counter to Jewish interests as one alleged effect of assimilation. To end assimilation Kahane promotes a solution of campaigning in Jewish communities to ultimately put a stop to intermarriage, to instil hadar and ahavat Yisroel among Jews by the means of a regenerated Jewish educational system, and to encourage Jews to ‘return’ to Israel.

Ledare för vol. 32/2 av Nordisk judaistik Editorial for Vol. 32/2 of Scandianvia Jewish Studies

In this short paper, I shall argue that legal philosophers ought to focus more than they have done so far on problems of legal reasoning. Not only is this a field with many philosophically interesting questions to consider, but it is also, in my estimation, the field in which legal philosophers can contribute the most to both the practice and the study of law. The practice of law is, after all, an argumentative practice. Lawyers and judges aim to provide solutions to concrete legal problems but rarely try to say anything of general application. And although legal scholars take a more general view of things and typically discuss types of legal problems, they, too, tend to prefer a rather piecemeal approach to legal problem-solving, and usually abstain from defending general theories or otherwise speaking in general terms. But even though reasoning and interpretation are at the center of what legal practitioners and legal scholars do, and even though there are many highly talented persons in the above-mentioned groups, neither legal practitioners nor legal scholars reason with the same care and precision as philosophers do. Perhaps the most important difference is that whereas legal practitioners and legal scholars typically approach reasoning and interpretation in an intuitive way, emphasizing rules of thumb, common sense, and the value of workable legal solutions to problematic cases, philosophers, although they may also reason intuitively and emphasize common sense, often take care to make the logical structure of the relevant argument explicit by formulating as precisely as possible both the conclusion and the premises, and by subjecting the argument thus formulated to close logical as well as substantive scrutiny, where such scrutiny typically involves paying close attention to the content, structure, and function of any relevant concepts. Against this background, I consider the following three types of questions regarding legal reasoning especially worthy of serious consideration. The first question is that of the relevance of the theory of reasons holism to legal reasoning in general. The second is the question of how to analyze (first-order) legal statements in a way that does not undermine the rationality of legal reasoning. And the third is the question of whether legal arguments or inferences are to be understood as deductive or as inductive inferences, or both, and if so how.

Hur hänger ett foto av en lule- och skogssamisk kvinna taget 1868 ihop med ett samtal mellan mor och dotter i ett kök över hundra år senare? I denna artikel tar jag utgångspunkt i en bild på min morfars farmors syster, skogs- och lulesamiska kvinnan Brita Stina Larsdotter Rim från 1868, som jag mötte 2008 för första gången i en webbutställning, och ett avgörande kökssamtal på svenska med min mamma på 1990-talet. Brita Stinas ansikte återfinns, än idag, via Nordiska museet tillgängliggjort online, utan restriktioner, utan etiska förbehåll, och utan att Brita Stinas livshistoria finns återgiven. Att resonera kring mitt möte med Brita Stinas bild och hur det hänger ihop med min familjs osynliggjorda samiska historia utgör ett återtagande – ett försök att använda bilden på ett samiskt sätt. Det är ett bidrag till svensk kolonial och bosättarkolonial historia, och därigenom ett bidrag till nordisk och europeisk historisk och kvinnohistorisk forskning. Jag ifrågasätter hur denna historia skrivs och hur den återges på museer, i undervisning i skola och på universitet, i läroböcker och i kurslitteratur. How does a photo of a Lule and forest Sámi woman taken in 1868 relate to a conversation between mother and daughter in a kitchen over a hundred years later? In this article, I take as my point of departure a picture of my grandfatherʼs grandmotherʼs sister, the forest and Lule Sámi woman Brita Stina Larsdotter Rim from 1868, whom I met in 2008 for the first time in a web exhibition, and a crucial kitchen conversation in Swedish with my mother in the 1990ʼs. Brita Stinaʼs face can still be found via the Nordic Museum made available online, without restrictions, without ethical protocols, and without Brita Stinaʼs life story being presented. To analyse my meeting with Brita Stinaʼs picture and the link to my familyʼs invisible Sami history is a recap – an attempt to use the picture in a Sámi way. It is a contribution to Swedish colonial and settler colonial history, and thereby a contribution to the research on Nordic, European and womenʼs history. I challenge how this history is written and how it is reproduced in museums, in school and university teaching, in textbooks and in course literature. FORMAS Dnr 2017-01923 FORMAS Dnr 2019-01975 FORMAS Dnr 2016-01039

The aim of this article is to increase our understanding of how history and social studies teachers in vocational preparation programmes (VET) in Sweden relate to the obligation of preparing students for their future lives as citizens. Previous research on VET programmes has primarily emphasised predetermined roles of education. Different critical perspectives have established how different VET practices contribute to reproducing specific values and a type of knowledge that leaves less room for students to act as independent subjects (Ledman, 2015; Nylund et al., 2020). In part, the findings of this article contribute to problematising such a description. In a series of interviews, teachers expressed what can best be described as a clear will to prepare students for a future as broadminded and tolerant citizens. The multi-perspective approach emphasised by these teachers not only illustrates the socialisation and qualification functions of education, it also gives prominence to the importance of student subjectification (cf Biesta, 2009; 2020). Furthermore, this article stresses that the teachers do not view the question of the purpose of their subjects in terms of either/or. Rather, it suggests they see their obligations as a matter of professional judgment and customised responses to unique didactic situations

Assessment of foreign/second language (L2) oral proficiency is known to be complex and influenced by the local context. In Sweden, extensive assessment guidelines for the National English Speaking Test (NEST) are offered to teachers, who act as raters of their own students’ performances on this high-stakes L2 English oral proficiency (OP) test. Despite guidelines, teachers commonly construct their own NEST scoring rubric. The present study aims to unveil teachers-as-raters’ conceptualizations, as these emerge from the self-made scoring rubrics, and possible transformations of policy. Data consist of 20 teacher-generated scoring rubrics used for assessing NEST (years 6 and 9). Rubrics were collected via personal networks and online teacher membership groups. Employing content analysis, data were analysed qualitatively to examine (i) what OP sub-skills were in focus for assessment, (ii) how sub-skills were conceptualized, and (iii) scoring rubric design. Results showed that the content and design of rubrics were heavily influenced by the official assessment guidelines, which led to broad consensus about what to assess—but not about how to assess. Lack of consensus was particularly salient for interactive skills. Analysis of policy transformations revealed that teachers’ self-made templates, in fact, lead to an analytic rather than a holistic assessment practice.

In the eleventh century AD, the Scandinavian countries were in the final stage of the process of conversion to Christianity. Local and regional processes of negotiations towards a Christian hegemony took various courses in different parts of Scandinavia. There are few substantial indications that social tensions resulted in violence. Rather, archaeological evidence indicates a gradual change. This paper highlights how these processes of negotiations were expressed by counter-hegemonic groups that took advantage of the affective affordances of runestones. By raising specific runestones, these non-Christian groups were part of an agonistic political process, as described by the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe.