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In this dissertation, all the categories of people that were on board fully manned warships are studied. The purpose of the study has been to describe life on board the large warships and to show how hierarchical power structures and social status were expressed and manifested in 17th century society. This has been achieved through an interdisciplinary method where historical and archaeological material, as well as imagery and ship models have been used. The roles of those on board at work, at rest and in battle have been analysed. In parallel, various hierarchical orders such as rank, estate, position and age, have been studied. Social status on board could be expressed through spaces, belongings, norms and practices. In the theoretical apparatus mainly used in this study, the concept of capital is central. Capital, i.e. various forms of assets, exist in several forms where symbolic capital is fundamental. This capital varies depending on the characteristics and abilities that are considered valuable in a specific social environment. Seamanship was a very important factor in obtaining status in the ship society. It formed the basis of the symbolic capital sought within the navy. However, there were differences between what seamanship meant and what the symbolic capital included for the different groups on board. Social status on warships was often expressed through rank and position, but this study also shows the number of other circumstances that could influence the social position of the people on the ships. Factors such as birth, age and experience played a major role. The ship society, with the many groups and individuals from different social strata on board, was characterized by the norms and practices that existed in its day. It was thus in many parts a 17th century society in concentrated form. 

Review: Per Höjeberg. Utmaningarna mot demokratins skola: Den svenska lärarkåren, nazismen och kommunismen 1933–1945 [The Swedish teaching profession, Nazism and Soviet Communism from 1933 to 1945]. Lunds universitet (PhD diss), 2016, 230 pp.

This paper gives a survey of the Germanic conception of a mountain into which the dead were thought to go in the afterlife. I start with investigating the Icelandic saga material, where the idea of the mountain of the dead is frequent. The study then takes the reader to continental Germanic speaking Europe in early Christian time. Here, elements such as the famous King Arthur and, eventually, emperors such as Charlemagne and Frederick II were added to the myth. Incorporated were also chiliastic notions of the Last Days and the final return of the (salvational) emperor from within the mountain. Finally, the paper looks briefly at the modern reception of the myth in romantic and nationalistic Germany, and ends with the picture of Adolf Hitler shortly before the outbreak of World War II, looking out over Untersberg, the home of the slumbering Emperor Barbarossa, who was expected to return in the final days...

Review: Marcelo Caruso and Daniel Maul (eds.). Decolonization(s) and Education: New Polities and New Men. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020, 231 pp.

This essay considers how a number of artworks mobilize what is tentatively termed “the analogue.” “The analogue” highlights artistic practices that implicitly or explicitly evoke themes and concepts associated with analogue photography. The essay argues that the so-called digital turn opens the possibility of tapping into analogue photography as a conceptual and cultural sensitivity distinguishable from the technique. It is the discourse of analogue photography that is key, not the technological process itself—therefore “the analogue” can be evoked also in works that are produced digitally. The essay explores how “the analogue” can be a productive way of analyzing specific artworks by artists such as Lotta Antonsson, Brian Ganter, Joachim Koester, Zoe Leonard, Vera Lutter, Joel Sternfeld, and Akram Zaatari. Contemporary artworks located within a postconceptual tradition can be said to have a built-in self-reflexive relationship to medium whereby the method and technique of production are always intimately intertwined with the artwork’s content and meaning. With that in mind, this paper shows how the selected artworks can be analyzed precisely in terms of this interplay between medium as technique and medium as concept and content. The essay adapts and modifies the analytical tools of intermediality to fit the specific conditions of contemporary photographic practices among artists, and shows that the artists considered in the text evoke both the documentary, evidentiary connotations 

Review: Annika Wickman. Filmen i försvarets tjänst: Undervisningsfilm i svensk militär utbildning 1920–1939 [Film in the Defence Forces’ service: Educational film within Swedish military training, 1920–1939]. Stockholm University (PhD diss.), 2018, 248 pp.

Syftet med studien har varit att med en mikrohistorisk ansats lyfta fram Anna Wemans roll som en föregångare i den svenska förskolans historia. I undersökningen av Wemans pedagogiska material skapas en bild av hur den småbarnsskolornas pedagogiska utveckling i riktning mot Fröbel såg ut vid sekelskiftet 1900. Med hjälp av en analys som påbörjades redan vid arkivet har jag hittat tecken på spårberoende, förändring och kontinuitet gentemot såväl dåtid som nutid. I arbetet har en empiridriven metod använts och empirin har visat tydliga tecken på att Anna Weman var engagerad och påläst inom gängse pedagogiska metoder och att förändringsarbetet bedrevs med en respekt och ödmjukhet inför det förflutna.

This dissertation explores the early digitalization in Sweden. As host to the first summit on the environment in Stockholm 1972 (UNCHE), as leading procurer of computer equipment as well as initiator to the world's first national Data Act of 1973, Sweden pioneered domains that have since emerged as critical to our age: environmental challenges and digital technology. Both products of the 1970s, environmental monitoring and population surveillance have typically been studied as separate phenomena. This thesis insists that they belong to the same lineage of procedures. In an effort to move beyond both celebratory and repressive discourses of technology, it turns to the infrastructural and operational aspects of histories of data. Crucially, the investigation traces a series of changes within the cultural techniques of modelling, linking and reuse. In so doing, it positions itself at the intersection of environmental and digital humanities, and contributes to both research fields. The aim of the investigation is to demonstrate how the handling of data shaped the environment and the population as objects of knowledge and to examine its consequences for state administration. By "following data" – noting how they were collected, transformed, played with, transferred, encrypted, stored and erased – the material and procedural elements of historical undertakings are emphasized. The investigation is organized in three parts: environment, population, and administration. Seeking the system dynamics origins of the 1972 Stockholm conference and the cybernetic principles of the systems ecology within the International Biological Program (IBP), the first part attempts to look past the politics of environmental movements and turns, instead, to modelling as a critical operation. The second part questions the generic surveillance studies approach to the 1970 census taking (FoB 70) and privacy debate in Sweden by considering these as part of the longer history of linking. Centering on an archival statistics system (ARKSY), a newspaper coupon campaign and the "deep map" of early computer cartography, the thesis here locates a shift from privacy as a vulnerable trait protected by law to a matter of database administration with citizens as managers of their own data. The third and final part is framed by operations of reuse. Such operations, the dissertation maintains, materialized as instrumental not only to household waste management but also to the handling of data in offices and archives. Scrutinizing test environments for word processing in the Swedish Parliament and the work of the Data Archiving Committee (DAK), the investigation argues that they should be understood as sites of reuse and recycling rather than as locations of paperless exchange. With early digitalization, the environment and the population started to emerge as "problems of data". Data were typically demanded in "raw" format and routinely portrayed as a new type of natural resource. In this setting, infrastructures of reuse proved more fundamental than imperatives of surveillance. Markedly, the manual aspects of "automatic" data processing (ADB) were downplayed even as they remained indispensable. Cycles of data appeared in many guises: in the natural environment, in models, in mapping systems, in archives. Guided by the analytical power of cultural techniques and drawing on a wide range of materials, this investigation is a prehistory of our data-driven world. QC 20230125