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‘Public health’ investigates the determinants of health, born during the Enlightenment in the seventeenth/eighteenth century. But ‘public health’ is also policies, aiming at the improvement of a population’s health. There is a mutual interchange between public health as science and as politics. A brief historical background is followed by an analysis of the impacts of political changes during the first two decades of the twenty first century in Sweden. In 2005, a policy document accepted by all political parties except for the Moderate Party highlighted socio-economic factors and structural reforms to decrease the health gaps in the population. The general election in September 2006 resulted in a new majority in the parliament and a center-right coalition government, including the Moderates and three parties that had approved of the 2005 document. In 2007 a “new public health policy” was introduced. Its priority lists stressed individual behavior and the new policy should be incentives to work instead of “allowances”. The Public Health Institute got instructions in accordance with the new policy. The ten years following this policy change has seen public health policies and attitudes to research shifting almost year by year. The new policy met a counter-stream from the very beginning. Influenced by Michael Marmot’s WHO Commission on health inequalities, regional commissions started in Sweden, Recommendations how to decrease social health gaps was adopted with almost no opposition by regional health boards in 2012–2013. But new problems were now occupying politicians and media—how to finance the growth of the old, multi-sick part of the population and increasing costs for new medical technologies and drugs. Public health as an academic discipline was in the middle of this fluctuating political landscape with direct effects on what has been considered worth listening to or support by public money.

AbstractThousands of Roma were killed in Ukraine by the Nazis and auxiliary police on the spot. There are more than 50,000 Roma in today’s Ukraine, represented by second and third generation decendants of the genocide survivors. The discussion on Roma identity cannot be isolated from the memory of the genocide, which makes the struggle over the past a reflexive landmark that mobilizes the Roma movement. About twenty Roma genocide memorials have been erected in Ukraine during last decade, and in 2016 the national memorial of the Roma genocide was opened in Babi Yar. However, scholars do not have a clear picture of memory narratives and memory practices of the Roma genocide in Ukraine. A comprehensive analysis of the contemporary situation is not possible without an examination of the history and memory of the Roma genocide before 1991.

This article considers colonial rhetoric manifested in representations of early settlement in the mining town of Kiruna in northernmost Sweden. Kiruna was founded more than 100 years ago by the LKAB Company with its centre the prosperous mine on Sami land. Continued iron ore mining has made it necessary to relocate the town centre a few kilometres north-east of its original location to ensure the safety of the people. The ongoing process of the town’s transformation due to industrial expansion has given rise to the creation of a memorial park between the town and the mine, in which two historical photographs have been erected on huge concrete blocks. For the Swedish Sami, the indigenous people, the transformation means further exploitation of their reindeer grazing lands and forced adaption to industrial expansion. The historical photographs in the memorial park fit into narratives of colonial expansion and exploration that represent the town’s colonial past. Both pictures are connected to colonial, racialised and gendered space during the early days of industrial colonialism. The context has been set by discussions about what Kiruna “is”, and how it originated. My aim is to study the role of collective memory in mediating a colonial past, by exploring the representations that are connected to and evoked by these pictures. In this progressive transformation of the town, what do these photographic memorials represent in relation to space? What are the values made visible in these photographs? I also discuss the ways in which Kiruna’s history becomes manifested in the town’s transformation and the use of history in urban planning. I argue that, in addressing the colonial history of Kiruna, it is timely to reconsider how memories of a town are communicated into the future by references to the past. I also claim that memory, history, and remembrance and forgetting are represented in this process of history-making and that they intersect gender, class and ethnicity.

We present an online API to access a number of Natural Language Processing services developed at KTH. The services work on Swedish text. They include tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, compound word analysis, word inflection, lemmatization, spelling error detection and correction, grammar checking, and more. The services can be accessed in several ways, including a RESTful interface, direct socket communication, and premade Web forms. The services are open to anyone. The source code is also freely available making it possible to set up another server or run the tools locally. We have also evaluated the performance of several of the services and compared them to other available systems. Both the precision and the recall for the Granska grammar checker are higher than for both Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The evaluation also shows that the recall is greatly improved when combining all the grammar checking services in the API, compared to any one method, and combining services is made easy by the API. QC 20230328

During a spectacular excavation in 1921 at the Norse farm of Herjolfsnes (Ikigaat) on the southern tip of Greenland, Poul Nørlund found 58 wooden crosses of drift­wood in the graves at the site. These vary in size from c. 10 to 70 cm. Since then, more crosses have been found in other churchyards, as well as a few in a more “profane” context in dwellings. Nearly all of these crosses are quite simple. But six of them are more elaborately carved with specific traits, which enable closer comparison with prototypes from Europe. Four crosses have Doric capital ends, which must be derived from the design of German and English crosses dating to the beginning of the 11th century and spread to Scandinavia in the 12th century. A regular crucifixion group (Calvary) has English and Norwegian antecedents dating to the mid-13th century, and a panel crucifix displays elements from a period as long c. 1200–1350, suggesting extreme lateness in style. There is nothing to stop us assuming that dissemination of influences essentially occurred through Nor­way and perhaps Iceland. Several stylistic traits, such as the Doric capitals, acanthus leaf and classical drapery, can be traced all the way back to classical anti­quity and represent their earliest occurrence in the western hemisphere. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-429323

Generalization from a case study is a perennial issue in the methodology of the social sciences. The case study is one of the most important research designs in many social scientific fields, but no shared understanding exists of the epistemic import of case studies. This article suggests that the idea of mechanism-based theorizing provides a fruitful basis for understanding how case studies contribute to a general understanding of social phenomena. This approach is illustrated with a reconstruction of Espeland and Sauder's case study of the effects of rankings on US legal education. On the basis of the reconstruction, it is argued that, at least with respect to sociology, the idea of mechanism-based theorizing captures many of the generalizable elements of case studies. Peer reviewed

Recently rediscovered photographs of the remains of thirteen individuals buried in the Sado Valley Mesolithic shell middens of Poças de S. Bento and Arapouco, excavated in 1960 and 1962, show the potential of revisiting excavation archives with new methods. The analysis, which applies the principles of archaeothanatology and is enriched by experimental taphonomic research, confirmed details concerning the treatment of the dead body and provided new insights into the use of burial spaces. Some bodies may have been mummified prior to burial, a phenomenon possibly linked to their curation and transport, highlighting the significance of both the body and the burial place in Mesolithic south-western Portugal. Une série de photos récemment redécouvertes, illustrant les sépultures de treize individus ensevelis dans les amas coquilliers mésolithiques de Poças de S. Bento et d'Arapouco fouillés en 1960 et en 1962 dans la vallée du Sado au Portugal, démontre le potentiel d'une réévaluation d'anciennes archives avec de nouvelles méthodes. L'examen des clichés, dans une perspective archéothanatologique et étayés par des recherches expérimentales en taphonomie, a révélé certains détails concernant le traitement des cadavres et offert de nouvelles perspectives sur des lieux de sépulture. Certains cadavres auraient été momifiés, un phénomène que les auteurs associent à la mise en valeur et au transport des défunts et qui souligne l'importance du corps et du lieu de sépulture pendant le Mésolithique dans le sud du Portugal. Translation by Madeleine Hummler Letztlich wiederentdeckte Fotos von dreizehn Individuen, welche in den mesolithischen Muschelhäufen von Poças de S. Bento and Arapouco im portugiesischen Sadotal in den Jahren 1960 und 1962 ausgegraben wurden, zeigen das Potenzial einer Neubewertung von Archivalien mit neuen Methoden. Die Auswertung der Bilder, aus einer archäothanatologischen Perspektive gesehen und von experimentellen taphonomischen Untersuchungen unterstützt, hat Aspekte der Behandlung der Leichen bestätigt und neue Einblicke in die Benutzung von Begräbnisstätten geliefert. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf eine mögliche Mumifizierung der Leichen, was vielleicht mit deren Erhaltung und Transport verbunden ist und die Bedeutung des physischen Körpers der Toten sowie der Bestattungsstätten im südportugiesischen Mesolithikum betont. Translation by Madeleine Hummler Bibliografiskt granskad

Allmän rösträtt?: rösträttens begränsningar efter 1921

This paper was prepared as part of the special collection on COVID-19 and the museum. The authors discuss the risks and uncertainties that the pandemic has introduced into the master planning process for cultural sites and resources. The paper concludes with reflections on how the heritage and cultural sector can best cope with these new realities.