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Class in the age of the pool of talent: Taxonomic struggles in and through Swedish education research, c. 1945–1960. This article studies conceptualisations of social class in Swedish education research, c. 1945–1960. The article follows knowledge produced about talent and class in state commissions and in the newly expanded social sciences, and how it in turn was interpreted and used in political debates and in the media. I show that the taxonomy of the population in social groups (Socialgrupper) was key for conceptualising notions of talent and framing education policy, beginning with debates around ”the pool of talent” (Begåvningsreserven) in 1948. At the same time as becoming a standard tool for mapping social difference in Sweden, the social group taxonomy was criticised for being unscientific.

Titele in WoS: The metropolises of the Middle East

Editorial for Vol. 32/1 of Nordisk judaistik / Scandinavian Jewish Studies.

This article explores the problem of innate, natural talent vs acquired skill, knowledge, and virtue in dissertations from Uppsala University around 1680. These texts have never before been studied. It discusses questions such as: how did Swedish academics of the period conceive the relationship between ingenium (innate potential) and (acquired) virtue or knowledge? Which teaching methods did they advocate? How do the texts relate to developments in seventeenth century society? The study uses a combination of contextual analysis and a ‘history of concepts’ approach to answer these questions. The analysis reveals that the Swedish dissertations respond to contemporary debates (involving well-known authorities such as Vives, Huarte, Erasmus, and Comenius) and that they were affected by the immediate context: the growth of the early modern state and the social mobility which accompanied that growth. Education is described in Renaissance humanist terms, with a clear affinity to moral philosophical concepts such as virtue and habituation. The learning process described is analogous to the acquisition of moral virtue and education itself is to a large extent legitimated with reference to moral socialization. The educational ideas put forward balance discipline and playfulness, and represent a relatively democratic view of the distribution of human capabilities, showing a great trust in the potential of education. However, there is also a distinct stress on medical explanations of differences in individual talent.

This article discusses modern runic inscriptions from Orkney and Caithness. It presents various examples, some of which were previously considered “genuine”, and reveals that OR 13 Skara Brae is of modern provenance. Other examples from the region can be found both on boulders or in bedrock and in particular on ancient monuments ranging in date from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. The terminology applied to modern rune carving, in particular the term “forgery”, is examined, and the phenomenon is considered in relation to the Ken­sington runestone. Comparisons with modern rune carving in Sweden are made and suggestions are presented as to why there is such an abundance of recently carved inscriptions in Northern Scotland. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-385073

This article presents the new find of a manuscript with runes from Byland in Yorkshire. It provides a full description of the manuscript and examines its Scandi­navian runic alphabet in detail. The runes are further assessed within the context of the English tradition of runica manuscripta and Scandinavian epi­graphical tradition in Britain. Due to the exceptional origins of the manuscript and a number of uncommon features, the background of the material and the runic scribe are also examined. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-384655

This article deals with the foundational juncture in a 60-year long (and counting) relationship between Swedish and Tanzanian adult educators. It analyses how Swedish correspondence education methods and objectives were adapted as they entered the emerging field of foreign aid. Two educational institutions in Tanzania, in which Swedish funds and personnel played a central role are studied: the Nordic-funded Co-operative Educational Centre in Moshi founded in 1964, and the Swedish-funded National Correspondence Institute in Dar es Salaam (1971–). The analysis shows how international NGOs and individual policy entrepreneurs created the initial arenas for policy transfer. It emphasises how the ideal of creating an equal partnership affected the policies that were being lent and borrowed. The article argues that the concept of aidification can be used to capture the ways in which transnational policy areas such as education were transformed in the wake of decolonisation.

The purpose of this article is to examine the major changes Finnish school craft has undergone and explain these changes by using societal, pedagogical and subject-driven determinants. The main sources of this research include committee reports and national curricula. Research data was classified into five periods: craft for home well-being (1866–1911), craft for civic society (1912–1945), craft for independent hard-working citizens (1946–1969), toward equality craft (1970–1993), and unlimited craft (1994–2014). The analysis show that school craft has steadily followed students’, society’s and the subject’s different needs during these periods.

How can the Danish lawn be read and interpreted through the last century? The cases vary a lot, therefore the cases reach out towards a general discussion.The investigation aims at exploring the Danish lawn in an international perspective, and lawns in landscape architecture or lawns as symbols signify critical points of view to societal matters.The present contribution explores the lawn as a central component in selected cases from 1915 till today. The modern breakthrough in the 1920s in Danish landscape architecture revitalized the lawn. Further artistic contributions in the 1950s launched the lawn in a delicate poetic edition. Only a few years later in the 1960s, the lawn signified the inhuman, industrialized suburb. The color TV in the 1980s made the lawn synonymous with commercial football and technology. In 2019, the lawn is an everyday thing, and parallelly it exists as the antonym to the ecological flower meadow – the “true” urban nature.