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This study presents an in-depth analysis of 69 case studies focusing on the energy retrofit of historic buildings, uncovering challenges, best practices, and lessons learned to balance energy efficiency improvements with heritage preservation. The findings highlight several challenges encountered during renovations, such as complex heritage evaluations, restrictions on alterations, coordination issues with authorities, technical limitations, higher investment costs, and knowledge gaps. On the other hand, identifying factors promoting renovation, including demonstrating energy savings while respecting heritage, early collaboration between planners and authorities, and quantifying investments, could incentivize owners and authorities. The limitations of a still-limited sample size, occasional incomplete data, and potential sample bias call for cautious interpretation of the presented analysis. Despite these, the study provides valuable insights into successful projects, emphasizing the need for scalability, knowledge transfer from innovative policies, and targeted policy-making for successful replication. The study concludes with a call for further development of the HiBERatlas (Historic Building Energy Retrofit atlas), an extensive resource for historic building renovation, expanding its database, collaborating with agencies, and tailoring guidance for stakeholders to foster energy retrofits in heritage buildings.

ABSTRACT Exogamous marriage alliances involving royal women played a prominent role in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity in the seventh century AD. Yet the large number of well-furnished female burials from this period suggests a broader change in the role of women. The authors present the results of isotopic analysis of seventh-century burials, comparing male and female mobility and the mobility of females from well-furnished versus poorly/unfurnished burials. Results suggest increased mobility during the Conversion Period that is, paradoxically, most noticeable among women buried in poorly furnished graves; their well-furnished contemporaries were more likely to have grown up near to their place of burial.

Abstract The fann is a genre of oral poetry in the vernacular Arabic of the Alawi community in the Antioch/Hatay province of Turkey. Until recently, it has hardly been mentioned in academic literature. Poetic form and rhythm structure are largely fixed in this genre and it is almost always performed in a similar way; when it comes to the quality of the voice, including a more or less clear melodic shape, there is more left up to the performer. During performances, the rhythmical element dominates the essence of melodic aspects. A preliminary comparison with related genres in the region demonstrates that both the form and performance practice of fann resemble genres in neighbouring Arab countries. Comparison also finds that there is hardly any connection with any Turkish and Kurdish singer-poem tradition as practised in nearby regions. Only recent changes indicate influences from contemporary Turkish music.

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of the contemporary ‘Medusa tattoo’ that gained traction on the social media platform TikTok in 2019 as a symbol of sexual assault survival, and which has since come to function as an instrument for digital feminist activism. The study aspires to provide a new, previously unexplored link to the long chain of academic research on the figure of Medusa by looking at the emergence, function, and potential of the Medusa tattoo. It makes use of multimodal discourse analysis followed by the application of a select number of theoretical frameworks by Hans Belting, Michael Baxandall, Roland Barthes, and Hélène Cixous. It is observed that historical representations of Medusa tend to draw upon her dualistic, transformative nature of beauty-monster, threat-victim, and powerful-powerless, in accordance with dominant thoughts and ideologies. The contemporary Medusa tattoo is identified as being comprised of a tripartite structure with three carrier mediums: the tattooed body, tattoo designs, and TikTok videos found under the hashtag #medusatattoo, all capable of acting both independently and intermediary. This form is a result of a decades-long process of thought influenced by various appearing and re-appearing factors, conditions, and agents. The thesis further identifies the ways that the Medusa tattoo functions as myth in accordance with the writings of Roland Barthes, its meaning becoming fixed through acts of repetition on social media. Lastly, it is concluded that while tattoos can act in accordance with Hélène Cixous’ concept of écriture féminine, the contemporary Medusa tattoo cannot, due to its iconography demonstrating postfeminist attitudes towards beauty and femininity that enforce instead of challenge patriarchal structures. However, it is noted that it retains its potential as a symbol of strength and healing on the individual wearer. Denna uppsats undersöker fenomenet av den samtida ‘Medusatatueringen’ som 2019 uppmärksammades på den sociala mediaplattformen TikTok som en symbol för överlevnad av sexuella övergrepp och vilken därefter har fungerat som ett verktyg för digital feministisk aktivism. Studien strävar efter att bidra med en ny, tidigare outforskad länk till den långa kedjan av akademisk forskning om Medusa vilket sker genom analyserandet av Medusatatueringens uppkomst, funktion och potential. Undersökningen använder sig av multimodal diskursanalys som följs av tillämpningen av ett utvalt antal teoretiska ramverk av Hans Belting, Michael Baxandall, Roland Barthes och Hélène Cixous. Det observeras att historiska representationer av Medusa tenderar att spegla hennes dualistiska, transformativa natur av skönhet-monster, hot-offer och kraftull-maktlös i enlighet med dominanta tankeföreställningar och ideologier. Den samtida Medusatatueringen omfattar en tredelad struktur med bärare som kan agera både självständigt och som mellanhänder: den tatuerade kroppen, tatueringsdesigner och TikTok-videor under hashtaggen #medusatattoo. Formen är ett result av en decennier lång tankeprocess som påverkats av ett flertal nya samt återkommande faktorer, villkor och agenter. Uppsatsen identifierar vidare hur Medusatatueringen fungerar som myt i enlighet med Roland Barthes, då dess innebörd fastställs och naturaliseras genom repetitiva handlingar på sociala medier. Slutligen dras slutsatsen att trots att tatueringar kan agera i enlighet med Hélène Cixous koncept écriture féminine så besitter inte den samtida Medusatatueringen samma förmåga då dess ikonografi reflekterar postfeministiska attityder till skönhet och femininitet vilka upprätthåller snarare än utmanar patriarkala strukturer. Det noteras dock att den bibehåller potentialen att agera styrkande och helande på individen.

Slagg ses ofta som en restprodukt efter metallhantering. När studier genomförs för att nå djupare kunskap om slaggen sker det vanligen genom olika typer av tekniska analyser. I de naturvetenskapliga beskrivningarna av slaggens struktur och olika komponenter försvinner människorna som skapat och hanterat den. Människor som jobbar med olika typer av material, exempelvis trä, skinn och betong, får ett särskilt förhållande till just materialet och dess egenskaper, detta gäller inte minst för metall och därmed slagg. I denna artikel utforskas hur slagg i olika tider använts som identitetsmarkör och hur den påverkat människor, både direkt och indirekt. Exemplen är hämtade från yngre järnålderns Gästrikland och det tidigmoderna och nutida Bergslagen. Genom att vända på perspektivet och istället se slaggen som primär, går det att studera hur den vid olika tider och på olika vis utgjort en viktig social komponent i människors liv. Utgångspunkten är ett materialitetsperspektiv där jag inte ser slaggen som statisk utan istället följer den i dess ständiga förändring genom skapandet av historiska och kulturella processer. 

1856 började Statens Järnvägar med gods- och persontrafik och någon gång under början av 1860-talet så uppstod önskemålet att ha uppvärmning i förstaklasskupéer under de kalla vintermånaderna. Därmed så infördes den första uppvärmningen i personvagnar. Systemet som infördes köptes in från företaget Lauenstein & Co, Hamburg, där man även köpte in de första personvagnarna till Statens Järnvägar. Värmesystemet etablerades i de svenska personvagnarna under det tidiga 1860-talet och kom senare att utvecklas för att bättre passa det skandinaviska klimatet. Värmesystemet som kom att bli det svenska systemet var i stället för att vara baserat på varmvatten, som i andra delar av Centraleuropa, baserad på uppvärmning av sand. Det kom att kallas för sandvärmesystemet. Cylindrar fylldes med uppvärmd sand som sedan placerades under sofforna i så kallade blecklådor. På utvalda stationer så fanns det ugnar och personal för att hantera uppvärmningen och utbyte av cylindrarna. Värmesystemet var i bruk under cirka ett årtionde innan det sedan byttes ut mot ångvärmen under 1870-talet. Eftersom det skrotades ifrån Statens Järnvägar under det tidiga 1870-talet så är det väldigt lite som eventuellt har överlevt och finns bevarat idag i de museala samlingarna. In 1856, the State Railways began transporting goods and passengers and sometime in the early 1860s, the desire arose to have heating in first class compartments during the cold winter months. Therefore, the first heating system was introduced in passenger carriages. The system that was introduced was purchased from the company Lauenstein & Co, Hamburg, where the first passenger coaches for the State Railways were also purchased. The heating system was established in the Swedish passenger carriages in the early 1860s and was over time developed to better suit the Scandinavian climate. The heating system that became the Swedish system, instead of being based on hot water as used in other parts of central Europe, was instead based on heated sand. It came to be called the sand heating system. Cylinders were filled with heated sand which was then placed under the sofas in so-called tin boxes. At selected stations there were ovens and staff to manage the heating and replacement of the cylinders. The heating system was in use for about a decade before being replaced by steam heating in the 1870s. Since it was scrapped from the State Railways in the early 1870s, very little has actually survived and is preserved today in the museum collections.

This thesis analyzes and documents the splint armor material from Valsgärde 8 and Vendel I,X, and XI. This armor is then contextualized in the warrior institutions, weapon-systems, and fighting techniques of warbands from Central Sweden. Analogies for the splint armor are sought after with the closest parallels being found around the Black Sea area, associated with Byzantine, Sassanid, and Steppe-Nomadic martial cultures. The systems of exchange between these two regions are then analyzed in order to inform as to where this armor came from, whyit is there in Central Sweden, and what this can tell us about the development of military contacts between Central Sweden and the Black Sea area during the Vendel Period. Denna uppsats berör analysen och dokumentationen av det Vendeltida skenpansarmaterialet från Valsgärde 8 och Vendel I, X och XI, där skenpansarna sätts i kontext med krigarinstitutioner, vapensystem och stridstekniker från krigsband i Centrala Sverige. Analogier för dessa skenpansar med närmaste paralleller har påträffats i Svartahavsområdet och associeras med Bysantinska, Sasanidiska och stäppnomadiska krigarkulturer. Utbytessystem mellan dessa två regioner analyseras för att få förståelse för var denna typ av rustning härrör ifrån, varför den har hamnat i Centrala Sverige och vad de kan säga om utvecklingen av militära kontakter mellan Centrala Sverige och Svartahavsområdet under Vendeltiden.

Det pseudovetenskapliga forskningsinstitutet Ahnenerbe var en del av det nazistiska kampförbundet SS. Före kriget dokumenterade man bland annat bohusländska hällristningar i syfte att spåra ariska kopplingar mellan nordisk forntid och tysk historia. Arbetet leddes av Herman Wirth, som hade tät kontakt med den svenska riksantikvarien.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka om det är möjligt att förutse var de okända fångstgropar befinner sig i landskapet med hjälp av karaktärsdragen från de kända lämningarna. Målet med detta arbete är att identifiera och registrera okända fångstgropar för att skydda dem från att skadas av skogsbruket. Denna studie förhåller sig till ett undersökningsområde (kommunerna Karlskoga och Degerfors) men diskuterar även andra fångstgropar i Sverige. Under detta arbete har de kända fångstgroparna nyttjats på flera olika sätt; med hjälp av terrängskuggning granskades området vid fångstgroparna i syfte att se om det fanns ytterligare gropar i närheten samt att studera hur en grop kunde synas i terrängskuggningen. Sedan fältbesöktes de kända fångstgroparna för att kunna sammanställa deras karaktärsdrag och med hjälp av detta, samt tidigare forskning och kartanalyser kunde fem karaktärsdrag uppmärksammas. I slutändan upptäcktes åtta okända fångstgropar, varav tre är kvalitetssäkrade av Ulf Eriksson, arkeolog på Skogsstyrelsen och är/kommer bli registrerade i Kulturmiljöregistret. Uppsatsen diskuterar också det nuvarande kunskapsläget om fångstgropar till olika bytesdjur, samt jakt- och fångstmetoderna vargskall och varggård. Detta har dessvärre inte kunnat nå en slutsats då det fanns alldeles för många osäkra faktorer i tidigare forskning som påverkade uppsatsen negativt. This paper aims to investigate whether it is possible to predict the location of the unknown pits in the landscape using the characteristics of the known remains. The goal of this work is to identify and register unknown pitfalls to protect them from being damaged by forestry. This study relates to an investigation area (the municipalities of Karlskoga and Degerfors) but also discusses other catch pits in Sweden. During this work, the known catch pits have been used in several different ways; with the help of terrain shading, the area at the trapping pits was examined to see if there were additional pits nearby and to study how a pit could be seen in the terrain shading. The known trapping pits were then visited in the field to be able to compile their characteristics. With the help of previous research and map analyses, five characteristics could be noticed. In the end, seven unknown trap pits were discovered, three of which are quality assured by Ulf Eriksson, archaeologist at the Swedish Forest Agency. The thesis also discusses the current state of knowledge about trapping pits for various prey animals, as well as the hunting and trapping methods wolf hunting and wolf enclosure. Unfortunately, this has not been able to reach a conclusion as too many uncertain factors in previous research affected the essay negatively.

What is sociology? For centuries sociologists have struggled to answer this question and repeatably proclaimed that their discipline is in crisis. The problem has generated a field of its own, the sociology of sociology, where sociologists of knowledge offer concepts for how the paradigmatic status of discipline and its crisis ought to be understood. Yet, the foundation of these understandings has often been limited to conceptual reasonings, historical exposes, and anecdotes from prominent scholars. Following the increasing availability of digitized texts and the development of computational techniques, new venues have been opened for investigating the empirical bearing of what sociology is. This dissertation offers a synthesis of, and a contribution to, this growing literature at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and computational social science. The starting point is a review of literature in the sociology of sociology that has found that our discipline is believed to exist in a state of fragmentation, lacks a paradigm, and is conditioned by the context of its production. Akin to the supposed crisis, these conceptualizations are often taken for granted rather than being empirically put to test. This is why this dissertation aims to shed new light on the crisis of sociology by empirically scrutinizing prevailing disciplinary understandings with an interpretative and theory-driven methodological approach to computational text analysis (i.e., word correlation networks, topic modeling, stylometry, and shallow neural networks). To account for textual representations of sociological knowledge that are firmly institutionalized and exist across different local contexts, hundreds of dissertations in this discipline published in Sweden between 1980 and 2019 by five main universities have been digitized to form two corpora – 380 full-texts and 850 abstracts. Using these corpora, the conceptualizations are operationalized to be able to scrutinize, and trace, reoccurring instances where dissertations allude to certain images of sociology, which, drawing on the work of Margaret Masterman, can be regarded as crude replicas of paradigms. The study design allows us to problematize prevailing understandings of what sociology is. In contrast to the notion of fragmentation, the corpora are constituted by a core conditioned by local institutions attuned to different paradigmatic images of sociology. A discrepancy is also found between the two corpora where the abstracts appear to follow a divide between qualitative and quantitative research, and the full-texts are characterized by five paradigms with distinct methodological, epistemological, and ontological positions. These results suggest that the coexistence of multiple paradigms has been conflated with fragmentation and that sociologists tend to present their knowledge along the lines of simplified dichotomies. In response to the crisis, a more fruitful approach might be to embrace paradigm pluralism. As a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, this dissertation is an example of how the methodological divide can be overcome by merging insights from the conceptual strand with a hermeneutical take on computational methods to empirically explore taken-for-granted assumptions behind the production of disciplinary knowledge.