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Highlighting the rural district of Nyanza in Rwanda, this article examines community relations to heritage resources. It investigates the possibilities for more ethical, engaged models of heritage management which can better deliver on agendas of decolonization and development. Our research finds that Nyanza’s heritage stakeholders highly value heritage’s social and economic roles, but communities are also significantly alienated from heritage resources. In seeking to bridge this gap, heritage professionals utilize a discourse of technocratic improvement, but community leaders emphasize ideas of ownership, drawing on higher state-level discourses of self-reliance and “homegrown solutions.” They mobilize the state’s own attempts to filter developing, decolonizing initiatives through Rwandan frameworks to advocate for communities’ right to participate in heritage. This local agency offers a roadmap for utilizing favorable aspects of existing governance to push heritage management toward community engagement and decolonization.

With the availability of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) courses, an increasing number of international students have been joining Swedish universities. However, the language use in Swedish EMI courses may display unique features; while many Swedish students have high English language proficiency, code-switching between Swedish and English is reported as a common practice by both lecturers and students, even when international students are present. Moreover, the term “international students” is often used to include students of various statuses and linguistic abilities, and the experiences and perspectives of short-term exchange students towards the language use in Swedish EMI courses are rarely documented. The current study investigates the perspectives of short-term exchange students from Japan enrolled in EMI courses at a university in Sweden. Questionnaire and focus group interview confirmed previous studies regarding the language-use practices in the classrooms. Moreover, the rate of speech, turn-taking, and background knowledge were found to hinder the learning and participation of the exchange students. The findings suggest the need to raise awareness of the language practices in Swedish EMI courses to students, lecturers, and other universities in order to support the learning experience of short-term exchange students.

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.

This article aims to give an overview of Jewish archives and archival sources in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Besides describing significant existing collections, the article looks into ongoing archival projects, digitizing and infrastructure programs, and maps out future challenges.

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 2016-01039 FORMAS Dnr 2019-01975