Föreställningen om att värmlänningen är trevlig, gästvänlig, go och gla är seglivad,. Värmlänningen sägs också vara humoristisk, samt extra begiven på att dikta och berätta. Artikeln undersöker ursprunget till dessa föreställningar.

Urban fantasy, the genre of fantastic literature in which magic and monsters meet modern society, is fairly young but has old roots. Stefan Ekman’s book, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, examines the genre in depth, including its inherent social commentary, its historical development, and its interplay between modernity and the fantastic. The author draws on a wide range of urban fantasy texts from five decades, combining detailed analysis of dozens of novels and other media with broad discussions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre across three sections. The first section presents an overview of what the genre looks like today-both in terms of its common traits and its variety of settings-and how it has developed over time, including the history of urban fantasy scholarship. The second section examines urban fantasy’s core concern with the unseen, for example through a focus on unseen individuals overlooked by society or hiding within it, and on ignored urban spaces or labyrinthine undergrounds. The third section addresses how urban fantasy explores the relationship between the supernatural and modernity. Ekman offers readings of fiction by Ben Aaronovitch, Lauren Beukes, P. Djelí Clark, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Max Gladstone, Kim Harrison, N.K. Jemisin, and Megan Lindholm, among others. Urban Fantasy will appeal to teachers and students of the fantastic as well as to urban fantasy enthusiasts and literary scholars. Ekman illuminates the genre’s evolution and defining traits, inviting readers to rethink urban fantasy as a creative tool for using magic to explore modernity. 

In the Traces of the Cold War. Threat, violence and protection as cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is not just something from the past, but always also reflects contemporary needs and desires. In the Traces of the Cold War describes the making of a diverse and innovative Swedish military heritage. The book shows how memories and material remains from a period characterized by fear and geopolitical tensions are infused with new meanings when bunkers, decommissioned military facilities and technology are transformed into luxury housing, attractive tourist destinations and museum exhibitions.

Through field-visits to military heritage sites across Sweden, the authors examine what material objects, narratives and emotions that today represent the Cold War. These examinations show how military structures and equipment from a time associated with threat and danger become captivating elements of the cultural heritage, while also communicating specific ideas regarding security and protection.

In the Traces of the Cold War takes a novel approach to cultural heritage by relating collective memory-making to security policy. Based on theoretical perspectives from critical heritage studies (CHS) and feminist international relations (IR), the analysis focuses on constructions of national belonging and underlines the role of gender and sexuality in narrations of security and protection.

In a democracy, the subject of military violence must always be a matter of ethical and political conversations. Setting out from this assumption, the authors critically discuss how Cold War heritagisation produces militarization as “natural” and necessary. The book invites reflection on how history is written as well as on what the requirements are for a safe and secure society.

In the Traces of the Cold War presents the results from an interdisciplinary research project. The authors are all researchers at Stockholm University and have written the book together.

Academic co-ordinator is Professor Yvonne Svanström, Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, ORCID: 0000-0001-7070-6250

People's work orientations and attitudes to paid work are highly important for the welfare of any country. Still, little is currently known about how such attitudes are distributed among different countries, men and women, classes, occupations, age groups and so on. Even less is known about how work orientations have changed during the dramatic social transformations of economies and labour markets during recent decades. What happened, for example, to work orientations in Iceland when the country went bankrupt? The answer is quite surprising. Or, is it true that work is losing its position in people's lives in Western world? What is the relationship between people's attitudes to work and the way they actually behave on the labour market?This timely book deals with these questions - and more - presenting fresh knowledge on changes in work orientations in many countries. It is based on genuine theoretical arguments and thorough empirical studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It is a great source of new knowledge on work orientations and changes in attitudes to work.

The aim of this study is to contribute with knowledge about different perceptions of technology that exist among girls in secondary school. The ambition is that the knowledge about girls' perceptions can be used to contribute to a more accurate picture of the concept of technology and an increased interest in technology among girls. The purpose is answered through qualitative group interviews with girls in grades 6 and 9. With a phenomenographic research approach, insights were made possible about the girls' perceptions of technology and whether the field of knowledge interests them. The results show that the girls mainly link the concept of technology to high-tech and male-coded things. The girls perceive that technology is something that is new, created by man or powered by electricity. All respondents link the concept of technology to men rather than women and believe that they are less interested in technology than boys. The girls in the 9th grade have a broader and more developed conceptual understanding of technology than the girls in grade 6. Unlike previous studies, our results show that the girls in grade 9 have a greater interest in technology than the girls in grade 6. Therefore, we notice a need for teaching about the definition of technology, but also its connection to norms in society. Students should be given the opportunity to reason and problematize the meaning of technology.

This thesis explores how current ways of imagining possibilities for intersexed and trans embodied lives within medical contexts might be informed by and reimagined through the historical lived experiences of intersexed and trans individuals as they have been articulated in autobiographical accounts.

Postmodern, queer, intersex, and trans researchers and activists have criticised existing standards of intersex and trans healthcare for limiting the possibilities for diverse embodied lives by articulating certain forms of embodiment and selfhood as more likely to enable a liveable life than others. This has often been done in a medico-legal context by referring to experiences in the past of the unliveability of corporealities and gendersexed situations that differ from privileged positions. With a point of departure in these critiques, this thesis reopens questions about how intersexed and trans people may be embodied and have relations with others by reflecting upon the period of the first three-quarters of the 20th century, when the present standards of care and diagnostic categories were emerging, but had not yet become established.

Drawing upon a unique set of historical source material from the archives of the Danish Ministry of Justice and the Medico-Legal Council, intersexed and trans persons’ life stories are rearticulated from their own and medico-legal experts’ accounts written in relation to applications for change of legal gendersex status and medical transition. In this way, the process is traced through which these life stories have been repeatedly rearticulated in order to become a usable basis for diagnosis and decision-making. At the same time, the stories are unfolded once more in a rearticulation focusing on their complexity and diversity.

Rolf Lindner argues in his essay Die Angst des Forschers vor dem Feld from 1981, that the ethnographer’s first meeting with the field might cause anxieties that, when reflected upon as part of ethnographic knowledge production, might hold important insights into the field itself, on the one hand, and into ethnography’s implicit normative frameworks, on the other. In this interview, Rolf Lindner talks, 34 years on, about how the essay came about, how it connected to and intervened in dominant academic discourses at the time, and what the essay’s legacy is regarding methodical and methodological teaching in contemporary cultural anthropology.

In his 1981 essay Die Angst des Forschers vor dem Feld, Rolf Lindner argues that the ethnographer’s first meeting with the field might cause anxieties that, when reflected upon as part of ethnographic knowledge production, might hold important insights into the field itself on the one hand and into ethnography’s implicit normative frameworks on the other. 34 years after the publication of this essay, in this interview Rolf Lindner talks about how the essay came about, how it connected to and intervened in dominant academic discourses at the time, and what the essay’s legacy is in regard to methodical and methodological teaching in contemporary cultural anthropology.

Recension av Elin Nystrand von Unges avhandling ‘Samla samtid’ Insamlingspraktiker och temporalitet på kulturhistoriska museer i Sverige, 2019.

This paper presents a theoretical reframing of journalism as a fundamentally mobile practice and outlines a research agenda for studying the politics of mobility in journalism that is centered on the everyday work of journalists. Our reframing draws on geographer Tim Cresswell's work on the six components of a politics of mobility, which are motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction (Cresswell, T. 2010. "Towards a Politics of Mobility." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (1): 17-31). Cresswell poses six key questions about mobility, and rephrasing them to to fit journalists, we get why do journalists move?; how fast do journalists move?; according to what rhythm do journalists move?; what route(s) do journalists take?; how do journalists feel when they move?; and what stops/impedes the movement of journalists? These questions entail a research framework concerned with the different conditions of movement for different bodies, thus drawing attention to previously under-studied areas of journalism studies.