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At the beginning of the 1960s, Swedish researchers started a sociological study of all children born in Stockholm in 1953, Project Metropolitan. This book describes the project’s at times dramatic history, where issues of personal integrity and the role of social sciences were heavily debated. These discussions were fueled by the rapid and far-reaching digitalization in society at large and also within social sciences. As such, Project Metropolitan came to symbolize the benefits and potential risks related to an expanding body of research based on large groups of individuals and multiple register data sources.
At the outset, the project’s founders sought to answer the following question: “Why do some get on better in life than others?” One of the main aims of the project was to study the long-term impact of conditions in childhood. The book therefore also includes an updated presentation of the main findings, as they have been conveyed in over 160 publications to date. These publications cover a wide array of topics and phenomena such as social mobility and education, substance abuse and crime, health and ill-health, peer influences and family relations, and adult lives of adopted children.
Today Project Metropolitan is known as the “Stockholm Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study (SBC Multigen)” and is still in full vigor. From its original group of 15,000 children, the study has become multi-generational by adding data about their parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews. As they approach their late 60s, it will also be possible to follow these “children” into retirement and old-age.
In the concluding chapter the author discusses some of the challenges contemporary social research is facing. What are the current threats to academic freedom and what opportunities do the unique data registers in countries like Sweden provide?
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Christophe Premat est maître de conférences en études culturelles au département d´études romanes et classiques de l´Université de Stockholm, il est co-rédacteur en chef de la Revue Nordique des Études Francophones, franorfon.org.
L´ouvrage revient sur la génèse des institutions de la Francophonie au moment des indépendances des pays africains dans les années 1960. En s´appuyant sur une analyse géopolitique et sur les théories postcoloniales, l´auteur réévalue le positionnement de la France qui officiellement prend ses distances avec cette organisation multilatérale pour mieux la contrôler dans les années 1980 lorsque la Francophonie augmente sa capacité politique à intervenir sur les grandes questions internationales. En confrontant l´esprit des structures aux acteurs de la Francophonie, l´ouvrage évalue les défis et la difficulté à cerner les domaines d´action spécifiques de cette organisation. Plus fondamentalement, cet ouvrage propose une analyse critique du discours francophone construit autour d´une idéologie qui fait de la langue française un instrument pétri de valeurs et de normes.
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Christophe Premat is a senior lecturer in cultural studies in the Department of Romance Studies and Classics at Stockholm University and Co-Editor-In-Chief for the Nordic Journal of Francophone Studies, https://franorfon.org.
The book studies the genesis of the institutions of the Francophonie at the time of independence of African countries in the sixties. Based on geopolitical analysis and postcolonial theories, the author reassesses the position of France which officially distanced itself from this multilateral organization. France controlled more and more the organization in the 1980s when the organization increased its political expression on international issues. By confronting the spirit of the structures with the actors of the Francophonie, the work reflects on the challenges and the difficulty to define the specific fields of action of this organization. Furthermore, the book proposes a critical analysis of the francophone discourse based on the ideology that makes the French language an instrument containing values and norms.
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Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange.
As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the one-sided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market.
How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values?
Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.
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The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.
Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research.
This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.
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Anarchism and religion have historically had an uneasy relationship. Indeed, representatives of both sides have regularly insisted on the fundamental incompatibility of anarchist and religious ideas and practices. Yet, ever since the emergence of anarchism as an intellectual and political movement, a considerable number of religious anarchists have insisted that their religious tradition necessarily implies an anarchist political stance.
Reflecting both a rise of interest in anarchist ideas and activism on the one hand, and the revival of religious ideas and movements in the political sphere on the other, this multi-volume collection examines congruities and contestations between the two from a diverse range of academic perspectives.
The second volume of Essays in Anarchism & Religion includes essays covering themes such as Yiddish radicalism, Byzantine theology, First Peter, William Blake, the role of violence in anarchism and in Christian anarchism, Spanish anarchist-themed film, and the Occult features of anarchism.
In a world where political ideas increasingly matter once more, and religion is an increasingly visible aspect of global political life, these essays offer scholarly analysis of overlooked activists, ideas and movements, and as such reveal the possibility of a powerful critique of contemporary global society.
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Anyone who studies the history of modern art—in art museums, in the classroom, in art historical handbooks or specialist surveys—will soon be aware of a certain recurrent pattern governing the selection of objects and forming a certain type of narrative where the history of modern art is presented as a variety of different -isms that dissolve into each other in the coherent sequence that constitutes the history of modern art as modernism.
But why is this pattern so similar in all different places and contexts? Is it possible to distinguish between the history of modern art and the history of modernism? And if so, when, where and how did modernism become synonymous with art of the modern era?
With a dual perspective—regarding art as well as the discursive perception of art—Modernism as an Institution attempts to answer these questions by studying the frameworks for the institutional establishment, as well as the historiography, of modern art.
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Denna antologi vänder sig till alla som är intresserade av estetiska ämnen, skapande och lärande. Den riktar sig särskilt till verksamma lärare, blivande lärare och lärarutbildare i estetiska ämnen samt till forskare och forskarstuderande inom det estetiska fältet. Boken presenterar olika kritiska och nya granskande perspektiv på estetiska och konstnärliga lärprocesser genom texter om barn, elever, lärare och studenter i varierande skapande verksamheter och verkstäder. Texterna berör alltifrån förskola, grundskolans yngre och senare åldrar, gymnasiet och kulturskolan till universitetsutbildning och internationella jämförelser. I antologin diskuterar forskare, universitetslärare och erfarna pedagoger forskningsfrågor kring estetiska uttryck och ämnen, lärprocesser och reflektioner ur ett praktiknära perspektiv.
Författarna är alla knutna till eller verksamma inom de estetiska ämnena vid institutionen för de Humanistiska och Samhällsvetenskapliga ämnenas didaktik (HSD) på Stockholms universitet. Boken speglar universitetslärares olika forskningspraktiker, såsom forskning av professorer och lektorer, post-dok forskare och doktorander samt adjunkters FoU-projekt. Antologin presenterar deras vetenskapliga studier och forskningsresultat av undervisning inom de estetiska ämnenas teori och praktik, undersökningar baserade på teoretisk och empirisk forskning som intervjuer, enkäter, observationer. Samtliga kapitel har genomgått en oberoende vetenskaplig granskningsprocess.
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This anthology presents perspectives on teaching and learning in the arts and is relevant for teachers and teacher students in the arts as well as researchers and PhD candidates. The analytical discussions about children, pupils, teachers and students in varying forms of creative education is treated from a variety of theoretical perspectives and offers new ways of thinking about the arts in all forms of education. In the anthology, researchers, senior lecturers and experienced educators discuss research questions about aesthetic expressions, communication, subjects, learning processes and reflections from a practice point of departure. The authors are all employed at or connected to the arts education at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Education (HSD) at Stockholm University, Sweden. The book includes descriptions of different research practices such as research by professors and senior lecturers, post docs as well as the reflective writings of teaching personnel. The chapters have all gone through a double-blind peer-review process.
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Hur blir de svenska migranterna i södra Spanien en livsstilsdiaspora?
Huvudaktören i denna bok är de stora nordiska sociala föreningarna i södra Spanien och de verksamheter de utvecklar för att främja svenskarnas sammanhållning. Studien visar att föreningarna går i spetsen för en diasporisk mobilisering av en svensk gemenskap. Detta görs genom att erbjuda de svenska migranterna sociala arenor, innehållsrika aktiviteter och service av olika slag. Föreningarna kan på så sätt underlätta migranternas förverkligande av sina livsstilsprojekt samtidigt som de också snitslar en väg in i Spaniensverige. Boken handlar om hur diasporagemenskap görs genom en mobilisering kring livsstilsprojektet där ålder, klass och transnationalitet är viktiga ingredienser.
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"Guiden till Spaniensverige" (The Guide to Spanish-Sweden) is an ethnographic account on the mobilisation of a social community of Swedish migrants who otherwise belongs to the diverse networks of lifestyle migrants or resident tourists in Southern Spain. The book is based on interviews with people who are engaged in Scandinavian associations/clubs or in other ways involved in practices which are associated with a Swedish community in Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol, which are two main destinations for lifestyle migrants in Spain. In addition the analysis is based on the discursive material that the social clubs, and to some extent other organisations and networks, are using in the service to their members.
The book demonstrates how the practices of the large Scandinavian social clubs, but also other organisations like the Swedish church and some of the business associations, are operating at the locus of an ethnic and transnationalised form of community-making. The offering of a home-like social arena with social and cultural activities are privileging the Swedish language and the Swedish origin. This study concludes that the social practices employed by the clubs are guiding potential members to a social space in which preferably ‘senior’ Swedish migrants meet, socialise, and, to some extent, also consume in ‘Swedish’. The book argues that the practices of the social clubs reveal the contours and infrastructure of a lifestyle diaspora in which a comfortable life in Spain – but in Swedish and with maintained relations with the Swedish society – is accentuated and given priority.
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In the two centuries since Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito was first performed, and the almost three centuries since Metastasio created the libretto, many rumours, myths and prejudiced opinions have gathered around the work, creating a narrative that Mozart, Mazzolà and their contemporaries would scarcely recognise.
The essays in this book contribute ideas, facts and images that will draw the twenty-first-century reader closer to the events of Central Europe in the late eighteenth century, and these new facts and ideas will help peel off some of the transmitted accretions that may hinder a modern listener from enjoying and understanding the opera in all its fullness. In this sense the essays present the reappraisal promised in the title.
The book is a product of the Performing Premodernity research project, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and based at the department of theatre studies of Stockholm University. Envisioned and edited by Magnus Tessing Schneider and Ruth Tatlow, the five essays by internationally renowned Mozart scholars are preceded by a chronology and a selection of original documents presented in new and revised parallel translations.
Praise for Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito: A Reappraisal
“[The monograph] supplies a wealth of information and thoughts about this opera, which has seldom been treated in such detail. It is a very welcome complement to John A. Rice’s 1991 monograph and to Emanuele Senici’s 1997 dissertation on the reception of La clemenza di Tito.”
“The idea of starting the volume with a documented critical chronology of sources relating to the genesis and reception of the opera is brilliant.”
— Lorenzo Bianconi, Università di Bologna
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The aim of this collection is to make possible the forging of a more robust, politically useful, and theoretically elaborate understanding of working-class literature(s).
These essays map a substantial terrain: the history of working-class literature(s) in Russia/The Soviet Union, The USA, Finland, Sweden, The UK, and Mexico. Together they give a complex and comparative – albeit far from comprehensive – picture of working-class literature(s) from an international perspective, without losing sight of national specificities.
By capturing a wide range of definitions and literatures, this collection gives a broad and rich picture of the many-facetted phenomenon of working-class literature(s), disrupts narrow understandings of the concept and phenomenon, as well as identifies and discusses some of the most important theoretical and historical questions brought to the fore by the study of this literature.
If read as stand-alone chapters, each contribution gives an overview of the history and research of a particular nation’s working-class literature. If read as an edited collection (which we hope you do), they contribute toward a more complex understanding of the global phenomenon of working-class literature(s).
Malmö University has published a short interview (2 min) with the editor Magnus Nilsson about the book. View the interview on the SUP blog.
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