Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper

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Kampen om Kommersen – kritik, motstånd och drömmar i den nyliberala staden
(2024-11-18) Westerström, Anders
The aim of this thesis is to study the ways in which neoliberal hegemony is produced and the processes by which it is maintained, negotiated and challenged. I critically examine the decisions, reports and interventions that surrounded the local flea market Kommersen in Gothenburg during the planning process of a comprehensive urban renewal area called norra Masthugget. The main research question is: for whom, how and to what ends is neoliberal hegemony upheld? In the first part of the thesis, I review the research literature related to the role of local marketplaces and culture in neoliberal urban planning processes. In the theory chapter I outline my understanding of methodological perspectives on ideology critique as well as Patrick Leary's notion of Keywords and Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and social space. I create a constellation and use a multimethods approach to better grasp the nonidentity of Kommersen. The first empirical chapter analyses the report Fallet Kommersen from 2013. This report is an example of how an intervention that aimed to protect marginalized groups in the city becomes part of a larger branding project, and there takes on a different meaning. In the second empirical chapter, I analyse the concept of "Kommersen 2.0" and attempts to integrate progressive values into the brand identity of the area. When Kommersen was demolished, a local artist organized a funeral ceremony for the building and erected several monuments in defence of free culture. In the third chapter, I analyse how these agents initiated a wider discussion about the right to the city in relation to Kommersen. To conclude, I argue that much of the meaning created around Kommersen is a product of ideology and an attempt to use Kommersen for commercial gain. I also show that hegemony is never total and discuss how different agents have challenged the land exploitation process in norra Masthugget. Finally, I look at the ways in which consent has been created around Kommersen and how neoliberal ideology affects the way we think, act in and dream in the city.
Människorna, musiken och de mekaniska instrumenten i Norge cirka 1480-1890
(2024-01-30) Krouthén, Mats
An international history of mechanical musical instruments is well documented from a technological perspective (innovation, patents etc.), for instance musical clocks, barrel organs, musical box and organettes. The purpose of this study is to elucidate the specific region of Norway from a sociocultural narrative, by analyzing the emergence, distribution, and reception of these instruments. The hitherto unexplored Norwegian milieu is compared with the canonized European. The study is enabled by the rich sources of digitalized newspapers, domestic literature as well as well-registered extant mechanical instruments in museums. Four articles enlighten the mechanical instruments from various organological perspectives by: 1) examining musical clocks through a sound study analysis, 2) recanonizing the repertory in the Norwegian clocks, 3) analyzing changes of concepts, examining the slow establishment of barrel organs, and 4) exploring idiomatic adjustments of arrangements of disc music boxes and comparing them with the original score. The study shows how mechanical instruments in Norway were established with a delay in time in comparison to the international scene. Also, a distinctive hymnal repertory can be noted in musical clocks. Later, the initial import of music boxes by non-music specialists shifted during the 1800s to an effective distribution by direct import from the producers, retailers in general or by the specialized music trade, when also the term «mechanical instruments» was established. Central uses over the years include the imitation of nature (during the Enlightenment period), to show good taste, to use as a tool of power for rationality (time discipline) as well as stressing the magic perspective (look, no hands) and to give consolation. They also played an important part in the emerging entertainment and consumer market In the thesis I juxtapose technical and social perspectives on the music box discs & cylinders as on the phonograph. This opens for a new understanding of the distribution of tangible, portable, repeatable, and temporal musical objects, and in the long term, of the process of mediatization and musicalization of society. Finally, a discussion on the Ogden & Richards theory of symbol-thought-referent can serve as a tool for museum use in terminology and taxonomy matters.
Ett tjejligt rum. Tidningen Starlet 1966-1996
(2023-10-16) Öhman, Kristina
This dissertation examines the Swedish girls’ magazine Starlet (1966–96), with the primary aim of exploring it as a girls’ product and experience and to understand what practices and spatial constructions are made visible in the magazine as well as in previous editors’ and readers’ recollections of it. The main research question is how bedroom culture appears in Starlet and what space is established in this magazine produced for, by, and with girls for 30 years. This is explored through multiple methods and materials, taking both the consumption and production aspects into consideration. The empirical material consists of 150 issues of Starlet from its entire era of publication, interviews with former editors and contributors to Starlet, and written recollections and reflections from previous readers of the magazine. The analytical entry points are three-folded: girl culture and girls’ culture, regarding products created for girls or by girls, respectively. The pursuit of happiness regards the labour the reader puts into the quest for a fulfilling life and what aspects of life are described as generating happiness. The combined consumption and production of the readers are central to the understanding of Starlet as a cultural product. Consumers were given space to participate and produce material for publication, and Starlet therefore spoke to girls while allowing readers to communicate with each other, making the magazine a social medium before the impact of the internet in the 1990s. Starlet became an extension of the girl's bedroom, with and in which readers could relax and have fun, but also ask for and offer support, ponder new topics and experiences, and share both joys and problems with each other. Through a narrative analysis of the material, this study argues that Starlet enables plenty of alternative readings of its content and offers its readers a plastic popular material. Starlet exemplifies the potential of popular media by providing creative and communicative material to use for an array of wants and needs, always with the reader’s individual and current happiness and desires in focus.
Spiritual transcendence and androgyny within Swedish and Finnish transnational Symbolism
(2022-10-13) Bruchmüller, Birte
This Doctoral thesis is an examination of a group of Swedish and Finnish artists and their role as important and active participants in a transnational Symbolist movement. It deals with the depiction of the spiritually enhanced human body in the work of the Swedish artists Olof Sager-Nelson and Tyra Kleen, and the Finnish artists Magnus Enckell, Ellen Thesleff and Beda Stjernschantz, as one central topic within the European Symbolist art movement. During their different Parisian sojourns at the turn of the twentieth century, these artists came in contact with the Symbolist and occult Rose+Croix-order, its Salons de la Rose+Croix and its transnational and androgynous art programme, which revolved around the exploration of the human being’s immateriality and spirituality. This study makes an investigation of the interrelations between the art by these five artists and, primarily, the Parisian Salons de la Rose+Croix, but also their interrelationship with other sources for a transnational Symbolist visual language. Thematically structured into three analyses chapters on portraiture, classical Greco-Roman themes and scenes of interpersonal intimate encounters, this research considers how the total of the fifteen studied artworks can be understood not only thematically, but also theoretically, aesthetically, and stylistically as active contributions to the transnational Symbolist movement. It makes use of the theoretical frame of a horizontal European art history and conducts art historical hermeneutical analyses. The project examines how the selected artists positioned themselves towards the Symbolist conception of spiritual transcendence as something exclusively male-defined, which both comprised the neo-platonic and theosophical notion of a powerful androgynous mental state of the male and an androgynous, i.e. feminised, ‘fashioning’ of the male human body. Particular focus is laid on the performance of gender and sexuality within the selected works, as well as on the role of transgressions of gender binary norms. Thereby, this project sheds light on a relatively unexplored and important Symbolist strand in contrast to the dominating art historical accounts of Swedish and Finnish National Romanticist art as the Swedish and Finnish variety of Symbolism, and generates also important knowledge on the role of Swedish and Finnish Symbolist art within the overall European art history.
Invoking the modal nymph: The emergence and dissemination of the concept of modality in Swedish folk music
(2022-09-02) Huebscher, Netta
Since the emergence of a concept of folk music, the study and practice of certain Western European musical traditions has been informed by notions of the music’s modality. Specifically, the idea that older or more indigenous layers of traditional repertoires manifest an underlying, pre-tonal structure of their own has been significant in scholarship, musical education, and performance. This study seeks to shed light on this idea through the particular case of the conceptualisation of modality in relation to Swedish folk music. It asks what music-theoretical ideas on modality have risen through various scholarly and editorial endeavours, how these ideas have emerged, and in what shape they have been further disseminated in contemporary research and education. It addresses these questions by tracing the history of the modal discourse about Swedish folk music at two of its main stages: its inception and formation throughout the 19th century, and the establishment of a consensus around it from the late 1970s onwards. Through close readings of a wide selection of sources, the study offers an analysis of the ensuing concept of modality from a critical, historically informed, music-theoretical perspective. Looking at modality as an open concept, it proposes that the concept of modality that has been attributed to Swedish folk music concurs with a specific type of romanticist, neo-modal construction, in which scale-degree theory gives rise to dichotomous, evolutionist and organological definitions of mode as a marker of “musical otherness”. The study further explores the emergent aspect of this construction, as well as its projective and regulative force on the analysis and assessment of traditional repertoires.
Wicked women and witches. Subversive readings of the female monster in Mexican and Argentinian horror film
(2021-11-19) Villegas Lindvall, Valeria
This thesis accrues to the growing field of Latin American horror scholarship in relation to gender and sexuality, discussing the implications of the representation of the feminized, racialized and/or impoverished monster in relation to Mexican and Argentinian national identity discourses. The thesis looks at two distinct iterations of gendered monstrosity in Mexican and Argentinian visual culture: La Llorona and the bruja (witch), respectively. Through six case studies, the thesis examines the ways in which these monsters shore up and negotiate the roles allotted to their bodies in the larger process of national identity writing. This study ascertains the usefulness of these monstrous entities in perpetual categorical inbetweenness, a position from which they enable critique on the colonial optic that has informed their depiction. These distributions of power, it is argued, are worked through foundational conflicts that embroil La Llorona and the bruja, namely: Mexico’s reckoning with a colonial past turned colonial present and Argentina’s foundational opposition between the redeeming potentialities of “civilization” over “barbarism.” In order to tackle the transmogrification and hierarchization of sexual difference as vital to the writing of national identity discourses, this thesis draws from feminist philosophy and decolonial thought. From the former, it recuperates Luce Irigaray’s writing on fluidity and her critique of the constraints of patriarchal languages in the articulation of gender and sexuality and the hierarchization of difference. I envision fluidity as a faculty that allows us to better understand the ways in which patriarchal organizations of knowledge, time and sexuality reveal cracks in their configuration. These organizations, I posit, can be readily ascertained as the foundation of national projects written from colonial, patriarchal predominance. However, this thesis also acknowledges the limitations of psychoanalytical frameworks to account for racial difference and its relation to gender. Therefore, I turn to decolonial thought, reflecting on race and gender as co-constitutive, colonial fictions that inform representations of La Llorona and the bruja. In addition, this thesis relies on contextual readings that account for the importance of the political, cultural and historical circumstances in which each case study is embedded. Chapter One offers and overview of the ways in which Mexico and Argentina have followed similar tracks in terms of horror filmmaking, arguing for the parallel evaluation of their industrial, cultural and historical contexts, to present a novel way of reading the fashioning of their national identities by looking at their genre films. Chapter Two focuses on the figure of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) as a presence that evinces the painful colonial wound over which mestizo nationalism has encroached, voicing the trauma of oppression and exploitation of racialized and feminized bodies in service of colonial patriarchy. The chapter tracks the origins of the myth to La Llorona (dir. Ramón Peón, 1933), its subversion to La Maldición de La Llorona (dir. Rafael Baledón, 1961) and its updating as a figure of resistance in the era of feminicidio and gore capitalism in Vuelven (dir. Issa López, 2017). Lastly, Chapter Three explores the possibilities of the Argentinian bruja as the embodiment of all that stands outside of “civilization,” resisting the violence of its project in the advancement of colonial modernity by denouncing the regulation of the body and its knowledges. The chapter offers the hypersexual witch of Embrujada (dir. Armando Bó, 1969) as an affront to the policing of the body, its pleasures and knowledges and as a way to negotiate normative models of femininity and family in accordance to nationalist values. It then approaches the policing and governance of the body, birth and reproduction in two contemporary pieces: Habitaciones para turistas (dir. Adrián García Bogliano, 2004) and Luciferina (dir. Gonzalo Calzada, 2018). These case studies, I argue, find in the bruja a figure that either challenges or enacts the oppressions of extreme coloniality embodied in dictatorial necropolitical projects, always functioning as an enabler of critical thought.
Film i stadens tjänst: Göteborg 1938-2015
(2021-03-26) Florin Persson, Erik
The aim of this dissertation is to map and analyze the production of municipal city films in Gothenburg between 1938 and 2015 in relation to economic and political changes of the city. Covering a total of fourteen larger film projects as well as several shorter films, the focus of the study lies both on the commission, distribution, and screening of the studied films and on the manner in which the city of Gothenburg and its inhabitants are represented. In this, the study contributes both to the growing research field of so-called useful cinema within film studies and to research on municipal propaganda, information, and marketing. Earlier research on the latter has primarily focused on the period after the 1970s. In contrast, this thesis gives a longer historical perspective on these activities, studying them both during the welfare-state period and throughout the shift to a market-oriented mode of urban governance of the late 2000s. The results of the study show that moving images have been a crucial part of the municipal information, propaganda, and marketing activities throughout the study period. Many of the older films were produced with a multitude of aims and target groups, such as tourists, business industries and the city’s inhabitants. Their screening contexts include cinema’s program of shorts, classrooms and tourists’ organizations. Many of them also had a wide international distribution. By mapping both the pre-production process and the way the films move through different screening contexts, the study shows the ambiguity that characterizes many useful films and the fleeting boundaries between concepts such as propaganda, information, and marketing, at least until the 1980s. From 1990s onwards the films have more specific target groups and stand more clearly out as marketing material for attracting tourists and businesses. The study also demonstrates that the way the image of the city and its inhabitants has been constructed throughout the studied period can be read in relation to broader economic and political changes in the city. In this, different aspects of the city and its history have been used in a strategic way to construct contemporary arguments about the it.
Längtans och drömmarnas hus - Ideal och praktik bland en ny generation stugägare
(2020-11-11) Rolfsdotter Eliasson, Susanna
This dissertation examines second home ownership among a new generation of urban middle-class Swedes between the years 2015-2020. The main aim is to analyse motivation for buying one´s own second home, with the further purpose of illuminating how interviewees negotiate ideal lifestyles and practices in relation to their narrative identities, as well as their generational and class affiliations. The empirical material consists mainly of qualitative interviews and fieldwork conducted in second homes throughout Sweden. The interviewees belong to a generation generally portrayed as flexible, travelling the world and seeking new and exciting experiences. It is therefore noticeable when they choose to settle down with second homes in Sweden. Narrative analysis is used to understand and analyse the interviewees narrations, touching upon themes such as country and city, place and anchoring, dreams and fears and normative life expectations, all related to interviewees´ motivations for buying a second home and part of the process of making sense of their lifestyle choices. Furthermore, the interviewees strategies for realizing their ideal second homes, in compliance with important values, such as sustainability and reusage, are analysed using Bourdieu´s field theory. The study argues that second home ownership provides a small step on the way to settling down for real and one that interviewees can afford in order to achieve the good life. Choosing to stay in city flats manifests their desire for an experience that differs from earlier generations. Still, there is autonomy in owning one´s house and it can be considered an important step in fulfilling the middle-class life project. Moreover, the interviewees narrative identity representations are important resources for interviewees to communicate how they wish to be perceived. Additionally, they seem preoccupied with the here and now and second home ownership is a way of realizing life goals in the present, and enjoying life to the full in the moment.
Ålderdom, omsorg och makt. Gamlas situation och omsorgsrelationer i nyliberala tider
(2020-05-22) Palmqvist, Lina
This dissertation examines the status of old age and the nature of elderly care in Sweden, where the welfare state is being transformed through neoliberalism. The overall aim is to study old age as identity and lived experience, and how caring relationships condition the lives of the elderly. The dissertation’s empirical base consists of an ethnographic field study carried out in Gothenburg, Sweden, during the years 2014-2017. In total eighteen women and five men between the ages of sixty and ninety-five participated in the study. Fourteen of the informants are primarily care users and nine of them are informal caregivers. Here elderly care is understood as a broad practice that includes both formal care performed by professional staff, and informal care performed by relatives. The approach is grounded in phenomenology, which centers on personal and bodily experience, and individual interpretations of lived situations. Methodologically the study is informed by Marxist-inspired feminist standpoint theory, where the analysis of the personal and the individual are seen as relating to common conditions. This dissertation combines care research within disability and feminist studies, thereby contributing to a power-conscious analysis in which the complexity of care emerges. Old people are socially constructed as deserving welfare subjects through their merits as working citizens. However, in the realm of actual welfare services this group is very much affected by contemporary neoliberal austerity policies. On the basis of the empirical material this dissertation argues that this dissonance risks creating antagonistic conflicts between different subordinate groups where age, generation, gender, racialization and class become demarcation lines. Another conclusion is that neoliberal governance of the formal organization of elderly care redirects care work to users, and highlights freedom of choice as a goal, while at the same time undermining real opportunities for users’ agency and societal participation. In Home Help Services users’ routines are reshaped according to the planning and work schedules of the organization. An expression of this is how waiting characterizes the everyday lives of users. Waiting means that users are being exposed as one person in a queue of people who need help, but also that they are exposed to their care needs.The material shows that waiting for help can lead to increased impairments but also create new ones. Through the use of assistive- and medical technology these disabling effects are rectified. In this way users’ body time is disciplined and redirected according to the neoliberal clock time of the Home Help Service organization. The study shows how the re-domestication of care, that has followed in the wake of neoliberal austerity, affects old people in an extensive way. Informal caregivers talk about a day to day situation where they need to be on constant stand by, ready to assist. These informants have tried to extend care relationships around their loved ones by arranging needs assessments, but without receiving the assistance they need. The municipally-run family care centers, that all of these informants attend, offer them recognition and to some extent help with the administration of their care work. This study suggests that family support attends to the symptoms of this problem, instead of addressing its root causes. Indeed, there is reason to ask whether the increased recognition and current forms of redistribution concerning relatives that provide care—where family support centers play a significant role—risks legitimizing the re-domestication of elderly care, rather than contributing to more equal and fair care relations.
Mellan jaget och världen. Feminism och etik under nyliberala villkor
(2019-10-22) Johansson Wilén, Evelina
The overall purpose of this study is to investigate how the tension between feminism as an ethical and political project is brought into light under neoliberal conditions. More specifically, the aim is to, through 21 interviews with 12 self-defined left-wing Swedish feminists whose living conditions, political action and self-understanding are conditioned by the economic, political and ideological imprints of neo-liberalism, study potential joints and crimes between feminism and neoliberalism and how these relate to the tensions between ethics and politics that have been present long before the entry of neoliberalism on the scene. The analysis is largely done in close dialogue with the feminist political thinkers Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser and Chantal Mouffe, all of whom have devoted themselves to the relationship between ethics and politics and the effects of neoliberalism on political movements and political subjectivity. It also engages in academic work on neoliberal subjectivity and ideology and progressive movements.
Smartphone Cinematics: A Cognitive Study of Smartphone Spectatorship
(2019-09-13) Szita, Kata
Audiovisual Constructions: Material Interrelations in Live Rock Performances
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2019-05-24) Nikolaeva, Olga
This dissertation examines and analyzes the material interrelations in audiovisual constructions of live rock performances. It explores the interrelations that take place among four key modes of a live rock performance’s material modality, namely: the musicians’ bodies, screens, screen visuals, and sounds. According to the analysis conducted in this dissertation, an audiovisual construction is understood both as a process that describes the confluence of a performance’s modes and as a momentary result of their interrelations that creates the performance as a whole. Rather than exploring the ways audiences perceive performances, the central focus in this dissertation is to investigate the relations and potentialities of the performance’s modes by focusing on the assemblage and display of the audiovisuality of three selected case studies. The three case studies that form the empirical material for this research study each consist of a song performed by a rock music band. The specific performances are: “Angel” by the British band Depeche Mode, “The Handler” by the British band Muse, and “Óveður” by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Relying upon the concepts of performative materiality (Johanna Drucker), the vitality of materials (Jane Bennett), and an understanding of a live rock performance as a scenographic spectacle (Joslin McKinney, Scott Palmer), this study explores the perspective of the materiality’s performative potentialities, which emerge and develop in the audiovisual construction. The analysis of each particular case study reveals that processes of audiovisual construction create conditions under which a performance’s modes continuously activate and renegotiate each other’s individual material potentials, while creating new forms of scenographic assemblages of vital materialities. Furthermore, understanding the material potentials of modes gives rise to new considerations of the roles these modes play in live rock performances.
Etnologiska kompositioner. Orienteringar i yrkeslivet
(2018-10-19) Mellander, Elias
Using the discipline of European Ethnology in Sweden as a point of departure, this dissertation aims to examine graduated students’ experiences of entering the labor market. The main line of inquiry is how an educational background without apparent professional ties shape skills, knowledge and self-image in relationship to work, as well as how this is expressed in terms of orientation towards personal or societal values. The empirical foundation of the study is interviews with twenty-four Ethnology graduates working outside of academia. They are employed at museums and archives, as public officials in municipal or state organizations, and as consultants performing qualitative research for businesses or public organizations in the private sector. The dissertation follows the interviewees from their first encounter with Ethnology to their graduation and entry into working life, and onward into their everyday professional practices. In tracing the participants’ career paths, the study touches upon a number of overarching themes. Among these are the conditions of knowledge work in the late modern era, the meaning ascribed to work and education as well as the ostensible crisis of the humanities. The study argues that there is an affinity between the participants’ educational background and their occupation, but that these lines of association are multiple and not always apparent. While Ethnology has had a marked effect on the participant’s outlook on the world as well as on how they view themselves, their traversal into professional life has not been frictionless. The prevalence of precarious employment, the challenge of claiming expertise in issues pertaining to everyday culture, and working with a qualitative perspective in a quantitative framework are examples of this. In conclusion, the study shows that academic disciplines like Ethnology shape certain dispositions, skills and values that are put to work in society, through the hands of graduates.
Första klass mot framtiden. En musiksociologisk studie av Blå Tåget
(2018-04-03) Palmqvist, Morgan
This doctoral thesis will examine and highlight the factors, driving forces and conditions that led to the band Blå Tåget being formed in the late 1960’s, and the role they played in forming the Swedish progressive music movement. A fundamental issue is in what social climate and in what era the Blå Tåget emerged and what significance this had for the creative activities of the band. In the thesis, I will deepen the understanding of what characterized the Blå Tåget as a music group. The focus will be on the characterization of the music, lyrics and live performances of the Blå Tåget and whether it is possible to discern a change over time. This provides the basis for a further characterization by comparing Blå Tågets’s music and activities with two other leading bands in the Swedish progressive music movement: Hoola Bandoola and the Nationalteatern. In Sweden in the 1960's there was new and great interest in ”visa” (a sort of singer-songwriter ballad), often with fairly clear political messages following a general rise in the politicisation of cultural life in the 60s. In a comparison, I will investigate Blå Tåget’s relationship to the period known as ”visvågen”. Two significant and parallel trends in the Swedish popular music scene during the 1960’s, where leftist political currents were in the foreground. A parallel and fundamental aim of the thesis is to investigate the importance of the material and cultural conditions of creativity and artistic production through the specific example of Blå Tåget. An underlying but central question relevant to this aim is: what significance did the group's social and cultural backgrounds have? It is this aspect of the thesis which informed my decision to use Pierre Bourdieu's sociological framework, and to complement it with Richard Florida's theories about the creative class and the importance of whether the place (city / town) offers opportunities for these people to live a stimulating life.
”Fullständigt otillförlitlig, men absolut oumbärlig”. En historiografisk undersökning av projektet Svensk Stad
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2018-03-19) Dahlgren, Anders
This dissertation is a historiographical study of the research project Svensk stad (Swedish Town). The project, lead by the professor in Art History Gregor Paulsson (1889-1977), included about 20 members and was conducted between 1940 and 1953. The interdisciplinary studies ot the Swedish towns of the 19th and early 20th century combined methods and perspectives from art history, sociology, cultural geography and european ethnology. The dissertation has two main lines of inquiry: interpretation and mapping. The interpretation of Svensk stad is related to a a hermeneutic tradition (Hans-Georg Gadamer) and psychoanlytic theory (Sarah Dillon) and aims at investigating the theoretical and methodological perspectives that were integrated in the project. The mapping, uses perspectives and methods from the field of sociology of science (Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering, Susan Leigh Star och James Griesemer). A third line of inquiry of the dissertation combines the two main lines and analyses the project’s paths to knowledge using concepts from visual studies. The primary empirical material consists of the published work Svensk stad, and preserved archive material from the project.
Swingin’ Swedes: The Transnational Exchange of Swedish Jazz in the US.
(2016-12-09) van Kan, Mischa
Birgittaskolorna. Modeateljéer och sömnadsskolor mellan tradition och förnyelse
(2016-10-20) Carlgren, Maria
The purpose of the study is to examine, compare and analyse the Birgitta Schools. These were two fashion studios and dressmaking schools in Stockholm directed by Emy Fick (1876-1959) and Elisabeth Glantzberg (1873-1951). Together, they started and ran the Birgitta School from 1910 until 1914. However, a rift caused them to divide the business in two but keeping similar names and structure of their schools. From 1914 until the middle of the 1930s, Fick ran the Saint Birgitta School and Glantzberg was head of the Birgitta School. The analyses are made through various visual artefacts such as trademarks, photographs and clothes, as well as through surveys of the persons connected with the Schools. The aim is to bring forth what happened inside the walls of the Schools, but it is also to examine how the works related to the contemporary discourse in which femininity as well as fashion, modernism and modernity were negotiated. With a base in a gender theoretic perspective, the results have primarily been reached through the tools of cultural sociology. The ideas of Pierre Bourdieu are of particular interest; not least, the concepts of capital, habitus and social fields have been fruitful. A complement to these theories is the cultural sociological views of Howard Becker; here, a broader scope for individuals to act and a more inclusive perspective are provided. Judith Butler’s performativity theory has also been useful since she argues that identity and gender are ‘made’ through the acts of people. In this making of gender, the clothes we wear are significant. The body that is in focus in this study is thus the social body; this body consists of the physical body along with clothes and the person’s symbolic capital and habitus, and the interplay of constructed social and symbolic forces. The study shows that Emy Fick held conservative values; her views were close to the norm, a complementary and essentialist view of men and women predominant in Swedish society in the beginning of the twentieth century. In this respect, Fick and the Saint Birgitta School is considered to be orthodox, defending the doxa. In Yvonne Hirdman’s terms, Saint Birgitta School made women who acted according to this norm. In the study of Glantzberg’s several examples are found that the Birgitta School instead appeared to have been a room of challenge, to which a range of open-minded, radical, independent and educated women were connected. The women who were associated with the Birgitta School tended to act against conventional norms in society. Glantzberg also commissioned the modernist artists Siri Derkert and Valle Rosenberg to create fashion collections. The Birgitta School and Elisabeth Glantzberg is thereby considered as heterodox, since contemporary views were challenged and questioned. Nonetheless, both Birgitta Schools expressed modernity – although in different degrees. Together, the Saint Birgitta School and the Birgitta School illustrate the ‘whirlpool’ of modernity – in which different attitudes to, and experiences of modern life existed side by side.
Den ofrivilliga lyssnaren - möten med butiksmusik
(2016-08-26) Stenbäck, Olle
The aim of this dissertation is to explore potential customer’s encounters with the phenomena of in-store music. The area chosen for the study is the core shopping district of Gothenburg, Sweden, known as Inom Vallgraven (“within the moat”). The material for the study consists of 12 in-depth interviews with persons in the ages 27 to 71, as well as a digital enquiry with approximately 120 replies. Today, in-store music is a highly ranked aesthetical component for stores and shops worldwide. Instore music is often presented as a symbolic “umbrella”, which allegedly heightens other aesthetical components within the stores. In-store music is not a new phenomenon per se, but during the last decade it has gone through what can be described as a spatial transformation; what once was often referred to as barely audible Muzak or background music is now, in general, in the absolute foreground. The focal objective is to analyze how potential customers perceive and negotiate with the phenomena of in-store music. How do they direct themselves towards in-store music? How do they listen to it? What kind of listening experience is possible/impossible within different store atmospheres? What meaning is attributed to the phenomena of in-store music? And what do they do when bothered by it? The study confirms that a lot of potential customers seek what could be called auditory asylums, where strategies such as actively ignoring (when possible) or fleeing to portable music players are common. In contrast, the study also confirms that – when in-store music is used ‘right’ and with tending surrounding components – it can generate a desirable nightclub-esque sensation. The study also confirms that potential customer’s encounters with in-store music often are of an ambivalent and doubtful character. Not knowing how – or if – they are affected by the music, it tend to leave them in a state of resignation from their own knowledge and experience. The result is a battle between knowledge and ignorance. The origin of this state can be linked to a strong marketing discourse, where a broad and culturally relativistic perspective on musical influence is narrowed down and, in some cases, completely absent.
Temporalitet i visuell kultur. Om samtidens heterokrona estetiker
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2016-08-15) Sandahl, Ann-Louise
In contemporary society temporalities in different scales coexist, cooperate and collide. Clock time serves as a main reference for time, although a lot of processes have nothing to do with clock time and can’t be measured by its scales. One of the dissertation’s points of departure is that temporal narratives is a key factor for affecting how people act and think, and therefore there is a need for visualizations, conceptual figurations and cognitive objects for complex forms of time. The dissertation evolves around art works, visualizations and theories that deal with today’s multiple temporal forms and narratives. One of the questions the dissertation sets out to answer concerns how temporality is visualized in contemporary art and visualizations. It also aims to demonstrate the relevance of visual studies in the new field of environmental humanities. A number of temporal concepts are explored in relation to art works. One such concept is heterochrony, a term referring to a multifaceted temporality, that art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud claims is common in contemporary art. Another is timescapes, a term for an entangled temporality, described by sociologist Barbara Adam, and chronoscopy coined by philosopher Paul Virilio, referring to an extremely short-termed perspective. Space of flows and space of places are concepts formulated by sociologist Manuel Castells, denoting the spatiotemporal logics that have emerged in the network society, where citizens simultaneousley can exist in physical and virtual spacetimes. Also two concepts for a vast time span are discussed: anthropocene, a suggested new geological era, and the long now, a perspective formulated by the artist and musician Brian Eno. One conclusion is that complex and sensous understandings of temporality can be accomplished through art works and visualizations. Artistic expressions have the potential to inspire, worry and affect viewers and produce narratives of the multiple temporalities embedded in climate changes. Multiple forms of temporality can be found in the discussed works, and the narratives that emerge are entangled and heterogenous and speak of heterochrony, chronoscopy, and anthropocene, that is, of temporal forms that cannot easily be related to a human lifetime or to everyday understandings of time.
Berättelser om Breivik. Affektiva läsningar om våld och terrorism.
(2016-02-16) Eriksson, Mia
In this thesis, I take a closer look at three books that have received a lot of attention, as well as a handful of popular science and newspaper articles, about Anders Behring Breivik and the terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011, with the intention of analyzing how Breivik and the terrorist attack have been explained and made sense of. My primary focus is on Breivik but I also touch upon the attack, partly by looking at how the violence is depicted in these texts, and partly by discussing the explanations given for the attack. The purpose of the thesis is twofold: on the one hand, I look at how Breivik is being narrated and what kind of knowledge the stories about him produce; on the other hand, I look at what these stories do, that is, how it feels to read them, and how they affect and orientate their readers. My choice to focus on what has been written about Breivik is based on a desire to understand how the white Norwegian terrorist is, and can be, talked about. Through this shift in focus away from Breivik and into the discursive-material context in which his acts are embedded, I want to place Breivik in a larger context where “right-wing extremism”, in Breivik’s case expressed primarily through a nationalistic, racist, and anti-Muslim rhetoric, is seen not as something coming from, and happening at, the outskirts of society but as something being produced and formed by the ways in which “the normal” is understood and practiced. The thesis places a critical perspective on how the stories individualize Breivik and reproduce normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, and age. It also finds that there are important differences in the explanations offered for terrorist attacks that are interpreted as religious or Islamist and terrorist attacks that are understood as “secular”. Methodologically, the thesis explores writing as a method of enquiry, meaning that it not only explores the material, but also the researcher and the context in which both I and the material are situated. Theoretically, the thesis is an exploration of the relationship between language and matter, and between affect and emotion.

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