Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Institutionen för litteratur, idéhistoria och religion

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Making Waves: Podcasting Among Feminist Latter-Day Saints
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2025-06-03) Torgrimsson, Kristel
Publicly criticizing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints carries significant risks, prompting feminist members to turn to the internet as a crucial platform for expression. Following the excommunications of the 1990s, blogging emerged as a medium that enabled regrouping and growth. Today, podcasting has taken center stage as a preferred platform for new actors within this movement. This dissertation explores what podcasting affords Feminist Latter-day Saints through a qualitative case study of three podcasts: The Faithful Feminists, At Last She Said It, and Year of Polygamy. Drawing on the concept of “technological affordance” as the interplay between the medium’s performativity and its attributed discourses, the study develops a bipartite analytical model. This model comprises two frameworks: “performed media” which examines podcasting through the communicational and technological topologies of parasocial relationships, liveness, and seriality, and “discursive framing” which considers how media technologies are constructed and validated through discourse. The findings reveal that podcasting enables Feminist Latter-day Saints to 1. Foster what they perceive as caring and advocative communities, where hosts build intimate, friendly relationships with listeners as an alternative to what they construct as the Church institution’s bureaucratic care; 2. Create a setting of spontaneity and informality, allowing for the revaluation and reframing of the Church’s communicative patterns; 3. Navigate the tensions between feminism and faith by providing a dynamic temporality that facilitates the recovery of women’s voices and ongoing faith development, while also introducing a hurried pace that limits reflection and expansion; 4. Evolve personal faith journeys, sometimes through continuous conversion and other times through processes of departure. These findings demonstrate how podcasting enables Feminist Latter-day Saints to foster community, reframe institutional narratives, navigate the complexities of faith and feminism, and construct their personal faith. They contribute to (a) a deeper understanding of contemporary Latter-day Saint Feminism, (b) a critical and nuanced perspective on women’s agency in digital media, and (c) advancing conversations on methodological and theoretical approaches to religious podcasts.
Visions Beyond Empire: British Federalism and Post-Imperial United Kingdom, 1884-1945
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2024-04-08) Norrby, Jens
This study seeks to trace federalists’ continuous effort to envision and plan for the end of the empire from 1884 to 1945. While British federalism changed a lot during this period, there was a constant concern with the post-imperial world order and this thesis studies the federalist texts based on the context of the contemporary reckoning with the shifts to the UK’s geopolitical standing. Seen in this way, the British federalists were not only important in developing political theory, but also one of the earliest and most serious examples of attempting to pre-empt and influence the dissolution of the British Empire. In order to do the tradition of British federalism justice, this thesis studies the central federalist organisations—Imperial Federation League (1884–1893), The Round Table (1909–today) & Federal Union (1939–today)—as well as the activity and careers of their members. Some of the key figures are Lord Lothian, Lionel Curtis, Leo Amery, W. T. Stead, F. A. Hayek, Harold Laski, William Beveridge, Barbara Wootton, and Lord Rosebery. As such, the thesis applies a close con¬textual reading of the federalist texts as a framework for understanding contemporary geopolitics, entwined with British public life, rather than as a series of isolated constitutional schemes. I will argue that one can find an early British example of a discourse on post-imperial global order within the British federalist tradition. The federalists developed a number of narratives as to how and why the British Empire should end, principally informed by their relationship to history and the emplotment into which they inscribed themselves. This thesis surveys a transition from preservationist narratives—whose main aim was to preserve British cultural influence—to utilisationist narratives—aspiring to utilise British imperial institutions and the UK’s global standing in order to further the progress towards a global union. This text demonstrates how this aspect of federalist thinking is relevant to its contemporary political discourse, and how the fundamental elements of this transition were already in place following the First World War. It reframes the tradition of British federalism, not only as an important hub for the development of ‘the federalist idea’, but as a way of thinking about and discussing the post-imperial world order.
Beastly Lessons: Natural Utopias in Seventeenth-Century England
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2022-04-06) Kottum, Sandra Iren
The present study investigates the motif of virtuous animal instructors in three selected English texts from the second half of the seventeenth century: James Howell’s The Parly of Beasts (1660), Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), and Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Health (1683). These authors proposed solutions to the challenges facing early modern England, most notably the Civil War, the emerging empirical science, and the incipient colonization of the Americas. By contrast to those con-temporary thinkers who sought to reestablish lost dominion over the natural world, Howell, Cavendish and Tryon located their blueprints for human betterment in the animal kingdom. They thereby revived theriophily, the ancient notion that animals are superior to humans by virtue of their natural-ness. In this study I examine how in the selected works this idea takes on a distinct, context-specific form. I introduce the genre category natural utopia to capture the authors’ fusion of natural ideals with the utopian impulse that pervaded late seventeenth-century England. Through close readings that counter presentist interprettations, I examine the animals in the texts in light of the era’s shift from an emblematic to an empiricist perspective on nature, highlighting four themes: animal exemplarity, politics, malleability, and animal language. Throughout, I show how Howell’s, Cavendish’s and Tryon’s animal characters introduce a metaperspective on the human/animal relationship, denouncing both general anthropocentric claims to human preeminence, as well as local cultural developments in their era. The selected texts, I argue, depart from established genres of beast literature like fables and bestiaries, and also from speculative literature from the same era. Ultimately, my study shows how these works, while varying greatly with respect to form, content and the authors’ political orientations, are united in a green, countercultural protest against the early modern period’s increasing objectification and destruction of the natural world. My study foregrounds aspects of the texts that have hitherto received little scholarly attention and thereby deepens our understanding of animals in the selected texts, as well as in the seventeenth century’s intellectual landscape.
Assembling the Historic Environment: Heritage in the Digital Making
(2022-03-02) Illsley, William R.
The historic environment is a formulation of the cultural past as experienced and documented in space. Traditional approaches to the historic environment tend to favour conservational and preservational paradigms, such as heritage stewardship or the dynamics of cultural resource management in relation to national policies. Alternatively, they often enquire into the entertainment and time travel approaches of contemporary museum and tourism sectors. Instead, this study will focus on digitality, as both an epistemology and as a means of transmission for assemblages and spaces in the historic environment. This approach is framed around a comparative study between UK and Swedish approaches to virtual heritage, including immersive technologies and XR (extended reality environments), and the digitised approaches to site and monument inventory, borne out the nineteenth century state-led interest in the preservation of cultural traditions within the public sphere. In doing so, I identify the recurring themes enrolled in processes surrounding digital creation and transmission of historic environment material. Often, this is manifested in the politics of representation and identity, as well as the dynamics of accessibility. Audience matters are crucial to both approaches, but in this thesis, I argue that broad understandings of usership are not fully understood and that the benefits of interdisciplinary humanistic approaches to the historic environment are not being sought. The argument being that simply making a tool or product accessible is not the same as making it egalitarian, nor easily useable or meaningful. It is found that the risk is often run of creating products whereby the audience is broadly the same in terms of culture or profession to that of the product creators. Many of the root issues, in particular those regarding diversity, are established in the current definitions of what the historic environment is as a physical entity embedded in the cultural landscape. These definitions are described within and expanded upon through proliferation of social and spatial theories to proffer a less tangible definition of the historic environment as a social space in its own right. By removing the physical boundaries of landscape, the goal is to re-establish a historic environment without the limitations of authorised vocabularies, narratives, or terms of authenticity, that shackle the historic environment to local or national government institutions. This in turn allows for a more socially defined, participatory, and holistic approach, returning the historic environment to a cultural realm defined by the lived experience of the contemporary public.
In Search of the Self: A Study of the International Scene of Modern Advaitic Satsang in Present-Day Rishikesh
(2022-02-10) Thorsén, Elin
The north Indian pilgrimage town Rishikesh has since the late 1990’s become something of a center for the international scene of Modern Advaita. An increasing number of teachers and adherents from mainly Western countries have started to gather there for a few weeks each spring to engage in satsang, a form of dialogical lectures, in these cases based on contemporary interpretations of the classical Indian philosophical system Advaita (“nondual”) Vedānta. At the heart of Advaita Vedāntic philosophy lies the postulation that the inner Self (ātman) is identical with Ultimate Reality (Brahman), and in its essence is nondual awareness. In contemporary versions, “awakening” to such nondual awareness is usually presented as being within reach “here and now”, rather than as a goal in a distant future. Modern Advaita can be characterized as an “internalist” form of spirituality, as focus is put on the practitioner’s gradual realization of nondual tenets through techniques such as meditation and self-inquiry. Salvific space, hence, is thought of as being located within rather than outside of the practitioner’s body. At the same time, Modern Advaita is an ambulating movement, as teachers regularly go on tours to give satsang and offer retreats, and their followers often travel far to join these activities. As such, this is an inherently transnational phenomenon where mobility and locations play a crucial role. Taking its starting point in Thomas Tweed’s theory of religion as entailing “crossing and dwelling”, In Search of the Self is an ethnographic work that investigates the aspects of movement and position within Rishikesh’s Modern Advaitic satsang scene. It follows a group of satsang participants on their journeys to Rishikesh; their reported alternation between dual and nondual “space” during satsang; and their attempts to implement nondual teachings, partly by recreating satsang as a symbolic space, in day-to-day life at home.
Att skriva gränserfarenheter. En studie i Åsa Nelvins och Eva Runefelts författarskap
(2021-08-19) Bojö, Anna-Klara
Abstract The late 1970’s through the early 1980’s was an exciting and eventful period in Swedish literary history. Not only did the controversial and highly debated political women’s lit- erature emerge during this time, but also, simultaneously, new expressive forms began to take shape. In particular, young women writers appeared to take Swedish literature and poetry into new aesthetic directions, exploring questions regarding experience and language. This thesis centres on the study of the writings of Åsa Nelvin (1951–1981) and Eva Runefelt (b. 1953). The two writers, who were also friends, were regarded as two of Swedish literature’s most interesting names in prose and poetry respectively during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Yet, due to literary history’s tendency to create a sharp divide between a political yet aesthetically naïve 1970’s and a theoretically stringent but less political 1980’s, they tend to appear as somewhat peripheral figures. This study intends to demonstrate that Nelvin and Runefelt transcend the presumptive strong divide between the two literary decades. Inspired by post critical perspectives, mainly the assertion that literature can be philosophically interesting, this thesis highlights a set of linguistic problems articulated through Nelvin’s and Runefelt’s works concerning what Michel Foucault has termed limit experience. The study explores how Nelvin in her two most significant works of literature, the novel Tillflyktens hus, eller en f.d. inneboendes erinran (1975) and her only and post- humously published work of poetry Gattet: sånger från barnasinnet (1981) brings to the fore the experience of madness, and how she attempts various literary strategies to give that limit experience shape and form. Runefelt’s writing is more diverse, at least in regard to themes. In her earlier works of poetry, En kommande tid av livet (1975), Åldriga och barnsliga trakter (1978), Augusti (1981), and Längs ett oavslutat ögonblick (1986), Runefelt constantly reaches for the limits of language. Whether in a poem about the juncture between dream and wakefulness, or a more defining limit experience such as the moment between life and death, Runefelt stretches her phenomenologically informed poetic language beyond the point of reason to create logically impossible, yet poetically and affectively charged expressions. Runefelt’s later works, however, and especially her later works of poetry Mjuka mörkret (1997), I djuret (2001), and I ett förskingrat nu (2007) are centred around one dominant theme, death. Beginning with a series of texts written in memory of Nelvin, whose premature death occurred in 1981, Runefelt’s later writing takes a turn towards mourning and the dead. The study highlights how Runefelt’s later poetry, with one foot in elegiac myth and the other in a form of phenomenological poetics, constantly contests the limits of death, and furthermore attempts to make the paradoxical experience of being dead accessible to the living through her writing.
The Meaning and Uses of βασιλεία in the Gospel of Matthew. Semantic Monosemy and Pragmatic Modulation
(2020-11-13) Ålöw, Tobias
This study examines the meaning and uses of the term βασιλεία in the Gospel of Matthew. Contrary to the predominant scholarly view, according to which the pertinent term is a verbal noun signifying God’s exercise of kingship, it argues that this so-called dynamic usage is merely one aspect of a much fuller concept and multifaceted utilization of the term. Taking its theoretical point of departure in C. Ruhl’s notion of semantic monosemy and pragmatic modulation, the study instead suggests that the term βασιλεία has a single, abstract, general, and diversity-unifying meaning – viz. that which pertains to royalty – which is pragmatically modulated by co- and contextual factors, to the effect that senses relevant to the respective settings in which the term occurs are engendered. More precisely, the study submits that the pragmatic range of the term in Matthew’s Gospel covers both five distinct categories of use – personal (king), abstract (kingly status), dynamic (kingship), collective (people/kin-ship) and spatial (kingdom) – and their integration into a coherent concept. After discussing the variegated use of βασιλεία in the literary and linguistic environment of Matthew’s gospel as exemplified by the Greek Book of Daniel, all fifty-five occurrences of the term in the first Gospel are examined by means of a composition-critical method, with the objective of identifying which particular category of use each occurrence belongs to. As the analysis demonstrates, although Matthew occasionally uses βασιλεία dynamically concerning God’s exercise of his “kingship” this usage only plays a rather nominal role vis-à-vis the overall account. It is instead the collective use of βασιλεία as “kin-ship” that emerges as the most frequent and significant category in Matthew. Moreover, though not as frequently attested as the former, the personal use of βασιλεία as “king” also plays a relatively prominent role in the Matthean account. Together these two uses attest and contribute to Matthew’s overarching dual focus on the Messiah and his people, and the gradual shift in attention from the former to the latter From the centrality and significance of βασιλεία, and how it is entangled with virtually all other themes, literary and/or theological, in Matthew’s gospel, it follows that in-depth study of how the pertinent term is used is not only of importance in order to appreciate the Matthean Zentralbegriff in-and-of-itself, but is also incumbent for an accurate apprehension of the nature and aims of the Matthean narrative as a whole as well as the theological sentiments it aims to communicate.
A Sufi for a Secular Age: Reflecting on Muslim Modernity through the Life and Times of Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri
(2020-11-03) Eneborg, Yusuf Muslim
Fadhlalla Haeri (b. 1937) is a contemporary Muslim figure best known for his spiritual commentaries on the Qur’an and his influential role as a ‘post-madhhab’ and ‘post-tariqa’ Sufi teacher. Born and brought up in the pilgrim city of Karbala by its religious elite, Haeri would go on to pursue a secular education in the West and a successful career in the booming Arab oil industry. But Haeri would inevitably withdraw from the business world and return to his roots by directing his efforts towards teaching the Qur’an, resulting in numerous publications and a worldwide network of students, with past and present communities especially established in the United States, Pakistan, England, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and South Africa. The purpose of this thesis is to observe Haeri’s life and works through the larger historical story of secularity as told by philosopher Charles Taylor. As a Sufi sage in a secular age, what Haeri offers us is a mirror, reflecting a period of time in which we are still so immersed that it eludes our ability to understand it in any comprehensive way. By looking at how his life and works both reflect and respond to our current epoch, the intention is to offer a compelling narrative of what can broadly be called Muslim modernity, together with the themes of ‘authority’ and ‘authenticity’ that can be seen to define it.
INDEBTED BODIES, Debt and Decadence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
(2020-11-03) Gammelgaard, Signe Leth
This dissertation investigates the relationship between linguistic and stylistic innovation in nineteenth-century literature on the one hand and shifts in the dynamics of the economic sign system on the other. It draws on prior work on parallels between language and money and argues specifically that developments in the nineteenth-century novel can be understood in terms of the contemporaneous economic history, and that the two sign systems of language and money display structural similarities in this period. The central focus is the shift away from realism and towards the proto-modernist forms of the fin de siècle, in particular the decadent works. The dissertation thus argues that the period displays issues of representation not only as semiotic gaps between sign and thing or signified and signifier but as a downright loss of meaning, a loss of the signified in the constitution of the sign. The present work examines novels by six French and British authors through the lens of debt as a literary motif in order to portray the economic developments of the period. This focus allows for comparative points between the various works and shows how the money plots in these novels parallel their take on linguistic representation. A central concern is the relationship between debt and the human body in each work, which displays a development from withering bodies, over tortured and torn ones, to decomposing, decaying, and ravaged flesh. The focus on the human body also works as a segue into larger questions on the way these novels negotiate the relationship between art, language, and material reality. The dissertation contributes on the one hand by supplying a reading of the nineteenth-century novel with a stronger and more structural take on the influences of money and economic dynamics than what previous scholarship has offered. On the other hand, it reveals problems of meaning in a period where production to an ever-larger degree gives way to financialization, and where the economy exhibits what Giovanni Arrighi has termed “signs of autumn” of a specific cycle of capitalist development.
Vithetens koagulerade hjärta. Om avkoloniserande läsningars möjlighet
(2020-08-31) Svensson, Therese
The purpose of this dissertation is to read three Swedish-language works of literary fiction from the 20th century in a decolonising way in order to provide insights into what the development of such a reading style entails. With this goal in mind, I make use of theoretical and methodological perspectives taken from decolonial studies, indigenous studies, neomaterialism and critical race- and whiteness studies. The readings of Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doktor Glas (Doctor Glas) (1905), Ludvig Nordström’s Herrar (Masters) (1910) and Karin Boye’s Astarte (1931) show that the decolonising movement in the texts, identified as the re- establishment of a subjective flow of circular reciprocity between different forms of matter, is limited by the spread of whiteness in them. Although the decolonising reading is able to show the non-colonial becomings of the fictional worlds, it is not able to disarm the coloniality in them. Despite this, the dissertation establishes a type of reading that not only shows aspects of the works that have not previously been noted in research but also a possible path for the responsibility of research in relation to the ongoing decolonisation of the world. The congealed heart of whiteness thus proves not only to be a place in fiction that points to the pseudo- ontological emptiness that is established as a constant incentive for the colonial devouring of non-whiteness, but also a place where the heart’s colonial rupture can turn into healing tissue.
Dom stökar och bråkar och kastar sten. Iscensättning och hybridisering av dominerande diskurser i Backa Teaters uppsättningar Lille kung Mattias, Gangs of Gothenburg och 5boys.com
(2020-04-14) Grehn, Sandra
The aim of this dissertation is to examine whether or not, and, if so, how Backa Theatre’s stage art contributes to the questioning of norms concerning children and young people by subversive representation of the young. The study investigates the dominant discourses of “children as citizens”, “the young gang member” and “boys and masculinity” that are staged and hybridized in the productions of Lille kung Mattias (Little King Matt) and Gangs of Gothenburg, directed by Mattias Andersson and 5boys.com, directed by Anja Suša at Backa Theatre between 2009 and 2012. By analyzing how ideas concerning sex/gender, sexuality, race and age appear intersectionally in the selected productions, and how the discourses are structured artistically through casting, dramaturgy, directing and scenography/the use of space, the dissertation examines the artistic composition of the discourses themselves. Theoretically and methodologically, the dissertation is based on a combination of semiotic performance analysis and critical discourse analysis. Concepts from Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis such as activities, schemata, frames and scripts are used to uncover the performances’ foundations and relationships to the surrounding society, and to understand how the discourses are artistically formed and composed in the selected performances. In Lille kung Mattias “the becoming discourse” is staged and hybridized. According to sociologists Jens Qvortrup and James Lee the dominant view of children as being in a state of becoming adults has the consequence that children are granted neither significant private nor public space in the present tense nor are they taken seriously. In Lille kung Mattias the children in the audience are encouraged to conduct political discussions and democratically vote on Sweden’s national budget. Thus, they practice what religious scholar John Wall calls childism. In this, the becoming discourse is challenged, since the children’s current priorities and views on society are focused. Gangs of Gothenburg stages and hybridizes “the marginalized gang member discourse” found in the contemporary media debate. In Gangs of Gothenburg the medial process of generating meaning is staged and challenged. By using Sara Ahmed’s concept of phenomenology of whiteness, the racialization of the young gang member is discussed and problematized. The adult, white viewer position/ gaze is staged when the white middle-class couple watch and comment on the documentary interview of a young gang member. 5boys.com captures and stages “the patriarchal masculinity discourse” that, according to gender scholar David Buchbinder, is based on the practice of misogyny and homophobia, a strategy to distance masculinity from femininity. The discourse is hybridized by letting the actresses themselves choose their costumes, by incorporating metafictional elements in which the actors discuss each other and the play, by the use of passionate movements and dancing to music, and by the literal deconstruction of the scenography. Thus, by capturing the patriarchal masculinity discourse and combining it with other contexts, the very embodiment of sexism, misogyny and homophobia is problematized. This dissertation thus situates Backa Theatre’s productions in an intersection of political, philosophical and artistic ideas and practices where children’s and young people’s realities encompass existential issues, socio-economic conditions, the pronouncements of adults, and not leastwise, power structures. In Backa Theatre’s performing arts, the worlds of children and adults are presented as co-operative and existing in a conditional relationship.
Som en Sapfo. Publiceringsstrategier, självframställning och retorik hos tre tidigmoderna kvinnliga författare.
(2019-09-27) Amundsen Bergström, Matilda
In Early Modern Europe, it was self-evident that a poet was a man. But despite overwhelming theoretical proof that women could not be poets, some women were. This thesis explores how some women succeeded as writers, through the study of three poets who were all presented to their audiences as the Sappho of their time: French Louise Labé (ca 1520/1523–1566), English Katherine Philips (1632–1664), and Swedish Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht (1718–1763). What did it mean to be a new Sappho? Sappho, and the idea of the Early Modern woman poet as a ‘new’ Sappho, links Labé, Philips, and Nordenflycht to each other. Therefore, this study endeavours to follow the traces of Sappho through the centuries and through the works of Labé, Philips, and Nordenflycht. The thesis consists of six chapters. After an introductory chapter and a chapter discussing the Early Modern reception of Sappho, three chronologically ordered chapters analyse the three poets’ strategies of publication, their self-presentations and what rhetorical devices they employ to present female poetic speakers and to justify their writing. The sixth and final chapter brings Labé, Philips and Nordenflycht together, comparing and contrasting their works and lives. Taking its cue from Judith Butler’s call to “take up the tools where they lie”, the thesis argues that the poets became successful because they learned to capitalize on the opportunities that their specific contexts offered, and to both master and vary the aesthetic codes available to them in ways that their readers appreciated. Drawing on Susan Lanser’s term sapphic subject, the discussion develops the role played by Sappho in the three poets’ works, to further contend that Labé, Philips, and Nordenflycht created real or fictional female communities which enabled them to move away from the traditionally silent role played by women in Early Modern literature, and to underscore that they were not exceptional but rather that women were as capable poets as men.
Den nödvändiga manligheten: Om maskulinitet som soteriologisk signifikant i den svenska debatten om prästämbete och kön
(2019-08-22) Andersson, Johanna
This thesis examines the theological reasons why male gender is perceived as a necessary qualification for the office of priesthood in the Church of Sweden. The issues that are investigated examine the masculine ideal, the concern for a feminization of Christianity, claims for legitimacy and representation, and which discourses were used to reinforce the arguments for an office of priesthood reserved for men. The thesis primarily analyzes minutes from the three church councils that focused on the question of priesthood and gender: in 1938, regarding a special church office intended for women; and in 1957 and 1958, when the office of priesthood was debated. Throughout, the priesthood was described as very masculine, adapted to men, public, competing, and hierarchical. Church of Sweden was also portrayed as too masculine. The notion that the manliness of the Christian priesthood would be questioned and needed remasculinization does not emerge from the debates. The ideals presented as problematic for men outside of a Christian context, such as humility and gentleness, were not criticized during the Church council debates. But indirectly, the frequent occurrence of referrals to military and scientific discourses, which are examined in the fourth and fifth chapters of this thesis, may indicate a problematic masculinity: an unquestioned male clergy would hardly have had to emphasize their affinity with the military and physicists, or so often point out physical differences between men and women.
Performing Perfectly: Presentations of Childhood in Knutby Filadelfia Before and After the Breakup of the Congregation
(2019-02-28) Nilsson, Sanja
The Knutby Filadelfia Congregation, founded in 1921, started out as a Pentecostal congrega- tion. It has, however, been considered a deviant and semi-isolated new religious movement ever since it became known to the public after a murder took place within its community in 2004. The massive media attention it received revealed the presence of a charismatic leader within the group, and the development of a new theology in which the charismatic leader was con- sidered to be the Bride of Christ. After 2004, the congregation reinforced its boundaries with society, and then suddenly began to dissolve in 2016. This study discusses the development of totalistic features within the congregation from the perspective of sociologist Erving Goffman; it highlights the simultaneous presence of in-group as well as out-group social stigma; and it explores the conflicting presentations of childhood in the congregation in performances from before and after the dissolution of the congregation. The results are based on empirical material from 25 semi-structured interviews with children and youth aged 7–25, 2 focus group interviews with youths, and 24 days of participant obser- vations. Goffman’s theoretical framework, including the key concepts total institutions, stigma, and presentations, is used together with an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach in order to explore the experiences of childhoods as presented by children and youth within the congregation. The findings suggest that their individual understandings of and responses to the presence of a charismatic authority, as well as the consequences of such authorities on parent–child relations, are individual. The Pre-Narratives focus on stigmatisation from society, while the Post-Narratives include stigma within the congregation in the form of social exclusion. The study further indicates that the presentations of childhoods given prior to and after the dissolution of the congregation, the so-called Pre- and Post-Narratives, differ due to changing dramaturgical loyalties, although they should both be considered front-stage activity in Goffman’s terms.
The Aporia of Equality: A Historico-Political Approach to Swedish Educational Politics 1946-2000
(2018-11-15) Wedin, Tomas
In the present thesis, I analyse how the idea of equality appeared in Swedish educa- tional policy documents from 1946 to 2000. The dissertation aims to advance our understanding of equality as an educational ideal by analysing it as a politico- temporal problem. I do this by combining political thought with historiographical reflections. The material on which I draw is primarily governmental official reports (Statens offentliga utredningar) and Government bills. Utilising what I call the histo- rico-political approach, I examine the empirical material by focusing on how the idea of equality has been envisaged with regard to the past, present, and future. The chief problem is divided into five research questions, which in turn are analy- sed in four separate studies. By exploring how the relationship between teacher, pupil, and content has appeared in key policy documents, I reveal a crucial dislocation in educational poli- cies that has been overlooked to date. Whereas the idea of centring education around the individual pupil was initially popularised in the post-war period and articulated as a more efficient means for ensuring that pupils assimilated greater knowledge, this successively morphed into a democratic goal in itself, in line with the overt attempt to further the democratisation of the educational system in the 1970s. Concurrently, the role of the teacher and the content taught also underwent substantial changes. I show how these transformations can be seen as indicative of a new way of temporally charging equality, where the present is given priority at the expense of both the past and the future. Building on and yet diverging from previous research on Sweden’s educational reforms, in which the reforms around 1990 are depicted as a break from earlier educational policies, my results showcase important and seldom noted strands of continuity in educational policies from 1946 to 2000. In short, this project shows how the desire to further equalise conditions in the educational system paradoxically undermined the democratic order that it was intended to strengthen, helping to pave the way for the changes around 1990, which are often depicted as manifestations of a major, systemic shift.
Radera. Tippex, tusch, tråd och andra poetiska tekniker
(2018-11-09) Schmidt, Lisa
This study examines the field of Erasure Poetry from the 1960s to the 2010s with specific focus on intermedial, multimodal, dialogical and iconical aspects. Erasure Poetry results from erasures in earlier works of literature and the text-removing techniques varies between whiteouts, blackouts, cuts, painting, sewing or digital deletions. The explicit aim is to show how visual iconic aspects relate to the erased source texts and how they can be read as dialogical elements. This study also raises questions concerning censorship, literary re-use, book destruction, originality, plagiarism, authorship and metapoetics. The first chapter introduces the field of Erasure Poetry as well as the theoretical framework of the investigation. Chapter two discusses the differences between Visual Poetry and Visual Iconicity and introduces the term Dialogic Iconicity developed in order to specify a dialogical relation between the source texts and visual iconical elements of the erasure poems. Chapter three presents an historical contextualization, starting with the history of the palimpsest and its theoretical aftermath in the 20th century, as well as historical changes of the concept of authorship. Chapter four examines appropriations of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard from a spatial point of view while chapter five discuss book destruction, censorship and poetic activism from an historical as well as an aestetic point of view. Chapter six analyses intermedial, multimodal and reader interactive aspects of Tom Phillips’ A Humument. Chapter seven discusses dialogical aspects in erasure works by Elisabeth Tonnard, Yedda Morrison and Jen Bervin while chapter eight focus on media transformations and dialogic iconicity in Erasure Poetry in which everything but punctuation has been erased. Chapter eight performes a parallell reading of Jen Bervin’s erasure work The Desert and its source text, The Desert. Further studies in natural appearances by art historian John C. Van Dyke. Finally, in chapter ten, the analytical observations as well as the ramifications of my choice of theoretical framework are summarized. My conclusion also emphasizes the importance of expanded forms of readings when analyzing intermedially and multimodally rich forms of poetry in the expanded field.
The Making of Martyrs. Uprising, Cultural Sacralization and Death in Downtown Cairo after 2011
(2018-10-09) Giubergia, Giulia
This dissertation is aimed to better understand the multifaceted and contested narratives of the 2011 Egyptian uprising by exploring the visual and material cultural representations of selected events in the form of unofficial memorials (predominantly graffiti), official monuments, and anniversary commemorations. These narratives were produced and reproduced in the streets and squares of Cairo, principally in the neighborhood of Downtown Cairo, as well as online through the mass and social media. The analysis of graffiti, official monuments, and anniversaries is conducted from the perspective of the cultural sociology of religion, which is overwhelmingly concerned with the boundary between the sacred and the profane, the fundamental dialectic through which humans understand the world. The concept of multiple, shared, but culturally, historically, and socially dependent sacred forms has been used in this thesis to analyze and understand the conflicts over the symbolic meanings of the uprising, especially from the protesters’ side of the divide. An introductive chapter (1), where an overview of the events of the uprising most relevant to this thesis and of previous research is provided, is followed by a chapter (2) dedicated to method, theory, and material. Chapter 3 is a spatial introduction to Cairo and in particular Downtown Cairo, while chapter 4 focuses on the hagiography of the martyrs as represented on the walls. Chapter 5 deals with the everchanging uprising narratives painted on the walls of Downtown Cairo, chapter 6 focuses on the reactions to a feminist group painting in a sacred place of the uprising, and chapter 7 focuses on contested collective memories of the events. In the last chapter (8), the themes of death and dying, and conflict and contestation are recognized as the most relevant links sowing the analysis of the material together. Moreover, in the same chapter the relevance of this thesis for the field of religious studies is highlighted, followed by a brief summary of the case-study analytical findings.
Life Outside Life: The Politics of Immortality, 1914-1945
(2018-08-17) Björk, Mårten
Between 1914 and 1945 a discussion took place amongst Christian and Jewish theologians and philosophers on the possibility of immortality and eternal life. The discussion had profound political and metaphysical implications and involved ‘secular’ questions that still haunt contemporary debates on the meaning and origin of life: what is human life and life in general? Where might one locate the border between death and life, and what does it mean to die? Among the participants to this discussion were the Jewish philosopher of religion Franz Rosenzweig, the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, the Jewish scholar of myth Oskar Goldberg, and the Catholic historian and Patristic scholar Erik Peterson. In their own ways these thinkers conceptualised eternal life in response to the dangers of nationalism and the horrors of modern war. In their work we can discern a politics of immortality confronting what the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén in 1916 called the biopolitics of the modern nation state and what the physician Wilhelm Schallmayer already in 1905 described as biologische Politik. The speculative question of eternal life became a way to address the meaning of a good life in a period when millions of lives were being destroyed by war, and in camps and prisons. This dissertation deals with the intersection between the discussion on immortality and politics in the period between 1914 and 1945, by analysing Rosenzweig, Barth, Goldberg, and Peterson in relation to the racialisation of politics and the politicisation of life during these decades. The approach taken in this study is a contextually informed hermeneutics. In four chapters I discuss how these theologians’ conceptualisations of immortality and eternal life challenged the idea of life that was hegemonic during what has been termed the ‘monistic century’ and the ‘biocentric’ era. My reading of Rosenzweig, Barth, Goldberg, and Peterson shows on the one hand that their conceptualisations of eternal life and immortality were related to central political concepts and ideas of the era––such as the Darwinian idea of a struggle for survival, or the understanding of immortality as the perpetuation of the human species––and on the other hand that their theologies entail an understanding of life as something that transcends its facticity and points to an exteriority to the domain of biology, culture, history, and nature. For them, the origin of life is something that exceeds the living, and their notions of eternal life and immortality involve a proposal for a community with—and even more for—the dead and seemingly nonexisting. This study maintains that it is important to deal with the interactions and intersections of religious and metaphysical ideas, such as immortality and eternal life, with political thought; that one should neither separate theological metaphysics and philosophical anthropology from the domain of politics, nor neglect the cosmological basis of political thinking.
Åke Hodell. Art and Writing in the Neo-Avant-Garde
(2017-11-15) Gardfors, Johan
Åke Hodell and the Art of Illegibility provides the first in-depth discussion in English of the concrete poet and neo-avant-garde artist Åke Hodell’s works from the 1960s. Throughout the study, Hodell’s artistic practice is contextualized by way of comparison with examples from the earlier avant-gardes, as well as with contemporaneous writers and artists, indicating how the avant-garde and modernist legacies are preserved and transformed in the works of Hodell. The dissertation is a case study that unfolds against the background of the expanded field of the 1960s, for which a core issue is that of the relation between the different arts. Simultaneously as institutions such as Moderna Museet, Fylkingen and the electronic music studio EMS provided spaces for ‘open art’ in Stockholm, functioning as important catalysts for Hodell and his colleagues, the question of intermediality is manifest on the level of the work. Through analysis of Hodell’s early works, the present study demonstrates how a tendency towards dissolution of the different arts is paralleled by an emphasis on their respective materialities, and indicates the artistic practices of illegibility and linguistic reduction as a point where the ambiguous relation of the arts come to the fore. The study examines how Hodell’s artistic project is realized throughout various mediums and forms, and shows how his printed works open up a space between poetry and visual art, while they simultaneously highlight the medium of writing. Within this framework, the dissertation traces how writing becomes a means of representing subjectivity in several of Hodell’s early works. The study characterizes Åke Hodell’s artistic practice through its turn towards materiality, conceptuality and performativity. While this shift should be understood as a reaction against modernist ideals, the resulting procedures are ultimately connected to values of expression, subjective experience and conveyance of meaning in Hodell’s work, which hence is shown to rely on the fundamentals of the tradition it appears to overthrow. The present dissertation thus situates Hodell at a moment of transition, in which the radical turn towards the materialities of the artistic mediums co-exists with an idiom of subjective expression, and in which conceptual and performative procedures are paralleled by an ethico-political pathos. In sum, the present study provides an examination of the works by an artist who has been remarkably absent from the international discussion of the neo-avant-garde, while it also contributes with perspective on how we can understand the specificity of writing in relation to the permeability between the arts that characterized the neo-avant-garde.
En fängslande vetenskap?: Kriminologi i Sverige, 1885–1965
(2017-11-02) Pedersson, Anders
The purpose of this dissertation is to write a history of criminology in Sweden 1885– 1965. It is an investigation of how criminology was established as a science – as an acknowledged field of scientific knowledge – not as a broader discursive formation. The aim is to put criminological theories and practices in relation to political movements, media, the state and its institutions, such as the prison, the asylum and the university, and through that analyze Swedish criminology from the point of view of history of science. I mobilize the theoretical concepts of “hybrid management” and “boundary movement” to investigate how the borders between science and politics were negotiated and upheld. The study is divided into three parts which relate to each other both chronological and thematically. I argue that criminological theories and practices were established by being connected to different actors, different modes of thinking and different types of political aims. By analyzing criminology as a public science as well as tool for political administration and reform and as an academic discipline, I investigate not only the criminological text and ideas but also the infrastructure and political and cultural context of the science of crime. For this purpose I utilize diverse source material, including, but not limited to, popular scientific texts, state committee reports, the daily press and documents from a range of archives. I argue that criminology as a historical phenomenon is best understood as a social science which tries to mobilize a scientific way of thinking, talking and acting with the purpose of changing society in one way or another. Rather than focusing on which different criminological perspectives dominated at different times I focus on continuity and investigate criminology in Sweden as a project in which criminologists and their allies tried to achieve their goals of 1) production of knowledge, 2) securing the conditions for production of knowledge and 3) implementation of that knowledge in social and penal political reform. The dissertation shows that the political dimension of criminology should be described as shifting and multifaceted. Criminology did not represent repression or emancipation. Rather, as a science of the welfare state it was mobilized for both purposes and it needs to be understood in a complex process of conflicting interests. I conclude that a fundamental aspect of the establishing of criminology as a science in Sweden 1885– 1965 was its proponents’ ability to balance between scientific and political interests in their endeavor to produce criminological knowledge and promote a criminological rationality.

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