Bauer's History

 I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to deconstruct historical events and terms. For a couple of months in 2022 I however went through a crisis as a researcher. Since the pursuit of my studies have been to pave the way for social change and thus increasing social liberty, I came to ask myself how my research would connect to an overall social change. What was worse was that as I was grappling with this problem, I had no solution.  Let's start with the obvious. From the school of discourse were I take my point of departure language is seen as an immensely powerful tool both for social control and social change. Through the use of language we exercise controll by creating policies that according to Bacchi is dependent on social categories. Categorization is on my understanding the process in which we align meaning to abstract terms, such as foreigners, gays and the poor. By aligning meaning to these groups we constitutes them and thus create the possibility to s...

  During the last weeks I have seen this meme to an increased degree being shared. In many regards, I am very positive towards it core message: the humanities have values that we can not look past. Doing so would be denying the very essence of what makes humans. But still, something with it agitate me. And it took a couple of weeks of reflection to gain insight to why. After some careful thinking, I think i've nailed it: it is still bond upon the division between value producing sciences and the humanities.  In Swedish discourse, the humanities often come under attack from the so called intellectuals from the conservative and liberal sectors. The key notion is often that studies in humanities renders students unemployed and that it is a luxury we can not afford. Efforts have been made to adress this understanding and studies from Lund University have showed that people with majors in humanities often get qualified positions post-graduation even though their work life is not of...

Even though my ongoing project is rather old-school "hands on history" I still would mainly label myself as an primarily a migration historian working from constructive approach. One of my core beliefs is that social categories, whatever they are gender or race, is the result of our inherent tendency to place other people into categories. There have been written miles of research on this theme and one of the things that is the most clear to me is that whilst labels seldom change, the meaning of the labels are themselves quite dynamic and subject to  change.  The label I am most familiar with is the label of immigrants in 20th century Sweden, a category which I wrote my thesis on. For a person like myself, born in the early 1990's, the word itself carries two meanings. The first is the dictionary meaning - a person who have crossed a national border and then obtained citizenship or lived for a long time in a different country than they were born in - and the second is more...

In 2018 I wrote an article on identity formation within the refugees welcome movement . Back then research were grippling with the task of understanding what this movement was all about, since they used volunteering as a form of protest. My article noticed the same kind of tendency that had previously been noticed in Austria, where the refugee welcome movement were seen as occupying the nexus between social protest movement and conventional NGO. This is something that eventually was brought up in the larger debate were social movement scholars Donatella della Porta and Elias Steinhilpir labelled the refugee movement as a hybrid movement , which both contained elements of volunteering and social protest.  Refugees welcome protest. Picture from Wikimedia Commons.  In the article I departed from a well known theoretical framework within social movement studies called framing theory. This theory states that social movements, much like the conventional media, creates schematas of i...

During my PhD-education I came to be more and more interested in social movements. For me this has be a drastic shift from my previous research on primarily state actors and public officials, but also a logic consequence of my interest in politics. During the beginning of this phase I wrote an article called "from aid organization to political movement" where I developed a notion that had been seen throughout Europe during the last decade: the old division between humanitarian aid organizations and traditional social movements have become more and more blurred.  But one of my key difficulties in social movement studies were a rather strong notion of social movements as something new. A common concept within this field of study is that social movements arose in the 1960's when people gathered around trying to change societies values rather than economic conditions. This is based from a division were the classical socialist massmovement lost their relevance in a society wit...

During the last period of his life, Foucault became increasingly interested in a field known as  bio-politics . There are several ways to define this tricky term, but one understanding of it that have been rather important to me is Foucaults thought on  why the biopolitics were created. According to Foucault the late 17th and early 18th century marked a new era, when states to an increased degree became aware of the population as a resource that could be re-developed and mastered, thus improving a countrys financial and cultural assets. This is a crucial point, since it would explain how population management became a part of state policy.  The idea here is that states need to manage their population in order to make it grow which throughout history have manifested differently were perhaps one of the modern eras main points is a form of governmentality in which citizens should conduct their behavior according to the states wishes. This is for instance rather clear in the ...

 Today (the 2nd of january) marks the birth-day of Swedish sexual educator and reformer Elise Ottosen Jensen. Originally born in a conservative priest family in Norway, Ottosen-Jensen lived her life as an international anarchist whose actions would transform the swedish sexual politics during the last fifty years of her life (1923-1973). As a reformer Ottosen-Jensen is mostly known for the creating of the Swedish association for sex education (RFSU) in 1933 which was formed during a dynamic period in Swedish sexual history. During the 1920's and most of the 1930's it was illegal to publicly support contraceptives in Sweden and hence one of the key goals of RFSU was to reform the legislation, which eventually suceeded in 1938 when marketing of condoms and pessars were made legal. After that Ottosen Jensen and RFSU spent years propagating for important reforms such as sexeducation in public schools and a reform of the swedish abortion legislation, which Ottosen Jensen however did...