Bauer's History

 I month ago I visited Louisians exhibtion on pussy riot. For me, pussy riot stands for bravery and speaking truth to power, so to the least I thought it was a brilliant exhibtion. The fate of pussy riot have been in the western countries been linked to the pursuit of not only political emancipation but also a question of sexuality: Pussy riot fights for the rights of LBTQ+ communities and the most basic human right of all: to manage our own reproduction.  Pussy riot - picture from Wikipedia Since I've for the past year have been intrested in sexual politics, the parallel to my own country of Sweden is not that for away. Some months ago I read Gunnela Björcks "I lust och nöd" (a wordplay which can be translated into "in lust or poverty" which is a paraphrase of the english wedding vowel for richer or poor"). What stands out in this story about a young couple who in early 20th century started the sales of contraceptives is the huge amount of political and po...

 The philosopher Thomas Kuhn once divided the history of science, somewhat simplified, into two forms of periods. The first period is when science is undergoing business as usual and even though small progress is made, it does not count as a scientific revolution. The second form of period is when science radically expands through new findings and people becomes aware of these radical changes. This is something that Kuhn labells as a paradigm shift, in which the conditions for knowledge and knowledge production radically change.  For the past two years the innovations in AI have sparked debate in which people think that we are living in a digital revolution. Some people would even profoundly put forward that this is the second digital revolution, with home computers being the first. This debate have invoked my scientific curiosity in two ways: firstly is this really a revolution or a paradigm shift? This is due to that the development with computers leading to ai can be seen a...

 In 2019 a swedish government enquiry for the future of archive politics where launched. In it, digitalization was proposed as a important way forward for the Swedish archives since it both cut public spending and increase the access of public records. During the past twenty years or so, society have been singing praise to digitalization but one question still remains with cultural heritage: should everything be made accessible for a wider public? In 2011 Paul Dalgleish published his paper " The thorniest area " which conceptualized an important question: what happens to privacy of those creating the record once they are published online? Drawing on the idea that psychical archives comes with certain informal limitations, such that a person have to visit an archive and take photocopies of the material the digitalization provides a challenge. This challenge is due to that when material becomes digitalized they become avaible for every person to read, even though for instance t...

 Given the last years advances in artificial intelligence, and in particular the so called generative artificial intelligence, the EU have launched a series of regulation towards the implementation of AI in every-day life. Given the wast amount of dystopian ideas on what AI can do with society, this legislation is from a humanities and historical perspective quite interesting. The presentation of the legislation comes in the form of starting with a highlight of how AI can change our society for the better, such as better healthcare access and changing the conditions of manufacturing. However, the legislation also presents some key elements to which the EU have to regulate the use of AI in society. Drawing inspiration from the field of policy analysis, the legislation in itself can be seen as the product of which risks that the decisionmakers think that AI poses to society (Bacchi 2006), so let's start with the areas of legislation.  The policy-document presents three forms of...

 When I am asked to define history as a subject I often find myself in a complex situation. Since atleast the 1960's history have been influenced by various sciences, from sociology to political science and urban planning. History thus have not a theoretical foundation, instead we would speak of multiple histories. However, one aspect that I often highlight is that history have a large focus on contuinity (what remains the same) and change as well as explaining how the human experience are subject to both genealogies and sudden breaks. The second aspect I often speak about is that history have a very strong source criticism, an aspect that comes from the launch of history as a academic subject in the 19th century, when Leopold von Ranke started to write history from actual archive records rather than myths and folklore. This aspect of source-criticism is crucial to both my identity as a researcher and as an historian. However, given the rise of digital society, the possibility for ...

 In the anthology Race and Whiteness in Sweden (ras och vithet i Sverige) one of the authors describes how language have come to work as a race-barrier in contemporary Sweden. According to the author Swedes have a perception of the Swedish language as essential for a Swedish identity and as a skill that are hard for non-swedes to acquire. For the past years similar tendencies have been showed in the migration debate, were foreigners lack of language skills have led to social and economic stagnation within the group.  It is therefore little surprising that the Swedish government have procclaimed the need to reform the national program "Swedish for immigrants" (SFI). Statistics have showed that a majority of the students dropout with having a degree and that this have led to extensive segregation in the labour market, since companies view skills in Swedish language as essential for becoming hired. As a result a new programme for SFI was presented this morning, which aims to inc...