Bauer's History

A bout a month I was granted a scholarship from the Swedish national archives to conduct a four months study on ethics and digization. This project can in some terms be seen as a party-pooper project, since one of the key aims is to describe complexities within the digization of cultural heritage. For the past years, digitization have become a key element in the discussion on how to increase accesibility of the cultural heritage and the long term preservation of records. Whilst the latter have been subject to much debate, such as how we can handle formats become obsolete there have been little discussion on the ethics of digitization within Swedish academic circles. This even though in an international perspective, ethics have played a larger and larger part in big scale digitization projects.  Drawing inspiration from Fredrik Skotts article "finns den på nätet" (is it avaible online) I view digitization as both a tool for increasing accesibility and a threat towards the indi...

(the title of this entry is a play with words, since the name "Hinke" carries resemblance to the word hink in swedish which means bucket).  For the past months I have been working on a project on Swedish politician Henrik "Hinke" Bergegren, who is often forgotten in contemporary history writing. Bergegren was born in an upperclass family in Stockholm in the year of 1861 and early in his life came into contact with rising workers movement. Within the movement he soon gained prominence and was a key person in forming the social democratic party, which would shape Sweden upuntil this day. In the scholarship on Bergegren a key concern have been the framing of him as a political terrorist, where he on the party's congress spoke openly about using violence as a mean to achieve the workers goals. In 1908 he was excluded permantly from the social-democratic party, which often have been described as a result of his agitation for violence. However, historian Åsa Linderbor...

 Albert Einstein once famously said that he was not sure how the third world war will be fought, but that he was sure that the fourth would be fought with sticks and stones. Whilst this was said during an era of a global nuclear arms race, it do enables a critical discussion on how technology always will shape the the forms of war humanity will fight. With the rise of a globally connected world, the warfare have transformed into the digital platforms, and perhaps a striking example of this is a current scandal in Swedish politics.  For the past weeks it has been discussed how an investigative tv-documentary showed that the right wing populist party the Sweden-democrats have created several accounts on social media where they through memes tries to affect political discourse. This has been done anonously and is a practice which many countries employ in cyber-warfare to de-stabilize their competitors. Whilst this development is remarkable in itself it also shows an important shi...

 I just finished reading Anna-Lena Lodenius book "En värmländsk Hitler - Birger Furuguråd och de första svenska nazisterna" (A Hitler from Värmland - Birger Furugård and the first Swedish nazis). This book deals with a often forgotten character in Swedish political history Birger Furugård (1887–1961), who from the early 1920's until the early 1940's was a leading member of the Swedish nationalsocialist movement. The book mainly focus on his activity between the years c.1923–1941, when nationalsocialism was rising in Germany and the outbreak of the war. Even though it is a popular science book, it is still worth a read from two perspectives.  Firstly, I think that a well-done biography not only contributes to the understanding of a historical actor but also the social climate that they lived in. Lodenius book does exactly this, where she departs from Furugårds personal archives and the works further in situating him both in a Swedish political context as well as a nort...

 Throughout the last years there have been a tremendous amount of philosophical work on gender and the issue of why queer have invoked such resistance. I would in particularly recommend Jason Stanleys how fascism works on this issue, as well as the writings of Judith Butler on "who's afraid of gender". Whilst this entry is an attempt to discuss gender as political intervention, the work previously mentioned is as also well worth a read and takes a different point of departure than my own. Let's start with something obvious: gender-relations are clearly intertwined with those of power. The perhaps most interesting such example is the writings of Connell who launched the theory of masculine hegemonies. In the writing of Connell it becomes clear that bodily politics have created a norm of masculinity which few men live up to but still have an interested in maintaining, since the position of the ideal man is never obtainable by women. Thereby, by making society in the wor...

As the nation states started to fully arise in early modern times, so also did a conceived need to monitor it's citizens. One example of this need to monitor was legislation on excess, where one of the first laws from 1775 states that women from the lower classes were prohibited from wearing a wide arrange of garments done in velvet. A part from functioning as a way to keep Swedish money within the country, it also functioned as a way to keep people in place . The social stratas thus become bound to a form of performance, where everyone should act ording to their class-position in their expression, rather than allowing transgressions. In my previous post, gender 101, I discussed how gender works as a performance. In this post I will however also discuss how gender is undone by people within the trans and queer-community, and how this will invoke a fear of gender-transgression.  German picturing of ideal "people uniforms"  in 1908. Picture from Wikipedia .  Even though we ...