Bauer's History

 As this semester have fast forwarded, I have come to teach alot about the church's historical role. I would say that it is perhaps not impossible, but very hard to write a history of Europe and especially Sweden without taking the church into account. From a very obvious point, Sweden was not a literal society (apart from rune-writing, which is not fully a classical way to write) society. It was with the early church that the latin alphabet entered Sweden and the church need for adminstration later on played an important part in spreading the written word. This have for instance the consequence that much of Swedens early history only can be viewed through christianity, since it was mostly christians that knew how to read or write.  As history forwards we can also see how religion becomes a tool for giving legitimacy to hatred and actions that we today would view as crimes against humanity. A clear example of this is the Swedish crusades into Finland which led ot the country b...

 For the past years I have come to focus more and more on digital humanities both consciously and subconsciously. Starting with the conscious part I have undertaken a research project on creating digital archival collections in which I aim to investigate the ethical practices within the archival sector when creating new collections. I have also come to include perspectives in my teaching, were for instance teach course on AI and archival science at Lund university. On a more subconscious level I have also come to work with material that is avaible online, such as in my thesis were much of my source material was already digitised. I have also come to use data-processing softwares such Nvivo and Tropy. Likewise much of the material use in my teaching consists of sources that are already digitized. This can be seen as digital revolution 1.5 with the first being the inclusion of digital tools such as cameras, computers and wordediting software which became available already in the 198...

 Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes. My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history ...

 Since I finished my PhD I have not researched the same field. My dissertation was on history of migration with a clear perspective on state and municipal policy. My ongoing research projects have instead come to focus on two main fields. First and foremost, I have written on the history of sexual education in late 19th and early 20th century Sweden. Secondly I have also returned to my previous profession as an archivist and written a bit on digital appraisal policies and approaches at large archival institutions.  When I changed my perspectives, some people told me that it was a mistake in regards to career. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps they are not right. From one perspective I still get funding for my other projects and I also learn a lot. On the other hand, I do not fully see the long term effects and I could for instance see a scenario were having a strong expertise in one field would be an advantage, none the least when applying for highly specialised positions in...