Bauer's History

 For better or worse, the theories of french philosopher Michel Foucault shaped alot of my thinking and writing between 2015–2023. I have since moved on theoretically and today I would place myself as ecclectic in terms of theory: the aim of using theory should be to explain reality, rather than proving the works of a certain philosopher. Still I have thought alot about the relevance of Foucault and my interpretentions of them. In this two piece entries I will try first try to explain some of Foucault theory of governmentality and some of his philosopher, and in the next entry I will try to describe how some of them might relate to contemporary society on a wider base.  Foucault is perhaps one of the most ambigious philosophers, since his work to a large degree have intersections even though they deal with different subjects and time periods. But perhaps the most common way to understand Foucault is his discussions on power and how society shapes human behaviour. The word powe...

 A couple of day's ago I stumbled on Lee Edelmans book No Future: Queer Theory and the death drive. This book is originally formulated as a way to create queer contention towards current society, but what I came to think about was it usage of archetypes. In Eldemans book it is clear that politics often revolves around a concept of the Child, which is an archetype that is considered as pure and innocent. Furthermore, the Child also represents the idea of societies future, since it eventually is our children that will pave the way for society. According to Edelman this creates a problem in politics, were no sane person can claim to not act on the interest of the Child, since this would also mean not acting on the interest of the future.  Even though this only a passage in Edelmans writing, it came to be quite interesting in regard to my previous research on children and childhood. When writing my dissertation I was rather fond of a theoretical concept such as "the swede" or...

 This semester I have taught a class on the use of history. Due to this being a first cycle course students studying , its texts have to be in Swedish. A consequence of this is that we often ends up with Swedish writers, were one is the writings of professor Klas-Göran Karlsson, whom I actually had as a professor in ancient times when I was a student.  My previous department often discussed Karlssons texts and often takes his typology of uses of history as point of departure. In this regard it is basically often stated that Karlsson have identifiers four or five modes in how history is used. In this regard Karlsson for instance have identified the political use of history, where history is utilised as a way to legitimize claims of for instance how to arrange society or to create social coherence within a country. Other modes identified is the academic use, the commercial and the none use of history.  Sometimes in academia this text is utilised to criticise those historian...

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...