Bauer's History

The common historiographical narrative (i.e., the history of the academic discipline of history) goes something like this for Sweden and other parts of northwestern Europe: Until the mid-19th century, historians did not fully grasp what a historical source was. Instead, myths and popular understandings were often entwined in the academic writing of history. In 1825, the German historian Leopold von Ranke published a book called Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 , which was groundbreaking due to its use of sources primarily derived from archives. This led to the establishment of history as a source-based science, where we use contemporary sources from the time we study to reconstruct the past. This does not mean that all sources are deemed "trustworthy" in themselves, but archival records are continuously scrutinized through source criticism. However, what this development has also led to is a notion of archives as neutral. From this perspective, hi...

 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...

 As a PhD-student I came in contact with the writings of Lynn Hunt, whose writings actually helped me overcome some problems brought forth by the more post-modern perspectives. In short these perspectives sometimes highlight that we really can not know anything, since knowledge in itself is a social construct and a outcome of power relations. As a young researcher this was a rather depressing insight; since if all we ever produce is just social constructs then why is research worth it? The solution to this problem was presented in the writings of Lynn Hunt's book "History: Why it matters" which highlights that science can produce temporary truths. These truths can be seen as state of the art on what we can claim to know about the world right now, but that these truths are also subject to change. Therefore, we never make a claim that can last for centuries.  This is a conclusion that I have drawn in to my teaching and in the current course I teach on the history of childho...

One of the many perks with being a university teacher is that you get to read alot of various scientific literature. This semester I have been assigned to teach course about the history of childhood, which actually aligns rather well with my research interests on the history of families and migrant children. However, teaching also requires to read through the course literature and in this case a key-book was Colin Heywood's "a history of childhood".  As a standalone book it works rather well as an introduction to both the history of childhood and, in a wider sense, social constructionism. What I however have struggled with when incoorporating it to teaching is these three aspects: a) The structure which is divided thematically rather than chronologically  b) The books overestimation of the social; whilst also underestimating human evolution c) The approach where the past is presented as a one-way route to an enlighted, contemporary Europe or western world  Starting with m...

 During the last two years I have come to think a lot about method, and how method sometimes blurs what is important in a text. I have, for reasons unknown to me, mostly worked with complex text and context bound methods such as different modes of discourse analysis. However, the texts I am most satisfied with are those I have written based on thematic content analysis, which I during recent years have started to think about as the most underestimated methods. Let’s start with why I think it is underestimated: it is basically because it does not hold an onthology of its own. For instance Foucaldian based discourse analysis, which is the method I have most experience with, comes with a heavy theoretical luggage. To know how a discourse operates is an achievement in itself. The same can not be said about thematic content analysis. Instead it is very straight forward, were the material guides it’s operation. It is seldom you go into a material without a hunch of what you will encounte...

 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...

 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 ...

 For the past weeks I have taught seminars on the use of history and history culture. This is not an area of history that I specialise in and I also think that a lot of the theoretical writing on the subject sometimes is both to complex (often invoking everything from Marx and Foucault to that in betweeen) and sometimes to simplified (often these texts highlights a schematic of how people use history in a matrix, thus lessening the complexity of the issue). However, when you teach about teaching, it always become inevitable that you start to reflect around your own practices. In my career as a history teacher at the university level, I have come to conclude that large historical overviews are often lacking in some way or another. Perhaps this is due to the complexity in writing a global history on around 1500 pages and with several authors involved. There are however some parts of writing synthesis that more complex than others given our current culture. As a student I personally h...

 F or the past week I have worked alot with the history of AI for an upcoming course on AI and archives which I will be part of the teaching team during the next semester. This area have been rather tricky for me as a scholar in humanities to learn about, since most of the text is rather technical and does not really have historians as a point of departure. The texts that have been written as a way to popularize are also filled with technical terms such as "neural networks" which they seem to think is rather obvious terms for scholars from all fields. Yet I have read some technical courses at the university, and this have helped alot. I have even managed to read some of Alan Turings original writing, and apart from the math I found rather interesting.  What I however have come learn during this week is actually how complex the notion of AI really is. Basically the idea of living machines have been part of western culture since ancient greece with Heifastos golden robots and f...

 F irst a disclaimer is warranted: I strongly condemn any movements that try to deny genocides which for the past decades have been quite common in neo-nazi enviroment even though this view is undergoing a change. This change means that some leading nationalsocialist movements no longer denies the undeniable, but rather questions the results of research on for instance exact numbers. This is of course a change of tactics rather than beliefs, but is likewise also worth condemning. As an historian and a policy researcher I am however quite unsure of whetever actually criminalizing such expressions of beliefs (beacuse this is what it is) can actually be a good way forward. For the past years Sweden have discussed a legislation which primarily aims at stopping holocaust denial. As a result of EU-regulations this have actually happened and today a new law is taken into effect. This law states the following: Anyone who in a statement or other communication that is spread denies, excuses,...

 Working as a social historian I mostly deal with struggle and suffering one way or the other. I have written on the inhumane treatment of refugees, on how politicians came to cut public spending on integration even though they knew it was wrong and on anti-abortion politics that caused severe suffering for women in the early 20th century. Yet I remain a strong optimist when it comes to humanity, perhaps as a psychological response or perhaps just because I know that sometimes - even during the most dark times - there are people who aim to change the world and often suceed. In my dissertation on immigration politics I wrote alot on a local social democratic politician who was a municipal leader during the 1970's and 1980's. During the latter half of this period, Sweden went through a rise in xenophobic ideas, which for decades to come have shaped the political landscape. It was during this time Keep Sweden Swedish were formed, which eventually would evolve into todays right win...

(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...

 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 ...

 For the past week I have been reading a quite different book from what I usually read on my sparetime. Since I read alot of history in my line of work I seldom read books on social science or popular history, due to that it basically would mean to work in the little spare-time I have. However, I made an exception for the book Veras Resa - min syster nationalsocialisten (Veras Journey - my sister the national socialist) by Folke Schimanski.  In Swedish political history, you will sooner or later encounter Vera Oredsson (née Schimanski) whom for the past six decades been part of the right wing extremist environment. Furthermore, part of her infamousy comes from her being the first female party leader when she in briefly held leadership over the Nordic Reich Party (swedish Nordiska Rikspartiet), which in reality was chaired by her husband Göran Oredsson. Much can be said about Vera Oredssons life but to keep it short the following summary can work: Oredsson was born in Berlin in...

 For the past two weeks I have been reading a book called "The poor in lodz" (om Swedish de fattiga i lodz") which deals with life in a Polish ghetto during WWII. This ghetto was an exception in many ways, both due to its large production for the German army and that it never rebelled. Instead it stayed in operation until the summer of 1944, when Germany in a last desperate attempt to finish its dark deeds deported all of its inhabitants to finish its dark deeds. At the center of the story is Chaim Rumkowski, who for decades have allured historians. He was the elderly jew of the ghetto and had chief responsibility for almost a quarter million persons. During the war, he tried to negatotiate with the German authorities and tried to reach an agreement in which the Jews would not be deported to concentration camps in exchange for their slave labor. As a leader Rumkowski is remembered as a traitor, since he collaborated with the German authorities. Furthermore, he was prone ...

One of the main things I love about history is that the more I learn, the more taken for assumption knowledge is challenged. Since I've for the past year have been reading alot about the history of gender and sexuality, I've come to learn that our common perceptions of the past is often wrong. One such example is a doctoral dissertation by Sofia Kling titled " Vi våga ej helt leva " (we dare not to fully live) which discusses the fertility transformation that took place during the early 20th century.  Klings point of departure is a phenomena which have been the subject of debate within the discipline of demographics: in the first decades of the 20th century the western world faced a decline in birth rates. This decline can not be connected to natural events or enviromental factors that affects fertility. Instead the decline have to have it's root causes within human behaviour and a variety of ideas have been put forward to explain it. This fertility transition als...

Following the advances in post-modernism historians have become rather aware that they do not produce neutral knowledges, but rather that the questions they ask to some degree also mirrors the questions historians ask. A clear example of this is Donna Haraways critique of the idea of "neutral" social scientists, since this idea often have taken people in academia as point of depature, thereby creating an image of the the neutral research as a middle-class male in his midforties without thinking of the limitations such as person have on what becomes possible to ask.  Given my awarness that openAI is not fully transparent of its sources, and thus neither transparent in which taken for granted assumptions that shapes it's answer (an aspect that fails to meet the standard of Tracy's good qualitative research ), I became curious on what would happened if I started to make a conversation with it with my own area of expertis as a point depature. I therefore asked OpenAI the...

 This is the second entry to my series of posts on social constructivism. An important criticizism that have been brought forward by both scholars and public intellectuals have been that social constructivism reduces the human experience. If there is no "objective" reality, then there are no ways to explain the root causes of suffering.  In a 2012 article by Tracey Loughrahn this criticism is partialy met. The article revolves around the social construction of a psychatric diagnosis - shell shock - which commonly labelled to soldiers in the first world war. The common denomenator for this diagnos was that the soldiers became passive in various ways, from withindrawing into a shell which the outside world had limited possibility to connect with to somatic syptoms such as loosing the ability to use ones legs. In her article, Loughrahn puts forward the notion that this was reported from all over Europe in the early stages of war became described as a psychatric illness. However...