Bauer's History

 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...

 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...

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...

 I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to deconstruct historical events and terms. For a couple of months in 2022 I however went through a crisis as a researcher. Since the pursuit of my studies have been to pave the way for social change and thus increasing social liberty, I came to ask myself how my research would connect to an overall social change. What was worse was that as I was grappling with this problem, I had no solution.  Let's start with the obvious. From the school of discourse were I take my point of departure language is seen as an immensely powerful tool both for social control and social change. Through the use of language we exercise controll by creating policies that according to Bacchi is dependent on social categories. Categorization is on my understanding the process in which we align meaning to abstract terms, such as foreigners, gays and the poor. By aligning meaning to these groups we constitutes them and thus create the possibility to s...

 One of my favourite american authors is Sinclair Lewis , who saw a surge in popularity after 2016 election of Donald Trump. The reason for a public interest in Lewis authorship was back then his book it can't happen here which dealt with the danger of a fascist take-over in the US by democratic means, something that was actually quite close due to Lindberghs popularity. A year ago I however read another novell of his, Kingsblood Royale which dealt with the question of race in the american 1930's. Sinclair Lewis - an early 20th century writer that  perhaps is more relevant today than ever before. The main character of Kingsblood Royale is Neil Kingsblood, a sucessfull middle-class american whom upon his father's request start to investigate his family ties. His father was a strong believer that the Kingsblood family were actually of royal descent in Europe but Neils research points in the direction that family had african american lineage. According to contemporary racial ...