In the spring of 1933, the halutz-quota was established in Sweden. This quota gave young German Jews the possibility to come to Sweden as transmigrants to receive training in agricultural work for 18 months and then continue to Palestine. In total, between the years 1933-1941 490 teenagers were sent to Sweden through the halutz-quota. The focus of this article is on how and what the young people communicate about their time in Sweden in different sources. Drawing from various unpublished materials produced within the movement in Sweden as well as interviews with former members of the He-Halutz, the aim is to place the persons who entered Sweden through the halutz-quota as central actors in the text, both as important agents in the past and as constructors of the stories of that past. 

Digitaliseringen är en global informationsteknologisk process som innebär en genomgripande förändring när olika verksamheter förändras från analoga till, alltmer, digitala. I den svenska skolan påverkar digitaliseringen såväl administrativa styrsystem som lärares arbete och elevers lärande.

Sedan början av 2000-talet har arbete för ökad digitalisering av skolan bedrivits av såväl marknadsaktörer, beslutsfattare som lärare. När nästan samtliga barn i grundskolan regelbundet arbetar med digitala enheter skapas nya förutsättningar för, men också förväntningar på, lärare att arbeta med digitala läromedel, läxförhör, källor, videotjänster eller redovisningsformer.

Inom detta spänningsfält befinner sig skolans centrala uppgift, ämnesundervisningen. Trots en omfattande rörelse för digitalisering är kunskapen om vad denna gör med undervisning och lärande begränsad. Vad som blir den faktiska konsekvensen av digitaliseringen för historieämnet. Denna undersökning ämnar ta fasta på detta.

Projektets övergripande syfte är att undersöka hur digital teknik påverkar historieundervisningens innehåll och former. Genom att undersöka relationen mellan historielärares undervisningsformer och undervisningens innehåll satt i samband till deras användning av digitala verktyg, tekniker samt olika historieförmedlande medier blir det möjligt att studera, inte bara hur digitalisering i bred mening påverkar historieundervisningen, utan också dess innehåll. I relation till detta kommer frågor som berör sociala faktorer som klass, kön och etnicitet ställas, men också frågor om centrum/periferi. Historieämnet spelar en stor roll i såväl individuella som kollektiva identitetsprocesser och frågor om hur dessa processer påverkas är i förlängningen inte bara en fråga om likvärdighet, inkludering eller exkludering utan också en fråga om demokrati.

”Goal by Simonsen!” Den 21. september 1983 besejrede det danske fodboldlandshold helt uhørt England 1-0 på det ikoniske Wembley Stadium. Straffesparket i kampens 36. minut viste sig enormt vigtigt: Sejrsrusen var euforisk og skabte et fællesskab uden lige – hele Danmarks landshold var en realitet. Det rød-hvide firserholds succes skyldtes ikke bare et stærkt forbund eller en træner med den rette re-seppt, men generationer af boldglade bønder og byboere. Amatørfodbold havde stået stærkt, lige siden en læderkugle trillede over grønsværen første gang i 1883. Og i over 100 år har fans og fæ hujet sig hæse i skummende debatter om amatører vs. professionelle, om fairplay og diktaturer, om kvinder og fodbold – og om dansken er bedre end svensken.

Liftning –  att med hjälp av tummen och välvilliga bilister ta sig från en punkt till en annan är en praktik uppstod i USA i under 20-talet och sedan fick stor spridning under depressionen.  Efter 2:a världskriget blev liftning vanligt förekommande i Europa, mycket tack vare amerikanska soldater och det tidiga 50-talets europeiska vägar kom sedan att präglas av en generation frihetstörstande ungdomar, som varit instängda under långa krigsår och nu reste från ett vandrarhem till ett annat. Trots fenomenets popularitet (även i litteratur och konst) finns, som Schlebecker och flera andra forskare påpekar, mycket litet skrivet om liftning rent akademiskt.  Än mindre om liftning i det tidiga 50-talets Europa ur ett svenskt perspektiv. 1951 liftade min far, som då var 19 år gammal, under sju veckor genom Danmark, Tyskland, Frankrike, Schweiz, Belgien och Holland. Hans noggrant förda dagbok, omfångsrika samling fotografier och pass-stämplar berättar om en ung man som upplever frihet och utvecklar självkänsla i mötet med en internationell skara liftande ungdomar. För att bättre förstå denna resa bestämde jag mig för att med den tecknade serien som metod bearbeta hans material; kartor över dagsrutter, utvalda texter och fotografier, till sammanhängande berättelser.

Trails and paths are pathways to the past – and serve as a physical and cultural infrastructure of human memory. While they lead the way forward for anyone out walking, they also point backwards, towards history. 

Walking has been a common denominator for human life everywhere, at all times. While other forms of mobility have grown in importance and changed our societies in dramatic ways, most of us still depend on walking in our daily life. The massive number of human steps throughout history has created a rich and widespread network of trails that cross the globe and connect places. It has also resulted in a vast immaterial heritage through literature, art and music about walking. Paths and trails accommodate both the material and the immaterial, and challenge not only conventional heritage management but also the very essence of the nature/culture divide. 

In our current age, the Anthropocene, traces of people’s movements can be regarded as a distinct kind of cultural heritage, a ‘movement heritage’ that is dependent on continuous use or memory work to remain. It also points to historical and current forms of land use that is sustainable in the most basic meaning of the word, i.e. that these activities can be and de facto has been practiced over long periods of time without causing large-scale environmental degradation. Few other forms of human mobility can make similar claims.

So, while traces and remains from different kinds of movement may be small in physical scale, they are monumental in terms of their importance for the understanding of how a landscape has been used historically. Traces of mobility form lines that, with Tim Ingold, tie together the life worlds of the past with those of the present.

Walking tracks, paths, and trails are usually ephemeral and often also neglected traces of humans moving by foot through landscapes in the past and the present. These subtle landscape features seem to be difficult to handle within established heritage management regimes, partly because of their fugitive and timid nature. However, their uses and impacts have often been decisive and important for individuals and communities across spatial and temporal scales.

In this anthology, we explore possibilities to acknowledge human motion, and traces thereof, as heritage. Today, with the increasing interest in local and sustainable connections, and in bodily and spiritual enhancement, we see a growing use of walking tracks both in landscapes within reach from urban centres and in more remotely located or ‘wild’ areas. The corona pandemic has further propelled these trends. Of course, landscapes that are commonly understood as wilderness or ‘nature’ are in most cases clearly influenced by human actions and movements. While walking trails tend to be regarded as pathways to experience nature and as tools to promote public health, they could also be seen and used as routes to culture and history, indeed as pathways to the past. Based on a Swedish research project with the aim to explore the multiple dimensions of walking, paths and movement, this volume discuss the potential effects of such an expansion of the heritage register.

Landscapes of mobility have been shaped by hiking, hunting, outdoor life, tourism, sports, and physical training for centuries. They are historical remains of those activities, while simultaneously being the infrastructure for present-day usages. The demand for places suitable for movement, training and events continue to grow, and hiking trails are a key component in the rise of nature-based tourism, sport events such as trail running and mountain biking, and the increasing interest in outdoor life and hiking. So far, the historical and heritage aspects of these developments have been underarticulated. However, the Norwegian heritage board together with the Norwegian Tourist Association (Den Norske Turistforening, DNT) have initiated a project around historical hiking trails that have been attracting attention over the last couple of years. Similar attempts are now being made in Sweden, England, and elsewhere. There is need for a more explicit discussion about trails as heritage. With this anthology we contribute with precisely that through gathering leading scholars in Europe and beyond around this subject and engaging them in dialogue.

This thesis explores the role of history in popular culture with a particular focus on the Swedish reggae scene. It examines how cultural meaning applied to music bears strong connections to historical representations, and how individuals understand, communicate, and reproduce selective notions of the past in relationship to popular music. History is viewed as an essential cultural component in this thesis, a component equipped with the ability to articulate political resistance, and express a sense of identity and belonging. The overall purpose is to examine how history is constructed, represented and used in the Swedish reggae scene, and how notions of origin and authenticity are expressed. The empirical chapters examine how different representations of the past in Swedish reggae relates to notions of origin, place and authenticity. These representations are constructed through social interactions, but also through interaction with texts, objects, and cultural practices.

As the thesis shows, different representations of pasts and notions of origins exists in Swedish reggae, connecting to various geographical, cultural, and historical contexts. The hybridization of reggae becomes an important factor that contributes to making Swedish reggae something special and unique. In the Swedish reggae scene, which is predominatly white, the hybridization can be understood as an attempt to free oneself from aspects of reggae associated with Black experiences of white oppression. The use of local, regional, and national cultural expressions and representations of the past creates a distance to the Jamaican reggae traditions, and the historical narratives of slavery, colonialism and racial discrimination that reinforces the Black identification in Jamaican reggae. Instead, by relating to Swedish historical milieus, traditions and events, a closer and more relatable understanding of reggae is created. However, the thesis also shows that not all actors who consume and produce reggae in Sweden identify with the Swedish hybrid version. In such cases, its typical Swedishness is seen as an undesirable departure from the history and traditions of Jamaican reggae. Jamaican reggae is then perceived as a cultural heritage that should be preserved and respected in its original form - not in a copied or remodelled version.

This article investigates conflicts in retrospective Facebook groups, i.e., groups created with a particular interest and focus on the past, to analyse how members of these groups understand the past and how they negotiate, resist and challenge each other’s notions of the past. The data comes from a netnographic fieldwork within six such retrospective groups. Theoretical inspiration is drawn from Actor-Network-Theory (Harrison 2013, Latour 2005). The analysis thusly focuses on human (the members of the groups) as well as non-human actors (the operative logic of Facebook) and study how these produce associations between the past and the present. An overall result of the study is that the retrospective Facebook groups are not characterised by conflict. Instead, they are produced as places of sanctuary, where associations with the past becomes a basis for a nostalgic feel-good culture. However, the analysis also shows that the sanctuaries build on the production of a discontinuity and a conflict between the past and the present. Using Boym’s concept of ruinophilia, as well as Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, the article discusses how the conflicted discontinuity between the past and the present produces an us-and-them relationship where group members can come together in a nostalgic as well as a critical care for the world as it (in their perspectives) was supposed to be. The analysis also illustrates how members’ use of sources and references becomes a mere stylistic performance of authority, as the operative logic of Facebook not only enables but also constrains group interactions, reducing the members’ possibilities of having profound interactions and negotiations based on their memories and notions of the past. The article hereby contributes to the emerging research on digital memories in general, and memory work on Facebook in particular.

Collecting in times of crisis is a precarious task. In recent years, oral historians have considered the risks and pitfalls that so called crisis or rapid response collecting entail. However, in countries where oral history practices are not dominant within the cultural heritage sector, these discussions surrounding ethics and collecting have had little impact. In this article we problematize the absence of oral history perspectives on the ethics of crisis collecting through a Swedish case study involving the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) and Sweden's most prominent cultural heritage institution, Nordiska Museet (the Nordic Museum). In 2015, DN started interviewing refugees for a social media-based project entitled RefugeeSweden. Excerpts from the interviews as well as photographs of the refugees were published on Instagram and Twitter, with Nordiska Museet later acquiring this material. Through this case study we show how the act of digitization constitutes a process of transformation which fundamentally affects collections and how they can be understood. In addition, we demonstrate how seemingly inclusive notions of digitization and representation can obscure exclusionary practices of institutions that have not considered cocreation or participatory practices.

En översikt av arebtarlitteraturen i fackförbundstidningen Kommunalarbetaren 1911-1970, med särskilt fokus på år 1970.

Muntlig historia kan användas som en dokumenterande metod för att skapa en ny primärkälla och för att nå ny eller utökad kunskap om det förflutna. Muntlig historia kan även praktiseras som en kulturanalytisk metod för att undersöka och söka förstå vilka kulturella komponenter som finns i en berättelse om ett ihågkommet och tolkat minne av det förflutna eller en särskild händelse i det förgångna. Minnet används då inte enbart som källa utan är i sig undersökningsobjektet. Utgångspunkten är då att minnet är en aktiv process som ständigt omförhandlar och skapar ett meningsfullt förflutet, och inte en passiv förvaringsbox för fakta om en förfluten tid. Forskningsuppgiften blir därmed inte enbart att söka nå och skapa ny empirisk kunskap om det förflutna, utan även att förstå denna aktiva process genom vilken en eller flera berättare skapar meningsfulla historier om det förflutna i olika situationer och kontexter. I detta kapitel diskuteras såväl den dokumenterande som den kulturanalytiska utgångspunkten för att praktisera muntlig historia.

Oral history has been a vast and diversified field in the Nordic countries for several decades. The proposed roundtable is gathering senior and junior oral historians from oral history organizations or associations in three of the Nordic countries: The Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN), Memoar in Norway and the Oral History in Sweden (OHIS). The aim is to discuss and understand the past, present and future of oral history in the Nordic countries.       

The roundtable will take on a wider perspective on oral history in the Nordic countries.  What have been done in the past and what perspectives have been applied? What subjects has been researched and what is missing out? What theoretical and methodological developments can we see in the field of oral history in the Nordic Countries? What is the position of oral history in the universities, in relation to history and other disciplines? What are the major trends and how has our understanding and practice of oral history changed/not changed over time and space? What similarities and differences are there regarding how oral history is practiced in the Nordic countries? How and what can we learn from each other? What can we expect in the future from oral history in the Nordic countries in terms of developments, cooperation etc.?

Organizers: Martin Englund & Malin Thor Tureby

Ylva Grufstedt investigates the role of counterfactuals in uses of history through game designers and through digital strategy games. It discusses the content, form and perspectives that define different types of counterfactuals in the context of game-making – an effort to outline and detail the values and frameworks that shape the past in this popular media.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Sweden saw an upsurge in state-sponsored memoryprojects pertaining to the country’s controversial and largely unspoken relationshipwith the Holocaust. The Holocaust memorial in Stockholm, the then Prime MinisterGöran Persson’s informational campaign Living History, and the StockholmInternational Forum Conferences, all demonstrated a heightened interest in theHolocaust—as history, as memory and as educational instrument. Central to theseendeavors was the collecting of survivor testimonies. One such example is thecollection Jewish Memories that was created during the years 1994-1998 by the NordicMuseum in Sweden. Today it is—comprising approx. 400 oral and written life stories,1 600 photographs and 100 objects and sound recordings—is, in sheer size, one of the most significant Swedish holdings of Holocaust memory in relation to Swedish-Jewish heritage. However, the materials were collected without informed consent and thecollection is protected by a 70-year clause that restricts access to the material on thebasis of it being too ‘vulnerable’. “Jewish Memories” remains hidden, inaccessible tothe public and to researchers without permission to study the material. The people whohave left their stories remain anonymous and their names, stories, and testimonies arenot heard in public or used by researchers. As survivor testimony continues to be acrucial genre to Holocaust studies, perspectives that pertain to how, and for whom,survivor stories are told highlight problems that relate to vulnerabilities, digitizationand accessibility. This paper would present the research project, The Ethical Dilemmas of Digitalization:Vulnerability and Holocaust collections, that was designed to research and explain how ethical problems become embedded in collections that pertain to Holocaust survivorsthrough processes of archivization, organization and digitization. The project also aimsto present suggestions for how these ethical problems can be addressed byreconceptualizing digitization as transformation by developing participatory and ethicalarchiving/digitization methods in order to make the collections like the Jewish Memories accessible.

Following the ambitions of international and national policy makers to digitalize the cultural heritage sector, a growing research field that deals with digitalization and cultural heritage has emerged. However, it has been argued that too much focus has been placed on technology and information policy issues and that research on how to achieve administrative effectiveness and preservation has taken precedence over studies of different actors’ engagement, participation and access to cultural heritage. Previous studies have also tended to problematize the “hows” rather than the “whys” of processes associated with digital heritage and digitalization. In addition, research has shown that collections documenting minorities and marginalized groups have been excluded from national strategies concerning the digitalization of cultural heritage. Therefore, the aim of this article is to investigate why and under what conditions digital heritage about and with migrants has been initiated, created and curated. We study the motives and the roles of different stakeholders in the digitization and patrimonialization processes of one collection containing life stories from migrants. Furthermore, in the article we understand stakeholders not only as decision makers, owners or managers, but also as any person or organization that feels affected by whatever happens to the object or piece defined as heritage. Consequently, a central element in the methodology of this research was the interviews conducted with crucial actors in relation to their engagements with the studied collection. During the interviews, we paid specific attention to the different motives of the involved stakeholders and why it was important to them that the collection was created and digitized.

Denna artikel behandlar hur förintelsen ska undervisas enligt den svenska skolans läroplan där den tillhör det central innehållet. Artikeln analyserar elevers responser på en fråga från det nationella provet i årskurs 9. Den diskuterar hur elever förstår förintelsen ur  två perspektiv: en traditionell historisk föreståelse alternativt ett samtida moraliskt uppdrag

This article explores how emotions are practised within retrospective Facebook groups and how these practices are shaped by the logics of the interface. Theoretical inspiration is drawn from Ahmed’s discussions on emotions and mood work and the study is based on netnographic fieldwork involving six retrospective Facebook groups. Overall, a positive emotional relationship with the past is practised and the analysis illustrates that three interrelated mood works are found in the groups; fascination, nostalgia and knowledge desire. The analysis of these indicate that Facebook’s interface directs the members towards fragmented interactions which produces a memory culture that is more focused on brief and general, rather than elaborate and specific, accounts of the past. I conclude by discussing how the emotional practices within the retrospective Facebook groups creates a double-edged sword; at the same time as they offer a sense of positive emotional belonging for likeminded members, they also risk producing simplified notions of the past that feeds into retrotopian tendencies of the present.

Översättning av hemsida som samlar Förintelseöverlevandes vittnesmål om livet och erfarenheter i Theresienstadt och illustrerar dem på olika sätt med hjälp av interaktiva kartor. Hemsidan är en produkt av ett forskningsprojekt som letts av Therkel Stræde vid Syddansk universitet i Odense.

Presentation om processen att arbeta med översättning av hemsidan "De danska judarna i  Theresienstadt" till svenska.

With the point of departure in discussions on knowledge production within the research filed of oral history and Judith Butler’s discussions on vulnerability and agency this article explores the collecting practices and archiving of stories from one group that often is referred to as vulnerable in Swedish society, the Jewish minority. The analysis is based on life stories kept in the archive of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm (Nordiska museet), that came about as the result of project focusing on Jewish memories in Sweden. The article explores in which ways the different actors – the professionals from the museum and the interviewees – in the knowledge production reaffirmed or contested prevailing discourses about Jewishness in the 1990’s and how this is manifested in different ways during the collecting process, archival practices and in the archived materials. The analysis demonstrates how a memory institution, despite the best intentions, might contribute to maintaining stereotyping discourses on for example Jewishness. However, the analysis also gives examples on how vulnerability enters agency when some of the individual Jewish narrators resisted certain descriptive discourses on Jewishness during the interviewees and the archival process. Hence, an important conclusion from this study is that the power of the knowledge production in the archive does not only belong to the initiators and interviewers working with the collection, but also to the individual narrators – when their acts of resistance is recognized as central in the creation of the collection and its archived narratives

Synen på var och hur träning ska bedrivas har varit ett ämne för upphettaddebatt inom svensk idrott och friluftsliv sedan 1800-talet. En viktig skiljelinjehar gått mellan naturlig respektive vetenskaplig träning. Den förra harinnehållit utomhusträning och traditionella rörelseformer som löpning ochsimning, medan den sistnämnda har lyft värdet av repetition av konstrueraderörelser i standardiserade inomhusmiljöer. En av de första och mestcentrala rösterna i diskussionen var den av historisk forskning sparsamtuppmärksammade men på sin tid betydelsefulle Anton Santesson (1825–1892). Han var utbildad vid Gymnastiska centralinstitutet (GCI) i Stockholm,men gjorde sig impopulär och lämnade lärosätet för en tillvaro somförfattare. Santesson publicerade ett tiotal böcker, varav flera handböckeri gymnastik för läroverken, och intresserade sig bland annat för gymnastikför kvinnor. Med detta var han något av en föregångare, men hans övriga bidrag har inte uppmärksammats, trots att han även i fråga om landskapetsbetydelse för träning och fysisk aktivitet uttryckte idéer som bröt med tidensrådande ideologi.I det här kapitlet vill jag analysera hur Anton Santessons idéer om naturensbetydelse som träningsarena i viss mån bröt med linggymnastikensideologi och hur hans reformförslag kan förstås som en tidig form av friluftslivoch naturlig träning. I linggymnastiken, som var den dominerandeformen av kroppsövning under 1800-talet, var landskapet av begränsad betydelse.Merparten av träningen bedrevs inomhus, i lokaler som kom attsätta standarden för svenska gymnastiksalar under lång tid. Detta föll inteden konfliktsökande Santesson i smaken, utan han avvek från gymnastikensmittfåra genom att förorda utomhusträning, användning av redskapoch fokus på praktiskt användbara färdigheter som simning och skridskorsnarare än exercisliknande övningar

The anthology Cross-Sections: Historical Perspective from Malmö University contains contributions from researchers sharing historical perspectives, but representing different disciplines, such as arts, ethnography, history, literature studies, religion and sports science. The seventeen contributions clearly demonstrate the breadth and diversity of historical research carried out in different departments at Malmö University.