Public libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) have historically played a pivotal role in the establishment and support of European liberal democracies (Rasmussen, Rydbeck, and Larsen 2023). Ideally, they serve as promoters of democracy, offering reliable information accessible to all, regardless of factors like gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, age, disabilities, political beliefs, or faith. In an ideal scenario, LAMs encourage engaged, well-informed citizens, contributing to a vibrant civil society. However, contemporary Europe faces significant challenges to the underpinnings of deliberative democracy. The region witnesses the growth of anti-globalist movements, widening divides between urban and rural populations, regional conflicts, and nationalism, often driven by populist ideologies disregarding fundamental democratic norms. These factors result in new social and cultural divisions, complicating values of openness, pluralism, tolerance, and non-discrimination. Currently, the existing conceptual tools are insufficient to comprehensively grasp LAMs’ role in these developments.

The panel consists of members from the core group of a recently formed network Libraries, archives, and museums as key pillars of modern European democratic societies. A key ambition of this network is to develop a conceptual model for discussing local LAMs’ role in democracy. The local perspective is critical because previous research on LAMs’ political or social roles typically focuses on large national and pan-national LAM initiatives. The model focuses on democracy as an area of problematization for local LAMs and describes the entanglements and assemblages of resources, processes, and activities as they produce democratic legitimization. We rely on theories of democracy, cultural policy, and legitimacy in the cultural sphere, (e.g. Mouffe 2000; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Larsen 2016), and build the model on an agency-oriented approach.

The panel introduces the first iteration of the model based on our research in Sweden and Denmark. We invite our audience to an interactive session in critiquing and refining the conceptual model that addresses the issue of how local LAMs contribute to democracy. We take an iterative and abductive approach, moving between theory and empirical evidence. The model is a work in progress and is part of a creative and experimental method where we invite the audience to think about democracy and LAMs with us. We invite the audience to contribute with global perspectives on the issue.

By developing the model, we aim to get a richer understanding of the expectations and responsibilities that are ascribed to libraries, archives, and museums in relation to political transformation, and the roles they themselves take on. We will also provide knowledge on processes of legitimization and responsibilization in cultural policies in Sweden and Denmark.

Graphic Novel is a rather recent term, it marks distinct qualities of a group of artefacts to allow for differentiation and sales in late-modern (or post-modern) cultural context. 

Comics add their particular narrative potential to what the novel has done: they transplant novel-style narrations into image-based stories. In novels their author’s individual way with words, their voice is crucial. It defines the style, perspective, tone – the novel is about how a particular voice is expressed, it is not about the plot of the story as such. Comics are built from graphic representations that mark the distinct individuality of the auteur and/or graphic artist. Their view is expressed in the execution of each image and page design: "its 'graphiation’ – that is, the presence, within the very act of storytelling, of its maker" (Marion 1993 after Baetens 2001b, 146-150). 

There are enough comics labelled as graphic novels that are meeting the criteria for other literary genres to introduce differentiated labels: auto/biography, historiography, reports, travel writing, novels, …Even the difference between graphic adaptations of prose novels in difference to auteur comics matters (s. Schmitz-Emans 2013, 397 ff.).

We need to invent the Graphic Novel twice. The marketing term is established, now we need to differentiate the academic use to understand and describe better specific literary forms and genres. To restrict “graphic novel” to visually narrated novel-type literature instead of all longer comics is a beginning…

In 2015, the Swedish government allocated 130 million SEK to Äga rum ('Taking Place'): a three-year program of arts projects across Sweden to address low voter turnout in certain housing areas, but which, in effect, target the immigrants. We argue-through a short account of Foucault's take on the state, biopolitics, race, and governmentalisation-that this is an example of contemporary state racism, which is best understood as an inextricable part of biopolitical governmentalisation through forms of veridiction. We further analyse a specific governmental program (Äga rum) and a specific project (anonymised) within that program which takes place in two Miljonprogrammet housing areas in Malmö. Although both the program and the project have clear political agendas of empowerment and anti-exclusion, we argue that they nevertheless end up producing racial divisions and what we call a 'racial archipelago.'

This paper maps some of the ontological and methodological concerns incurred by the governmentalization of art and culture that has come about in most advanced liberal societies since WWII. The main argument is that cultural policy forms a new historical ontology constituting a transformed relationship between art and the state. This transformed relationship has profound effects on the “art institution,” loosely defined after Peter Bürger as the apparatuses of production and distribution of the art system but also the historical ideas about what art is and what it should be doing. This transformation has produced a new situation for art and for artists: if print capitalism secured the conception of the artist-genius and the contemplative reader, then today we have the emergence of something new. In the wake of the governmentalization of art we have a landscape on the horizon, one that belabors art with economic, social and quantifiable functions. It is in this context that cultural policy has become a “historical ontology.”

The commencement of cultural policy in Sweden is analysed as part of global and networked socio-technical agencements, beginning with the transformation of the political rationalities underlying state support for theatre in the early nineteen-thirties and ending in the current moment, which is described as a phase of cascading metrologies. Using Actor Network Theory as a methodology, the article explores how cultural policy partakes in what Foucault has elaborated as the progressive governmentalization of power relations, whereby art and culture, in this case, is “elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions.” Specific attention is brought to the historical role of UNESCO in the governmentalization of art and culture, and its importance for the first Swedish bill of culture. The article also elaborates on the central role of metrologies in the process of governmentalization, whereby art and culture is subjected to measuring devices, and by extension, concepts and instruments that contribute to the progressive socialization and naturalization of novel art-effects, such as social and economic development.

Cities increasingly use artistic and cultural activities to promote active citizenship and social cohesion. We suggest that city-sponsored cultural and artistic practices in Sweden are finding a new discursive context in migration. In this article, we look at two artistic and cultural institutions in Malmö, Sweden: Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. We develop a typology of governmentalisation based on the work of Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, which allows us to describe the governing activity of Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. What becomes visible is the discrepancy between the moral form of the political rationalities and the technologies of government: even though institutions may harbour ideals and principles of inclusion, they are perfectly capable of sustaining activities that brighten the very boundaries they set out to challenge.

Cultural policies will be analysed as producing what Bruno Latour calls “metrologies”; that is, measuring devices and valuemeters, and by extension, concepts and instruments that contribute to the progressive socialization and naturalization of art effects such as social sustainability, community cohesion, social capital, and innovation. The case analysed will be the art scene of the city of Malmö, its policies and metrological devices, with a focus on one community theatre project as an exemplary case. The metrologies, we claim, are the ways in which the policy apparatus opens up to larger concerns of what Michel Foucault calls dispositifs, linking art policy to other policy changes and societal concerns in general, and making art respond to those concerns in managed ways.

Cultural policies will be analyzed as producing what Latour calls metrologies; that is, measuring devices and, by extension, concepts and instruments that contribute to the progressive socialization and naturalization of art effects such as social sustainability, community cohesion, social capital, and innovation. The case analyzed will be the art scene of the city of Malmö, its policies and metrological devices. The metrologies, we claim, are the ways in which the policy apparatus opens up to larger concerns of what Foucault calls dispositifs, linking art policy to other policy changes and societal concerns in general, and making art respond to those concerns in managed ways.

Cities increasingly use artistic and cultural activities to promote active citizenship and social cohesion. We suggest that city-sponsored cultural and artistic practices in Sweden are finding a new discursive context in migration. In this article, we look at two artistic and cultural institutions in Malmö, Sweden: Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. We develop a typology of governmentalisation based on the work of Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, which allows us to describe the governing activity of Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. What becomes visible is the discrepancy between the moral form of the political rationalities and the technologies of government: even though institutions may harbour ideals and principles of inclusion, they are perfectly capable of sustaining activities that brighten the very boundaries they set out to challenge.