This essay discusses popular life writing by younger

Danish writers descending from immigrants. It focuses

on selected works, within the last two decades, that

all have had significant presence in public sphere

debates or caused controversy. The books in different

ways addresses struggles around intergenerational

memory and it is argued that the works can be seen

as ways of trying to re-approach life in an ambiguous

as well as insightful engagement with one’s heritage

as well as a majority culture.

The chaper engages with published prison writings of two Indian South African activists, Ahmed Kathrada and Fatima Meer, who wrote extensively while imprisoned during Apartheid.

This book ‘plays up’ stories of mostly unknown figures and their journeys through a life affected by movement, and a search for home. It engages with individuals and groups whose passions have carried the subjects through ‘uncharted’ or unhomely territories, here told in a series of ‘tracks’ depicting their roles in community memories and histories. Side A engages with individual journeys, such as Lewis, the American black literature book seller; the civil rights activist, Izzy, an American-Swedish folklorist; Eugene, a black classical pianist; and Pi, the Jew transported to Sweden during WWII. Side B focuses on communal histories and alternative educational and artistic spaces, addressing life writing and memory in German comic books; alternative educational spaces in Israel-Palestine and Africa, and  ‘small press passions’ of zines/newsletter culture. Tellers and their interpreters are mediating identities where nationality, race, and class (and other markers of identity) have influenced selfhood and collective belonging - revealing how individuals and outsider cultures have the power to influence dominant cultures and inspire societal change.

Narrations codify perspectives on the past. Individual narrations and opinions detail stages in that process and are part of the negotiation on the meaning of things. 

Comics contribute visual negotiations of the past and its artefacts. They primarily document how the past is re-told at that particular moment in time (i.e. their present). They codify generational and cultural perspectives (plural!) on the past in their narratives. They participate in negotiation of the ”floating gap of memory” (Assmann). 

Narratives about recent history are selectively institutionalised and documented / codified. With growing historic and biographical distance, situations, events, behaviours are re-evalued and re-told. Individual involvement in collective actions becomes re-evalued from focus on a person’s behaviour and responsibility to focusing on the collectives ethical state of mind and actions. BUT: ancestorial involvement can keep excusatory myths intact despite historic evidence against them. 

With growing biographical / historical distance it becomes easier to be judgemental on individual and collective responsibility: other narratives compete and complement the formation of identity and can limit dependence on particular older narratives if these are not considered crucial by involved individuals. 

Conviviality has lately become a catchword not only in academia but also among political activists. This open access book discusses conviviality in relation to the adjoining concepts cosmopolitanism and creolisation. The urgency of today’s global predicament is not only an argument for the revival of all three concepts, but also a reason to bring them into dialogue. Ivan Illich envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of ‘autonomous individuals and primary groups’ (Illich 1973), which resembles present-day manifestations of ‘convivialism’. Paul Gilroy refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be ‘at ease’ in contexts of diversity (Gilroy 2004). Rather than replacing one concept with the other, the fourteen contributors to this book seek to explore the interconnections – commonalities and differences – between them, suggesting that creolisation is a necessary complement to the already-intertwined concepts of conviviality and cosmopolitanism. Although this volume takes northern Europe as its focus, the contributors take care to put each situation in historical and global contexts in the interests of moving beyond the binary thinking that prevails in terms of methodologies, analytical concepts, and political implementations.

This article draws upon research done as part of a formative evaluation of a radio project on children’s rights in Tanzania. Fieldwork was conducted between January and June 2016 followed by a longer period of analysis. In this article we take the project as a case study of applied Communication for Development (ComDev) and examine the insights it offers into this field of both theory and practice. Making use of data generated during the evaluation process we reflect critically on the project, and the evaluation processes itself, taking participation, community radio, selection, involvement, community exchange, and radio practice as our points of departure. The empirical work and analysis revealed a strong potential in the project’s activation of crucial local contexts and webs of communication, but also vulnerability and uncertainty in terms of vision as well as practical models for a sustainable continuation and impact.

This article explores existing and emerging frames of writing history involving a push for new modes of telling and writing history/histories. This, from the point of view of a recent movement, in short named Women Making History, launched in Malmö, Sweden in 2013 aiming to cover a 100-year period, from when immigration began until the present day. The movement - engaged in activism and archival work and research around the lives and work of women immigrants in the city - took off in 2013 with support from authors engaged in a Living Archives research project, and formally ended, though some activity continues, with a book publication in 2016. With the initiator of the movement Feminist Dialogue Malmö University researchers (mainly the two authors and students) have been documenting activities and workshops over hree years, revealing the voicing of ambivalent identities that wish to maintain a plurality and openness of identifications and directions. These voices do not want to be framed as ‘outsiders’, ‘homogenized others’ or ‘victimised strangers’, and struggle with a feeling of being amended to a more homogenous national history – an ambiguous predicament which is investigated in this article through diverse ways of trying to understand how belonging is developed in the notions of multidirectionality, multilogues, amendments and re/framing.

In 2013, Parvin Ardalan, a former journalist and civil-rights activist from Iran, launched a project in Malmö, Sweden called 100 Years of Immigrant Women’s Life and Work – or, Women Making History for short. Ardalan was Malmö’s first ‘safe-haven writer in residence’ from 2010 to 2012. In 2007, she was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for her work campaigning for the equal rights of men and women in Iran. At the time of the project launch, we, the authors, were involved in the Living Archives research project at Malmö University, which was rethinking the archive as a social resource. We were invited by Parvin and fellow activists to be partners in the work of documentating activity for Women Making History, alongside a few other Malmö-based organisations. This article recounts the movement’s engagement in rewriting Malmö’s history – a rewriting that focused on the lives and work of immigrant women over the last 100 years from a feminist and activist perspective.

City Symphony Malmö was a collaborative documentary that engaged citizens of Malmö in recording short film sequences. The Symphony’ video material was also performed at the art and performance centre Inkonst where electronic musicians improvised to VJ’s digital and analogue live mixing of the material. A remediation of the performance was streamed live on the Internet with live footage from the performance. All clips were released under the creative commons licence and made available for remixing through The Pirate Bay. This article explores what it can imply to hand over the means of film production to citizens. The discussion concentrates on participatory and spatially distributed filmmaking and screening of non-institutional memories, produced in the symphony. The analysis merges influence from silent cinema and Soviet Montage, theories of public memory and place. It describes the complexities of creating non-institutional memory and archiving practices and argues that such citizen-driven and non-institutional memories may challenge official history and societal memory production, yet also reproduce typical and iconic images which reveal spatio-material hierarchies. Such complexities demonstrate the value of an analysis of participation and spatio-material dimensions of public memory as unfolded in the article.

Abstract This chapter re-envisions the influence of Stuart Hall in British political and cultural history with an emphasis on two incidences of remediation; a screening of John Akomfrah’s film The Stuart Hall Project followed by a conversation between Lola Young and Faye Ginsburg, moderated by Anders Høg Hansen at the Voice & Matter conference, Malmö, September 2014. Following Young and Ginsburg’s discussion, the article reads as reflections on culture, identity and the movements and ideas Stuart Hall inspired or became inspired by. Notably, Akomfrah’s film as well as the panel discussion reflects on significant years of Stuart Hall’s academic and activist journey, the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with increasing social tension in Britain. A general introduction (by Anders Høg Hansen) is followed by the edited conversation, which has been shortened slightly with a few changes to original chronology to fit into a thematic organization: Voice and Sound, The Public Intellectual, Multiculturalism, The Dip into Feminism, and finally; Art, Heritage and Social Change.

This book approaches the memory sharing of groups, communities and societies as inevitable struggles over the interpretation of, and authority over, particular stories. Coming to terms with the past in memory work, alone or with others, is always unsteady ground and the activation of memory will always relay imaginations of futures we want to shape and inhabit. The contributors all explore in different ways how citizens can actualize a public and how citizens and groups struggle with their pasts and presents - and other group’s understandings - in their work for futures they dream of, or envision. This implies an engagement with the notion of social justice, which in turn entails trial and revision of ideas and procedures of how to share the world. But to share also requires some kind of common ground and distributed power. The anthology thus engages with a range of cases that bring views and voices back in public, demanding justice, recognition, sometimes literally triggering new trials. Some of the memory work is done strategically, in the context of communication for development and social change interventions where NGOs, community-based organizations, governments or UN agencies pursue not just voice and views, but also very material demands for social justice and social change.

This article introduces a research project to be used in a larger study that aims to investigate how around-the-globe musical practices have become tied up with political movements and functioned as conflict-coping mechanisms in contexts of social and political upheaval. A series of historical as well as recent cases are explored in this preliminary study, drawing from research undertaken separately on Solentiname Islands, Nicaragua (by Mery A. Pérez),Zanzibar, Tanzania (by Shani Omari), Australia (by Lesley J. Pruitt) and from the USA (the author). This piece in particular is concerned with the different musical movement’s engagement with tradition and change.

Reclusion and openness—an oxymoron, one might think. However, in the course of this essay, I attempt to test these notions on the life trajectory of the African-American classical pianist, Eugene Haynes, who befriended an even more well-known artist, the Danish writer Karen Blixen (also known under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen). Haynes crossed continents for work and adventure in the midst of the Cold War, and now with a base in Denmark, he continued to nurture his friendship with Blixen and her secretary, Clara Selborn, from 1952 and over the next ten years until Blixen’s death in 1962. Over many holidays and work trips in Denmark, he used Selborn’s house in the small fishing village of Dragør, located south of Copenhagen (while Selborn stayed with Blixen in Rungstedlund), to practice the piano, study music, and in between, travel around Europe giving concerts.

This essay is a review of experiences with coordinating the final thesis or Degree Project course (15 ECTS) that completes the MA in Communication or Development at Malmö University, as well as a look into the future. The essay contains reflections on the particularities of ComDev ‘trekking’. The program and the majority of the degree projects have a strong focus on communication interventions specifically in contexts of development/social change. This has given the new and interdisciplinary subject area a strong orientation leading to many innovative degree projects. However, some degree projects also struggle with how to handle an ambitious body of empirical field research material and reaching theoretical depth in the analysis.

This article investigates the representation of memory and dream in selected American TV serial fiction concentrating on 1990s shows that blended the real, the surreal and the supernatural. Departing from Northern Exposure, and moving on to Twin Peaks and The X Files, these shows embarked on an extensive use of vision, dream and memory themes to portray, I argue, negotiations between what Jan Assmann coined communicative and cultural memory (Jan Assmann 1995, 2010). While Twin Peaks and The X Files concentrated on the dark undercurrents or repressed forms of American belief and anxiety, Northern Exposure took a more benevolent route, re-imagining and rewriting alternative American aspirations of belief and coexistence. Key protagonists were portrayed as exiled individuals engaging with their pasts and the communities of which they became part of or estranged from while on roads to self-discovery. Carl Jung’s writings formed an inspirational body of thinking for the shows, perhaps most explicitly in Northern Exposure, which also elaborated on Jungian visions of a shared humanity among the many differences inside and between humans. All shows elaborated on the consequences of opening oneself to dimensions of life that formed the shadows (Jung 1958, 1959), human duplex or doubling (Jung 1958), as well as the unused potential of imagination in Western modernity. Roads to self-discovery involving repressed or difficult memory work were also spelled out during the first seasons of a very different contemporary show, MadMen. This show will be brought into discussion at the end of the article where I elaborate on the consequences of particular forms of American dreaming.

This article investigates examples of citizen media production and communication (blogs and social media sites in Tanzania and its diasporas) in the immediate aftermath of the Gongo La Mboto blasts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 2011. At the centre is the relationship between media use and communication practices of the pavement - drawing from the notion of pavement radio - and the spaceship, i.e. a metaphor for traditional mass media, exemplified by policies and practices of the BBC and its World Service. We argue that new social media practices as digital pavement radio are converging with traditional forms of street buzz and media use. Forms of oral communication are adapting towards the digital and filling information voids in an informal economy of news and stories in which media practices are stimulated by already ingrained traditions. An existing oral culture is paving the way for a globalization of the pavement.

Kærlighed, krig og historie er i denne bog ledetråde for en diskussion af Bob Dylans sange, og de sociale og kunstneriske sammenhænge de var en del af, i perioden 1961 til 1967. I bogen diskuteres blandt andet Talkin’ World War III Blues, The Times They Are A-Changin’, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, og Desolation Row. Mange af Dylans sange og optrædener i denne periode udforsker en vidtforgrenet kulturel, mytologisk og historisk baggage som væves ind i samidige sociale spørgsmål. Forfatteren viser, hvordan Dylan kan ses som en af rockmusikkens uregerlige, maskespillende og omskiftelige harlekiner. Dylan hentede inspiration fra Shakespeares vise klovne, fra vandringsmænd og lovløse, vaudevillen, datidens aviser og tv, poeter som Arthur Rimbaud og Robert Frost, og meget andet. Hans universer, som rækker både bagud og fremad, taler til problemer vi kan genkende i dag i det 21. århundrede. Bogen er skrevet til alle, der gerne vil lære og underholdes om, hvordan kærlighed, krig og historie har præget en kunstners udtryk og tekster i 1960erne og hvordan de sociale spørgsmål , tiden og kunsten og Dylan selv lod sig lede af, påvirker os i dag.

Abstract The article addresses how a selection of participatory art and memorial projects have engaged with public memory and interaction. The intention has to been to explore the tension between the artists’ strategies - and the actual life span and use of the art works by its audiences. The authors interviewed the artists Esther Shalev- Gerz, Alfredo Jaar and Rafael Lozano Hemmer (during 2008 and 2009) and examined specific works. In addition, one of the literally ‘ground-breaking’ works of process art by Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, was included in the analysis of cases that have provoked interesting social or collective memory debates and community interaction around public art.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a series of brief short cases as examples unfolding a variety of learning approaches and communication practices, which we may place in the category of organized learning activities outside formal schooling, here termed non-formal education (after the www.infed.org summary, using Tight and Fordham). However, an example of informal learning with no intentional or explicit organization of learning activities -a TV serial fiction case which could be argued to have an edu-tainment potential- is also included. Several of the cases here have a connection to processes of development and societal change.

In this chapter I explore Memorial Art, Monuments and the Politics of Memory in the cities of Hamburg, Germany and Haifa, Israel – two migrant, merchant and multiethnic harbour cities, each with interwoven histories of conflict and war. The chapter will analyse the conceptual and spatial strategies of a range of memorial projects and sites, focusing on the potential of the various projects and monuments to involve the public in a continuous engagement with the past and the present.

I dette essay diskuterer jeg vidnesbyrdet som kilde til at belyse forholdet mellem erindring og historie med en orientering omkring erindringer af krig og konflikt. Jeg anvender her fortrinsvis metoden og forskningsområdet oral history, som fokuserer på det mundtlige vidnesbyrd. Essayet vil udfolde nogle af komplikationerne ved den indbyggede tvetydighed i begrebet ’history’ og metoden ’oral history’. Som underlag for diskussionen har jeg anvendt min egen spæde forskning omkring erindringer af krig og konflikt, her belyst ved tre mini-cases eller eksempler, hvor jeg inddrager såvel mundtlige som skriftlige kilder/erindringer. Mit sigte er her at udfolde og undersøge informanternes genfremstilling i forskellige genrer og tider i forhold til begivenhederne som skildres – men også at belyse, hvordan oplevelserne har påvirket den nærmeste familie.

Chaplins Modern Times fra 1936 husker de fleste nok som en film om den lille mands kamp med store maskiner. I dette essay undersøger jeg 3 underliggende temaers forbundethed og udtryk i filmen: krop, kommunikation og modernitet. Jeg belyser vandrings- og vagabondfigurer i en historisk kontekst - blandt andet via Hannerz, 1983, der trækker på Chicago etnografer i begyndelsen af det 20. århundrede - og diskuterer her, hvordan vagabondliv, vandring og løsarbejde er portrætteret i Modern Times. Dette tema bliver bundet sammen med en diskussion af vagabondens kropslige handlen og kommunikation i filmen (via Merleau Ponty, 1958, Bourdieu, 1991) og overgangen fra stumfilm til lyd- og talefilm, som er tematiseret i netop stum/talefilmshybriden Modern Times (via Niels Jensen, 1991 og andre).

This article addresses educational encounter projects between Jewish and Palestinian Arab high school students, teachers and facilitators in the state of Israel after the outbreak of the intifada (year 2000). Through the display of ethnographic footage and commentary from particular workshops in a high school encounter program, some of the key obstacles to dialogic engagement, the problems of and potentials of narrative reconfiguration and the limitations of the intergroup approach are illustrated. The particular educational model is practised, with variations, at some of Israel's major and pioneering institutions for peace and conflict education. The workshops under scrutiny in this article were taking place at Givat Haviva—a centre for peace and conflict related educational and cultural programs, including language and art courses.

In this article, the author addresses the negotiation and ‘gestaltung’ of space, identity and memory among Jewish and Palestinian Arab youth in alternative conflict education projects in Israel. Various pedagogic devices brought into play at a particular project at the educational centre Givat Haviva are discussed, as well as activities and spontaneous incidents besides the formal programme.