Center of Diversity: Sámi in Early Modern Stockholm in the Light of European Colonial Expansion. A Historical Archaeological Approach

This paper deals with the presence of Sámi in central and southern Sweden in the seventeenth century. The Nordic countries have generally been believed to be ethnically homogeneous, with the** colonial subjects not being present in the center of these empires. If the multicultural aspects of early modern Nordic countries are at all discussed, Sámi and other ethnic groups are understood as peoples living on the outskirts of the empires. This notion has cemented an idea that cities such as Copenhagen or Stockholm were inhabited solely by peoples from southern Scandinavia and the continent. Drawing on the experience of the role and presence of indigenous people from the Americas and the Arctic in cities such as London in the seventeenth century, this paper examines the multi-ethnic aspects of early modern Stockholm, capital of Sweden, as an imperial center.     

Organized Materiality

In the late medieval period the religious guilds along with trade guilds grew in importance, as did the role of material culture related to the guilds. This history has seen little examination from a Fenno-Scandinavian and particularly a Swedish vantage point. In order to analyse the role of material culture in the formation of this way of organizing people, the article investigates the existence of late medieval guildhalls, especially rural ones, and discusses remains of other material culture that can be connected to the guilds. The halls, drinking vessels and other material things were activated in the growth of a new more substantial way of organizing society outside the boundaries of feudal society and family control. It is argued that material culture had a significant role in the recurrent activities of the guilds of the Middle Ages and in the shaping of new ways of organizing people.     

From sustainable development to carbon control: eco-state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development

The management of carbon emissions holds some prospect for challenging sustainable development as the organising principle of socio-environmental regulation. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon polity as an ideological state project, and examines its potential ramifications for the regulation of economy–environment relations at the urban and regional scale. Carbon control would seem to introduce a new set of values into state regulation and this might open up possibilities for challenging mainstream modes of urban and regional development in a manner not possible under sustainable development. But low-carbon restructuring also portends intensified uneven development, new forms of state control and a socially uneven reworking of state–society relations. In order to explore these issues we start by setting out a framework for conceptualising environmental regulation based around the idea of eco-state restructuring. This idea is introduced to capture the conflicts, power struggles and strategic selectivities involved as governments seek to reconcile environmental protection with multiple other pressures and demands. Overall the paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution to theoretical work on state environmental regulation and the emerging spatial dimensions of climate policy.     

The Changing Accessibility of Educational Opportunities in Southern Sri Lanka

To handle the double challenge of economic competitiveness and poverty alleviation, there are increasing calls for dual education strategies designed to handle both these issues simultaneously. Based on field research in rural Sri Lanka, this article aims to contribute to the understanding of how educational opportunities of different groups in different areas are shifting in the context of a changing world of work and new skill requirements in the global economy. An ongoing stratification of educational opportunities is identified, based on the growth of private tuition and English‐medium education, as well as a rationalization of the education system. The article shows that future attempts to reform the education system in Sri Lanka must be better rooted in the preferences and aspirations of poor groups in rural areas, and that educational opportunities must be seen as relative, relational and contextual.     

The Right Tool for the Job: The Canalization of Presidential Policy Attention by Policy Instrument

This article investigates how presidential policy attention is allocated across policy tools and whether there is a channeling of tool use by policy area. I also examine whether there is evidence of disproportionate information processing within presidential policy attention allocation and whether it is common across presidential policy tools. Presidential messages, hearings on administrations' legislative proposals, amicus briefs, and executive orders are employed to capture presidential policy tools. The allocation of attention via these four instruments is examined from 1957–2007 in the policy areas of defense and foreign affairs, macroeconomics, banking and commerce, civil rights, law and crime, and labor and immigration. I find that there is a canalization of presidential policy attention by instrument, and that the opportunity structure of policy tools shapes attention allocation. Additionally, I find evidence for punctuated equilibrium theory in the allocation of presidential policy attention via these four tools. When presidents do shift their attention to an issue area, they often attack the issue with some coordination of their policy instruments.     

Archaeology in the World of Display: A Material Study of the Use of History in the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897

History was an important notion in constructing an industrial capitalist society in the nineteenth century. This article deals with the manifest use of history at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897. At this exhibition, history was ubiquitous and was most fully expressed in the model of medieval and Renaissance Stockholm called “Old Stockholm.” The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century exhibitions in general has been thoroughly studied in the field of humanities. However, the specific use of history and space has not attracted much interest. This analysis of the model of Old Stockholm is of the first archaeological study of remains of the great exhibitions ever to have been done. Even though the “Old Stockholm” pavilion was exceedingly popular in the summer of 1897, only very scarce documentation has survived. An archaeological excavation of parts of the temporary historical models, such as the “Hospital of the Holy Spirit,” showed convincing evidence of the hegemonic position which the use of history enjoyed at the exhibition and in the nineteenth century.     

Captain Canuck,audience response,and the project of Canadian nationalism

This paper addresses the role of comic books in interpellating national identities, locating the process of national identity formation in the interplay between popular culture producers and their audiences as described by Althusser (1977 Althusser, L. 1977. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books.  [Google Scholar]) and McGee (1975 McGee, M. 1975. In search of ‘the people’: a rhetorical alternative. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61: 235–249. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The empirical section of this paper focuses on Captain Canuck, a Canadian-produced comic book originating in the 1970s and sporadically published through the present day. The authors engaged in a qualitative content analysis of the Captain Canuck comic books, searching for themes and markers of Canadian-ness and looking for audience identifications with those themes and markers in the ‘letter to the editor’ columns published within the comic books themselves. The study finds that through the many incarnations of Captain Canuck various versions of Canadian identity have been projected, with varying degrees of support by the readership. The role of the USA in Canadian identity formation looms large, especially in the positioning of Canadian quality and multiculturalism against the tacitly American lack thereof. Another finding of this research is that there has been a fundamental change in the way Canadian identity is structured as a new, commercially driven Canadiana culture industry has arisen since the 1970s.     

Gerhard Schøning,Gothicism and the Re‐evaluation of Northern Landscapes

In this article we shall survey some central views of the north and the people living there, as it was presented by different scholars from the 16th to the 18th century. In particular, we will focus on Gerhard Schøning (1722–1780). Many historians have stressed the big influence that French Enlightenment philosophy had on Schøning. This article, however, will also point to other ideas and traditions that inspired him. One is the old Swedish cultural and patriotic movement called Gothicism. Schøning did, no doubt, share many ideas with Swedish Gothicism. Even so, important factors like aesthetics, scholarly orientation and religious ideas changed greatly during this period, and this effected both Gothicism and Schøning's relation to it. It is also fundamental for us to clarify these changes when trying to explain the re‐evaluation of northern landscapes in the 18th century.