THE PUZZLE OF THE BANQUET HALL OF THE DUKES: THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SWEDISH HISTORICAL RESEARCH STUDIED THROUGH LUDWIK FLECK'S “THOUGHT COLLECTIVE” AND “THOUGHT STYLE”

In 1312, the Swedish dukes Erik and Valdemar Magnusson married the Norwegian princesses Ingeborg Haakonsdaughter and Ingeborg Eriksdaughter at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. In 1313, the two couples were reunited at a purpose-built banquet hall, believed to have been located in the medieval Swedish town of Lödöse. The main source of information concerning these events is the Swedish medieval rhyme chronicle The Chronicle of Duke Erik. However, a closer reading of the chronicle reveals that Lödöse is never mentioned in relation to the banquet hall. The article discusses the passing down of knowledge through generations of the same professional collective, in this case the professional collective of Swedish historians during the twentieth century, and demonstrates how the validity of once-established prescientific knowledge persists. To achieve its goal, the article applies Ludwik Fleck's terms “thought collective,” “thought style,” and “tenacity in science,” as well as Thomas Kuhn's concept of the “paradigm,” to a historiographical case study of how the proto-idea of the banquet hall being located at Lödöse has survived to become an established scientific fact. The location of the banquet hall concerns but a minor detail in the turbulent political situation of the Swedish kingdom during the first decades of the fourteenth century. However, the continuing reiteration of this minor detail is evidence of a larger phenomenon, namely how contemporary historical research is influenced by scholars in the prescientific past.     

The art of nationalism: Artists' perspectives on the Latvian Centenary film programme

In the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism in Eastern Europe, the social fabric of post-socialist societies is frayed. In this context, nationalist cultural policies and everyday displays of national belonging have emerged as key instruments of social solidarity. There has recently been a drive of state initiatives in Latvia in the field of cultural policy aimed at strengthening national identity. In this paper, we focus our attention on one particular cultural policy initiative, Latvian Films for Latvian Centenary. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 16 film directors who participated in the Centenary film programme, the paper explores how artists and cultural operators involved in this programme are mobilised as national(ist) subjects and how they see their work within such a framework. We argue that nationalist cultural policy can be successfully implemented because the artists, themselves formed as responsible political and moral subjects in the tradition of Latvian cultural nationalism, share a regard for culture and the arts as a resource for sustaining the political statehood and the national community. However, the artists also recognise the limitations of their work as a source of social cohesion and solidarity in a society that is ethnically divided.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

What's the grand story? A macro-narrative analytical model and the case of Swiss child and adult protection policy

This paper expands on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by adding a theoretical and empirical exploration into macrolevel narratives. Existing NPF research largely neglects macrolevel narratives, which prevents the NPF from developing its full power. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) It provides a definition of macrolevel narratives by conceptualizing them as the “story form” of a policy paradigm. (2) It proposes a model and an empirical approach, which may lay the foundation for a standard macrolevel NPF approach. (3) It contributes to the NPF's aim of connecting the macro and meso level. The paper tests the model in a comparative multi-method design applied to the Swiss child and adult protection policy. The findings show that macrolevel NPF analysis helps understand where mesolevel policy debates come from, namely from an underlying paradigm and its effects on institutions and culture that enable and constrain macrolevel narratives.     

New regionalism in Turkey: questioning the ‘new’ and the ‘regional’

Turkey’s regional policies are inspired by the new regionalism theory. During past two decades, key concepts of new regionalism, including knowledge economies, specialization, networked cities and innovation, have been incorporated in policy documents. At the same time, Turkey comes from a strong central state tradition that controls local and regional development. At first insight, new regionalism and strong central state control do not fit in the same frame. This research analyses the trajectory of regional policies in Turkey with the aim of explaining how these seemingly incompatible policies can coexist. It argues that regional policies developed at the central state level utilized new regionalism as a part of the strategy to maintain power in the course of transformation of the nation state.     

Place-based innovation policy for industrial diversification in regions

New industrial innovation policies like smart specialization aim at boosting economic growth by diversification towards more complex and higher value economic activities. This paper proposes a conceptual and analytical framework to support the design and implementation of such policies considering place-specific preconditions, particularly the differentiation of the regional system of innovation and entrepreneurship and the degree of current industrial diversification. The paper expands on the links between these preconditions and the barriers and opportunities for industrial diversification. Consequently, it proposes an archetypical place-based policy framework covering overall policy objectives as well as measures at the level of actors, networks, and the institutional and organizational support structures.     

Two new species of benthic foraminifera from the Holocene of the Papuan Plateau

Two new species of benthic foraminifera have been identified from Holocene sediments of the Papuan Plateau. Spirorutilus collinsi sp. nov. (suborder Textulariina) has a rapidly tapering, agglutinated test with depressed sutures, flattened upper chamber surfaces, and a low, broad-arched aperture. The second species, Cibicorbis aspera sp. nov. (suborder Rotaliina), differs from others of the genus in having rugae on both sides of the test, as well as rugose to serrate dorsal sutures.     

Make-believe: fashion and Cinelandia in Rizzoli's Lei (1933–38)

Amidst the wide array of women's magazines published in Italy in the 1930s, Lei. Rivista di vita femminile presents a compelling case study of the make-believe effect achieved through fashion and the allure of the silver screen. Published by Angelo Rizzoli between 1933 and 1938, Lei stands out for a cosmopolitan, American-looking lifestyle that champions an Italian ‘new woman’, aware of her own new image and enmeshed in a fantastic world of romantic novels and movie stars. This essay studies the paradoxes and complexities of an Italian illustrated periodical promoting the image of a fashionable woman in the midst of growing imperialism and autarchy, and publishing the work of Leica photographers, Lucio Ridenti and Paul Wolff in particular. Lei reflects the fundamental ambivalence of this time, promoting Italian fashion through Hollywood as a way to counteract the French fashion industry, and inviting women to role-play through the allure of their image.     

‘They have to abide by our laws … and stuff’: ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism

The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to ‘follow the law’. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category ‘Muslims’, are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia.