The Nordic countries do not just identify strongly with gender equality: they also increasingly mobilize their pasts, as well as more contemporary notions held at the international level wherein the Nordics are seen as exceptionally gender equal, to highlight and brand themselves in the present as global pioneers of women’s rights. In this article, using nation-branding as an overarching perspective, we examine how this eagerness among the Nordics to be perceived as front-runners of gender rights affected the memory politics at play during the national commemoration of 100 years of women’s suffrage in Finland (2006–2007), Norway (2013) and Sweden (2018–2022). In addition, we ask what national narratives the respective jubilee celebrations helped to facilitate – and whether those narratives correspond with the images that function as the primary brands of Finland, Norway and Sweden today.

This article explores memory politics in the context of the centennial of women’s suffrage, focusing on the jubilee for democracy in 2018-22, initiated and organised by the Swedish parliament. The article pays particular attention to how the centennial celebration of votes for women is represented and materialised during the jubilee. Similar to its neighboring country, Norway, Sweden has chosen to widen the scope of its celebrations beyond women’s suffrage. Instead, democracy, its values, history and current challenges take centre stage. The years between 1918 and 1922 are portrayed as a period of democratic breakthrough, even as the birth of Sweden as a modern nation. In this memory production, “votes for women” have an important symbolic value, not least with respect to visual representations, such as pictures and photos. At the same time, contemporary gender related issues and feminist historiography are pushed to the margins.

Lagom till att Södertörns högskola fyller 25 år kommer denna betraktelse över hur högskolan växte fram och hur tvär- och mångvetenskapliga utbildningsprogram utvecklades.

Författaren Sören Jansson beskriver hur man ville bygga något nytt, en högskola utan institutioner och fakulteter.

Intervjuer, arkivmaterial och egna observationer ger en levande bild av en hur en annorlunda högskola hittar sin form.