This article demonstrates how scholarship and political  positions can be negotiated when democratic and authoritarian systems converge in an international context; it takes as a case study cooperation among members of the International Association for Folklore and Ethnology (IAFE) and its successor organization, the International Association of European Ethnology and Folklore (IAEEF) in 1930s Europe. In particular, it examines how leading Swedish folklorists and ethnologists experienced the influence of Nazi politics as they sought international cooperation in their field. Attempts to dialogue with colleagues whose home countries had adopted fascism were combined with attempts to prevent Nazi dominance of the IAFE and IAEEF. This paper examines the discourses that circulated among different scholars and groups and demonstrates how these discourses constructed people, stances, and fields, sometimes in contradictory or self-serving ways. Discourse-historical analysis thus reveals how scholars from different countries negotiate the connections between scholarship and politics in varying political contexts.

In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) the overthrow of the socialist regime did not only bring about both an economic and political shift, it resulted also in the inclusion of the GDR into the Federal Republic of Germany. The fall of the Wall brought with it transformations in everyday life as well as changes in social identities.

This study examines how people who grew up in the GDR define the East and the West in unified Germany, as well as identifying which concepts play a role in the self-interpretations given by former GDR citizens. Through applying discourse theory, I investigate how identities are partially fixed and change over time, relating this always to historically situated discourses. In the analysis, East and West are considered as floating signifiers, which, through articulations made with other categories such as class, nation, place and gender, come to be filled with meaning. The study is based on twenty-five life story interviews conducted in Eastern Germany. The group of interviewees consisted of fifteen women and ten men born in the GDR between the years of 1970 and 1979, all of whom had different levels of education.

The demise of the socialist state and the transition to a capitalist society is central in the interviewees’ life stories. Their narratives about the past are formed in a discursive order other than the one in which the events themselves took place. Conversely, the past is used as a foil against which the present is compared. With the dislocation, the interviewees have developed a reflexive stance to both themselves and the world. The study reveals both how East and West are still used to make the world intelligible in a number of fields and, at the same time, how these same concepts are transcended. It shows in what ways the interviewees employ different strategies to adapt to the new circumstances and to handle a potentially marked position in unified Germany.

This essay seeks to address whether blogging can serve as a feminist tool, particularly as a form of practicing citizenship. More specifically, it asks whether feminist blogging contributes only to individualized forms of expression (based on the empowerment of single individuals) or whether blogging has a role in both the construction and endurance of collectivist forms of feminist politics. This essay begins by situating feminist blogging in a larger historical context of media production in the feminist movement. It then presents three different feminist blog projects in order to investigate the various ways in which these blogs practice what in recent literature is discussed in terms of “intimate citizenship.”

What does discourse theory "do" to ethnology? And complementarily, what does ethnology "do" to discourse theory? In this article, these two questions are approached by investigating how Swedish ethnologists have hitherto described and applied discourse theory. The article identifies a couple of overarching tendencies within Swedish discourse theoretical ethnology, relating these tendencies both to other intra-disciplinary trends and to paralell international developments of applied discourse theory. Specifically, the article will discuss current ethnological interpretations and applications of the concept of discourse as well as the discourse theoretical understanding of the subject, and will furthermore argue that these theoretical ideas still harbour underutilized possibilities, opportunities that, if taken, might serve to further develop discourse theoretical ethnology.

This article explores how during the period of 1997 to 2003 the signifier of Sisterhood came to serve as an empty signifier within and among a number of small Swedish feminist grassroots publications (i.e. zines). It begins by positioning the Swedish feminist zine community within the larger context of so-called ‘second and third wave feminisms’ but argues at the same time that it is important to break with traditional feminist chronologies, and resist reductive generational narratives of feminist movement history. On the basis of this particular empirical case the article introduces an analytic of sexual logics as an alternative for analysing feminist discourse. From here the article goes on to investigate how the notion of Sisterhood has come to serve as an empty signifier within this specific community. It concludes with a more general discussion of the function of empty signifiers in relation to recent feminist discussions of Sisterhood.

The aim of this thesis is to highlight the central conditions, norms and values which enable the staging of certain masculine pupil positions and hinder others at a school located in the northern part of the municipality of Botkyrka, during 2004–2005. The school and the neighbourhood in this study are characterized by a high percentage of people with immigrant background, a result of urban ethnic segregation. The methodological approach is qualitative. The empirical data consists of interviews with 15 boys in grade 6, participant observations, and official documents. The study examines the central position of socially sanctioned conceptions of “good becoming” in society. Children are expected to control their own bodies and take on certain areas of knowledge in the correct way in order to create themselves as expanding subjects: they learn to ask for “success” and “upward” social mobility. But as this study shows this does not apply equally to all pupils. The boys in this study have to create themselves as pupils on terms that make it harder for them to establish themselves as successful pupils. The teaching they encounter in school, the socioeconomic conditions and the effects of the segregation that characterises the urban landscape they live in makes it harder for them to live up to the requirements of what an “ideal pupil” should be. The study also highlights the ways in which difference is being made between girls and boys in school, creating arenas that are more open for boys than for girls to enter into in everyday life, namely football and the multiethnic youth language. These arenas allowed the boys to stage masculine coded subject positions which in one way or another were connected with a positive social status. Thus boys in this study do not have as much reason to establish themselves in the position of a good pupil in comparison to girls since there is a greater variety in how they can create themselves within subject positions connected to social status.