The purpose of this chapter is to investigate salient approaches to citizenship and civic-normative educationin liberal democratic life. The chapter argues that core technocratic assumptions about clarity,linearity, and predictability feeding into civic-educational deployment and change warrant critical attention.The chapter aims to shed new light on states’ instinct to regard themselves and their value setsas seamless conceptual wholes. A range of ramifications of this typical approach are interrogated, inprinciple as well as in relation to Swedish civic-educational matrices. The chapter refines a heuristicmodel for unpacking citizenship and civic-normative education thinking in liberal democracy originallypresented in an earlier work by the author. It is concluded that even as the enormous policy efforts thatgo into organizing and revamping public civic-normative education in response to new societal challengeshave little chance of meeting governments’ intentions; they may still be important since they areexerted in highly visible public spaces and domains.

This book explores the inherent tension in civic education. There is a surging belief in contemporary European society that liberal democracy should work harder to reproduce the civic and normative setups of national populations through public education. The cardinal notion is that education remains the best means to accomplish this end, and educational regimes appropriate tools to make the young more tolerant, civic, democratic, communal, cosmopolitan, and prone to engaged activism. This book is concerned with the ambiguities that strain standard visions of civic education and educational statehood. On the one hand, civic-normative education is expected to drive tolerance in the face of conflicting good-life affirmations and accelerating worldview pluralisation; on the other hand, nation-states are primarily interested in reproducing the normative prerogatives that prevail in restricted cultural environments. This means that civic education unfolds on two irreconcilable planes at once: one cosmopolitan/tolerant, another parochial/intolerant. The book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of education, sociology, normative statehood, democracy, and liberal political culture, particularly those working in the areas of civic education; as well as education policy-makers.

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary, multidimensional research on civic and religious education in northern Europe, this article explores disciplinary epistemological economies in an era of mounting discontent with the narrowness of mono-disciplinary analyses of complex social and educational issues. It is argued in the article that under conditions of sufficient world complexity, interdisciplinarity provides for a more cogent scholarly approach to educational structures and phenomena than either of the logics of mono-, multi- and transdisciplinarity—the main extant alternatives. It is shown in both conceptual and empirical terms that these alternatives cannot accommodate social and educational diversity, complexity and sprawl other than thinly, hence should mainly be endorsed by universities and research funders for other than epistemological reasons or when there is agreement that the object subjected to analysis is correspondingly thin and isolated. As education in and of itself is a remarkably complex social phenomenon and field of study, it is concluded that interdisciplinary environments may typically be expected to provide a stronger potential for assessing and understanding it.

This article investigates civic-political and cognitive participation as they play out in democratic theory. Its core purpose is to develop a conceptual-normative critique of the presupposition in liberal democratic theory that these logics are mutually reinforcing and complementary. This misunderstanding of a theoretical ambivalence contributes to inhibiting constructive assessment of epistocratic*technocratic frameworks of democratic interpretation and theory. I demonstrate that these logics circulate contrasting views of democratic power and legitimacy and should be disentangled to make sense of liberal democratic theoretical and political spaces. This critique is then fed into a political-epistemological interrogation of post-truth and alt-facts rhetorical registers in contemporary liberal democratic life, concluding that neither logic of participation can harbor this unanticipated and fundamentally nonaligned way of doing liberal democratic democracy.

This article investigates the normative logic and orientation of civic and religious education in seven countries in northern Europe. One main underlying argument is that public schooling must be generically regarded as a heavy functional contributor to the ‘soft’ normative reproduction and validation of certain ethical and cultural identities. In the article, the rhetorical goals of neutralism and tolerance in current European political–educational thought are measured against empirical modes and practices of education. A parochialism–cosmopolitanism conceptual dichotomy is constructed and used as a main analytical guide, which allows for a number of critical conclusions to be made on the production of normative statehood through education in contemporary ‘post-normative’ Europe. The ultimate ambition of the text is thus to contribute to shedding new light on the interpretation and enactment of value diversity in these seven educational settings and interculturalising societies. © The Author(s) 2014

Vem satte dagordningen inför EU-omröstningen 1994? Hur mobiliserades politiskt stöd, hur finansierades mobiliseringen? Vem påverkade oss, hur gick det till och vad ville man få oss att tänka? Respekterades vi som medborgare? I denna undersökning av demokratins struktur och medborgarskapets villkor 1990-94 inriktas analysen på ja-sidan, på organisationssverige, på massmedierna och på staten. En detaljerad historisk grund läggs för fortsatt analys av ett avgörande skede i Sveriges europeisering.

Recension av: Hren, Joshua, 2018. Middle-Earth and the Return of the Common Good. J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy. Eugene: Cascade Books.

Begrepp är centrala i allt politiskt tänkande och handlande: begrepp formar politiska program och dagordningar, men också maktförhållanden och världsbilder. Det går inte att förstå en politisk idéströmning om man inte tar hänsyn till de uttolkningar av begrepp som individ, gemenskap, autonomi eller kultur som strömningen omfattar – men uttolkningarna skiftar från en ideologisk tradition till en annan.

I denna bok utvecklas en modell för att förstå politisk-normativ begrepps­­bildning och här analyseras nio av de mest framträdande politiska begreppen. I anslutning till analysen diskuteras också villkoren för god kunskapsbildning i en tid som präglas av post-sanning, val­manipulation, sociala mediebubblor, elitförakt och politisk kunskaps­resistens. I ett utförligt appendix presenteras slutligen ett antal centrala västerländska ideologiska traditioner på ett överskådligt vis.

This article hinges on the notion that the location of the term ‘culture’ in political discourse and debate remains under-theorised, particularly regarding its covariation with political recognition. It is shown that arguments for culturally motivated justice, recognition, or redress of past wrongs may be expected only by marginalised groups, not by states or other powerful political agents –since these are not framed as cultural in the first place. This suggests that to become more powerful in modern politics one normally must become less cultural. The article ultimately aims to unpack this implicit logic of modern liberal democratic reasoning on culture.

Even under globalised and hyper-diverse cultural and social conditions, representative liberal democracy conceives of itself as non-involved in issues to do with ethics, faith and belief. Drawing on a formalist systemic state identity it advocates a neutralist, secularist, generalist and non-biased approach to education in state schools. Building on a current research project on religious/civic education in the Baltic-Barents area, this article argues that this self-image is flawed and that representative liberal democracy cannot avoid being ethically biased. There is thus, the article argues, a need to better frame our understanding of different modes of religious/civic education as well as the logic of ethical neutralism characteristic of contemporary democratic statehood. © 2013 © Taylor & Francis.

I modernt tänkande om staten finns en framträdande idé om att korrekt kunskap om politiska frågor och omständigheter bör vara vägledande för hur stater agerar och organiserar sig. Denna politiska epistemologi skyggar inför tanken att staters maktutövning och allmänna orientering skulle vara mer irrationell än rationell; vilket framträder klart i både Platons och den tidiga upplysningsfilosofins statsteori. Slutpunkten för resonemanget är att normativ bearbetning av politiska problem inte kan vara mer än ett korrelat till beslut som fattas på sakligt kvalificerade grunder.

I denna text visas hur den rationalistiska politiska epistemologin bygger på radikalt felaktiga föreställningar om förhållandet mellan specialistkunskap om olika samhällssektorer och insikter och utsagor om politikens allmänna område. Bidraget avslutas med en översiktlig bedömning av Sveriges, respektive EU:s, grad av överensstämmelse med det teknokratiska styrideal som springer ur rationalismens politiska epistemologi.

In this first Södertörn Studies in Education research volume, a collection of original, inter-communicating, and partly intersecting analyses of education and learning by Södertörn scholars is, for the first time, presented in one binding. The book is organised in three overall themes: liberal education, interculturality, and steering. New scholarly ground is opened up in the fields of linguistic, ideational, social, ethnographical, systemic, spatial, political, and organisational studies, bringing us new knowledge as well as showing the strength and width of educational studies at Södertörn University. We are confident that it will be put to good use by researchers in the field and students alike.

Contemporary European life seems to require new ways for people to combine family life and career. There is a fear among European governments and the European Union, however, that such changes will alter received patterns of child rearing and may, in the long run, threaten social cohesion, integration and solidarity between generations. In current discussions how to make childcare generally available, as a social service, without posing a threat to social cohesion, the Swedish post-war experience may serve as a point of reference. This study traces and analyses the development of Swedish childcare which, in order to cater to two-career families, has changed from rudimentary and scarce to sophisticated and comprehensive.