Representation and interpretation : textbooks, teachers, and historical culture

This article presents a study of how contemporary Swedish lower secondary school textbooks present the emergence of the Cold War and how 10 active lower secondary school history teachers interpreted a quotation that was ambiguous in relation to the general narrative in the studied Swedish textbooks, seeking to analyse textbooks both from the perspectives of content and reception. Applying a theoretical framework of uses of history, the study finds that the narratives presented in the studied textbooks are what could be called traditional in the sense that they do not acknowledge perspective and representation in history. While the interviewed teachers generally acknowledged that textbook narratives are representations of history and contingent on perspective, few teachers extended this to include how their own views affect their interpretations, suggesting an intermediary appreciation of the contextual contingency of historical narratives.

Corruption, governance and collective sanctions: : can a wicked problem be tamed?

Tackling a problem requires mostly, an ability to read it, conceptualize it, represent it, define it, and then applying the necessary mechanisms to solve it. This may sound self-evident except when the problem to be tackled happens to be “complex, “ “ill-structured,” and/or “wicked.” Corruption is one of those kinds of problems. Both in its global and national manifestations it is ill-structured. Where it is structural in nature, endemic and pervasive, it is perhaps even wicked. Qualities of the kind impose modest expectations regarding possibilities of any definitive solution to this insidious phenomenon. If so, it may not suffice to address the problem of corruption using existing categories of law and/or good governance, which overlook the “long-term memory” of the collective and cultural specific dimensions of the subject. Such socio-historical conditions require focusing on the interactive and self-reproducing networks of corruption and attempting to ‘subvert’ that phenomenon’s entire matrix. Concepts such as collective responsibility, collective punishment and sanctions are introduced as relevant categories in the structural, as well as behavioral, subversion of some of the most prevalent aspects of corruption. These concepts may help in the evolving of a new perspective on corruption fighting strategies.

Students’ Perspectives on Extensive Literature : Using Literature to Enhance Communicative Competence and Cultural Understanding in the EFL-Classroom

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the use of literature within the Swedish Upper Secondary EFL-classroom from the students’ perspective. How do the students in the study relate to literature and its use to enhance and enable their communicative competence and cultural understanding? Also, how do their answers compare with their teacher’s and the adult perspectives and findings from previous international research? The empirical data obtained from the study has been analysed from the perspectives of sociocultural and motivational theory, and the findings show that the participating students believe literature to be a good didactic tool to apply in the EFL-classroom, both in order to enhance their communicative competence and their cultural understanding. The students prefer to have a sociocultural approach to their literature-learning, with group-discussions of various sizes. The key for the students in this respect is interesting, relevant and engaging subject-matter, as well as a positive and motivational teacher. The responses given by the students correlate with those given by their teacher as well as previous international research. The students regard literature as a way of gaining new perspectives, as well as experiencing language in use. Where they diverge somewhat from the international research is in regard to literature’s use for enhancing their competence to speak in class, and that some students seem to think that communication and cultural understanding are separable. Future studies within this field might include the conducting of a larger and more in-depth survey regarding the students’ ideas about literature, culture and communication. Why do so many of the student respondents neither agree nor disagree with the statement concerning communication and cultural understanding being inseparable? This can be an important issue to investigate in today’s global climate of cross-cultural and intercultural experiences, especially in view of the political climate of diverse attitudes towards refugees, immigrants and emigration

Stranger in a Strange Land: The struggle for cultural and personal identity in Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

In order to explicate Murakami's version of the official culture, I have analyzed the novel with the works of several different theorists. Primarily, I drew my own understanding of the official culture from Raymond Williams's examination of culture in Marxism and Literature. His terminology became helpful in writing about the operation of the System and the Town, though it did not define that operation precisely. Williams's work also introduced me to the theory behind the official culture's manipulation and exclusion of historical aspects in order to create their "official" version of history, from which the official culture draws its identity. For further analysis of the treatment of history, I turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Though it examines the official culture's manipulation of history in a much more in-depth manner, it seems to have influenced Murakami's treatment of individual memories and cultural histories. For instance, the herd ofunicoms in the End of the World resembles Nietzsche's description of the ''unhistorical herd," or has the potential to resemble it. With these theories I was able to access the mechanisms of cultural control that Murakami depicts in the form of the System and the Town, and from there I was able to develop a model for how the narrator struggles to subvert that control. Both sides of that struggle are depicted and re-imagined many times throughout Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.