With discourses of ’crisis’ and ’disaster’ featuring strongly in contemporary discourses on contemporary society, this book brings together critical perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to explore the idea of ’crisis’ as inherently related to power dynamics and the formation of different subjectivities and identities within the Nordic countries and globally. This volume emphasizes the importance of investigating the interrelationship of three crises - social, economic and environmental - as these address the interlinked surfaces of the same reality, and it examines the negative connotations of the notion of crisis, whilst also raising the question of when and why something becomes identified as crisis, and for whom. With chapters on media representations of crisis and the global context of crisis discourses, the crisis of national identities and their mobilization in response, and environmental crisis, as well as the interrelationship between the social and the environmental and the different positioning of individuals in relation to power, this volume offers an understanding of crisis as a multivocal symbol of the present. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, literature and political science.
A hopefully reasonably coherent string of tales about the odd, funny, exhilarating and at times sad experiences I have survived through many years in Africa. From a childhood and teenage-years in Tanzania and then around many countries in Africa until today where I am still fortunate to live, work and travel around this incredible continent. I have endeavoured to let the characters I have met along the way be the thread that carries the reader through the abundance of colour, music, pure human energy and determination to succeed which constantly confronts the observer in Africa. Restless and aimless but with highs of love and lows of broken promises; some dreams came true, others not. My relationship with Africa is complicated. The Africa that will never let go of me.
This book explores the anti-Islamic turn and expansion of the far right in Western Europe, North America and beyond from 2001 and onwards. Driven by terror attacks and other moral shocks, the anti-Islamic cause has undergone four waves of transnational expansion in the period since 2001. The leaders and intellectuals involved have varied backgrounds, many coming from the left, uniting historically opposed sets of values under their banner of a civilizational struggle against Islam. The findings presented in this book indicate that anti-Islamic initiatives in Western Europe and the United States form a transnational movement and subculture characterized by a fragile balance between liberal and authoritarian values. The author draws on a broad array of data sources and methods, including network analysis and sentiment analysis, to analyze the impact of the anti-Islamic expansion and turn at a macro level, and the theoretical implications for our understanding of the current far right flowing from this. Offering an overview of anti-Islamic activism, the book explores the background of their leaders and ideologues, provides an in-depth look at their ideology, online organizational networks, and the views expressed by their online members as well as which emotions and messages continue to drive their mobilization. The book will be of interest to scholars in the social movement field as well as political scientists, sociologists, and general readers interested in issues such as populism, extremism and understanding the ways in which the contemporary far right challenges liberal democracies.
This volume crucially provides an analytical and comparative approach, investigating the meaning and uses of the concept of exceptionalism, while demonstrating the ways in which it manifests itself in different historical and geographical settings. Exceptionalism offers comparative case studies from different parts of the world, showcasing the way in which exceptionalism has come to occupy an important narrative position in relation to different nation-states, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, various European nations and countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. An introduction to and overview of a term that has come to define the past and present identity of many nations, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and politics.
This book adopts a global approach to analysing Danish nationhood in the current context of a Europe paralysed by crises. Focusing on the global strands which have produced understandings of national selfhood as a consequence of a series of historical and contemporary global encounters, it calls for the production of narratives which better capture how European nations, including Denmark, are shaped by narratives that cannot be understood in (national) isolation, but are contingent on ideas about the nation’s globality. In historical terms, this entails examining how colonialism shaped national self-perceptions; in a contemporary context, it requires looking at colonialism’s unfinished business. The first chapters revisits colonialism throughout the Danish empire. In the second section, the book revisits Danish (post-1945) attempts to restage global interventions and military intervention since 2000, and considers how migration since 1965 has led to a profound questioning of relationships with the non-European world – and increasingly with Europe itself. Postcolonial Denmark situates Denmark at the centre of a number of current and ever more urgent challenges facing Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and cultural studies with interests in Europe, the Nordic region through a postcolonial, a whiteness and a decolonial inspired approach.
Is Stuart Hall a Cultural Studies Scholar or a Postcolonial Scholar? Or is it better to engage with his work as an intellectual of both fields? Postwar Britain witnessed the concurrent evolution of two new intellectual movements which have since become institutionalized as two major academic fields of enquiry; Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Although both fields are enormously diverse they have developed a parallel focus around the place of individuals in terms of race, ethnicity, class and gender. Beyond Britain offers a history of the major ideas that have shaped the evolution of a shared space of inquiry in British Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It uses the work of Stuart Hall, a figure a uniquely well positioned in both fields, to offer a rich cultural-historical study of the evolution of both movements. It argues that the questions which both movements have continued to preoccupy themselves, are as relevant today as they were when they first originated, which was also a moment of challenging a conformist, exclusivist, and self-sufficient nation’s view of itself.
Tracing the origins, evolution, and goals of Polish and Estonian émigré politics in Cold War Sweden and its linkages with both the host and homeland societies, this book investigates the transnational dimension of resistance and opposition to the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis of the constantly shifting, at times conspiratorial, and even subversive networks that transcended the Iron Curtain draws a line from World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union, framing half a century of transnationally concerted political activism in a geographical context that has not received much scholarly attention. Challenging the image of the Baltic Sea Region as a periphery of the European Cold War theater, the topography of the multilayered and complex linkages between neutral Sweden and her opposite coasts suggests that the small inland sea was a particularly vibrant setting for processes that efficiently defied the rigid border regimes of the Cold War era. This book relates both to ongoing historiographical debates about the scope and extent of East-West contacts that developed underneath the radar of international diplomacy and to the question of the role, significance, and impact of émigré politics during the Cold War. Embedding the dynamics of transnationally framed opposition in the wider context of political, economic, and cultural relations at the northeastern peripheries of divided Europe, the study not only sheds new light on so far still unexplored facets of interaction and cooperation between societies in East and West, but also offers a first comprehensive synthesis of the Baltic Sea Region’s post-war history.
Although relatively small, the northern countries of Scandinavia have made a disproportionately large contribution to world cinema. Indeed, some of their films are among the best known of all times, including The Seventh Seal, Dancer in the Dark, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And Scandinavian directors are also among the best known, just to mention Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier. But there is much more to the cinema of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland than that, and this book shows us what they have been accomplishing over more than a century from the beginnings of cinema until the present. The Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema shows just how long and busy this history has been in the chronology, starting in 1896. The introduction then describes the situation in each one of the component countries, all of which approached and developed the field in a similar but also slightly different manner. The dictionary section, with over 400 substantial entries, looks at the situation in greater detail, with over 400 substantial entries on major actors, directors and others, significant films, various genres and themes, and subjects such as animation, ethnicity, migration and censorship. Given its contribution to world cinema it is good to finally have an encyclopedia like this which can meet the interests of the scholar and researcher but also the movie fan.
Throughout the history of social thought, there has been a constant battle over the true nature of society, and the best way to understand and explain it. This volume covers the development of methodological individualism, including the individualist theory of society from Greek antiquity to modern social science. It is a comprehensive and systematic treatment of methodological individualism in all its manifestations.
The little-known story of the Swedish king and military commander who conquered much of Germany in the early seventeenth century. As one of the foremost military commanders of the early seventeenth century, Gustavus Adophus, king of Sweden, played a vital role in defending the Protestant cause during the Thirty Years War. In the space of two years—between 1630 and 1632—he turned the course of the war, winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Breitenfeld and conquering large parts of Germany. Yet remarkably little has been written about him in English, and no full account of his extraordinary career has been published in recent times. That is why this perceptive and scholarly study is of such value. The book sets Gustavus in the context of Swedish and European dynastic politics and religious conflict in the early seventeenth century, and describes in detail Swedish military organization and Gustavus’s reforms. His intervention in the Thirty Years War is covered in graphic detail—the decision to intervene, his alliance with France, his campaigns across the breadth of Germany, and his generalship at the two major battles he fought there. His exceptional skill as a battlefield commander transformed the fortunes of the Protestant side in the conflict, and he had established himself as a major European figure before his death on the battlefield. Lars Ericson Wolke, one of the leading experts on the military history of the Baltic and the Thirty Years War, offers a fascinating insight into Gustavus the man and the soldier.
In perhaps the most creative and authoritative book on selling brands ever written, international business experts Keith Lincoln, Anthony Aconis and Lars Thomassen, reveal how the world's most successful brands sell themselves to today's increasingly demanding shoppers and retailers. As the world of mass communications evolves into the world of media of the masses the very concept of the brand is transforming - from branding to the shelf to branding from the shelf. Two years in the analysis Retailization is the largest study ever conducted on how corporations and their brands are dealing (or not dealing) with this new era. The study covering over twenty countries worldwide and interviews with some of the leading brand marketers has drawn on countless examples of both creative execution and retail impact. Retailization shows how to establish a business approach that can better meet the needs of today's shopping Kings and Queens by creating and activating revolutionary selling situations. The central thesis of this book is that corporations must undertake nothing less than a radical reinvention of how they reach their customers to sell their products. The shelf where products are sold is the new centre of the business and communications universe. The answer to how to get the most from this change lies in a radically new business philosophy - RETAILIZATION. Retailization presents an innovative and pragmatic step by step process to help businesses rethink, reimagine and restructure their entire business and brand efforts around the retail strategies and executions that can better meet the needs of today's shopping Kings and Queens. Research shows that we have as little as four seconds to get a shopper's attention. The authors explain what you need to do to guarantee that you own that four seconds from understanding your competitive arena and context to understanding the nature of today's shopper. From there they explain how you can optimize the creation of your products, your retail impact and your communications. Finally, they demonstrate how to activate the process through retailizing your entire organization from top to bottom and we how to verify the results.
The first comprehensive guide to the aquatic plants of the region Beneath the surface of bodies of freshwater—springs, streams, rivers, ponds and lakes—there is a world of plants of great variety and beauty, a realm that is often poorly known and understood. Correctly identified, these plants can tell us much about the character and condition of the habitats in which they live. A collaboration of Danish, German, and British field botanists specializing in freshwater plants, this guide presents all of the known aquatic plants of Northern and Central Europe, including Britain and Ireland, as well as many marginal and wetland species. This is the first comprehensive guide to the identification of the region’s 410 species and hybrids of both native and non-native ferns and flowering plants that are dependent upon freshwater wetlands. Following the latest taxonomy, the book features 358 plates in pen and ink, more than 1,400 colour photographs, illustrated keys, distribution maps and detailed descriptions. The introduction gives an overview of evolution, anatomy and morphology, ecology, eco-physiology, research traditions and more, and the book also includes guidelines for working with aquatic plants. The first comprehensive guide to the region’s aquatic plants Covers all 410 known species Features 358 illustrated plates, more than 1,400 colour photographs, distribution maps, detailed descriptions and much more
In this book Lars Hermanson discusses how religious beliefs and norms steered attitudes to friendship and love, and how these ways of thinking also affected people’s social identity and political action behaviour in medieval Northern Europe, c. 1000-1200.
The most comprehensive and richest study undertaken so far of the factors and conditions that will determine the scope and range of shipping and shipping activities in Arctic waters now and in the future. Furthermore, it is the first study comparing the three Arctic transportation corridors, covering a variety of interacting and interdependent factors such as: - geopolitics, military affairs, global warming, sea ice melting, international economic trends, resources, competing modes of transportation, environmental challenges, logistics, ocean law and regulations, corporate governance, jurisdictional matters and rights of indigenous peoples, arctic cruise tourism and marine insurance.
Sprache und Schriftlichkeit eines Grenzgebietes im Wandel eines Jahrtausends : Internationales Kolloquium im Wikinger Museum Haithabu vom 29. September - 3. Oktober 1994
Sprache und Schriftlichkeit eines Grenzgebietes im Wandel eines Jahrtausends : Internationales Kolloquium im Wikinger Museum Haithabu vom 29. September - 3. Oktober 1994
The papers in this volume were first presented in 1994 at an International Colloquium devoted to language and writing in the German-Danish border area. The time period covered ranged from the first short inscriptions on the weapons found at Thorsberg in the territory of the Angles to the medieval runic inscriptions discovered in the cities of Schleswig and Oldenburg in Holstein. Central themes of the colloquium were the linguistic history of this area and the historical events documented in the linguistic records.
This volume explores Nordic textbooks chronologically and empirically from the Protestant reformation to our own time. The chapters are written by scholars from Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and deploy a wide range of methods, representing different academic fields.
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