This article presents a theoretical framework for applying an identity approach to personal naming. It also presents some results from a doctoral thesis project in which this framework has been applied in an analysis of parents’ choices of first names for their children. Questions discussed in this article include: To what extent do choices of first names function as acts of identity? Which aspects of first names are used as resources for identity creation? Which kinds of identities are created? To what extent are traditional sociolinguistic variables (such as age, education, etc.) able to account for the social variation of naming today? To what extent is the identity creation of naming negotiated from moment to moment? The discussion is based on results from two component studies: a written survey (with 621 participants) and group discussions (with 23 participants) conducted in Göteborg, Sweden 2007–2009.

This article analyses patterns of personal naming in an urban environment. It focuses on parents’ choices of first names in contemporary Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden. The discussion is based on three proposed characteristics of urban environments often cited in urban culture research – innovation, awareness of trends and cultural meetings – and explores how these are reflected in a set of name data. The article also examines to what extent social variation exists in parents’ participation in these patterns and considers the parents’ age, education, housing and linguistic background. The analysed data consist of first names chosen for 621 children, all born in Gothenburg during the year 2007, and their parents’ motivations for the name choice as described in a written survey. The analysis is primarily quantitative. To some extent the article also refers to spoken data that were collected through focus group interviews with another twenty-three new parents in Gothenburg in 2008 and 2009. Both sets of data have previously been used in my PhD thesis, Naming as a social act. Parents’ choices of first names and discussions of first names in Göteborg 2007–2009 (2011). The article shows that all three of the proposed characteristics of urban life are prominent in the name data. Innovative first names, trendy first names and multicultural first names are common throughout the data regardless of social factors, suggesting that these patterns may be typical of urban naming rather than typical of a certain social group. However, the patterns are realized in somewhat different ways depending on social factors, which shows that the same name characteristics can be handled in different ways in order to create different social stances. Since the study does not include non-urban data for comparison we cannot conclude that the examined characteristics are specific for naming in urban environment, but it is hoped that the results can serve as a starting point for further research.

Artikeln undersöker praktiserande svensklärares attityder och erfarenheter kring textbedömning, samt betydelsen av sociokulturella faktorer för bedömarvariation. Materialet består av en webbenkät som besvarats av 135 svensklärare i Västsverige verksamma i årskurs 7–9. Frågorna behandlade textbedömning generellt, det nya betygssystemet, samt bedömning och beskrivning av en autentisk elevtext. Resultaten visar flera goda exempel och erfarenheter, men också behov av ökad information från Skolverket på flera punkter. Vidare framkommer en påfallande bedömarvariation, som föreslås hänga samman med en stor variation i synen på textkvalitet bland deltagarna. Bedömarvariationens samspel med den sociala kontexten (läraren, dennes erfarenhet samt skolmiljön) är begränsad men visar ett intressant mönster som efterfrågar fortsatt forskning.

Studien bygger på hur kvinnorna vid Norra Åsbo häradsrätt framkommer i domboken under åren 1680 och 1681. I förhållande till tidigare forskning har en diskussion förts gällande om kvinnan var underordnad mannen och i så fall hur detta har framkommit i domboken. Yvonne Hirdmans genusteori har använts för att studera dikotomier, det vill säga motsatserna mellan manligt och kvinnligt samt hierarkin mellan könen. De ärenden som kvinnorna hade störst delaktighet i var de rörande ekonomi, affärer, arv och stöld. Ärenden rörande trolovning, lägersmål, ärekränkning och fysiskt våld har också framkommit i domboken. Enligt dansk lag hade kvinnorna rätt att föra sin egen talan vid tinget men de behövde inte närvara. I studien har det framkommit att kvinnorna, om så i små mängder, kunde ansvara för männens affärer och ärenden vid tinget.  Det har också framkommit att männen oftast förde kvinnornas talan.

In this thesis the female Christian temperance union the White Ribbon is in focus. The White Ribbon was founded in Stockholm in 1900 and it was part of the international organization World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU). The organization’s ambition was to create a temperate and moral society, running a variety of philanthropic institutions and adult education, as well as non-alcohol serving restaurants.

The aim of the thesis is to study the White Ribbon’s social and political commitment and its ideological approach during the first three decades of the 20^th century. The White Ribboners’ ideological approach and culture are problematized in relation to the prevailing and predominant view on women. The organization’s monthly journal has been closely studied and the ideas and practical social and political commitment have been analyzed in a theoretical perspective of social movement theory, according to the Swedish sociologist Håkan Thörn’s methodological framework. This theoretical approach is an instrument to analyze what the White Ribbon identified to be social problems; what was considered to be the reasons for these problems; and what strategy the organization regarded to be the best way to deal with them in order to reach the prognosticated change.

The analysis shows that the White Ribbon identified the predominant gender system and the bourgeois view on women as a primary social problem. The organization’s strategy was to eliminate the patriarchal order of the gender system and to change the attitude of people through adult education, information and persuasion. The White Ribbon participated in public debate pursuing temperance and women’s suffrage, and was a lobbyist proposing motions and demanding legislative reforms. The White Ribbon’s ideological approach, as well as their philanthropic activities emanated from a bourgeois ideal of conscientiousness and cultivation, and from an interest in social politics. This was in contrast to the bourgeois view of what the ideal woman should do. From the White Ribboners’ point of view, society could only prosper when women had the same rights as men, and could participate the public sphere and become involved in politics.

The study shows that the organization worked hard for equality and democracy, pursuing a feminist and liberal ideology. The White Ribboners regarded themselves, and also acted, as political agents. They introduced and increased women’s possibilities for adult education. They initiated and provided social protection for alcohol addicted women, and for poor and fallen women and girls. These activities must be seen as forms of enterprises and the White Ribboners  as entrepreneurs, since these institutions were, in fact, innovations and models for solving problems in order to build a welfare system and to create a temperate and prosperous society. The thesis put forward arguments that the White Ribbon’s social and political work are political innovations and important elements in the process of democratization and, therefore, played an important part in this process.

I would like to present my dissertation on the female temperance organization the White Ribbon, founded in Sweden in the year 1900. The organisation was part of the international World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The aim of the White Ribbon was to create a temperate society and the activity was nationwide. The organisation ran temperance restaurants, and established different kinds of philanthropic institutions such as orphanages, rest homes, and rescue homes for prostitutes and female alcoholics. They also launched vocational training and educational courses for women. They had their own publishing firm, which issued a journal and pamphlets.

I have studied the White Ribbon as a social movement, and therefore I use a social movement theory to analyse their work. This theoretical approach has made it possible to analyse the underlying ideology as well as the organisation’s practical activities. Thus, I have been able to focus on the social and political activities in relation to the process of democratisation in Sweden. The study shows that the White Ribbon’s aim was not only to create a temperate society. In fact, it may be argued that the primary ambition was an equal and democratic society, which was founded on women’s political rights and their participation.

Generally speaking, female Christian associations and their charitable activities have been considered conservative, promoting a traditional female ideal that consigned women to the private sphere. My study shows differently. The White Ribboners opposed the prevailing views on women, arguing that they had both a right and an obligation to act in society and politics. Their philanthropic institutes did not originate from a female Christian mission but from socio-political ambitions. Moreover, they should also be seen as businesses in a branch of new and necessary social services; the White Ribboners were in fact entrepreneurs and business owners. The organisation’s members were presented as role models for how women could and should participate in society. The journal paid attention and tributes to businesswomen, female politicians and writers, etcetera. This way the White Ribbon praised and promoted icons that contradicted the prevailing view on women. In short, they introduced a new and different female ideal.

As part of the temperance movement, the White Ribboners did not only have access to the political field, but were also recognised as political agents. Like their male equivalents, the White Ribboners were political lobbyists active in political parties. Quite a few of them were members of the Liberal party and had positions in local councils. Like many other studies, mine shows that women were active agents on the public and political scene. Despite this, female politicians are rarely mentioned in the history of politics; newly published school textbooks still reproduce the view that men, and not women, were agents in society, claiming that the public and political scenes were male domains. Unfortunately, after decades of gender research the history shelves in Swedish bookstores are still dominated by the history of men. This raises several questions worth discussing.

In order to briefly demonstrate the contextual and transnational background of the women’s movement and the temperance movement in Sweden, this paper shortly introduces how female organizations were founded due to the lack of gender equality in the American temperance movement. Thereafter, an excerpt from my dissertation Temperate Women. Educators, Entrepreneurs and Political Agents. The White Ribbon 1900-1930  (2011) follows, in which I conclude the result of my analysis of the Swedish female, Christian, temperance organization The White Ribbon, which was a Swedish branch of The World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, initially founded in the USA.

I briefly introduce the dissertation’s theoretical perspective of social movement, and give an account of how I analyze The White Ribbon as a political agent. I then summarize the result of my analysis of the White Ribboners participation on the political field and the public debate. In their ambitions to create a temperate society, the White Ribboners demanded women's political and social rights. The claimed that society could only progress if women participated in politics and decision making. The White Ribboners themselves were politically engaged and several had positions in local councils. All over the country organization ran philanthropic institutes, which were not only social companies, but also models or political innovations of how to deal with social problems. The work of the White Ribbon was generated from the feminist ideology of the American female teetotalers, and in the final discussion the conclusion highlights the American influence on the Swedish White Ribboners.

This paper shows how Cather parallels Thea's chronological development with a discourse on the pathology of voice, hinted at in the first chapter in Dr Archie's treatment of Thea's respiratory organ and then made evident towards the end when Thea's success is rendered in terms of mechanical sound. Thea lacks autonomy, becomes a specimen to be examined through a lens. The keen interest in her throat resembles the 19^th century urge for documenting the prostitute's body. If Cather is a female bildungsroman, it leaves us with fragments as from a dissection.

Writing a life necessarily means that the dichotomy public/private is actualised. Even the most private matters are made public as soon as they are put into the public medium of writing. As is a well-known fact, for a woman writing in the 19^th century this transition from private to public was particularly problematic. In order to handle it, many female writers adopted a male pseudonym in order to gain acceptance in the public arena. What was more unusual for a woman was to keep up a male persona in private correspondence.

In 1910 the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson (pseudonym for Ethel Lindsay Richardson) was contacted by the French man of letters Paul Solanges whose aim was to translate her first novel Maurice Guest (1908). In the ensuing correspondence spanning almost four years she never dropped the male mask. In the proposed paper I want to demonstrate the complex web of gendered position-taking in the letters they exchanged, which in the end proved that both their lives were entrapped in writing.

The player piano was an invention which revolutionised music making around the turn of the century 1900. This machine/instrument served to blur the sharp dividing-lines between social classes and between art and entertainment. As a consequence, it became an extremely popular artefact. However, as was reflected in the Edwardian debate on music, the mechanical dimension tainted the perception of virtuosity. As a consequence, the player piano became the material repository of the problematic phenomenon of virtuosity, which long before the invention of musical mechanisation had foregrounded the excess and materiality of showy pianistic technique.

In my paper I will not confine the discussion of the player piano to the musical sphere but will situate it in a wider material framework. Taking my starting-point in political economy, I will argue that the significance of the player piano may be understood within the context of the theory of labour and value. This approach fits into a general energy conservationist model of mechanical work in which the human motor is to be understood within the frame of thermodynamics. The player piano is thus, I claim, an innovation firmly grounded in an engineering tradition but linked to the medical discourse as a means of combating fatigue, which since the 1870s had been recognized as a growing medical problem.

The picture of the bourgeois woman seated at the piano is a familiar one. It has been reproduced in countless paintings, photographs and fictional accounts. Piano playing was one of the accomplishments to be displayed by the nineteenth-century young lady in the private sphere. Today we tend to regard this woman as a decorative relic, who was engaged in an unsystematic leisure activity, victimised by lacking career opportunities and far removed from the realities of industrial life in mid-nineteenth-century England. In fact, her pleasant music-making could be considered the antithesis of factory discipline, according to which time was strictly regulated by the demands of making a profit. During long working hours in the factory, the mechanistic principle disciplined the body; the movement of hands and legs, for instance, was subject to surveillance. As late as the early twentieth century, Havelock Ellis described how foremen were encouraged to monitor young women seated at sewing machines in order to prevent sexual excitement as a result of the wrong positioning of their legs. In comparison, solitary music-making in a secluded home appears to be the very epitome of harmony and freedom. However, I argue that the similarities between female factory workers and amateur lady pianists were greater than our construction of the Victorian period may lead us to believe. Factory discipline was implemented in bourgeois homes all over England. The standard piano practise for young women restricted physical freedom to such an extent that, like factory workers, they were fettered to a machine, the pianoforte. This mechanisation of music was established through the musical institution of the conservatory. Due to the emergence of conservatories all over Europe, the virtuoso became the norm for all pianists. The repertoire was standardised as was the recommended hours of practise. Thus, the distinction previously made between a professional pianist and an amateur disappeared. In addition, the more sophisticated the pianoforte became, the more it turned into a machine that had to be controlled. More often than not, though, the woman was controlled by the machine. Hand gymnastics was introduced as one means of preparing the fingers for the machine-like activity of performing almost impossible pianistic feats without wasting any time. Thus engaged in the virtuoso factory at home, the lady pianist would have no time for such potentially subversive activities as day-dreaming. Ironically, not until piano playing was in actual fact mechanised due to the launching of the player piano, were women freed from their musical servitude. In 1901 they had access to 6,000 music rolls, which they could operate at their own liberty without previous practise. What is more, while doing so they were at leisure to make the music accompany their own thoughts and desires.

To judge from literature produced in England around the turn of the twentieth century, the Edwardian period was a noisy one. The development of the player piano and the possibility provided by piano rolls for storing more music than previously helped introduce classical music to the masses. However, this process of democratisation resulted in confusion between music and noise. By analysing five Edwardian novels influenced by the player piano discourse, this article will argue that dealing with music in fiction was a means of disposing of musical waste.

Launched at the turn of the twentieth century, the semi-mechanical player piano opened up canonical music to new audiences by sidestepping musical literacy. In contrast to other more or less contemporary technical appliances for recording and reproducing sound, the player piano granted its operator the freedom of individual expression. While the machine produced the notes, the performer was at liberty to modify the tempo and the expression. Due to this manipulation of the original score, it became a gender-political instrument. As such, it had a significant effect on the perception, performance and appreciation of music, and thus implicitly on the fictional treatment of these phenomena.

The argument in this paper is built on the notion that the composer’s script as encapsulated in the piano roll could be subjected to such a highly individual treatment that almost a new composition emerged in the process. My first fictional example is from E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice (1971) in which the potential for new gender perspectives that the player piano could provide is glimpsed but rejected. It is argued that it was as great an anomaly to break against heteronormativity as to distort sonata form in Edwardian society. My next two examples demonstrate how the player piano facilitated self-expression and individuality for women performers. Both Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) and Miriam Henderson in Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915) challenge Beethoven’s iconic status and musical form by manipulating the male script and exploring a new pianistic behaviour informed by the mechanical discourse. In my concluding discussion, I will illustrate how the player piano was also a tool for a masculinisation of Chopin’s music. Here I will be referring to Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest (1908) and James Huneker’s Melomaniacs (1902). 

Seamless Fiction or Noisy Friction?: Audiobook Narration and the Grain of the Voice

In the past few decades fiction has become increasingly accessible through the audio medium due to the rapid development of sound technology from CD discs to Mp3 players. More recently, the technical sophistication of smartphones has greatly contributed to the creation of a culture of ubiquitous listening. We may allow ourselves to be swayed by spatialised sound reverberating through our bodies or we may decide to indulge in an interiorised experience of headphone listening that seems to make the cranium itself resound. Either way, the digitized voice has a powerful effect on our emotions.

However, enjoying fiction in this form also causes friction. The voice narrating the text is not infrequently perceived as a noisy machine. Arguably, twenty-first-century sonic friction of this kind is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding the nineteenth-century virtuoso, a figure that embodied the problem of mediation even before sound media existed and was often accused of tainting high art with commodified entertainment. In this paper I will move beyond simplistic value judgments that tend to polarise print text and audiobook format. Instead I wish to close the gap by exposing a behaviour associated with print culture through the agency of the recorded voice of narration. Subvocalisation is one case in point. In the reading of print text, the reader more or less unconsciously activates the vocal chords thus producing a rich and fully embodied experience of the text. Another example is the fairly recent Whispersync technology combining Kindle text, headphone listening and a spatialised sound experience. A main argument in my paper is that literary texts may contain audiophonic traces long before the technology as such exists.

Sound technology was a means of giving expression to new patterns that were emerging in Edwardian society. These changes were reified in the early unsophisticated piano roll which was an odd mixture of decorative Victorian arabesques and functional machine code. As the traditional music score was run through the paper-punching machine, the composer’s intentions were often deleted in the process and replaced with rudimentary tempo instructions in stencil. What remained was a script of telegraphic code to be deciphered at will, not least by the many women who had previously felt their subjectivity stifled in gendered music making.

E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) is a charming novel with a charming heroine. Lucy Honeyworth comes across as a conventional young Edwardian woman whose great musical talent as a performer of canonical piano music redeems her from the epithet "commonplace." Scholars have placed her within the framework of Victorian performance culture to prove that music renders her original and interesting. She acts out the expected role of the entertaining middle-class woman as well as redefines that role through her individual interpretation of the repertoire, in particular Beethoven's opus 111, a sonata demanding great technical skill. In this double role the piano is instrumental for lending originality to the character.

This picture tallies badly with that of Edwardian critics, who did not seem to think that music had a catalytic function on Lucy but saw her as an original young woman incapable of storing any cultural information, let alone memorising a complicated piano score. These critics may have considered the possibility that Lucy is operating a mechanical piano, a pianola.  I argue, therefore, that the music-making in Forster's novel must be studied at the intersection of the classical romantic discourse and the discourse network of 1900. Lucy is to be understtod against the background of sound technology and applied physiology. The mechanical discourse, and more specifically, the pianola discourse, opens up new possibilities for the female performer to express herself thus wreaking havoc with the heavily gendered traditional music discourse.

In her study of music making in the Edwardian novel, Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg argues that the invention and development of the player piano had a significant effect on the perception, performance and appreciation of music during the period. In contrast to existing devices for producing music mechanically such as the phonograph and gramophone, the player piano granted its operator freedom of individual expression by permitting the performer to modify the tempo. Because the traditional piano was the undisputed altar of domestic and highly gendered music making, Björkén-Nyberg suggests, the potential for intervention by the mechanical piano’s operator had a subversive effect on traditional notions about the status of the musical work itself and about the people who were variously defined by their relationship to it. She examines works by Dorothy Richardson, E.M. Forster, Henry Handel Richardson, Max Beerbohm and Compton Mackenzie, among others, contending that Edwardian fiction with music as a subject undermined the prevalent antithesis, expressed in contemporary music literature, between a nineteenth-century conception of music as a means of transcendence and the increasing mechanisation of music as represented by the player piano. Her timely survey of the player piano in the context of Edwardian commercial and technical discourse draws on a rich array of archival materials to shed new light on the historically conditioned activity of music making in early twentieth-century fiction.

Encompassing 40 years of immigrant life in Britain, Sandhya Suri’s filmic essay I for India (2005) is a collage of amateur home movies, British newsreels as well as film stock shot by the director herself. The home movie footage was filmed by Suri’s father who came to Britain as an immigrant doctor in the 1960s and who exchanged super8-films andaudio reels as cine-letters about his new life with his family in India. After having rediscovered the material on the attic of her family home, Sandhya Suri transformed it into her graduate thesis film at the The National Film and Television School in London. Dealing with memory, nostalgia and migrant experiences in Britain, I for India establishes a counter-history to the hegemonic national discourse in which migrant experiences are marginalized, objectified or rendered invisible.My paper is going to examine the role of the amateur footage for reflecting on the ontology of the image and the materiality of the different film formats. How does the reception of the footage change in the course of its dissemination? In what way does the filmic montage in I for India contribute to challenging the dominant media discourse on Asians in Britain? I would like to argue that the amateur footage helps to counter the ethnographic, Eurocentric gaze on the new citizens and subverts the hegemonic use of images of migrants as a means of control and classification (Alan Sekula) or as a weapon (Susan Sontag). How do the amateur images migrate into the collective (national) visual archive? Finally, the example of I for India might also show that Zygmunt Bauman’s binary opposition between tourists and nomads needs to be complicated.

Collective film-making practice in Germany is still a blind spot in film historiography. During the 1970s and 1980s independent film and video workshops established a nationwide network to provide ‘counter information’ (Negt/Kluge) in order to challenge dominant media representations. Therefore, the works of the video collectives can become a relevant source for historians and journalists alike. While the videos can be perceived as an important contribution to left-wing cultural memory, this memory of the various media practices of the last decades is currently fading away. The videotapes slowly disintegrate and as digitization is costly and time-consuming, many video productions will not survive. This has consequences not only for historiography, but also for the visual iconography of cultural memory. This article focuses on the archival practice of three workshops in Hamburg, the stronghold for German independent film-making after 1968: the Medienpädagogikzentrum (Centre for Media Pedagogy, 1973–), bildwechsel (1979–), the umbrella organization for women in media, culture and art, and die thede (1980–), an association of documentary film-makers. The examples show how archival practice can be conceptualized not only as part of the hegemonic national archive alone, but also as an act of counter-memory. © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article.

The fact that Black artists are quite often pigeonholed as spokespersons of Black experience is due to a mimetic understanding of art. Using examples from 1980s Black British diasporic filmmaking I would like to shift the analytical focus from representation and mimesis towards art as interventionist practice. The mysterious deaths of young Black men in police custody form the point of departure for an exploration of memory and mourning in Mysteries in July (Black Audio Film Collective, 1991). Additionally, the Sankofa film collective's Territories (1985) is an exploration of urban space, historiography, heterotopia and Black masculinities, while practices of surveillance and the framing of Blacks via media discourses are addressed in Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective 1986). These filmic essays, instead of looking at the black male as a given social problem, reflect on its construction through discourses of media and governmentality. Rather than creating a counter-discourse, these films abstain from trying to depict events "as they really happened". Instead, they deconstruct the hegemonic media discourse through the use of self-reflexive means. While counter practices often assume a unified essentialist stand (as in concepts of Afrocentrism and négritude, for example) I would suggest that in 1980s diasporic Black British filmmaking self-reflexivity is employed as a strategy which might be able to solve a notion of "strategic essentialism" (Spivak). Filmmaking thus serves as an epistemological tool to deal with the gaps, fissures and absences in the national visual archive and in hegemonic historiography while at the same time defying notions of homogeneity and authenticity. The use of self-reflexivity enables the films to reflect on modes of exclusion of the Black subject from hegemonic discourses on the ontology of the image and on the filmic apparatus. To sum up, my paper outlines auteurist strategies of dealing with the exclusion of both the official canon and of the collective visual archive of the nation.

Review of the DVD edition of Macpherson's experimental film "Borderline", a British avant-garde classic negotiating issues of race and sexuality.

This article describes the function of the metareferential turn in black British filmmaking of the 1980s. Metaisation is here a result of the impact of European art cinema (Godard, Paradjanov, Kluge) as well as of Third Cinema practice and of the ‘essay film’ represented by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. Using the examples of Handsworth Songs and Seven Songs for Malcolm X by the Black Audio Film Collective, directed by John Akomfrah, as well as Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston and The Attendant, this article outlines five functions of metareference. First, it can be regarded as a means to counter and reflect on the absences in the visual archive in Britain and of questioning the master narrative of British historiography. Second, it is used as a way of transgressing the boundaries of representation and of escaping the fruitless debate about negative and positive stereotypes. Third, metaisation is employed as an artistic strategy in order to inscribe oneself as an auteur into film historiography. Fourth, it can be regarded as a means of escaping the critical label of the social realist filmmaker who deals with the representation of black experiences. Finally, metaisation contributes to a reconceptualisation of the works in terms of both media theory and the essay film.

Review of filmmaker and DJ Don Letts' autobiography

Intervju med Werner Krebs, medlem av de oppositionella s k "Swingjugend" under nazismen.

Intervju med Hans Peter Viau, medlem av de oppositionella s k "Swingjugend" under nazismen.