What happens in a science classroom where students are engaged and how do teachers observe and interpret student engagement? This article highlights teachers’ perspective on students’ engagement in science education and to what extent it is connected to the scientific content. This approach complements earlier research which focuses mostly on students’ attitude towards science education and their interest in various topics in science.

The findings are based on a three-stage Delphi survey distributed to 39 expert science teachers. The results shows science education with a range of different perspectives and that most teachers do not perceive any direct connection between specific science topics and the students’ engagement. The survey also shows that teachers to a high level interpret students’ emotional expressions and academic behavior as engagement rather than their cognitive behavior.

This paper presents some results within Pedatronics; a fusion between pedagogics and mechatronics. Our research interest is to study what emerges in the play with robotic toys. Field-experimental studies of 67 year old children’s purposeless play with robotic toys created a self-developmental sphere, as well as evoked young girl’s technological interest. Both girls and boys prolonged and intensified their interest according to the amount of gadgets involved. The results disclose a learning potential, indicating the importance to develop strategies at an early stage in order to encourage girls to choose technological and engineering educations. The study recommend engineers and toy designers, in cooperation with children, to move towards ’Integrated Play Systems’. Due to an ethological method, the results differ from other studies of children’s play with technological advanced artefacts. © 2002 IEEE

This study investigates the effects of name-based ethnic and social stereotypes on teachers’ grading of pupils’ texts in contemporary Sweden. A total of 113 practicing Swedish high school teachers assessed an authentic pupil text with one of three male names inserted, each intended to evoke a certain ethnic or social stereotype. Participants also explained their grading and answered questions regarding key features of the text. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. The study concludes that name-based stereotypes generally have little influence on teachers’ assessment in contemporary Sweden. Results indicate a systematic but small and not statistically relevant name effect. A negative effect can be seen with regard to an ethnically marked name. This effect is shown when teachers evaluate language proficiency, but not for other features of the text. Regarding socioeconomically marked names there is little systematic effect. The study also suggests, however, that there may be compensatory mechanisms limiting the name effect. © 2016 American Name Society.

The Swedish language conventionally separates female and male first names respectively. Previous research from Sweden, as well as other cultures, shows that first names for girls and boys are chosen in partly separate ways with a desire for separate characteristics and structures, in a way that often contributes to traditional gender stereotyping. When parents choose to create a completely new name for the child, they have an opportunity to use new structural and semantic patterns and thus may negotiate the traditional gender boundaries. This article investigates newly created first names in Sweden in order to explore to what extent and in what ways parents do this. The data consists of 226 newly created first names registered by SCB (Statistics Sweden) for children born in 2012. The overall conclusion is that the newly created names generally still express gender and recreate stereotypical gendered patterns contributing to symbolic dominance. When gender negotiation occurs, it is primarily in boys’ names.

This article discusses the naming of objects and presents a socio-onomastic study of contempor-ary Swedish recreational boats. Based on survey data from 187 informants, the discussion focuses on the process of naming, name variation (in terms of gender, linguistic choices, semantic cat-egories and wordplay), and explicit reasons for names. Comparisons are drawn with personal naming. The influence of factors in the social context (type of boat and gender, age and education of the owner) is considered throughout, but generally found to be limited. It is argued that this kind of naming can be seen, rather, as a construction of the personal identity of the owner and of the boat concerned.

Choosing a name for a child is seldom a matter of simple labelling. It is often rather a long and complex process. Names are collected for inspiration, compared and evaluated by the parents. Many aspects are taken into consideration and (more or less consciously) viewed in the light of the parents’ own emotional, aesthetic, ideological and social stances, as well as personal experiences and hopes for the child. In this chapter, the act of naming a child is regarded as an act of identity. Parents, through the choice of first name for a child, engage in a social act which is very much about expressing their own identity – who they are or who they want to be – and constructing a hoped-for identity for their child.

The primary aim of this article is to test the relevance of phonetic symbolism for people's conceptions of gender connotations in first names. Students were asked to grade their perceptions of seven female and male names. Primarily for female names certain phonetic properties correlated with higher perceived degree of femininity. However, the study also showed resistance towards gendering first names and attempts of "undoing gender".© Aldrin 2020

This article analyzes how a small group of Swedish teenagers handle onomastic choices of self- and other-referencing as part of their everyday mobile phone interaction. It further discusses how the teenagers explained their views regarding online names during interviews. The data are analyzed qualitatively using theories of identity and socialpositioning. Results show considerable differences between onomastic strategies used for self- and other-referencing. Self-referencing names were often practical, coherent, and authentic to the offline self, while other-referencing names were more flexible, creative, and socially positioned. However, the teenagers also displayed varying individual onomastic strategies and different folk-onomastic views on the function of usernames. © 2018 American Name Society

This paper presents results from a doctoral thesis in socio-onomastics (ALDRIN 2011 Namnval som social handling [Naming as a social act]). It is based on a postal survey from the year 2007 with 621 participants who were newly-become parents and were living in the area of Gothenburg, Sweden. The survey included approx. 40 questions on parents’ choice of name and the process of naming. The focus of this paper will be to what extent naming motives and the naming procedure as such (sources of inspiration, time of choice etc.) varies in relation to traditional sociolinguistic variables such as parents’ age, level of education, and the gender of the child. The presented analyses are primarily quantitative, consisting of univariate tests and tests of statistical signification. Based on these results, the paper discusses to what extent the act of naming a child can be seen as having a function as a social marker in contemporary Sweden and which of the investigated social variables are of greatest importance in this context.

This article presents a systematic review of published research on adolescents’ use of proper names and other forms of address in their interaction with one another. The aim is to identify both central issues and gaps within the field, as the basis for a future research project. In all, 45 Scandinavian and English-language publications, dated between 1970 and 2015, are identified and analysed. The review reveals a number of recurring themes: playfulness, power and resistance, and identity. Several gaps in existing research are also identified, the most important of which are: combinations of data, theories and methodologies from both onomastics and interactional research; forms of address in digital communication, especially with regard to power issues; and finally young people’s perceptions of different ways of being addressed and how these influence their identity, power relations and well-being. 

The purpose of this article is to study how Swedish adults conceptualize the relationship between their name and identity and how their views relate to scientific theories. It also discusses to what extent the relation between name and identity changes throughout life and which social factors may influence this. The data consists of 173 written survey answers, including both highly structured answers and freely written comments. Perspectives from folk onomastics, sociocultural identity theory and psychological theories life span identity are combined in the analysis. Results indicate that most people do not experience that their name reveals anything about their identity, however a third of the participants do see such a relation. This is often conceptualized as a process and includes both personal and social identity traits. A third of the participants further perceive that this relationship has changes throughout life and basing on these results the article suggests a tentative model of the life development of name identity through certain phases.

This article presents five undergraduate dissertations in socio-onomastics written by students from Halmstad University in 2016 and presented during a visit to the Department of Scandinavian Languages, Scandinavian Onomastics, at Uppsala University in 2017. Two of the dissertations deal with personal names (a social constructionist approach to personal names in children’s literature, and perceptions of name and identity among senior citizens). Two others focus on animal names in contemporary times (a gender analysis of names of horses, and a comparative analysis of names within different dog breeds). The last undergraduate dissertation concerns the process of naming companies. 

This article explores how a heterogenous group of first year university students perceive writing in general, academic writing in specific, as well as their own writing proficiency. A questionnaire (n 93) was created basing on theories on academic literacy and writing psychology. The results show varying attitudes among the students which highlight questions of the dimensions of writing, identity and group affiliations. Gender was of little importance, whereas age and self-stated writing skills correlated to some extent with the results. The small scale of the study does not permit far-reaching conclusions, but the results indicate attitudes that could have importance for the development of academic literacy. The study can be used as a start of departure for interventions that facilitate for groups with different backgrounds to participate in higher education. ©2020 Emilia Sturm Aldrin, Monica Eklund och Heike Peter.

Innovations in names and name patterns was the theme of a Nordic Symposium held in Halmstad in November 2013. The symposium was arranged by Halmstad University in collaboration with NORNA. The proceedings present 20 symposium papers. They offers insights into names in multicultural environments, changes in the gender marking of first names, introduction of new names in the Swedish name day calendar, the role of names in literature, as well as emergence of new name patterns in place names, personal names, names of animals, planes, ships etc. The proceedings cover a large time span from iron age to contemporary time and deal with names from different Nordic countries as well as Germany. Several articles also present new theories and methods within the field of onomastics.

The Nordic Cooperative Committee for Onomastic Research (NORNA) was founded in 1971 with the aim to encourage and support onomastic research in the Nordic countries, as well as collaboration between Nordic scholars. The article presents the organization and activities of NORNA and discusses its' contribution to Nordic onomastics.

This study aims at investigating how the image of the religion of Christianity is constructed in Swedish textbooks for the Upper Secondary School (gymnasieskolan), with a specific focus on the perspective from which the text considers the religion and how this perspective creates possibilities for and limitations of pupils’ identification. Introductions of Christianity through text and images were selected from six current textbooks; five printed and one digital. The method used for analysis was ideological text criticism with a combination of Linguistic and Theological perspectives. Three aspects were highlighted in the analysis: interest making strategies, demands of previous knowledge, and subject perspectives. The study showed that the examined texts did not express Christianity as the cultural norm as considered in previous research. Instead there seemed to be an ambivalence in the perspective from which the textbooks considered the religion. Demands of previous knowledge as well as subject positions varied highly both within and between textbooks.

This paper focuses on enacted PCK (ePCK), i.e., the specific knowledge and skills that science teachers use in their practice, as it plays out in specific classroom contexts while teaching particular content to their students. In unpacking this aspect of the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) of PCK, we consider both the nature of ePCK and its interactions with other realms of PCK, primarily personal PCK (pPCK). Recognising the complexity of practice—in terms of both the uniqueness of each classroom situation and the necessarily spontaneous nature of classroom interactions—we propose a mechanism through which pPCK is transformed into ePCK, and vice versa, throughout the plan-teach-reflect cycle. We then illustrate these ideas using several empirical examples of efforts to capture and analyse science teachers’ ePCK (and associated pPCK). We conclude with discussion of some of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of using the RCM, along with our unpacking of ePCK and its relationship to pPCK, as a means of understanding the knowledge that science teachers utilise in the midst of planning, teaching, and reflecting. 

This chapter focuses on enacted PCK (ePCK), i.e. the specific knowledge and skills that science teachers use in their practice, as it plays out in specific classroom contexts while teaching particular content to their students. In unpacking this aspect of the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) of PCK, we consider both the nature of ePCK and its interactions with other realms of PCK, primarily personal PCK (pPCK). Recognising the complexity of classroom practice—in terms of both the uniqueness of each classroom situation and the necessarily spontaneous nature of classroom interactions—we propose a mechanism through which pPCK is transformed into ePCK, and vice versa, throughout the plan-teach-reflect cycle. We then illustrate these ideas using several empirical examples of efforts to capture and analyse science teachers’ ePCK (and associated pPCK). We conclude with discussion of some of the opportunities, challenges and implications of using the RCM, along with our unpacking of ePCK and its relationship to pPCK, as a means of understanding the knowledge that science teachers utilise in the midst of planning, teaching and reflecting.

Design is increasingly recognized as an instrument of power. We explore power in the context of the Swedish welfare state and care institutions, which are undergoing political and structural reconfiguration as new technologies are introduced. Our aim is to better understand the effects of designed technologies within care institution and over care workers. Through our research, we have identified deviances, or gaps, between institutional policies and daily working practices, in which workers must cope within a grey zone of legality. Against this backdrop, we bring together and discuss concepts from philosopher Michel Foucault and sociologist Dorothy Smith in order to frame issues of power relevant to design. We elaborate upon these issues through a discussion of our project set in Swedish elder care institutions. Three 'research through (critical) design' examples illustrate ways and extents to which power is exerted over care workers. We discuss effects upon their subjectivity, including how their knowledge and agency can risk being ignored or overruled. Ultimately, we argue for design research to examine and articulate the (powerful) role of design in such contexts. We see this as a form of 'De-Scription' and active 'mapping' that can open up for wider debate and reconfigurations of power.

This paper reflects upon our critical (feminist) design research approach developed in response to the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova)’s innovation program on equality. As a pilot of the program, the subject of our research is equality within elder care work, a female-dominated employment sector with particular gender and power dynamics. We have responded to this program and sector by rethinking our research methodologies and critical design research method. Inspired by institutional ethnography and the concept of ‘ruling relations’, our research approach involves critical design to materialize structural inequalities manifested within the everyday micro-practices of care work. Stories and sketches (as ‘material theses’) were generated through qualitative fieldwork involving ‘research through design’ processes to observe, document, explore, interpret, discuss and communicate gendered practices of elder care. Three themes emerged along the way, which articulate ruling relations revealed within elder care work. This research case is reported here along with reflections about the potentials of critical design as a (feminist) research approach capable of more critically interrogating power and positionality within design and innovation. From our perspective, equality as a policy and subject of research – including design research – calls for critical (and feminist) theoretical and methodological development. 

Research on multimodal narration in illustrated children´s books and picturebooks have mainly focused on the relations between the text, the illustrations and the book itself as a medium. Relatively few studies discuss the importance of sound in this context. In this article, however, I examine what Irina Rajewsky refers to as a medial configuration presented by an illustrated book for children and an accompanying CD including the narrator’s voice, songs and music. Drawing on the concept of aurality and Lars Elleström’s model for intermedial analysis, I analyze how text, illustration, and sound mediate a detective story for children: Martin Widmark’s and Helena Willis’ Schlagersabotören (2012). The concluding discussion combines perspectives from both genre theory and intermediality studies: In which ways can auditory text and non-verbal sound present the young reader with some of the clues needed in a detective story? Two major functions of sound as a medium can be identified. Firstly, non-verbal sound helps the reader distinguish between the different diegetic levels in the story, thereby focusing the locked room so typical of the detective story. Secondly, auditory text and vocal pitch help the reader perceive some of the anger and frustration among the suspects in that room. Sound, together with text and illustration, presents the reader with a mystery, but also with the cognitive tools to solve it.

”My heart was with Malin”: Mediation and Transformation in Fredrika Bremer’s The Neighbours. This article focuses on a scene in Fredrika Bremer’s 1837 novel, Grannarne (Th e Neighbours), investigating the relationship between reading aloud and empathy established in this work. It discusses the characters’ varied responses to the shared reading experience, utilising reception theory. In a follow-up discussion, I examine the feasibility of using newer theories concerning narrative empathy. Fritz Breithaupt’s theory is of particular interest since he suggests that second-level observation (and thus placing oneself in another person’s perspective) is central to the experience of empathy. Finally, I consider the emotional responses of the characters in relation to melodrama in Bremer’s work.

Money and myths: An exploration of models of value in early 19th-century literature and texts on economy

The main aim of this paper is to show how the concept of money could be treated in literary and in economic writings in the Swedish Age of Romanticism. Three texts — an early poem by Erik Johan Stagnelius and two contemporary essays in economic theory — serve as examples of how, and for which purpose, qualitative and quantitative values could be negotiated in these writings. The study shows that, in the poem, money and profit are treated as inconsistent with such qualitative values as freedom, justice, and joy, whereas the two theoretical essays both make use of different strategies of fictionalization to deal with qualitative and quantitative values in one and the same narration. In this paper, the fictionalization strategies are linked to the paracapitalist approach often to be found in the political and economic theories in the Romantic period. From the perspective of economy-discourse history, an attempt is made to link the two essays to the German economist and philosopher Adam Müller and his Versuche einer neuen Theorie des Geldes (1816).

Discussions about books and ways of reading play an important role in the curriculum for the Swedish secondary school system. In an intervention study based on a series of book discussions of an easy reader novel, I investigated the cooperation between a group of Swedish language learners aged 16 to 19, their teacher in the introduction program for newcomers, and the school librarian. Based on my function as a teacher educator, and drawing on the current research in literature didactics, I planned and carried out six discussions where different reading strategies and methods were used. Using the concept of third space (Gutiérrez, 2008; Skerrett, 2010b) and interpersonal space(Cummins, 2000), I discuss the students’cognitive and emotional responses to the story we shared, and reflect upon the way these discussions have developed. Semi-structured interviews with five students, a teacher, and a school librarian constitute the data for this study. The analysis of the data indicates that the leader of the group discussion is instrumental in helping the participants shift between different perspectives, try out new roles, and transgress different boundaries, thereby offering the group different emotional, cognitive and linguistic challenges. 

Many scholars have considered when and why collaboration between government agencies and societal actors occurs. This article argues that a simple but largely overlooked answer to these questions is that a formal legal or administrative requirement to do so is in place. Therefore, the objective is to substantiate whether there are legal requirements to collaborate and in what type of source and context this obligation applies in ten European countries. The main finding is that collaboration is underpinned by an extensive range of legal requirements in Europe, although imposing these requirements is generally not the main objective. © 2019 The Author(s).

Presentation of Anna Preinitz (1870-1912) in Biographical encyclopedia of Swedish women. 

Biografisk presentation av Emelie Rathou (1862-1948) i Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon.

Biografisk presentation av Emma Wretlind (1852-1944) i Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon.

Biografisk presentation av Gerda Meyerson (1866-1923) i Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon

Presentation of Elsa Bengtsson (1865-1922) in the Biographical encyclopedia of Swedish women.

Biografisk presentation av Hedvig Rinander (1868-1953) i Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon. 

Biografisk presentation av Maria Sandström (1870-1948) i Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon

The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on our lives and living. In higher education, it led to a swift shift from on-campus to online education resulting in practices of emergency remote teaching through virtual classrooms. In this project, we seek to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that this abrupt, enforced change to online education entailed for faculty and students in Sweden and Finland. We aim to examine the evolution of online work and study practices, their impact on the teaching and learning environment, and new expectations imposed on the faculty and students. Our goal is to enhance the theoretical understanding of e-learning, developing guidelines on how to make online education effective, exploring the impact of pandemics on the future of higher education. © AMCIS 2021.

The aim of this study was to explore migrants' experiences and perceptions of mobile resources specifically developed for integration purposes in Sweden. Thematic content analysis of semi-structured focus group interviews with newly arrived migrants, guided by the Indicators for Integration Framework, was used. The findings suggest that lack of knowledge about existing applications and skepticism towards mobile technology as integration support in combination with time pressure and limited digital skills impede migrants’ use of mobile applications for integration. Further, technical hurdles stemming from owning outdated smartphones and technical problems with applications prevent migrants from uploading the applications. Finally, fear of surveillance is another obstacle for using applications requiring social media logins for authentication. The study reveals the friction between developers and providers of mobile resources for integration and the users’ perspective on these resources, offering implications for the development of mobile technology for migrant integration. © AMCIS 2021.

The ongoing debate whether cyberwar exists or not is odd and to large extent based on an Industrial age view of the definition of war. The ongoing digital revolution ends the industrial age and it was in the context of the industrial age that the Clausewitzian theories of war were defined. The industrial age was built upon machines and physical objects, and the theories of war in this era were also based on these elements. However, when the importance of physical values is vanishing and replaced by other values, as information and knowledge, the fundamental elements of war in the industrial age becomes week. An extension of the theories of war in the information age is that destruction of digital assets is representing the same element of violence, if it potentially cripples an enemy to defeat. When a society’s valuable assets are in the digital form and not necessarily even present within the geographical area of a sovereign state one maybe have to reconsider the understanding of war. This paper explores the discourse framing war in the information age, and conducts a discussion on how to define peace and war in cyberspace, especially in the context of digital violence.

Judging from sales figures, the popularity of the audiobook is more than a passing trend. While everyone seems to have an opinion on the topic, either one listens avidly or one refuses to abandon the ingrained habit of print, the aesthetic dimension of the listening experience has long been underexplored. Recently, however, producers and researchers have started to show a growing interest in the actual voicing of a text and its aesthetic effect and, consequently, readers are becoming less categorical. Reading with one’s ears is neither inferior nor superior to reading with one’s eyes; it is quite simply a different experience.

My talk is founded on the assumption that this difference is related to double voicing which can be studied through the theoretical lens of audionarratology. What happens when the metaphorical voice goes physical in the performing act of narration? My focus is on the materiality of voice, what Roland Barthes famously termed its “grain.” A key argument is the recorded voice as a facilitator for an empathetic stance. In my study of the shift to the listening mode with its affective potential, previous research findings on readers’ emotional responses to print texts based on such parameters as story type (descriptive, emotional) and set (sympathetic spectator, identification) will be used as a reference point.

In this article, Carl Czerny’s Letters to a Young Lady on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte (1837) is studied as a machine manual within the cybernetic economy of James Watt’s governor. It is argued that while the young pupil is encouraged to subject herself to a strict discipline of physical deportment at the piano, this activity is in conflict with her own desire to become a self-regulated learner. The key claim made is that although Czerny’s surveillance strategy prevents Miss Cecilia from breaking with the cybernetic ideal and appropriating the pianistic technology for purposes of virtuosic self-expression, she becomes aware of her latent agency and its potentially subversive implications for gendered music making. As such, Czerny’s piano manual addressed to the stereotypical nineteenth-century piano girl anticipates the pianistic discourse associated with the invention of the player piano at the turn of the twentieth century. © The Author(s) 2018.

Readers’ emotional engagement with fiction is a busy research area situated at the intersection of cognitive, affective and narrative theory. Perspective taking is a feature that cuts across the disciplines since the narrative situation is crucial for communicating experiences of narrators and characters in literary texts. However, what has been explored in less detail is how the vocalisation of print text facilitates an empathetic response due to the expressive impact of the human voice so that narratives may be visualised and experienced in a variety of ways. Within audionarratology, the concept of voice is undergoing a redefinition since it ceases to be textually mediated and can be experienced directly. Audiobook narration is a case in point. In the present study it is argued that empathy is a mediating agency that resides in the vocalisation of text rather than in the text itself. For the purpose of exploring this phenomenon, a pilot study was carried out. Three canonical English texts that had previously been studied in their entirety in print by a group of students were accessed in part in a remediated audio format. The listening experiment showed that the individual voice profile of each of the narrating actors had a significant impact on perspective taking and emotional engagement. © 2020 IJLS; Printed in the USA by Lulu Press Inc.