Preliminary Programme

The state merged with the church in many areas of Protestant Europe during the 16th and 17th century. With its deeply-rooted organisation in local communities, the church became an important instrument for stately communication with and control of local communities. This was highly true for the Sweden, where previous research has shown that the churchly organisation in local communities was used extensively by the state.
It was therefore foremost through the church the Swedish laity got news and information about the outside world. Through the church then, the Swedish laity indirectly encountered other cultures although most probably never faces the unfamiliar themselves.
Previous research has pointed out that Turks were commonly described in the information that the state conveyed to the laity through the church during the 17th century. They were depicted as the arch enemy both to Sweden as a state, and to Christianity in general. This is unsurprising, since the Ottoman empire was a major enemy to the ambitions of the expanding Swedish state during the first part of the 17th century, and likewise a serious enemy during the later part of the century.
However, the Turks are referred to often also in Swedish churchly texts of the 16th century, long before the Ottoman empire constituted any serious political or military threat to the Swedish state. This is probably partly because many religious texts in Swedish originated from Germany, where the Turks arguably posed more of a rational threat. Nevertheless, for the Swedish laity, these descriptions were probably formative for how the world outside the realm was perceived. In this paper, I will explore how the Turks were depicted in churchly material from the late 16th century. I will employ a perspective inspired by the theoretical frame of emotional practices, which will make apparent how the state created an emotional, albeit not factual encounter with other people. This study will provide a background to the forming of an enemy to the state and the church in the 17th century.
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In the context of the rich variety of scholarly contributions on the 1935-1936 Italo-Ethiopian War and on the following five-year resistance war (1936-1941), this paper aims at revising the issues of flights and displacements of Ethiopian people that took place since 1935 to the collapse of the Italian rule in East Africa. The mass crimes and the Italian extremely harsh repression, without attempts being made in the direction of involving the communities submitted, coupled with the environmental degradation affected the livelihoods of the inhabitants, determining mass flights and displacements. War was the leading push factor for people on the move who – during more or less prolonged flights – became internally displaced persons or refugees, crossing the international borders of Ethiopia in search for safe havens from counterinsurgencies operations. The paper examines such phenomena both as grassroots resistance acts to the Italian occupation, and as forced migrations induced by protracted warfare. At the dawn of humanitarianism, internally displaced Ethiopians and refugees became pawns in local and regional relationships. Thus, recurring to unpublished and archive sources, the paper will provide a critical appraisal of these exit strategies in a regional perspectives, questioning a) the impact of mass displacements on the unrest in the occupied country; b) if the flows occurred across international boundaries considered irrelevant to the social relations of the local communities; c) the strategies of neighbouring host colonial countries and of humanitarian actors, ranging from the Red Cross to NGOs that provided relief and assistance to the people stranded in camps. (Show less)

During the later part of the 19th century and the early 20th century an increasing number of Euro-African Gold Coasters started to venture out to Britain. The purpose of these travels was among others to pursue education, tend to business or visit friends and family. However, the atmosphere in Britain was becoming increasingly racist and unfriendly towards them, which kindled the forging of closed-knit circles and societies for Africans abroad. During their meetings local affairs of the colonies were elevated into global topical themes. In my paper I will discuss how expatriates in Britain wrote articles and influenced debates in Gold Coast newspapers, which in turn inspired policies and legislation set by the colonial government. Therefore I ask to what extent the expatriate experiences of a selected few determined the emergence of anti-colonial activity on the Gold Coast? (Show less)

My paper studies the tension between the inclusive and exclusive forces of education in the history of the indigenous Sámi minority in early twentieth century Norway, Sweden and Finland. Building on theoretical premises inspired by the scholarship of Raymond Grew, Peter L. Berger, Pirjo Markkola and Mette Buchardt, I argue that while the planners of Sámi education saw it as their task to include Sámi children in early twentieth century Norway, Sweden and Finland into a modern economy and a citizenship of a modern Nordic nation state, these inclusions came with a cost for the Sámi. Some cultural attributes, most importantly Sámi language, were excluded. The actors in focus for my paper are the regional educational authorities that supervised, implemented, and participated in the planning of, educational reforms. The other group in focus is Sámi teachers, and the ways these teachers reacted to the educational policies. In the end, my paper cites a number of international points of comparison, including educational contexts in the Dutch colonial world, Peru, Canada and the US. (Show less)