Books by Niklas Bernsand
Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin's Russia, 2018
In Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin's Russia scholars scrutinise developments in offic... more In Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin's Russia scholars scrutinise developments in official symbolical, cultural and social policies as well as the contradictory trajectories of important cultural, social and intellectual trends in Russian society after the year 2000. Engaging experts on Russia from several academic fields, the book offers case studies on the vicissitudes of cultural policies, political ideologies and imperial visions, on memory politics on the grassroot as well as official levels, and on the links between political and national imaginaries and popular culture in fields as diverse as fashion design and pro-natalist advertising.
The volume opens with a short report of the activities of the action delivered by the chair at th... more The volume opens with a short report of the activities of the action delivered by the chair at the final conference of ISTME in Dublin 1-3 September 2016. It is followed by a selection of papers presented at the action's conferences and workshops (see the report in this volume). Most papers written by the action participants have been aimed for one of the five publications (two collected volumes and three special issues of scientific journals) prepared by the action or became included in other academic publications. However, several papers were published electronically on the action's website, and it is a sample of those publications that are featured in this volume. The concluding chapter constitutes an attempt to look ahead and reflect over current and possible future directions in Memory Studies. It emerged in connection to the conference " Thinking through the future of Memory " , 3-5 December 2016, inaugurating the Memory Studies Association, which was initiated by a group of participants in our COST Action.
Book chapters by Niklas Bernsand
Krzysztof Kowalski, Lucja Piekarska-Duraj, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (eds): Narrating Otherness in Poland and Sweden. European heritage as a Discourse of Inclusdion and Exclusion., 2019
After the WWI Battle of Jutland in 1916, hundreds of dead British and German marines drifted asho... more After the WWI Battle of Jutland in 1916, hundreds of dead British and German marines drifted ashore on the beaches of the region of Bohuslän in western Sweden. They were buried in local cemeteries, until the remains of most of the soldiers were reburied in Gothenburg in the 1960s. The chapter focuses on two local Bohuslän memory cultures in relation to the sailors and their graves. It seeks to identify factors facilitating remembrance of the fallen Other in the two local communities, focusing on the importance of materiality for the perseverance of memory as well as on the role of transnational factors linking the graves to wider circles of memory. In this regard it also takes into account the shifting interpretations in German memory cultures of one of the dead marines, the writer Gorch Fock.
Articles in journals by Niklas Bernsand
Drabbrikan, 2018
Popular presentation in Swedish about a research project on Romani Travellers and the Swedish maj... more Popular presentation in Swedish about a research project on Romani Travellers and the Swedish majority population in the former neighbourhood Valhalla in Helsingborg, Sweden
East European Politics and Societies, 2019
Drawing on tropes, stories, and symbols emanating from lost layers of urban cultural diversity ha... more Drawing on tropes, stories, and symbols emanating from lost layers of urban cultural diversity has been an important resource in post-socialist city branding in many cities in Eastern and Central Europe that saw significant ethno-demographic changes in connection with World War II. In Chernivtsi, this is usually framed by narratives emphasizing tolerance, cultural diversity, and Europeanness, notions that are prominent in myths about the city in German-speaking Central Europe. A common strategy here, found in municipal city branding and in commercial efforts to draw on the multiethnic past in restaurants and cafés, is to deemphasize difficult questions about what actually happened to the celebrated cultural diversity and soften or ignore the temporal break. The article analyses how the International Poetry Festival Meridian Czernowitz, that has taken place in Chernivtsi since 2010, works with the city’s culturally diverse past and its literary dimensions, drawing on tropes from both local multiculturalist narratives and on the Bukowina-Mythos popularised by intellectuals from German-speaking countries. Although the festival is not a venue for working through traumas, locating events in symbolically charged places such as the Jewish cemetery and highlighting Holocaust themes in poetry readings opens up for difficult questions where the lost cultural diversity might become something more than only a resource.
Politeia, 2018
The article analyses the contexts, arguments and paradoxes of thinking about cultural heritage in... more The article analyses the contexts, arguments and paradoxes of thinking about cultural heritage in Sweden of the 2000s when the topic achieved broad societal relevance in traditional media, internet fora, political communication and academic research. The discussion focuses on four themes: the normative criticism paradigm that has been increasingly influential in the heritage sector in recent years and the tensions and conflicts it provokes, recent heritage work on and with the until the last two decades silent ethnic minority Romani Travellers, the continuing media polemic around the Sweden Democrats and its heritage policies, and the heritage debate initiated by journalist and China expert Ola Wong in 2016. The analysis builds on projects and publications featuring heritage professionals, academics, NGO people and professionals with other kinds of cultural capital working in the heritage sector, as well as on illustrative debates and interviews in the mass media. The debates are often heavily polarized, interwoven with positions in other politically loaded issues such as globalization, migration and integration, and laden with questions of the legitimacy and authority of political and institutional actors.
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies Vol 1 No 1 2014 pp. 59-84
Despite geographical proximity and comparable historical development since the fall of the Soviet... more Despite geographical proximity and comparable historical development since the fall of the Soviet Union, Lviv and Chernivtsi betray different approaches to commemorating the past.This might point to the existence of different cultures of memory that sustain anarrative about acceptance or rejection of ethnic diversity.
But the cultures of memory in the cities also have common characteristic, namely, contemporary urbanites form the attitudes towards the past not through personal experience and family transmission of past memories but through prosthetic
memory, which relies on hearsay,media, literature, popular culture and the arts. When deliberate choice comes to the fore in building various identity projects, the work of stitching together contradictory historical representations is guided not so much by path-dependent logic of collective memory as by present-day expediency and power games of different mnemonic actors. Therefore, this paper argues that the most observable trend in the cultures of memory in Lviv and Chernivtsi is pillarization, i.e., an agreement among external and internal memory entrepreneurs
and marketeers that each population group is the custodian of its “own” heritage. Nevertheless, ultimately the condition of heritage envisioned in the two cities seems to be an assimilationist “incorporation-to-the-core” model, where the core consists
of various versions of the Ukrainian national heritage.
Russian Journal of Communication No 2 2014 pp. 166-168, May 20, 2014
Kulturos Barai 7-8 2013 pp. 8-16
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Books by Niklas Bernsand
Book chapters by Niklas Bernsand
Articles in journals by Niklas Bernsand
But the cultures of memory in the cities also have common characteristic, namely, contemporary urbanites form the attitudes towards the past not through personal experience and family transmission of past memories but through prosthetic
memory, which relies on hearsay,media, literature, popular culture and the arts. When deliberate choice comes to the fore in building various identity projects, the work of stitching together contradictory historical representations is guided not so much by path-dependent logic of collective memory as by present-day expediency and power games of different mnemonic actors. Therefore, this paper argues that the most observable trend in the cultures of memory in Lviv and Chernivtsi is pillarization, i.e., an agreement among external and internal memory entrepreneurs
and marketeers that each population group is the custodian of its “own” heritage. Nevertheless, ultimately the condition of heritage envisioned in the two cities seems to be an assimilationist “incorporation-to-the-core” model, where the core consists
of various versions of the Ukrainian national heritage.
But the cultures of memory in the cities also have common characteristic, namely, contemporary urbanites form the attitudes towards the past not through personal experience and family transmission of past memories but through prosthetic
memory, which relies on hearsay,media, literature, popular culture and the arts. When deliberate choice comes to the fore in building various identity projects, the work of stitching together contradictory historical representations is guided not so much by path-dependent logic of collective memory as by present-day expediency and power games of different mnemonic actors. Therefore, this paper argues that the most observable trend in the cultures of memory in Lviv and Chernivtsi is pillarization, i.e., an agreement among external and internal memory entrepreneurs
and marketeers that each population group is the custodian of its “own” heritage. Nevertheless, ultimately the condition of heritage envisioned in the two cities seems to be an assimilationist “incorporation-to-the-core” model, where the core consists
of various versions of the Ukrainian national heritage.