En viktig del i diskussioner av kärnkraft är frågan om det avfall som skapas i driften av kärnreaktorer. Undersökningen har identifierat en förändring i uppfattningen av avfall under perioden mellan 1956, då kärnkraften var i sitt tidiga stadium, och 1980 då densamma har implementerats kommersiellt i Sverige. Uppsatsens syfte är att närmare förstå vilken roll diskussioner om kärnenergins restprodukter hade under denna förändring. Detta görs genom att använda sig av statens offentliga utredningar som material och användning av Sheila Jassanoff och Sang-Hyun Kims teoretiska ramverk sociotechnical imaginaries. Dessa används båda för att belysa utvecklingen av synen av avfallet som skapas av kärnenergin. Materialet visar hur avfallsfrågan diskuterades av experter och hur problematik eller icke-problematik togs upp till regeringen som hade beställt utredningen.

Love and Suffering in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s workThis study asks how love and suffering are expressed in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Light ofthe Flowing Godhead, with an emphasis on how the two are connected. What do the two termsmean and how do they influence each other and Mechthild’s understanding of them? Empirically,this study is based on Mechthild’s book, which was composed between about 1250 and 1283 inseven parts and distributed even while Mechthild was still working on later parts. The study alsodraws upon modern research to explain the wider religious contexts in which Mechthild wasworking, such as the clerical understanding of suffering as a means of contrition, and the use ofromantic and erotic metaphors to express a relation to God. In accordance with this, both love andsuffering are found to have shifting meanings depending on their respective contexts. Both havethe ability to bring humans closer to God, but, if used for the wrong purpose, can separate thehuman entirely from God. However, a shift in focus can be found over time. While the concept oflove becomes less allegorical and more abstract, the concept of suffering becomes more prevalentand central for Mechthild’s understanding of life and spirituality. At the same time, Mechthild’spositive relation to her faith and its power remains mostly unchanged.This study shows how Mechthild understands and interprets the themes of love and sufferingas a lay sister, woman and human being. Using Barbara Rosenwein’s term “emotionalcommunity”, Mechthild is found to be part of such a community, tying together academic religiousunderstandings of suffering and female mystics’ understandings of love. By examining one thinkerand drawing possible connections to a bigger, as of yet mostly unexplored, community, itcontributes to the overall picture of medieval mysticism.

Uppsatsen analyserar Rudolf Anderbergs (1892-1955) skrifter med avseende på vetenskapsuppfattning, människosyn, syn på psykets natur samt vad gäller intellektuella och vetenskapliga traditioner han förhåller sig till. Anderbergs liv och verksamhet samt hans skrifter, förstås i relation till såväl ett vetenskapshistoriskt som ett vidare kulturellt sammanhang. Anderbergs vetenskapsuppfattning placeras i ett positivistiskt och naturvetenskapligt inriktat sammanhang och kopplas samman med positivismens betydande vetenskapliga och kulturella inflytande i hans samtid, liksom med moderniteten och den svenska välfärdsstatens utveckling. Hans skrifter ses som uttryck för i första hand psykofysik, differentiell psykologi, samt intelligensundersökningar. Hans människouppfattning uppfattas naturalistiskt. Tron på naturvetenskap och tekniks kulturella och vetenskapliga betydelse ses som karaktäristiskt för hans skrifter, liksom med betoningen på psykologins betydelse för att lösa konkreta problem i arbetslivet samt i samhället i stort. Anderbergs skrifter ses i ljuset av den sociala ingenjörskonsten, liksom dess mål, människouppfattning, vetenskapsuppfattning och metoder. Hans skrifter kopplas i någon mån ihop med Nikolas Rose och begrepp som ”biopolitik” och ”biomakt”. En diskussion förs slutligen där Anderbergs vetenskapsuppfattning och människosyn, liksom dess konkreta kulturella uttryck i hans samtid, kritiskt diskuteras. Slutligen betonas samspelet mellan vetenskap, politik, sociala frågor och ”biomakt” i Sverige under första hälften av 1900-talet, som möjlig utgångspunkt för vidare studier. Keywords: Rudolf Anderberg, Psykologi,

This is a study of Epicurus garden in Athens in the 300´s bce, and the method of rehabilitation applied in the garden of Alnarp today at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science. The study aims to pinpoint areas of comparison in methods of healing in a garden environment, in Epicurus garden versus the rehabilitating garden of Alnarp. To make this comparison I have split my analysis into four parts, the conversational therapy, the hierarchy, the garden and its community, and finally the isolation from society. This is a qualitative study, and methods used is, amongst others, hermeneutics.The essay ends with a final discussion of the finds, which conclude that although very different contexts in both time and space, it is easy to find similarities between the two.

The purpose of this study is to address a period in Swedish political history when the politicization of the Church of Sweden was formed, a politicization that still exist. How this period came about is viewed through the writings and speeches of an important member of the Social democratic party, Arthur Engberg, who became Minister of Education and Religion in the first Swedish social democratic government in 1932. Prior to being a minister, Engberg first argued to immediately separate the church from the state. Later, he argued that the church first must be reformed by the state before the separation can take place. The question addressed in the study is, if Engberg continued his efforts as a minister, 1932­–1939, or if he instead, as some implies, aligned with the church? The most authoritative literature when studying Engberg is Beltzén Arthur Engberg – publicist och politiker (Arthur Engberg – publicist and politician) from 1973 which suggest that he did follow his early intensions. This is however contradicted by a contemporary prominent party member, Rickard Lindström in an article in Tiden 1946. The method applied to study this question was to research Engberg’s writings and speeches in a chronological order and to put them into context with the parallel processes of the formation of the Christian Socialist Group and with the internal reformation of the church.  The conclusions drawn by the study is that Engberg became a defender of the church as the cultural institution he wanted it to be. He had come to realize that the church could be accepted and even useful for managing the religious matter of the state. As such it must be controlled by the state and a separation between state and church is not necessary in the foreseeable future.

This essay examines visions of the future in Alex Garlands 2015 film Ex Machinausing critical futures studies and posthumanist theories. The aim is to make visible howfutures are constructed and how artificial bodies are coded based on ideas of the future.Through an image and discourse analysis, the essay shows how “Western” society isstructured and how it is expected to be structured in the future. While the previous researchmainly focuses on phenomenology and gender, this essay shows that intersectional methodscan be helpful in making visible how power structures influence how we construct and viewbodies. In addition, the analysis shows how images of the future are multifaceted andcomplex, while at the same time they reproduce hegemonic visions of the past, present andfuture. In summary, this essay shows how the visions of the future in Ex Machina areprimarily based on a “Western” scientific tradition that reproduces colonial and patriarchalideals, though they are consistently challenged by the existence and actions of the cyborgs.

Methods of timekeeping have changed drastically throughout history and especially in the last century, as has humanity’s relationship to nature. Building upon existing research into the history of clocks and clock-time this study sketches a long-term chronology with a novel environmental, sensory, and aesthetic analysis. The connection between everyday time(keeping) and the environment, as well as the significant role of objects in how we tell the time. The interactions with our surroundings is explored in order to understand the material role of technology, techno-aesthetics, and eco-social cues. The thesis investigates the aesthetic and sensory dimensions of historical timekeeping, particularly with regards to sound and vision. The thesis follows a chronological narrative so that the significant shifts in European timekeeping can be identified at particular moments in history, as well as demonstrating the overall arc of change. It begins with the lead up to the invention of mechanical clocks followed by a case study – conducted using imaginative phenomenology – of an Uppsala student in 1482 interacting with the clock-bell in his local timescape. After sketching the significant inventions and shifts in the proceeding centuries, there is a comparative case study that conducts a phenomenological autoethnography of the author’s timekeeping practices in Uppsala in 2022 and aesthetic analysis of personal clock devices. This seeks to identify what characterises timekeeping in the Anthropocene. Throughout, the thesis compares the experiences of ‘time foraging’ as opposed to ‘self-referential timekeeping’ to explore how different timekeeping affects our relations on an ecological and social scale.

No description available.

This essay examines the role of metaphoric thought at the symposium Beyond reductionism: New perspectives in the life sciences organised by the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler in 1968. The symposium can be interpreted in part as a protest against the metaphor of man as a machine, which was connected by the participants to reductionism in a broader, cosmological sense. Metaphors were widely utilised by the participants to communicate scientific and philosophical ideas, but the use of metaphors was also criticised for over-simplifying a complex reality. Different variants of general system theory were explored by some participants as a way of avoiding the limits of specific metaphoric imagery. Analogies based on modern linguistics were repeatedly used to explain biological and behavourial processes, as an alternative to the established mechanistic, reductionist models. Reductionism was also connected to existential concepts of meaning and alienation in connection with the concurrent student riots. Using Max Black's interactive theory of metaphor, this essay argues that the symposium produced a more coherent anti-reductionist position than is apparent at first sight, while also highlighting the importance of metaphors and analogies in the life sciences discourse of the late 1960's.

With the intention of analysing changes in natural history, human variation and the exercise of imperial power across the British Caribbean, this study poses the following questions: How did changes in natural history impact the understandings and applications of human variety, 1700–1750? How did natural history influence the exercise of imperial power in the British Caribbean? The study posits that there is a connection between natural history and imperial power. Through the contexts of the history of natural history and the history of fear, biopolitics acts as a theoretical framework wherethrough two themes of natural history, "spirits" and weaponry, are analysed using the travel writings of Hans Sloane, Henry Barham, Charles Leslie, Griffith Hughes and Patrick Browne. The study finds that natural history mainly manifested itself as a tool of imperial power by manufacturing two primary ways in which humans could, on demand, be excluded from the realm of humanhood. The first consists of an early eighteenth-century "moral conditional humanhood", manifesting as a symptom of natural history’s theological focus. The second is a mid-eighteenth-century "biological conditional humanhood", being a symptom of that time’s natural-historical focus on biology to determine human variation. The study finds support for a connection between natural history and the exercise of imperial power, for instance, concerning how fear is emphasised in the early eighteenth-century – to hide the violence exercised by Europeans – to then become hidden in the mid-eighteenth-century. In addition, human variation presented itself with a malleability, with the enslaved population being more malleable than the native population.