<p>. This thesis consists of an introduction and four previously published articles. The joint empirical focus is papermaking based on textile rags as fibre raw material. Furthermore the physical environment is central in the studies. The relationship between continuity and change is a prevailing theme. The thesis also pays attention to the use of different sorts of rags and to the connection between this kind of papermaking and the textile industry.</p><p>The overall purpose is to throw new light upon the paper industry based on rags – a part of early industry seldom mentioned in historical surveys of the industrialization process in Sweden. The aim is also to question the prevalent Swedish historical writing commissioned by the branch, characterized by set divisions between different phases of technical and industrial development, from simple craft to modern industry. One of these borderlines has been drawn between papermaking by hand and papermaking by machine, with the 1830s as the selected transition period. By studying and analysing changes in the traditional and seemingly static papermaking as well as the opposite: the traditional that has lingered in the new, this thesis shows that the course of events was much more complicated than that. An outcome of the studies is that the industrialization of the rag based paper industry has been a complex, uneven and prolonged process.</p><p>The first main part of the thesis consists of two Swedish regional studies centred on the province of Östergötland in a long-time perspective. The focus is mainly on the long continuity of papermaking by hand, which was carried out between 1628 and 1968. The study shows that a variety of types and sizes of mills regarding ownership, forms of production, location, paper qualities and techniques can be identified. Continuity was the dominating feature but within this framework technological and industrial change also took place.</p><p>The second main part of the thesis has a Nordic perspective and deals with a shorter period, mainly 1830-1870. One study examines the introduction of the paper-machine and the establishment of the first machine-made paper mills in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland with special attention given to the Swedish mill Holmen in Norrköping and the Finnish Tammerfors mill, both situated in textile mill towns. A second Nordic study surveys hand-made paper mills founded during and after the time when the paper-machine technology had been established. As the studies show, two parallel development tracks were prevalent in the paper industry in the Nordic countries during the period 1830-1870 – papermaking by machine and papermaking by hand.</p><p>The first paper machines were imported from Britain to some of the oldest and largest paper mills. The introduction of the new technology led to changes in for instance the paper mill buildings and the organization of work regarding the papermaking process. In the preparatory and finishing work manual methods remained, and as before it employed mostly women.</p><p>At the same time, papermaking by hand continued to change and new hand-made paper mills were founded until as late as the 1890s. The study discusses possible explanations, among them growing markets for special qualities and combinations with other branches of industry.</p><p>All the studies show a connection between hand-made paper mills and wool mills on one hand, and machine-made paper mills and cotton and linen mills on the other hand. The paper industry based on rags could in fact be characterized as a kind of textile industry</p>

In the last decade, scholars have recognized economic development and modernization as crucial themes in the history of the twentieth century and the ‘global Cold War.’ Yet while historians have written lucid histories of the role of the social sciences in American foreign policy in the Third World, far less is known on the Soviet Union’s ideological and material support during the same period for countries like Egypt, India, Ethiopia, Angola, or – most prominently – Afghanistan. This dissertation argues that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is best understood as the final and most costly of a series developmental interventions staged in that country during the latter half of the twentieth century by Afghans, Soviets, Americans, Germans and others. Cold War-era Afghanistan is best understood as a laboratory for ideas about the nation-state and the idea of a ‘national economy.’ One can best understand Afghanistan during that period less through a common but ahistorical ‘graveyard of empires’ narrative, and more in terms of the history of the social sciences, the state system in South and Central Asia, and the ideological changes in ideas about the state and the economy in 20th century economic thought. Four chapters explore this theme, looking at the history of the Soviet social sciences, developmental interventions in Afghanistan prior to 1978, a case study of Soviet advisors in eastern Afghanistan, and Soviet interventions to protect Afghan women. Making use of new materials from Soviet, German, and American archives, and dozens of interviews with former Soviet advisors, this dissertation makes a new and meaningful contribution to the historical literature on the Soviet Union, Central Asia, and international history.

This thesis explores how burglars and burglary in London were understood in cultural, criminological, legal, political, and economic discourse during the period 1860-1939, demonstrating how the ideas about crime and the criminal circulating in these domains were mutually constitutive. Specifically, it identifies how characterisations of burglary in visual and written forms of media — encompassing legal and criminological documents, as well as those produced by the press and commercial advertising, and in fiction, theatre, and film — cultivated a range of attitudes towards the crime to a greater or lesser extent. Encompassing not only fear-mongering and sympathetic representations, but also those designed to be exciting, to challenge preconceptions, and to entertain, I argue that these conflicting attitudes towards burglary and burglars emerged in response to specific changes in the cultural landscape: the advent of mass literacy and corresponding interest in narratives of crime that reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of an audience diverse of class, age, and gender; the commercial imperatives of the insurance and entertainment industries as the middle classes expanded, including the development of household insurance and the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre; debates surrounding women’s increasing social and sexual agency and their alignment with particular crimes; and the evolution of new modes of policing and regulation. The thesis thereby uses the topic of burglary to illuminate a broader range of contemporary preoccupations and experiences with gender relations, class structures and stereotypes, and the moral authority of state and society. By approaching burglary as a focus of interactions not only between police, criminal, and victim, but also between the market, consumers, and the state, this thesis uncovers new terrain upon which crime intersected with everyday lives historically.

The heterogeneous field of posthuman theory allows for an account of community under the convergence of late capitalism and high technology and its spread to a global scale. Spanning bioconservative fears of a potential loss of agency and a human ‘essence’ through advances in technology, ‘transhumanist’ hopes for a biological transformation that would fulfil liberal goals for human development, as well as postmodern, feminist interpretations of the posthuman as instantiating a liberating break with liberal ideology and patriarchal structures, theories of the posthuman offer a productive starting point for exploring the transformations in understandings of human subjectivity and community at the turn of the twenty-first century. Placing the concept of community against a background of past totalitarianism and a possible future of an uncontested globalised neoliberal regime that high technology risks intensifying, the present study enquires into the possibility of a community that would escape the metaphysical logic of mastery subtending both past and present models of community and suggests that problematizing representations of the creation of what a strand in contemporary philosophy terms a non-totalising ‘communauté désoeuvrée’ and implicit proposals not for the revival of community as a teleological ‘oeuvre’, but for its rewriting may be found in works by Maurice G. Dantec, Michel Houellebec, and Antoine Volodine, works which have been labelled posthuman themselves by virtue of their incorporation of posthuman themes or structures that come in the shape of representations and problematisations of high technology and its intersection with late capitalism and narrative structures that mimic or subvert conceptions of subjectivity that can loosely be termed posthuman. These novelists write in a context of an ideological, technological, and commercial constraint that hampers literary and political agency and which is problematized both implicitly and explicitly in the use these writers make of representations of violence and literary strategies such as irony, ambiguity, and hermeticism. These representations and strategies, it will be suggested, could be read as subtle attempts to bypass those constraints and restore the potential of literary production to comment on and even intervene in the creation of community in a posthuman age.

This thesis offers a political geography of unconventional energy development through a study of a particular fossil fuel resource called oil shale. Having long occupied a critical place in the politics and economy of certain states, most notably in Estonia, oil shale is now widely known as an ‘unconventional’ resource that is yet to become technically possible, commercially viable and socially acceptable to exploit. Following the movement through which oil shale becomes both unconventional and conventional, the thesis traces the resource through a series of geo-scientific, economic and political interventions. This study is based on analysis of technical literature and policy documents along with ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and site visits conducted in Estonia, Colorado, Utah, Jordan, London and Brussels. Drawing together relational accounts of natural resources in political ecology and economic geography with insights from Science and Technology Studies, this project both contributes to critical research on the carbon economy and to recent debates on the concepts of materiality, anticipation, and marketization in social sciences. The thesis proposes a relational conceptualization of resource materiality, situating oil shale in multiple and conflicting forms which derive from geographically disparate practices in both resource assessment and technological development. The future of oil shale exploitation is not pre-determined by the process of global resource decline, nor is it precluded by international demands to move towards lower-carbon futures. Rather, it is determined through the conjunction of different future-oriented economic and political calculations that are entangled with resource materials and associated technological systems. Developing a non-essentialist account of markets as socio-technically distributed arrangements, the thesis argues that these rival calculations influence the design of market rules for both energy and emissions trading. The thesis concludes that what counts as ‘unconventional’ is not given, but continues to be both created and contested at the same time as it is ‘conventionalized’.

Arbetet handlar om en studie i alternativa fyllnadsmaterial för mindre fanerskador. Syftet är att tydliggöra och vidga konservatorns palett av alternativa fyllnadsmaterial och skapa riktlinjer för lagning av mindre fanerskador med hjälp av dessa material. Parallellt med min undersökande del diskuteras även andra frågor såsom vilka värden möbler bär på samt vikten av att skapa ett nätverk med informationsutbyte för vidareutveckling av metoder och material inom möbelkonservering. I arbetet redogör jag för generella skillnader mellan möbelkonservering och möbelrestaurering. Undersökningen baserar sig på en analys av svar från mitt frågeformulär där svarspersonernas erfarenheter och praktiska undersökningar delvis har legat till grund för urvalet av material jag valt att gå vidare med i mina undersökningar. I dessa undersökningar testade jag olika fyllnadsmaterial på provplattor fanerade med björk och valnöt. I arbetet redogör jag för traditionella fyllnadsmaterial och i slutsatsen redogör jag för de material som jag anser kan utvecklas till att bli lämpliga komplement till de traditionella fyllnadsmaterialen, till exempel Aquazol 500 och Arbocel. / This is a study of alternative filling materials for smaller damages in veneer. The aim is to document and expand the palette of filling materials for furniture conservators and to create guidelines for the conservation and restoration of smaller damages in veneer. Parallel to this study I discuss other issues, such as the different values that can be found in an object. The importance of networking and the giving and sharing of information which is essential for the development of new techniques and materials. The difference between furniture conservation and furniture restoration is presented briefly. My tests are based on an analysis of the answers from my questionnaire where the respondents experience and practical skills serve as a partial base for the choice of materials that I have chosen to examine. My tests were executed on both birch and walnut veneer. I describe the pros and cons of traditional filling materials and in the conclusion, I present the filling materials that I believe can be a good complement to the traditional filling materials, such as Aquazol 500 and Arbocel.

The U.S. Southwest is a semi-arid region affected by numerous environmental problems. Chicana/o communities have been directly affected by such problems, especially ever since the region was annexed from Mexico by the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. From this moment onwards they lost their environmental sovereignty, mostly through their dispossession of the natural resources.   This environmental humanities dissertation focuses on the ethics, politics, and practices around water (management), for water is a key natural resource and a central element of Chicana/o cultural identity. It explores the ways in which Chicana/o culture is interconnected with environmental practices and sites in subaltern literary works about the Chicana/o experience. It investigates how the hegemonic Anglo-American environmental, political, and economic practices have challenged and undermined Chicana/o culture, identity, and wellbeing, and how this has been addressed in fiction; and it questions whether establishing such a connection adds any useful insights to the larger discussion on the global socio-environmental crisis. This dissertation also analyzes the writer activist character of the subaltern narratives of the corpus, with attention to the relevance of rhetoric in subverting and constructing environmental discourses and ethics.   By examining regional and border narratives, as well as fiction and non-fiction narratives about the socio-environmental struggles of other ethnic minorities in the Southwest and in other parts of the world, this dissertation puts literature about the Chicana/o experience in a regional, national, and transnational context. It moreover explores the pivotal role of literature in reclaiming environmental sovereignty, in asserting cultural identities, and in countering the environmental crisis by imagining alternative managerial practices and socio-environmental relations, as much as in challenging cultural hegemonies. / <p>QC 20170508</p>

I föreliggande avhandling undersöker Hultman hur bränsleceller och vätgas underolika tidpunkter beskrivits som delar i ett framtida energisystem 1978 – 2005. Detempiriska materialet som analyseras är statliga utredningar, böcker, rapporter,tidningsartiklar och riksdagstryck. Syftet är att undersöka vilka aktörer sombeskrev tekniken, på vilket sätt tekniken konstruerades samt hur dessa förflyttadesoch förändrades under olika tidsperioder. Avhandlingens empiri undersökstillsammans med teorier om utopier och förväntningar på teknik samt tidigareforskning om svensk energi- och miljöpolitik. Avhandlingen är indelad i kronologiskt strukturerade kapitel vilka länkas sammanav analytiska platåer. I slutkapitlet diskuteras resultaten av den historiskaförändringen från visionerna om vätgassamhällen till en vätgasekonomi i treteman. Inom det första temat analyseras omdaningar över tid med fokus påaktörer, argument och teknik. I det andra temat fokuseras hur föreställningar omtekniken byggdes upp till nya höjder mellan 2000-2005. Bland annat diskuterashur tekniska, ekonomiska, miljörelaterade och säkerhetsmässiga förväntningarskapades med hjälp av starka metaforer som vatten, vägkartan och marknaden.Dessa förväntningar gjordes på olika platser och lånades mellan lokaliteter. I dettredje temat diskuteras vätgasekonomin som en ekologiskt modern utopi. I ensådan extrapoleras framtiden utifrån en ökning i takten av teknikförändringarna,men samtidigt ska samhällsstrukturerna konserveras. / At the turn of the millennium, high expectations were connected to a technologycalled fuel cells. It was said that it could contribute in a significant way to solvingthe problem of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere andreverse the greenhouse effect. But this was not the first time fuel cells andhydrogen has been described as a technology for the future and connected todifferent kind of utopias. On the contrary, this technology has a history ofexpectations connected to it and in this dissertation the period 1978 – 2005 isanalysed with focus on reoccurring arguments, main actors and how descriptionsof expectations move between different locations and different periods of time.These questions are answered with an analysis of empirical material that containsgovernmental reports, mass media articles, scientific reports as well as field notesfrom an participatory study. In this dissertation the analysis is read together withprevious research regarding Swedish energy- and environmental politics as wellas international research about fuel cell and hydrogen. The investigation is alsoinformed by theories about utopia and sociology of expectations. The main conclusion to be drawn from the historical period 1978 – 2005 is thatthe utopia hydrogen and fuel cells are said to be parts of change, from differentpossible hydrogen societies to one hydrogen economy. This change can beexemplified with changing roles of science, technology and the state as well ashow former environmental activists and political parties change their values.

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