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This essay analyses the development of field and discipline formation in Sweden. A specific case is presented regarding the differentiation of the history of ideas, idéhistoria, and the delineation of the history of knowledge, kunskapshistoria, between 2015 and 2020. The distinction and differentiation between these disciplines has been contested by academics in related fields, who have questioned whether and what is new or distinct in the study of the history of knowledge and what prior disciplines and fields of study it draws on.  The aim of this study is to examine how the relationship between the two research fields is undertood by the academics that work in these fields themselves. The research question is: How is the interaction between the history of ideas and the history of knowledge described by Swedish scientists in papers published between 2015 and 2020? The study is based on scientific papers, anthologies, and book reviews written by Swedish scientists and mainly published in Swedish academic journals. The study shows that both research fields are developing towards eclecticism and internationalisation, both striving to participate in a broader international academic discourse. In both fields more publications are now written in English and fewer in Swedish. However, the predomination of English-language publications is more apparent in the new field of the history of knowledge. With respect to the history of ideas, the formative effects of institutionalisation as well as the importance of academic due due diligence i.e. engaging with the research in near-adjacent fields of study such as the study of the history of science, the history of medicine, and environmental history is apparent in the academic literature. The study indicates that Sweden has a potential of becoming a new research arena of some significance for generative and cooperatiion in humanistic science and thus of a general interest. / I studien analyseras samspelet mellan idéhistoria och kunskapshistoria i Sverige 2015 - 2010. Undersökningen berör generella frågeställningar om hur forskningsfält och discipliner skapas och påverkar varandra. Medan idéhistoria funnits i Sverige i snart ett hundra år har kunskapshistoria etablerats i Sverige först under de senaste fem åren. Detta ämne har av sina företrädare förklarats vara ett nytt oberoende forskningsfält med långt gående ambitioner ambitioner som sträcker sig över disciplingränserna. Dessa uttalanden ifrågasattes av forskare inom idé- och vetenskapshistoria om vad som var nytt inom det nya forskningsfältet och på vems axlar detta stod på. Syftet med denna studie var att analysera hur forskare från de två forskningsfälten upplevt påverkan mellan dem. Forskningsfrågan var hur påverkan mellan idéhistoria och kunskapshistoria framgått och beskrivits i publikationer skrivna av svenska forskare inom ämnena under perioden. Materialet som använts var uppsatser, antologier, recensioner och institutionernas utbildningsmaterial från denna tid, huvudsakligen publicerade i svenska tidskrifter. Studien visade att bägge forskningsfälten breddat sig och visat ökad ambition att delta i det internationella vetenskapliga samtalet. Här fanns dock en gradskillnad mellan ämnena. En möjlig inlåsningseffekt av att använda sig av svenska som språk diskuteras som en konsekvens av den äldre svenska forskningstraditionen. Fler publikationer inom idéhistoria skrivs dock numera på engelska och färre på svenska medan kunskapshistoria redan från början haft ett utpräglat internationellt fokus. Betydelsen av institutionalisering och de förmåner detta medför understryks. Studiens resultat visar att påverkan mellan kunskapsfälten under den studerade perioden generellt var liten. Ett undantag har varit den ovan nämnda kritiken från forskare inom idé- och vetenskapshistoria mot de anspråk som framförts av företrädarna för kunskapshistoria på att nu presentera ett verkligt nytt forskningsfält. Enligt kritikerna har man därvid bortsett från den utveckling som skett inom närliggande områden under de senaste åren. Vikten av akademisk due diligence har lyfts fram som en viktig princip inom forskning. / <p>By distance (Zoom)</p>

Over centuries, Hmong people have moved from mountain to mountain, home to home, country to country, crossing rivers and valleys in search of an escape from oppression. The Txiv Xaiv (Plig) ritual and chant has survived serial exodus and diaspora that Hmong people have experienced. This ritual encodes Hmong historical and cosmological understandings as an oral text, passed down from master to student, and performed at funerals to apply that understanding in the management of souls--ultimately to send them home. The Txiv Xaiv (Plig) serves as a glue, connecting the past generations to the generation of today and the generations of tomorrow. A funeral without a Txiv Xaiv is like a tree without its roots. Its ability to preserve Hmong history, morals, and traditions is unparalleled, but the dispersion of Hmong communities across a now global diaspora threatens the vitality of this oral text. An ethnographic film constitutes a critical and central empirical element of this thesis. This film, entitled Returning Home, draws on the affordances of visual and sonic mediums to both depict this oral text and the practices associated with it, and to unpack the cosmology of personhood encoded in the text, which Hickman (2014) calls "ancestral personhood". The film centers on a particular form of the Txiv Xaiv Plig that was preserved by a paramount Master, Shong Ger Thao, who passed down a critical version of the ritual to the director of Returning Home (and author of this thesis) before he passed away. This version of the ritual has the unique capacity to manage the soul of a person who did not receive a complete funeral and proper burial when they passed away, such as the post-1975 exodus from Laos, when Hmong families had to flee for their lives and many people were killed in the jungle along the way. By fate or coincidence (most Hmong would err on the side of fate), the first time that the director of this film was called upon to perform this Txiv Xaiv Plig was for an ex-post-facto funeral for Master Shong Ger's wife, Kia Yang, who had passed away during the lock-down phase of the Covid-10 pandemic, when large gatherings (necessary for a proper Hmong funeral) were not permitted. This film draws on this poetic circle of the passing down of knowledge and putting it into practice, in order to demonstrate the value of the knowledge that Master Shong Ger had preserved, specifically through the use of that knowledge to manage his own late wife's soul, thus completing the circle from one generation to the next in Master Shong Ger's family. This project--the written thesis in conjunction with the film--advances a "Hmong Oral Knowledge" approach that is critical to both understanding and preserving Hmong cosmology. This approach puts Hmong cosmology and philosophy into dialogue with scholarship being produced about Hmong communities across the world which tends to treat Hmong ideas as mere data-to-be-analyzed. The thesis focuses on the substance of Master Shong Ger Thao's philosophy (derived from Hmong oral ritual), in order to "look" and not just "see" (MacDougall 2019) human experience from a Hmong theoretical perspective. Given the primacy of oral and physically performative ritual practice, this thesis employs the medium of film in order to engage with Hmong ritual knowledge and practice in its own terms. The film provides a 'thick depiction' of these practices, and seeks to explicate the cosmology of the 'three souls' model of personhood that underpins these practices, while also focusing on the legacy of Master Shong Ger Thao, who cultivated and preserved the details of this cosmology and the oral texts that encode it.

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This thesis presents Hegel’s account of abstract ‘understanding’ (Verstand) and asserts that his thought is to be read as primarily presenting a critique of abstract understanding. Verstand involves the methodological supposition of a self-subsistent fundament of what it speaks of, and hence the critique of understanding is the critique of the supposition of self-subsistent fundaments. Grasping his account and reading him in its critical light yields a very different image of Hegel than the caricature of ‘totalizing systems’. The dimension of the Verstandeskritik has been relatively neglected in Hegel-reception and misunderstandings result from trying to ‘understand’ Hegel, by overlooking the topic of ‘understanding’ in his work as critique. Many caricatures result from understanding Hegel as a proponent of what he actually critiques (‘absolute knowing’ is often understood as a mega-understanding). The thesis then addresses the historically influential criticisms raised by his contemporary, F.J.W. Schelling, to give a voice to a Hegel that has been hitherto drowned out by caricatures that began with Schelling.

This dissertation examines how the chaotic social space of post-civil war England inspired new ideas of the ideal social structure and its ability to create social and political stability. Focusing on three non-fiction prose tracts, Margaret Cavendish’s Worlds Olio (1655), Thomas Traherne’s Christian Ethicks (1675), and Gerrard Winstanley’s Law of Freedom (1652), I use the concept of “space-making,” or “how texts aided readers in producing the space in which they understood humanity to be living” (Sauter 47), to engage three distinct perspectives on social cohesion. I situate my study within the larger context of the scientific revolution, and what Michael Sauter calls the “spatial reformation,” whereby humanist thinkers embraced Euclidean geometry to “make” space in a manner akin to God. I argue that, through their writing, Cavendish, Traherne, and Winstanley structure theoretical space to control, guide, or influence how social beings relate to one another and to the state. In doing so they make social space heterogeneous. The authors create theoretical spaces in which alternatives to England’s social structure are outlined. These alternatives reflect the subjectivity and interests of the space-maker, and while each author wishes to establish social cohesion in post-civil war England, the spaces they create reveal unique perspectives on social responsibility, free will, and self-preservation, leading readers to question the benefits and drawbacks of social cohesion. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines three works of non-fiction prose by Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, and Gerrard Winstanley, all of whom were seventeenth-century writers. I examine the ways that social structure in post-civil war England in fact rejects the geometric premise popular among canonical natural philosophers that all space (including the spaces we inhabit as human beings) was homogeneous. Instead, I argue that homogeneous space is oppressive in a social context, while also acknowledging that heterogeneous social spaces (spaces that are divided and have distinct "parts") also tended to limit the free will of social actors, particularly those in the lower classes. I examine themes related to free will, self-interest, and subjectivity, specifically with respect to how these themes can both create or detract from social cohesion.

For civilization and citizenship: emancipation, empire, and the creation of the black citizen-soldier tradition examines the origins and evolution of black military service and its relation to how black and white Americans understood citizenship from the Civil War Era to the First World War. This dissertation analyzes how different generations of black soldiers pursued full, civic citizenship through their military service and formed their own vision of citizenship rooted in military service and how the War Department sought to deal with the tensions created by a biracial Army. While it asserts that a separate, black citizen-soldier tradition linking service and citizenship emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, this dissertation argues that this tradition was informed by and rooted in American military culture and traditions. Concentrating on the nexus of American racial ideologies, War Department policies, and black aspirations for citizenship, this dissertation not only reveals the early, firm connection between military service and citizenship among African Americans, but also reveals the ironic nature of the black citizen-soldier tradition. Far from simply examining black soldier’s failures to translate their service into fuller, civil status, For civilization and citizenship analyzes the unique ways in which black soldiers resisted American racial ideologies and the rise of Jim Crow as well as the overall Americanness of black efforts to attain citizenship. In contrast to other studies’ emphasis on either direct, nonviolent or armed resistance to white supremacy, this dissertation proposes that the black citizen-soldier tradition represented a distinct, powerful form of black resistance that manifested as accommodation to American civilization’s institutions and imperial agendas while seeking to fundamentally change their meaning and ethos. As black soldiers served in the armies of the Union in the American Civil War, those of the western frontier in the postbellum era, and those of overseas empire at the end of the nineteenth century, they confirmed their status as Americans while countering the dominant racial tropes of American civilization. For citizenship and civilization reveals the links between emancipation, empire, and changing meanings of citizenship in the U.S. through the black citizen-soldier tradition.

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