Per Wisselgren

History of participatory media : politics and publics, 1750-2000

This book argues for a historical perspective on issues relating to the notion of participatory media. Working from a broad concept of media – including essays on the 19th century press, early soun ...

From Utopian One-worldism to Geopolitical Intergovernmentalism : UNESCO's Department of Social Sciences as an International Boundary Organization, 1946-1955

As a new coordinating organization in the rapidly expanding international field of post-World War II social science, UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences (SSD), set up in 1946, played a central r ...

Social Reform Collaborations and Gendered Academization: Three Swedish Social Science Couples at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

“The chapter focuses on three social science couples in Sweden at the turn of the twentieth century, of which the men are all well-known as pioneers of academic economics and sociology: Knut Wicksell, Gustaf Steffen, and Gustav Cassel. Far less known in the history of the social sciences are their wives: Anna Wicksell, Oscara Steffen, and Johanna Cassel. Hence, the basic questions posed in this context are if and, if so, how they contributed to their husbands’ careers? By doing so, the essay emphasizes, on the one hand, the “private,” gender-relational and routinized everyday practices of scientific knowledge production and, on the other hand, its wider historical, social and cultural contexts. The main argument developed is that such a perspective highlights the cognitive role of the contemporary social reform movement as an arena, which offered collaborative spaces for male as well as female initiatives important to the academization of social science. But it is also shown that the movement at the same time was a social and cultural context where traditional gender values and practices were both reproduced and reconstructed.”