Associate professor in History. My research focuses on gender and preparedness, housewives, housekeeping in WWII, civil defence, working life - in rural and urban areas
Preparedness
I obtained my doctorate from Stockholm University in 2005 with a thesis entitled In National Preparedness with Mrs Loyal: On the Need for Women’s Labour in Sweden during the Second World War.
2024-2027 - PI of the research project ”From Women’s Preparedness to Everyday Prepping: Gender in the Mobilisation of Tasks for the Nation in Times of Crisis, 1939 to the present day”. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR). The aim is to analyse how preparedness is constructed in the context of different historical periods, from the Second World War to the present day. We trace how crisis is articulated in different eras and contexts, a pattern emerges in which the home and care work are repeatedly mobilised as a central part of preparedness. During the 1940s, a section for cultural "folkberedskap" was established within the National Information Board (SIS), with the remit to “promote the intellectual and moral resilience of the Swedish people”, where social preparedness also proved necessary. The need for social care in times of war and preparedness is overwhelming, actiivities with the home, housekeeping and housewives at the centre. Today, we see how home preparedness is increasingly being promoted by commercial actors through products, package solutions and advertising messages. Here, security is packaged as a commodity, and a form of preparedness is emerging that is closely intertwined with consumption. We examine the role of care in preparedness, which has been crucial for societies’ preparedness, which has been crucial to the resilience of societies. At the same time, it is work that is undervalued and unpaid. What notions of gender are taken for granted by the state in campaigns on national preparedness? Who is assumed to have a role to play for the nation? What opportunities and obligations/responsibilities are placed on different groups? How is history used in narratives of national preparedness? The project is being carried out in collaboration with Linda Sandberg, Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at Umeå University.
Rural labour markets, structural transformation and location policy in northern Sweden
2015-2017 - PI of the research project ”From state control to private entrepreneurship? The transformation of labour market policy and its effects on women in sparsely populated rural areas of northern Sweden”, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ). In this project, we have studied the conditions of local labour markets in relation to global migration and how this complicates the picture of segregation based on gender, class and ethnicity. In my sub-study, I interviewed women who found employment following the establishment of the clothing manufacturer Algots Nord AB in Västerbotten between 1972 and 1982, asking them what this initiative meant to them.My research also focuses on regional and rural labour markets in sparsely populated areas of northern Sweden, where opportunities for paid employment are diminishing as the public sector scales back its operations.
Kiruna City Transformation
Another research interest centres on the study of memory-making and historiography. In a project on Kiruna’s City transformation (The Perfect City 2.0 – Building the Sustainable Kiruna, PI: Malin Rönnblom), I have studied representations of Kiruna’s history in the context of the ongoing urban transformation. Which version of history, and whose history, should shape the new Kiruna? See: Memory-Making in Kiruna: Representations of Colonial Pioneerism in the Transformation of a Scandinavian Mining Town (2019).