The universe is expanding, the world has gone global, and the US has launched a crusade to export the universal right to democracy to every part of the world. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the concept of universality is making a remarkable comeback in aesthetic and political theory. The meaning of the world, however, seems more contested than ever. Some denounce it as the ideological guise of particular interests, others as the conceptual equivalent of totalitarianism. But a growing number maintain that universality is an indispensable notion for any genuinely critical aesthetics and politics. This book consists of 12 contributors that examine how contemporary works of art in different media and genres influence, shape, or confront the political realm in both theory and practice by way of the universal. The topics of the essays include depictions of German unification, identity politics of aesthetic taste, contemporary uses of van Gogh, globalised photography, the infamous Danish cartoons, iconic architecture, cinematic representations of migration, the speeches of Nicolas Sarkozy and the interventions of contemporary art in the war in Afghanistan. From various theoretical points of departure, they all demonstrate the importance of the universal in the description of political aesthetic practice in a globalising world. Includes contributions by Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Mieke Bal, Kimberley DeFazio, Birgit Eriksson, Andrew Gibson, Rasmus Ugilt Holten Jensen, Stefan Jonsson and Ernesto Laclau.

What is the common denominator of Nordic artists and artist groups like Adel Abidin, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Das Beckwerk, Björk, Olafur Eliasson, Håkki, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Lise Harlev, Kristian von Hornsleth, Sami van Ingen, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Søren Lose, HuskMitNavn, Pekka Niskanen, Ellen Nyman, Øyvind Rimbereid, Annica Karlsson Rixon and Superflex? They all explore local identity formations and images of nationality and trans-nationality within a global context. The term 'Nordic' is indeed constructed historically for political, commercial and scientific reasons, but as any symbolic universe it obtains a material sense as a geopolitical 'place' through the collaborations between the nations involved. The Cartoon Crises and its many reverberations issuing from Denmark in 2005 became an important turning point for discussions on national as well as Nordic identities and values. The new cultural agenda in which local identities were branded for a global public, concurrent with attempts in domestic politics to create national safeguards toward globalisation, has indeed been noticed by artists during the last decade. In light of new global and transnational relations, contemporary art has requested a renegotiation of the frameworks constructing national and Nordic communities. All articles in this book discuss ways in which art seeks to redistribute national and cultural identity. Common to the artists examined is the drive to combine cultural images from multiple sources and several media. Thus, the book also explores how works that express new identity formations confront the conventional aesthetic production of meaning and, all in all, it contributes to the examination of how art reinvents itself when dealing with unresolved issues of political, national and cultural belonging.

This is the first comprehensive attempt at developing intercultural metalogues (ie: dialogues talking about how best to talk about intercultural problems). This book fills a remarkably empty spot in Nordic literature and philosophy on intercultural dialogue. In Part I: intercultural encounters, the metalogues stage encounters with "the other" on the Bosporus, on the Trans-Siberian and elsewhere, asking: how may meetings meet, be approached, talked about and created? Part II: intercultural hermeneutics uncovers the difficulties of understanding in intercultural encounters - philosophical, spiritual, and religious. Part III: intercultural rationalities discusses the relation between ideology and reason across cultures. Part IV: intercultural learning explores problematic ways in which it has been attempted to teach rather than to learn from others. Part V: intercultural blind spots seek the borders of the intercultural. To reflect the international and Nordic context in which the book was created, the metalogues appear in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and English. 24 researchers and practicians have contributed to Learning from the Other.

Telling stories is an essential part of being human: We tell stories about ourselves to show other people who we are and where we belong. Nations have stories to tell too - "stories of peoplehood" - that build and maintain a sense of national belonging and identity. The concept has been used to analyse identities, memories, and histories of individuals, communities and nations. But does it make sense to talk about peoplehood today? Can plural societies tell national stories without marginalizing their minorities? And is it even fair to assume that our individual self-narratives are coupled with shared cultural ones? In Narrating Peoplehood amidst Diversity, 16 internationally renowned scholars reflect on the nature and history of peoplehood and discuss how it forms part of national identities, public culture, and academic historiography. Based on theoretical analysis and empirical studies drawn from Latinos in the United States and African immigrants in France, and from multicultural stands in Canada to grand narratives in Danish history, the book is a timely contribution to the ongoing debate on belonging and identification in multicultural societies.

Book & CD. N F S Grundtvig (1783-1872) produced a major body of work in the fields of theology, education, literature, politics, and history. He was also a poet, a hymn-writer, and a translator. In particular, however, it is his educational writings that over the years have attracted international attention -- from the USA in the west to Japan in the east. In recognition of his influence the European Union called its adult education project 'the Grundtvig programme'. As part of its agenda to digitalise and translate some of this vast output, the Grundtvig Study Centre at the University of Aarhus is pleased to publish this broad selection of Grundtvig's writings on education in a completely new translation. The texts vary in form from poems and songs to articles in periodicals, introductions to books, an open letter to the Norwegians and a private letter to the King of Denmark. These texts, taken together, will provide a solid basis for international scholars without knowledge of Danish to be able to work closely with Grundtvig's ideas on education for the people. The accompanying CD (MP3 format) includes the texts read by Edward Broadbridge and the introductions by Clay Warren.

Just like national identities, European identity may be viewed as an imagined community, constituted by different levels of inclusion and exclusion along various border markers as those between included and excluded, between culturally dominating and dominated or between centre and periphery, natives and exiled. This book by researchers within the field of art and architecture, theatrical performance, literature and history, is an important contribution to the ongoing discussion of the borders of Europe, especially where large scale cultural borders towards the East are concerned. The Borders of Europe offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the notion of Europe and its regions, its origins and transformations while highlighting the aesthetics of hegemony and conceptions of centre and periphery in Europe, constructions of national, regional and artistic identity and the aesthetics and poetics of borders in literature and art.

An emerging interest in group guidance, collective forms, and integrative approaches is evident in Denmark and serves to contest a conventional individualistic mode of delivery. The latter being criticised for being both resource heavy and in risk of contributing to feelings of failure in those who are less successful with educational outcomes or employment. By showing how guidance activities can develop within the community generally, the book puts forward a decentred perspective. Career guidance is not an objective in itself; it is a means to support a person's participation in the economic society through education and work. The author shows how the participants in career guidance modify and change practice, thereby creating new possibilities for themselves and each other.

Historical political biography is a popular genre, capable of reaching a wide audience. It is also a genre closely associated with the modern nation-state. It often recounts the lives of great men in the service of the nation, but is there a way beyond this methodological nationalism? This book revisits biography as a historical and narrative genre. It explores and explicates the new analytical potentials of political biographical research in view of the recent transnational and sociological 'turns' in international and European political history. In doing so, the book attempts to facilitate exchange between scholars of biographical and 20th century European political historical research. With contributions by Birgitte Possing, Christoffer Kølvraa, Anne Deighton, Jan-Henrik Meyer, Jan van der Harst, Karl Christian Lammers, Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Thorsten Borring Olesen, Niels Wium Olesen, Johnny Laursen and Mark F Gilbert.

The articles in this second issue of "Romantik" demonstrate the crucial role of emergent regionalism and nationalism within the Romantic movement. But, the contributors also explore how the transmission of ideas and inspiration took place across national as well as linguistic boundaries, and how knowledge was transferred from one domain of knowledge to another. The articles provide a new map of such cultural exchanges in the Romantic era and the multiplicity of agencies that made them possible. "Romantik" continues to place the plurality of European Romanticisms within a comprehensive and multi-lingual context.

The Viking Age was a period of great economic complexity and experimentation in Scandinavia. By the end of the period, an ancient 'display' economy, based on ornaments of precious metal, had been largely replaced by counted money and national coinages. But this development was neither simple nor linear: for much of the Viking Age, several silver economies co-existed and interacted. The role of silver in Viking-age society and economy has recently developed into an exciting interdisciplinary topic for research. New evidence raises debates on the nature of valuables, bullion, monetisation, commodity money, and early urban trade. This book brings together an international group of archaeologists, historians and numismatists to draw a balance sheet of current research. Based on a symposium held in Aarhus, Denmark in 2008, it provides a structured basis for comparison, combining regional overviews with case-studies of significant sites or hoards. The book is dedicated to Dr Mark Blackburn (1953-2011) in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Viking-age numismatics and monetary history.

In this third volume deriving from the excavations of the Viking town of Kaupang of 2000-2003, a range of artefacts is presented along with a discussion of the town's inhabitants: their origins, activities and trading connexions. The main categories of artefact are metal jewellery and ornaments, gemstones, vessel glass, pottery, finds of soapstone, whetstones and textile-production equipment. The artefacts are described and dated, and their areas of origin discussed. The volume is lavishly illustrated. An exceptional wealth and diversity of artefacts distinguishes sites such as Kaupang from all other types of site in the Viking World. Above all, they reflect the fact that a large population of some 400-600 people lived closely together in the town, engaged in a comprehensive range of production and trade. The stratigraphically distinct layers from the first half of the 9th century allow us to put precise dates to the finds, and to the buildings and evidence of activities associated with them.

This book engages the complex relationship between family, religion and migration. Following '9/11' much research on migrants in western societies has focused on the public and political dimensions of religion. This volume starts out 'from below', exploring how religious ideas and practices take form, are negotiated and contested within the private domain of the home, household and family. Bringing together ethnographic studies from different parts of the world, it explores the role of religious ideas and practices in migrants' efforts to sustain, create and contest moral and social orders in the context of their every day life. The ethnographic analyses show how religious practices and imaginaries both enable engagement with new social settings and offer a means of connecting and reconnecting with people and places left behind. Offering a comparative perspective on the varying ways in which religious practices and notions of relatedness interconnect and shape each other, the book sheds new light on a contemporary global world inhabited by mobile bodies and souls.

This book questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The book also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and Woolf; and from W C Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and "real" life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, the book addresses current debates within the humanities.

From the screen of our laptops, and from the ubiquitous portable devices, smart phones, and media players, to the embedded computation in clothes, architecture and big urban screens, interfaces are everywhere. They are simultaneously demanding our attention and computing quietly in the background, turning action into interaction, and mediating our experience of and relations to the social and environmental. But how can aesthetics respond to this, and how do interfaces set the scene for artistic practices? This book is not another design manual but a critical investigation for readers interested in the aesthetic, cultural and political dimensions of interfaces. With contributions from leading researchers within the field, the book covers a wide range of aesthetic expressions -- including urban screens, wearable interfaces, performances, games, net-art, software art, and sound art, and discusses how new cultures evolve around, for example, open source or live coding. The volume critically investigates the aesthetics of inter-faces in ways that transcend the iconic surface of the graphical user interface and goes beyond the buttons. Ultimately the book develops interface aesthetics as an appropriate paradigm for a critical discussion of the computer.

Since the Danish architect Gerhardt Poulsen came to work for the French archaeological project at Delos in 1908, 73 Danish architects and students of architecture have worked for the French school at 14 different locations in Greece, (eg: Delos, Delphi, Athens, Epidauros, Tegea, Samothrace and other sites). The eight contributions present a mosaic of aspects concerning the Danish architects: Why did it all start, how did the architects work, what did their work mean to the French archaeologists and architects, and what influence their work with ancient architecture had on their future buildings, such as the Reykjavík City Theatre? The architects have worked on ancient temples, theatres and cities. The publication is the result of a seminar held in connection with an exhibition in 2008 at Thorvaldsen's Museum in Copenhagen.

In 1777, the Danish astronomer Thomas Bugge (1740-1815) was appointed professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Copenhagen. Keen to modernise the existing observatory on top of the Round Tower, he travelled through Germany to Holland and England to learn more about the state of astronomy and instrument-making in these countries. During his tour he kept a journal in which he noted what he saw, whom he met and which books and instruments he bought. He also included dozens of sketches and drawings, which greatly add to the historical value of his manuscript. The document lay undiscovered in the Royal Library at Copenhagen until 1969, when Kurt Møller Pedersen found it and prepared a provisional transcript. Forty years later, this journal is now made available and Bugge's drawings are complemented by portraits of academics and instrument-makers and by photographs of buildings and instruments, many of which survive in museums today. This richly illustrated and fully annotated edition of Bugge's travel journal will be of value for anyone who is interested in the history of science and technology in the 18th century.