Fredrik Norén

Umeå University | UMU · Humlab

This paper explores what was explicitly defined as ‘political’ during the post-war era, from 1945 to 1989, in two Swedish newspapers. Based on all extracted text blocks containing the term ‘political’, two research questions are examined: How has the use of the term “political” evolved over time? In which contexts was the concept inscribed, and how...

Based on digital readings of all records from the Swedish parliament 1867–2019, we examine how the concept ‘propaganda’ was used in the debates. To track the concept, we have extracted word window co-occurrences, bigrams, and keywords. Research on the history of propaganda in liberal democracies has emphasized that the meaning of the concept was op...

This chapter studies the exchanges of ideas and experiences related to public information within the Nordic region and beyond. As an empirical case, the analytical focus centres on the Swedish Board of Public Information (Nämnden för samhällsinformation, 1971–1981) and traces the various contacts—through seminars, study visits, conferences, and so...

This article highlights cultural policy as a governmental proxy to address political matters beyond the cultural domain – here civil health – and the need to problematize and historicize ‘arts in health’ policies. The article centres on the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare’s collaborations with cultural workers 1970–1975, framed by thre...

This article presents an alternative perspective regarding the concept of “propaganda” in the historiography of public relations. Recent scholars of public relations have rightly criticized early attempts to write the field's history as a linear progression, from propaganda to excellence. At the same time, however, the same recent scholars have com...

The Swedish civil defence organizations have a long tradition of balancing their messages to the public through diverse media use. Over the course of the early Cold War, however, the political and technical circumstances of the civil defence organizations changed, rendering old methods from the 1930s obsolete. To keep their relevance, the narrative...

Swedish health information, conducted by the National Board of Health and Welfare in collaboration with private participants, expanded rapidly in the 1970s. This study examines a controversial bread campaign, which declared that the National Board, in collaboration with the private Bread Institute, wanted citizens to eat six to eight slices of brea...

Using computational methods, digitized collections and archives can today be scrutinized in their entirety. By distant reading and topic modeling one particular collection – 4500 digitized Swedish Governmental Official Reports (SOU) from 1922 to 1991 – this article gives a new archival perspective of the history of Swedish film politics and policy-...

The period 1945-1960 was characterized in Swedish history by the rapid acceleration of state-led social reform. As part of this, there was a general feeling that film should be pressed into use for educational purposes. This article examines the activities of two public committees, the Committee for Public Information (Kommitten for social upplysni...

This fouth semester thesis examines the films and film activities of Civilförsvarsstyrelsen, a Swedish state-controlled Civil Defense authority under the Ministry of Interior. Studies concerning film activities of the Swedish state are highly rare about the years following 1945 until the television breakthrough in 1956. This study concerns 1949-195...