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.

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.

In 1725 the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, signed orders for Vitus Bering to set out on the First Kamchatka Expedition in order to establish if Asia and North America were connected, and to define the north-eastern borders of the Russian Empire. A classic among the voyages of discovery, the expedition took more than five years to complete. It moved across an immense landscape, building two vessels enroute, and claiming the lives of many men, before it set sail to reveal a passage between the two continents - the present day Bering Strait. The only surviving document to preserve the day-to-day details of the entire voyage is the journal of expedition member Midshipman Piotr Chaplin. Chaplin meticulously and impartially recorded all observations on location. His concise entries document the careful mapping of unknown land and give us a rare glimpse of Vitus Bering and the hardship borne by members of this strenuous expedition. The Journal of Midshipman Chaplin is the first complete publication of Chaplin's journal in any language. It includes introductory articles and commentary by specialists, and is richly furnished with both historic and contemporary maps.

The majority of Malevich's drawings and manuscripts only exists today thanks to the efforts of Anna Aleksandrovna Leporskaya (1900-1982). The present study reconstructs the outlines of this unique collection and of Leporskaya's and Malevich's own registration of the drawings, undertaken in 1926. Troels Andersen is the author of "Malevich". Catalogue raisonné of the Berlin Exhibition 1927, including the collection in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; with a general introduction to his work and the editor of "K S Malevich: Essays on Art, Volume I-IV".

Text in Danish.

During several hundred thousand years of human prehistory, siliceous rocks such as flint and chert were the most important raw materials used for tool production. In the 5th millennium BC, however, the use of copper is documented in many Neolithic tool assemblages and in the course of the 3rd millennium BC metal technology is introduced in prehistoric societies all over Europe. With a few exceptions, metal is largely superior to flint when it comes to the production of tools, yet there are regions throughout the world where flint craftsmanship thrived long after metallurgy had been introduced. There are numerous examples of copper and bronze implements being copied with great skill in flint, and in some areas simple flint tools would seem to be in common use even in early Iron Age societies. The present volume embodies the proceedings of a workshop dedicated to "lithic technology in metal using societies" that was held in connection with the XVth UISPP congress in Lisbon in September 2006. The workshop brought together researchers working on lithic inventories from a global range of societies in which tool-stone is being replaced by metal. Papers providing methodological and theoretical insight pertinent to these issues were also invited and the original score of papers presented at the workshop has been further enriched by papers from authors who were not able to participate in the workshop. With contributions by: Berit V Eriksen; Barbara Armbruster; Mechtild Freudenberg; Catherine Frieman; Annelou Van Gijn; Anders Hogberg; Torben B Ballin; Jarosaw Bronowicki & Mirosaw Masoj; Matthieu Honegger & Pauline De Montmollin; Chloe Druart; Evangelia Karimali; Georgia Kourtessi-Philippakis; Lasse Sensen; Steven A Rosen; Isaac Gilead; Angela Davidzon & Jacob Vardi; Teresa P Raczek; Miriam N Haidle; Udo Neumann & Alfred Pawlik.