The project studies Nordic historical understanding by investigating the connections between the practices of academic knowledge production and political legitimacy. A special focus is on the role of history and historians in the construction of Norden as a historical region and the role of Nordic networks in the writing of history.
Our interest deals with the methods and theories of the historians, their arguments and evidences, transfers and receptions and in particular, with their normative understand ings of their tasks, their ethics and working practices, the knowledge situated in everyday scholarly routines and in the dialogue with broader audiences. Three themes are of particular interest: 1) Networks: Institutional, Personal and Virtual, 2) Theori es, methods and practices, and 3) Historical master narratives.
The project forms a network of c. 20 people at all levels from PhD students to postdoctoral junior and established senior academics. By using a cross-national, comparative perspective, the p roject aims both at the specific development of Nordic historiography and the current international research agendas in this field.
The project contributes to the search of a non-ethnocentric cross-cultural dialogue by focusing on a situated historical k nowledge production, entangled in national languages and historical processes. The questions about categorizations as well as narrative and conceptual structures in historiography, have broad cultural and ethical implications.
