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Introduction: New Geographies of Scandinavian Studies. Moving maps, reciprocal images, emerging communities

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Jelsbak T., Körber L.-A.

Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia

2023

vol. 34

5-15

This article provides an introduction to the Research Network “New Geographies of Scandinavian Studies” while at the same time discussing some of its main concerns and questions: the position of the Nordic countries and the role of Scandinavian Studies in the changing geopolitical landscape of post-Cold War Europe. The collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989–1991 led to a reconfiguration of the European political map. This situation also entailed new possibilities for international and cross-disciplinary research: A new understanding of Nordic and Baltic studies was institutionalized and new regional concepts were developed as alternatives to Cold War geopolitics. The network “New Geographies of Scandinavian Studies” is rooted in this ongoing reorientation of the field. The article discusses some of the potentials and challenges of this new agenda of Scandinavian Studies in the context of the new geopolitical confrontation between Russia and the West after Russia’s military attack on Ukraine in February 2022.

“If Sweden is a province, what are we?” Map-making and man-making in Marius Ivaškevičius’s essay series My Scandinavia

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Körber L.-A., Steponavičiūtė-Aleksiejūnienė I.

Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia

2023

vol. 34

88-107

This co-written article approaches the influential Lithuanian writer and playwright Marius Ivaškevičius’s essay series My Scandinavia (2004) from two different vantage points reflecting either side of the former ‘Iron Curtain’. Published in the year when Lithuania joined the European Union, the essay series describes the narrator’s travels and symbolic and ironic conquest of Northern Europe in the wake of the border openings following the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, employing the notions of “temporal” and “spatial nodes” (Ringgard & DuBois 2017), the article addresses how the crossings of the Baltic Sea and journeys through Northern Europe depicted in Ivaškevičius’s essays represent an awareness of significant shifts in the unfolding of European history and Europe’s spatial configuration. Second, the article reads My Scandinavia as an example of creative map-making in line with theories of critical cartography. Finally, the article puts the travelling subject in My Scandinavia centre stage, looking at the dialectic ways in which subject and place create each other. Just as Scandinavia has been actively moulding the narrating and, by implication, also the writing subject’s biography, so has he given Scandinavia shape through his discourse, while also idiosyncratically framing Europe’s shifting political and mental geography.

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2 Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia

2 Körber L.-A.

1 Jelsbak T.

1 Steponavičiūtė-Aleksiejūnienė I.

2 2023

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Introduction: New Geographies of Scandinavian Studies. Moving maps, reciprocal images, emerging communities

“If Sweden is a province, what are we?” Map-making and man-making in Marius Ivaškevičius’s essay series My Scandinavia