Nordic Feminism Reconsidered: Activism, Scholarly Endeavours and Women’s Research Networks at the Nordic Summer University 1971–1990

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore the Nordic Summer University (NSU), an independent and migratory scholarly organisation, as a platform for interaction and cooperation for the new women’s movements and an arena for the development of women’s research in the Nordic region. In several accounts, NSU is described as a pivotal context for the development of Nordic women’s and feminist research and frequently appears in memoirs by pioneers in the field, but it has never been the direct object of scholarly focus. In recent years, there has been a scholarly debate about the historical narratives concerning the history of academic feminism in the Nordic region, where both the connection to the new women’s movements in the 1970s and the notion of the ‘Nordic’ have been contested. This article intervenes in these discussions by exploring the ‘women’s circles’ within NSU as they appear in various sources such as historiographical accounts, reports and memoirs and thereby, thereby defending a hands-on archival approach. We argue that focusing on an alternative international institution for knowledge production such as NSU offers valuable insights into how feminism as a social movement and a scholarly project - politics and academic endeavours - have been negotiated.

KEYWORDS:

• The Nordic Summer University
• history of women's- and gender studies
• history of women's studies
• history of knowledge
• feminist storytelling
• social movements and knowledge production
• history of the Nordic region

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Yulia Gradskova, Elisabeth Elgán and Heidi Kurvinen for their encouragement. Furthermore, many thanks to Kurvinen and the two anonymous peer reviewers for valuable feedback in the writing of this article, and to our friend Synne Myrebøe for all the conversations about NSU. Last but not least, we wish to give special thanks to Thorgerdur Einarsdóttir who has read the manuscript and contributed with valuable insights in different phases of the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Due to restrictions imposed by the covid pandemic, the main NSU archive at the Danish National Archive in Copenhagen has been inaccessible to us.

2. All citations in the article that are originally written in Nordic languages are translated to English by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work, grant no. 218064, was supported by the Icelandic Research Fund.

Notes on contributors

Valgerður Pálmadóttir

Valgerður Pálmadóttir holds a PhD in history of ideas from Umeå University. Pálmadóttir defended her doctoral dissertation The Perplexities of the Personal: How Women’s Liberation became Human Rights in November 2018. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of History and Philosophy at the University of Iceland with a project about symbolic women’s strikes. Her research areas are the history of political ideas; feminist theory; and social movements.

Johanna Sjöstedt

Johanna Sjöstedt holds a double master degree in gender studies and the history of ideas from the University of Gothenburg, thesis submitted in May 2021. She specializes in feminist philosophy in historical perspectives and has published scholarly articles on Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir. She is the editor of the anthology Vad är en kvinna? Språk, materialitet, situation [What is a woman? Language, materiality, situation] (Daidalos, 2021).