Description
Book SynopsisThis open access edited volume shines new light on the history of propaganda and persuasion during the Nordic welfare epoch. A common analytical framework is developed that highlights transnational and transmedial perspectives rather than national or monomedial histories. The return of propaganda in contemporary debate underlines the need to historically contextualize the role and function of persuasive communication activities in the Nordic region and beyond. Building on an empirically situated approach, the chapters in this volume break new ground by covering a range of themes, from cultural diplomacy and nation branding to media materiality and information infrastructures. In doing so, the book stresses that the Nordic welfare epoch, with its associated epithet the “Nordic Model”, was built not only on governance, social security and economic productivity, but also on propaganda and persuasion.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
- Fredrik Norén, Emil Stjernholm & C. Claire Thomson, “Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion: An Introduction”
Cultural Diplomacy and Public Information
- Ruth Hemstad, “Promoting Norden and Nordic Cooperation in the 1930s: Social Democratic Visions and Transmedial Manifestations”
- C. Claire Thomson, “‘It All Comes from Beer’: Tuborg, Carlsberg and the Role of Film in Danish Cultural Diplomacy”
- Fredrik Norén, “Nordic Public Information: An Epistemic Community of Experiences and Ideas in the 1970s”
- Elisabet Björklund, “Contested Pictures of Persuasion: American Images of Foetuses in Swedish Antiabortion Campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s”
Politics and Security
- Emil Stjernholm, “A Rain of Propaganda: The Media Production of the Office of War Information in Stockholm, 1942–1945”
- Emil Eiby Seidenfaden, “Mobilized for Propaganda: Danish Journalists in British Exile, 1940–1945”
- Øystein Pedersen Dahlen & Rolf Werenskjold, “Norwegian Defence and Security Policy: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds in the 1950s”
- Jukka Kortti, “Slow Media under Cross Pressures: US Educational Diplomacy in the Nordic Countries during the Cold War”
Internationalism and Environmentalism
- Mari Pajala, “Creating Information Infrastructure for Transnational Co-operation in Television: Nordvision in the 1960s–1970s”
- Björn Lundberg & David Larsson Heidenblad, “Mobilizing Scandinavian Children and Youth for the Environment: Launching a Transnational Campaign 1968–1971”
- Melina Antonia Buns & Dominic Hinde, “Green States in a Dirty World: 1975 and the Performance of Nordic Green Modern”
- Lars Diurlin, “The Nordic Mobilization of Public Opinion on Foreign Aid in the UN’s Second Development Decade”
- Laura Saarenmaa, “Diversity Principle Taken to its Extreme: East Asian Propaganda on Finnish Television”
Afterwords
- Nicholas J. Cull
- Peter Stadius
Author Biographies
