Fostrande förpliktelser : representationer av ett missionsuppdrag i Sydindien under 1900-talets första hälft

Fostering Obligations. Representations of a Mission in South India in the First Half of the 20th Century This thesis investigates how Swedish medical missionaries in South India represented their mission not only as a mission of converting people to Christianity, but also of spreading moral and scientific values in order to found an Indian Lutheran folk church. Missionary narratives were not only informative and entertaining stories of exotic places, they also mediated perceptions of a Christian and a Swedish duty to help others and a vocation to share what they believed to be better ways of life. This was part of a self-understanding shaped and reproduced in a particular historical and geographical context. Through their texts they influenced their readers' images of India and thus participated in shaping Swedes' world-views. Long before the 1960s and 70s critique of colonial exploitation, there existed in Sweden a widespread international engagement, an engagement firmly rooted in the belief that they as Swedish Christians had a duty to foster others according to their own principles, and that these were superior to others. Through the representation of ideals, counter-ideals and strategies the missionaries legitimized their presence in India and made it intelligible and meaningful. Drawing on post-colonial and post-structuralist research, the thesis analyses Swedish missionary letters, articles and books thematically, focusing on representations of bodies, homes and character. The missionaries in Tirupattur represented their task in India as a temporary but necessary fostering mission for change rather than as a race for conversion. Through their fostering projects they wanted to embetter their surroundings according to their own norms and standards. The self-understanding they conveyed calls on a duty to share ideals and knowledge through fostering, supervision, guidance and discipline. The missionaries shared perceptions with others writing within a colonial world. They were part of an international context where discourses were constantly shared, communicated and negotiated, but they also show differing perspectives. The missionaries talked mainly of reform, stressing voluntarism rather than coercion or force. Representations of anonymous unwilling Indians as stereotype Others played important rhetorical roles as counter-images in the narratives, whilst Indians open to change directed by the missionaries are included as individuals. Willingness to learn was a condition of individuality and inclusion in the Us of the Swedish missionaries and the mission project

I FEMTE FRU TSOS PALATS. PLATS, STRATEGI OCH RELATIONER I CHANGSHA KFUK, 1917–1927

Changsha KFUK (Kristliga Föreningen av Unga Kvinnor) grun-dades 1919. Två år tidigare hade den svenska sekreterarmissio-nären Ingeborg Wikander påbörjat arbetet för att väcka intresse för den kristna tron bland stadens kvinnor. Hon följdes snart av flera utländska och kinesiska krafter i arbetet, och verksamheten knöts till en plats, Tso-familjens bostadsområde. Denna artikel tecknar Changsha KFUK:s bakgrundshistoria och utforskar re-lationerna som uppstod först i ”Tso-palatset” och sedan i tem-pelområdet dit man senare flyttade. Tre av dessa personliga relationer ges särskild uppmärksamhet i analysen. Genom att fo-kusera på människor och deras strategier i mötet med andra lik-som platserna på vilka dessa möten uppstod, syftar denna artikel till att belysa förhållandet mellan människors möten och plats inom kristen mission. Artikeln argumenterar för att vi genom att se samverkan mellan dessa kan få en djupare förståelse för hur missionsarbetets vardagliga möten och relationer påverkade verksamhetens utformning och utveckling

Nordic Connections : Norwegian and Swedish Missionaries in Changsha in the 1920s

This article explores the interconnections and relations of Nordic missionaries in early-twentieth-century China. Focusing on encounters in the Hunanese province capital of Changsha in and around the 1920s, it discusses ways in which Norwegian and Swedish missionary workers from four Christian associations made sense of their position as Nordic Lutherans within the international community in Changsha. Using both unpublished and published sources it explores the arrival of the Church of Sweden Mission to China in 1920 and plans to establish a Swedish Lutheran university in China. In conjunction it examines the Nordics as part of the international networks in the city, the evacuation of foreigners in 1927, and the ways in which they were affected by national and imperial ambitions and relations. The exploration of Nordic missionaries as ambivalent actors in a semi-imperial arena contributes to our understandings of the connections, co-operations and power dynamics of the transimperial world of the early twentieth century

High-resolution mapping of a complex disease, a model for rheumatoid arthritis, using heterogeneous stock mice.

Resolving the genetic basis of complex diseases like rheumatoid arthritis will require knowledge of the corresponding diseases in experimental animals to enable translational functional studies. Mapping of quantitative trait loci in mouse models of arthritis, such as collagen-induced arthritis (CIA), using F(2) crosses has been successful, but can resolve loci only to large chromosomal regions. Using an inbred-outbred cross design, we identified and fine-mapped CIA loci on a genome-wide scale. Heterogeneous stock mice were first intercrossed with an inbred strain, B10.Q, to introduce an arthritis permitting MHCII haplotype. Homozygous H2(q) mice were then selected to set up an F(3) generation with fixed major histocompatibility complex that was used for arthritis experiments. We identified 26 loci, 18 of which are novel, controlling arthritis traits such as incidence of disease, severity and time of onset and fine-mapped a number of previously mapped loci