This sabbatical was meant to result in a comprehensive survey in English on Swedish fascism between 1920 and 1950. The book was to be based on my own previously published research, other scholar’s research published in Swedish and additional new research to fil in some of the gaps. However, this focus changed during my year on sabbatical. Instead of a more ”narrow” academic publication, I decided to write a more publicly accessible volume in Swedish about how to understand fascism, both as an historical and a contemporary phenomenon.

There were two reasons for changing the focus of the project, and the first and foremost reason is linked to and influenced by the current political situation not only in Sweden but in Europe and the world. Fascism and other adjacent and related ideological variants (which can be and are described using terms as ultranationalism, radical nationalism, right wing extremism and right wing populism) are currently growing both in size and influence which is an urgent democratic problem. Meanwhile, it has become clear to me that common knowledge levels about the ideological platform, tactics and political significance of these movements and currents of thought are quite low both within and outside of academia. Taking this wider context into account, I therefore deemed it both important and urgent that my knowledge about fascism and its context was made accessible for a wider audience than would have been the case had I stayed with the original plan. Put in simpler words, the project was thus given a more popular and accessible angle.

The second reason for changing the focus of the project was that when I started working on it, it became obvious that the time frame was too tight and that the project most probably wouldn’t be finished on time. This in its turn was due to a number of things. First, it turned out that the work I was planning to get done during the autumn of 2016, when I was spending time as a visiting teacher at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), wasn’t possible since my work-load at UCLA turned out to be way bigger than estimated beforehand. Second, there was unexpected and time-consuming problems connected to the additional new research I was planning to do. And third, the planning of my stay as a visiting research fellow at the Center for European and Russian Studies at UCLA during the autumn and winter 2017 took much more time than i thought it would.

Since I made the carefully reflected and committed choice to give the project a more popular angle and perspective, I also chose to present parts of it in different kinds of frameworks and on different arenas outside of academia until I left for the US and Los Angeles in September. This was done both in speech and writing and was very useful, not least for shaping my future carreer strategy (se further below). I have however also attended two academic international conferences (in Los Angeles and Uppsala) as well as one more popular international conference arranged by The Swedish Committee against Antisemitism that also gathered a lot of academics during my sabbatical.

During autumn and winter 2017/2018 I had the great fortune to spend five months as a visiting reseach fellow at the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies in Los Angeles, USA. My stay in Los Angeles gave ample time of peace and quitet for concentrated work and I also attended quite a lot of very interesting seminars and guest lectures during my stay, but the great majority of these had no or very limited bearing on my own work. Doing this contributed however to widening my competences and horizons from a more general perspective and were thus extremely valuable. I also held one seminar about my own work. The seminar was well attended, but the lengthy discussion that followed did, for reasons that might be understandable, focus on the current political situation in the US rather than on my presentation and made it pretty clear that even faculty at one of the world’s more renowned academic institutions were grappling with rather basic issues relating to the content, context and strategy of fascism. To me, this made it all the more obvious that choosing to write in a more popular and accessible manner was the right choice.

The book that the sabbatical project was meant to result in is unfortunately not finished (see comments) and it is not possible today to say when the book will be published. The sabbatical period has however been unvaluable for my future carreer in a number of ways. First and foremost I was given the chance and the time to think through how I might make my research and my vast array of knowledge and reflected understanding within the field accessible and ”applicable” from a wider civil and social perspective and it has become clear to me that in the future I would like to put even more emphasis on accessability and applicability. This means writing in Swedish and publishing through chanels and media that are readily available also  for people outside of the academic world suck as teachers, politicians, policy makers, cultural workers and so forth. I will also to an even larger extent than before engage in the public debate both as an academic expert and as a popular educator and commentator.

Apart from articles and other texts recorded in the publication list (and the book itself), I’ve got two more forthcoming publications. One is an article on defining fascism that will be included in the comference volume for the international conference ”Fascism and Radical Nationalism in the Nordic Countries Past, Present and Future” that was held in Uppsala in November 2017. The second is a comparative study of the 1940’s ultranationalist daily paper Dagsposen and the contemporary weekly journal Nya Tider, focusing on journalistic professionalism and the recontextualisation of news which will be published in the History of the Press Year Book in 2019.