By Northern Lights

Anne Buttimer is Professor Emeritus of Geography at University College Dublin, Ireland, and has previously held research and teaching positions in Belgium, Canada, France, Scotland, Sweden and the USA. She was invited to Sweden first in 1973 and her interactions with Swedish colleagues continue to this day. She was Visiting Fulbright Professor of Social Ecology at Lund University in 1976 and was full-time researcher there during 1977-1979 and 1982-1988. Tom Mels studied human geography and environmental science at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. He completed his doctoral thesis at Lund University in 1999 and is currently a lecturer of human geography at the University of Kalmar, Sweden. In the academic year 2001-2002, he visited the Geography Department at University College Dublin for post-doctoral research. His research interests include critical geographies of landscape and nature.

Contents: Science, Society and Sources of Geography in Sweden (Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries): Introduction; From Vasa Empire to patriot nation; Modernity and model welfare state; Saecuritas I: welfare for all (1920s-World War II); Saecuritas II: toward a new Swedish geography (late 1940s to mid-1970s); Chiasmus (mid-1970s-2000). On the Disciplining of Geography in Sweden: Introduction; An interview with Torsten Hägerstrand; Meaning, metaphor, milieu and horizon: reflections on career experiences; Apprenticing for Geography in Twentieth Century Sweden: 1890-2000; Geography as social science: concluding reflections; Bibliography; Appendix A: doctoral dissertations in Swedish Geography 1884-2000; Index.