J Fornas
Biographic Data
| ID | 22050 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Fornas |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Fornas |
| SIGNATURE | FORNAS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Södertörn University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9419-4883 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 59 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Obituary
Symbols and narratives of Europe: Three tropes
Throughout history, attempts have been made to identify Europe as a geographical, political, social, and cultural entity. Recent efforts to establish key symbols and narratives of Europe have focused on a set of central signifying elements, even if there is a wide and contradictory range of ways to define, structure, and interpret them. An introductory remark on the current debate on the need for renewed European self-reflection paves the way for…
Cultural studies: Crossing borders, defending distinctions
To identify a set of defining traits and goals of the cultural studies field is the task of this intervention. It begins by investigating how leading actors in this field today define it: the Association for Cultural Studies and the journals Cultural Studies, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Inter-Asian Cultural Studies. Three main tropes are identified: diversity, contextualization and …
Defending Culture
Three tasks for mediatization research: Contributions to an open agenda
Based on the interdisciplinary experience of a Swedish research committee, this article discusses critical conceptual issues raised by the current debate on mediatization – a concept that holds great potential to constitute a space for synthesized understandings of media-related social transformations. In contrast to other, more metaphorical constructions, mediatization can be studied empirically in systematic ways through various sub-processes t…
Publishing for Public Knowledge
No abstract available
Culturalizing Mediatization
Culturalizing Mediatization
The term ‘mediation’ denotes that something functions as a linking device between different entities. Media are socially organized technologies made for being used in the practices of communication that are prime examples of such mediating processes. ‘Mediatization’ refers to some kind of historical process whereby such media ‘increasingly come to saturate society, culture, identities and everyday life’ (Fornas, 1995, p. 1).1 However, there are m…
Stuart Hall's dialogical interventions
Stuart Hall was for five decades a key front figure for British Cultural Studies, and for the process that turned this field from a local grouping sometimes called the “Birmingham School” to today
Introducing Capitalism: Current Crisis and Cultural Critique
No abstract available
The Dialectics of Communicative and Immanent Critique
In cultural studies and cultural research, the importance of being critical is often stressed, but it is more rare to scrutinise how such critique is and can be performed. This text discusses different modes of critique, in three main steps. First, a brief review of the history and signifying layers of the concept of critique itself leads up to a late modern communicative concept of critique, linked to the contested relation between critique and …
Forever Young: The Beginnings of the Nordic Journal of Youth Research
Culturalisation at an Australian-Swedish Crossroads
No abstract available
Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences
Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences
Exclusion, Polarization, Hybridization, Assimilation: Otherness and Modernity in the Swedish Jazz Age
The introduction of jazz in Sweden fed into discourses renegotiating modern forms of identity in welfare society. In this new Jazz Age, music became an arena for reformulating norms of age, class, ethnicity, and gender differences. This article presents an intersectional and inter-medial study of songs, films and print sources with such topics. The new jazz idiom was linked to enticing and horrifying forms of otherness. Four basic positions are h…
Satellitblock
Kulturforskningens kvaliteter
There is a widespread talk of an increasing role for culture and for transgressing borders, but still interdisciplinary cultural research experiences considerable difficulties in the new landscape of research policy. Having outlined the problematics of measuring quality in general terms a discussion and a series of proposals concerning the main dimensions of this problematics follows. First, the dominant scales for measuring publishing are critic…
Bridging gaps: Ten crosscurrents in media studies
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in: Media, Culture and Society, (30), 6, 895-905, 2008.Johan Fornäs, Bridging Gaps: Ten Crosscurrents in Media Studies.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443708096811. by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. http://www.sagepub.com
Röster som gjorde skillnad. Korsande identifikationer i folkhemmets populärkultur
Voices making difference: Crossing identifications in Swedish populär culture 1920-1950" starts and ends with reflections on the concept of intersectionality and its uses in recent debates. Its potentials to open dialogues between different perspectives on identity orders such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, age and generation need to be nourished and protected against divisive ways of transforming it into a means to dig trenches between …
The Words of Music
Words and music are two distinct symbolic modes. Yet, as human ways of communication or forms of expression, they have much in common. They have important similarities as signifying systems, their mutual penetration is suggested by metaphors like “the language of music” or “the music of language”, and they are multi-modally united in all song genres. Popular song in particular is generally “text-intensive” (Booth 188). Many attempts to distingu…
The crucial in between: The centrality of mediation in cultural studies
This essay argues against trends in cultural studies to avoid textuality and mediation in favour of a presumably direct access to reality, materiality or lived experience. Grand gestures of stepping out of modern thinking in toto might be rhetorically effective, but turn out to be expressions of a critical self-reflexivity on the productive contradictions within modernity. The centrality of the concept of mediation is defended in two opposite dir…
Theme issue: Place and meaning in Nordic popular music
Digitaliserade meningsvävar: Musik, estetik, identitet och interaktivitet i nya medieformer
Text and Music Revisited
Are words and music two separate symbolic modes, or rather variants of the same human symbolic practice? Are they parallel, opposing or overlapping? What do they have in common and how does each
In Garageland: Rock, Youth, and Modernity
Journal Article In Garageland: Rock, Youth, and Modernity. Byjohan Fornás, Ulf Lindberg, and Ove Sernhede. Trans, by Jan Teeland. (New York: Routledge, 1995. xii, 284 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 0-415-08501-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-415-08502-0.) Get access Barbara L. Tischler Barbara L. Tischler Columbia University, New York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issu…
The future of rock: Discourses That Struggle to Define a Genre
Time shifts increase our sensitivity to birth and death, to the rise and fall of cultural epochs, by drawing attention to all sorts of changes. When years, decades or centuries turn, there need not necessarily be any corresponding great shift in society and culture. What does 'real' history care about dates and years? But our way of measuring time produces a sort of numerical magic that sometimes makes us extra sensitive to collective cultural mo…
Three tasks for mediatization research: Contributions to an open agenda
Based on the interdisciplinary experience of a Swedish research committee, this article discusses critical conceptual issues raised by the current debate on mediatization – a concept that holds great potential to constitute a space for synthesized understandings of media-related social transformations. In contrast to other, more metaphorical constructions, mediatization can be studied empirically in systematic ways through various sub-processes t…
The Words of Music
Words and music are two distinct symbolic modes. Yet, as human ways of communication or forms of expression, they have much in common. They have important similarities as signifying systems, their mutual penetration is suggested by metaphors like “the language of music” or “the music of language”, and they are multi-modally united in all song genres. Popular song in particular is generally “text-intensive” (Booth 188). Many attempts to distingu…
Text and Music Revisited
Are words and music two separate symbolic modes, or rather variants of the same human symbolic practice? Are they parallel, opposing or overlapping? What do they have in common and how does each
The crucial in between: The centrality of mediation in cultural studies
This essay argues against trends in cultural studies to avoid textuality and mediation in favour of a presumably direct access to reality, materiality or lived experience. Grand gestures of stepping out of modern thinking in toto might be rhetorically effective, but turn out to be expressions of a critical self-reflexivity on the productive contradictions within modernity. The centrality of the concept of mediation is defended in two opposite dir…
Moving Rock: Youth and pop in late modernity
What is moving in rock and pop? This question concerns both what levels change in the popular music arena, and how music can initiate changes inside and outside itself. Revolution in popular music can mean radical transformations of music itself, as well as the way in which social and psychic changes express themselves in music. Musical forms can go through revolutionary changes, and musical content can thematise revolutions
Cultural studies: Crossing borders, defending distinctions
To identify a set of defining traits and goals of the cultural studies field is the task of this intervention. It begins by investigating how leading actors in this field today define it: the Association for Cultural Studies and the journals Cultural Studies, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Inter-Asian Cultural Studies. Three main tropes are identified: diversity, contextualization and …
Under the surface of rock—Youth culture and late modernity
Exclusion, Polarization, Hybridization, Assimilation: Otherness and Modernity in the Swedish Jazz Age
The introduction of jazz in Sweden fed into discourses renegotiating modern forms of identity in welfare society. In this new Jazz Age, music became an arena for reformulating norms of age, class, ethnicity, and gender differences. This article presents an intersectional and inter-medial study of songs, films and print sources with such topics. The new jazz idiom was linked to enticing and horrifying forms of otherness. Four basic positions are h…
Do you see yourself: Reflected subjectivities in youthful song texts
Reflexivity has been a focal theme in much recent youth research, including my own. This theme connects studies of identity construction, subject formation and text reception with diagnoses of cultural modernization and methodological issues of qualitative ethnography. Popular-cultural mass-media texts are continuously drawn into reflexive practices in everyday life, apparently in increasingly intense and complex ways. ‘Reflexivity’ derive…
Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences
Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences
Bridging gaps: Ten crosscurrents in media studies
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in: Media, Culture and Society, (30), 6, 895-905, 2008.Johan Fornäs, Bridging Gaps: Ten Crosscurrents in Media Studies.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443708096811. by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. http://www.sagepub.com
Mirroring meetings, mirroring media: The microphysics of reflexivity
There is today a growing reflexivity in individual and collective identity constructions. Identities are always formed in relation to others and through symbolic structures, but this process has been more mobilized, differentiated, focused and problematized in late modernity – the most recent phase of the process of modernization.[i] This is true for daily life as well as for research. Reflexivity has in various ways been an importa…
Play it yourself: Swedish music in movement
In Sweden, rock music has in many different ways and phases moved young people into action. Listening to music, and making rock, induces new thoughts that can inspire social and political activity, as is well known in the general mythology of rock-as-rebellion. In the 1970s, an “alternative”, “non-commercial” or “progressive” music movement was born, and it is informative to study how and why it formed, developed and (at least in some ways)…
Under the surface of rock—Youth culture and late modernity
Moving Rock: Youth and pop in late modernity
What is moving in rock and pop? This question concerns both what levels change in the popular music arena, and how music can initiate changes inside and outside itself. Revolution in popular music can mean radical transformations of music itself, as well as the way in which social and psychic changes express themselves in music. Musical forms can go through revolutionary changes, and musical content can thematise revolutions
Play it yourself: Swedish music in movement
In Sweden, rock music has in many different ways and phases moved young people into action. Listening to music, and making rock, induces new thoughts that can inspire social and political activity, as is well known in the general mythology of rock-as-rebellion. In the 1970s, an “alternative”, “non-commercial” or “progressive” music movement was born, and it is informative to study how and why it formed, developed and (at least in some ways)…
Mirroring meetings, mirroring media: The microphysics of reflexivity
There is today a growing reflexivity in individual and collective identity constructions. Identities are always formed in relation to others and through symbolic structures, but this process has been more mobilized, differentiated, focused and problematized in late modernity – the most recent phase of the process of modernization.[i] This is true for daily life as well as for research. Reflexivity has in various ways been an importa…
Do you see yourself: Reflected subjectivities in youthful song texts
Reflexivity has been a focal theme in much recent youth research, including my own. This theme connects studies of identity construction, subject formation and text reception with diagnoses of cultural modernization and methodological issues of qualitative ethnography. Popular-cultural mass-media texts are continuously drawn into reflexive practices in everyday life, apparently in increasingly intense and complex ways. ‘Reflexivity’ derive…
The future of rock: Discourses That Struggle to Define a Genre
Time shifts increase our sensitivity to birth and death, to the rise and fall of cultural epochs, by drawing attention to all sorts of changes. When years, decades or centuries turn, there need not necessarily be any corresponding great shift in society and culture. What does 'real' history care about dates and years? But our way of measuring time produces a sort of numerical magic that sometimes makes us extra sensitive to collective cultural mo…
In Garageland: Rock, Youth, and Modernity
Journal Article In Garageland: Rock, Youth, and Modernity. Byjohan Fornás, Ulf Lindberg, and Ove Sernhede. Trans, by Jan Teeland. (New York: Routledge, 1995. xii, 284 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 0-415-08501-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-415-08502-0.) Get access Barbara L. Tischler Barbara L. Tischler Columbia University, New York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issu…
Digitaliserade meningsvävar: Musik, estetik, identitet och interaktivitet i nya medieformer
Text and Music Revisited
Are words and music two separate symbolic modes, or rather variants of the same human symbolic practice? Are they parallel, opposing or overlapping? What do they have in common and how does each
Theme issue: Place and meaning in Nordic popular music
The crucial in between: The centrality of mediation in cultural studies
This essay argues against trends in cultural studies to avoid textuality and mediation in favour of a presumably direct access to reality, materiality or lived experience. Grand gestures of stepping out of modern thinking in toto might be rhetorically effective, but turn out to be expressions of a critical self-reflexivity on the productive contradictions within modernity. The centrality of the concept of mediation is defended in two opposite dir…
The Words of Music
Words and music are two distinct symbolic modes. Yet, as human ways of communication or forms of expression, they have much in common. They have important similarities as signifying systems, their mutual penetration is suggested by metaphors like “the language of music” or “the music of language”, and they are multi-modally united in all song genres. Popular song in particular is generally “text-intensive” (Booth 188). Many attempts to distingu…
Röster som gjorde skillnad. Korsande identifikationer i folkhemmets populärkultur
Voices making difference: Crossing identifications in Swedish populär culture 1920-1950" starts and ends with reflections on the concept of intersectionality and its uses in recent debates. Its potentials to open dialogues between different perspectives on identity orders such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, age and generation need to be nourished and protected against divisive ways of transforming it into a means to dig trenches between …
Kulturforskningens kvaliteter
There is a widespread talk of an increasing role for culture and for transgressing borders, but still interdisciplinary cultural research experiences considerable difficulties in the new landscape of research policy. Having outlined the problematics of measuring quality in general terms a discussion and a series of proposals concerning the main dimensions of this problematics follows. First, the dominant scales for measuring publishing are critic…
Bridging gaps: Ten crosscurrents in media studies
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in: Media, Culture and Society, (30), 6, 895-905, 2008.Johan Fornäs, Bridging Gaps: Ten Crosscurrents in Media Studies.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443708096811. by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. http://www.sagepub.com
Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences
Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences
Exclusion, Polarization, Hybridization, Assimilation: Otherness and Modernity in the Swedish Jazz Age
The introduction of jazz in Sweden fed into discourses renegotiating modern forms of identity in welfare society. In this new Jazz Age, music became an arena for reformulating norms of age, class, ethnicity, and gender differences. This article presents an intersectional and inter-medial study of songs, films and print sources with such topics. The new jazz idiom was linked to enticing and horrifying forms of otherness. Four basic positions are h…
Satellitblock
Culturalisation at an Australian-Swedish Crossroads
No abstract available
The Dialectics of Communicative and Immanent Critique
In cultural studies and cultural research, the importance of being critical is often stressed, but it is more rare to scrutinise how such critique is and can be performed. This text discusses different modes of critique, in three main steps. First, a brief review of the history and signifying layers of the concept of critique itself leads up to a late modern communicative concept of critique, linked to the contested relation between critique and …
Forever Young: The Beginnings of the Nordic Journal of Youth Research
Culturalizing Mediatization
Culturalizing Mediatization
The term ‘mediation’ denotes that something functions as a linking device between different entities. Media are socially organized technologies made for being used in the practices of communication that are prime examples of such mediating processes. ‘Mediatization’ refers to some kind of historical process whereby such media ‘increasingly come to saturate society, culture, identities and everyday life’ (Fornas, 1995, p. 1).1 However, there are m…
Stuart Hall's dialogical interventions
Stuart Hall was for five decades a key front figure for British Cultural Studies, and for the process that turned this field from a local grouping sometimes called the “Birmingham School” to today
Introducing Capitalism: Current Crisis and Cultural Critique
No abstract available
Sociology (20 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)