In this article we discuss the epistemological status of the knowledge and understandings that a specific way of working with women's experiences-memory workgenerates. This discussion is held in the light of the last decades' feminist debate on the risks and problems inherent in research taking women's experience as a point of departure. We put forward memory work as a fruitful method of working scientifically with experiences, especially when it comes to understanding deeply naturalized power structures such as gender, nation, and sexuality. We show how different interpretative modes and practices in memory work may help us locate ruptures and ambivalences in the already known, and open up for understandings and interpretations that take us beyond the discursively given. However, several epistemological as well as methodological issues need to be addressed in order for memory work to render possible new forms of understanding that reach beyond established discourses and concepts. To avoid the muchdebated risk of essentialism and reproduction of different power structures, we argue that a great deal of reflection is required when elaborating research techniques. It is thereby necessary to carefully design the different steps in the process of memory work. This article shows how different ways of handling methodological problems in memory work-concerning foremost the choice of theme for the memory project, the textual practices used when writing memory stories, and the modes of interpretation employed-are crucial for what kind of analysis is made possible. We also highlight the importance of displacing the research problem at a certain distance from the theme of the project. The concepts of transferring and dislocating the research problem are introduced as a means to elucidate how different types of displacement generate different research results.

During the 20th century, wars were fought primarily in the name of protecting the homeland. Making the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ was a national masculine duty and a key feature of military heroism. Today, human rights and international values justify war-making and legitimise military action. In one of these post-national wars, the International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan, more than 700 European soldiers have lost their lives. How have these deaths been legitimised, and how has the new security discourse affected notions of masculinised heroism and sacrifice? This article investigates how the dimensions of national/international and masculinity/femininity are negotiated in media narratives of heroism and sacrifice in Denmark and Sweden. Regarding scholarly discussions on the professionalisation, individualisation and domestication of military heroism, the empirical analysis demonstrates that the Danish/Swedish nation remains posited as the core context for military heroism and sacrifice. In the media narratives, professionalism is represented as an expression of specific national qualities. The media narratives conflate nation and family and represent military heroes as distinctively masculine and national figures. It is argued that a family trope has become vital in present-day hero narratives. This trope is disposed towards collective emotions, national loyalty and conservative gender ideals.

Essay-writing is generally viewed as the primary learning activity to foster independence and analytical thinking. In this article, we show that independent research projects do not necessarily lead to critical thinking. University-level education on conducting independent projects can, in several respects, counteract enhanced analytical skills. The purpose of this study is to advance knowledge on the difficulties students experience in acquiring analytical skills. A group of undergraduate political science students were interviewed while they attended an independent research course. They were also asked to record their reflections. The digital diaries provide access to the students' perceptions regarding the assignment and their struggles as they handle scientific problems. We argue that the students are caught up in different learning dilemmas when asked to perform independent academic research. One result is that ambiguous and contradictory understandings of science affect the learning processes and thus affect the students' possibilities for developing analytical thinking.

This article demonstrates that the concepts of gender and nation illuminate the Swedish-Soviet submarine crisis in February 1981, when a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine was stranded for ten days in the Swedish archipelago. The crisis challenged both the Swedish armed forces’ status as protectors of the national territory and the government's foreign policy doctrine of neutrality. The article analyzes Swedish media from 1981 to identify the interpretive frames, with a particular emphasis on emotions and body imagery. Gendered notions of protection permeated the crisis narratives. Male bodies embodied national and military agency, whereas women's bodies symbolically merged with the Swedish nation's territory. The Soviet intruders were disparaged and Swedish military prestige redeemed through gendered and corporeal representations. The article improves our understanding of the way the Swedish ideal of the neutral soldier and the foreign policy doctrine of neutrality incorporated gender.

In this article, we present the results of a research project where we have tried to elaborate more socially inclusive ways of teaching and learning political science by making use of a specific feminist method of analyzing social relations-memory work. As a method, memory work involves writing and interpreting stories of personal experience, written in relation to a specific theme. The theme we worked with was gender and nation. The article compares memory work to more conventional educational approaches to this specific theme.By focusing on experience and everyday life, we claim that memory work can challenge conventional and gendered understandings of how academic knowledge is produced and what is deemed to be part of the political sphere. We discuss how memory work can open up different forms of knowledge and new ways of learning. At the same time, we put forth the problems encountered and the resistance among the students we worked with. By analyzing the reactions and processes that were initiated by the memory work, we discuss both how gender and nationalism are reproduced and incorporated into understandings of what counts as proper political science and point out under what circumstances these conventional notions can be challenged.