This chapter describes the development of research quality articulations. It shows how articulations of research quality in Swedish humanities policy spaces have changed between 1980 and 2010. The study demonstrates an increased presence and diversity of quality articulations in the spaces studied. However, different contexts produced different outcomes. Co-production between science and policy articulations resulted in what this study terms responsive quality articulations, neither internal nor external in nature. These findings have implications for how research quality can be studied and conceptualized, as well as for the history of humanities in Sweden. An understanding of how research quality has developed responsively complicates the commonly used narratives that depict the humanities as either passive or reactive to policy changes. Therefore, the findings offer an alternative narrative to the trope of a “crisis” in the humanities, by highlighting how humanities scholars influenced research policy in articulating quality. It shows that negotiations over research quality during these 30 years have been more complex than previously acknowledged, in turn allowing us to reassess current understandings of research quality in the humanities.

Despite its proven societal value, humanities knowledge tends to be marginalized in research policy; this has been a topic of debate for some time. In this chapter, we focus on the valorization of humanities knowledge, with the aim of comprehending the way this process engenders societal impact. We argue that historical impact stories offer an effective methodological approach for a deeper understanding of such valorization and its subsequent impact. Drawing on three humanities research cases from Sweden, we propose that valorization and impacts of humanities knowledge should be seen as processual and as influenced by societal actors who determine the premises and condition the somewhat unpredictable nature of such impacts. We introduce two concepts: (i) acting space, which involves access to collaborators, audiences, and channels that enable knowledge valorization, and (ii) meandering knowledge flows, which provides insight into the uneven and hard-to-predict nature of valorization. Through these concepts, we wish to provide a better and more nuanced understanding of how knowledge valorization in the humanities unfolds. By doing so, we hope to support humanities scholars to find ways of articulating their own modes of mattering.

Coastal areas in many high-income countries face complex challenges of de-population, geographic conditions, and sensitive ecosystems. At the same time, they offer attractive leisure activities and nature for summer residents and visitors. This report summarizes experiences and observations from action-oriented collaboration in island communities of the Baltic Sea specifically focused on sustainable water and sanitation. A co-productive approach was employed where researchers and students collaborated with residents, municipal and regional authorities, conservation organisations, landowners, and private sector actors. Our findings indicate that co-productive approaches are beneficial and can complement formal structures, although we note several challenges to efficient collaboration. Most importantly, we identify an uneven temporal distribution of population that conflicts with the natural fluctuation of water availability as a key factor that affects, and in some cases blocks, positive outcomes. We propose the concept of schizotope (split landscape) to describe this seasonal variation. We argue that schizotopes pose serious challenges to co-production and sustainable development of islands in general, which need much more attention in regional policy and in research.

This report outlines how KTH Royal Institute of Technology could endeavor to align its business travel practices with its sustainability goal of reducing the climate impact of travel by 40% between 2015 and 2025. The core of the study involved participatory workshops with KTH's division of Real Estate Business and Financial Systems (AIE) to devise a CO2 budgeting and governance model tailored to the university's operations. This model aimed at establishing rules, practices, and strategies to mitigate challenges related to the reduction of CO2 emissions from flying, utilizing detailed flight data from 2019 as a basis for developing speculative CO2 budgets for 2025. The approach taken underscores the importance of granular data in understanding and managing travel emissions at the institutional level.

Our conclusions suggest a decentralized approach to managing carbon budgets at the divisional level, allowing for flexibility and autonomy in travel planning within predefined CO2 limits. It emphasizes the need for transparency in travel data within divisions to ensure equitable and effective participation in the carbon management process. The report calls for the development of systems to support data collection and integration into travel management processes, alongside a central oversight mechanism to ensure fair budget allocation and manage budget overruns. We propose an operational planning mechanism called "KTH Carbon Cycle" that -after further refinement - could enable KTH to meet its climate goals without significantly disrupting its operations or research activities. 

Sports historians have argued that the type of ball games common in the British Isles, which were practiced by two teams and in which the ball was driven with sticks towards predetermined goals – i.e., hurling, shinty, bandy and hockey – were never played in early modern Sweden. By highlighting descriptions of ballgames in Johannes Schefferus’s The History of Lapland (1674), a source previously ignored by sports historians, this article challenges such a claim. One of the games described by Schefferus has some similarities with the violent stick-and-ball game known in Icelandic sagas as knattleikr. Even greater similarities (such as the start of the game with a face-off and the goals consisting of lines on the short edges) emerge when the game is compared with the Scottish game of shinty. Thus, pre-modern Scandinavia does not appear to have been as isolated in terms of sports and games as has been suggested by Swedish sports historians.