How to Write an Academic Paper This is an updated and improved version of my cult classic, “How to Write an Academic Paper.” The aim is not to provide yet another article on scientific methods, but instead to tell students about what I take to be the very core of

Muslim Calls to Prayer in the Swedish Welfare State This article discusses the heated public debate which erupted in Sweden in the spring of 2018 regarding the right of Muslim congregations to issue public calls to prayer by means of loudspeakers. Critics complained that the calls were noisy and disturbing,

What Are Public Moods? ‘Public moods’ are often referred to in laymen’s accounts of public reactions to socialevents, yet the concept has rarely been invoked by social scientists. Taking public moodsseriously as an analytical concept, this article relies on recent work on the moods of individuals as a means of

What Benedict Anderson Doesn’t Understand about the Imagination This is a 3,000 word piece I wrote for the E-International Relations website. It discusses Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism, and his famous claim that nations are “imagined communities.” I agree with Anderson. Nations are indeed imagined communities, but Anderson knows next

Extended Minds, Cognitive Institutions, and the Congress of Vienna The following is a first draft of a chapter I wrote for a forthcoming volume, Under the Skin: On the Corporeality of Culture, edited by Zdravko Radman. It discusses the work by the philosopher and cognitive theorist Shaun Gallagher and his