Figuring Politics – Spatial Diagrams of the Political System in Global Upper Secondary School Civics Textbooks (1900–)

The project will investigate how the political and social order has been represented spatially in upper secondary school civic textbooks from the 20th and 21st.

Common examples include the political left-right spectrum, flow charts of the voting process or decision hierarchies, or diagrams of the class structure of society.

At the center of analysis is how political, social and technological transformations have affected the ways in which politics is represented spatially. The principal investigator is Janne Holmén, who is the sole employee in the project.

He is aided by an international interdisciplinary reference group of scholars experinced in researching diagrams and spatial representations. The sources used are civics textbooks at the Georg Eckert institute in Braunschweig. Textbooks from 47 countries and five continents will be compared.

The project will run for four years, during which three peer-reviewed articles will be published, a workshop arranged, a workshop anthology edited, and a monograph published.Earlier research on the use of diagrams in textbooks, which is scarce, has lacked a historical perspective, focusing on diagrams in contemporary textbooks without tracing their development over time.

The existing research on political diagrams have focused on Western Europe and the US.

In a globalized world, it is of great importance to investigate representations of non-western political systems, as will be done in this project.