Introduction

I remember entering the vice-chancellor’s conference room at Stockholm University and being overwhelmed by the impact of this room. Stockholm University is a comparably young university partly built in the late 1960s at the height of the democratic and feminist movements, with modest and minimalist 1960s furnishing, airy, light, high-ceiling corridors and exquisite abstract art. But the furniture of this room was old and similar to what I had seen in movies from colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. With its large heavy-framed paintings of men in robes with distinctions and honours in straight rows on the wooden panelled walls, it constituted a distinct contrast to the university as I knew it up until that day. Upon encountering the stuffy air lingering in this room, I was almost forced to a halt. It felt hard to breathe in here and smelled like an old museum that had never been aired. The wooden chair, with its backrest taller than the top of my head, creaked quietly as I sat down on it at the large oval shiny table. The wide leather seat was quickly heated from the warmth of my jeans-clothed buttocks. The chair embraced me as I leaned back and put my arms on the generous armrests, giving me a feeling of authoritarian comfort, excitement and inferiority, all at the same time. The low voices of the assembled professors were almost drowned by the intensive creaking of their chairs as they turned and twisted in their seats during polite exchanges and greetings. As the chairman rose from his chair at the end of the table, the human voices quickly silenced. Only a few mocking creaks from chairs penetrated the mat of silence that had spread out into the room. He gave a welcoming speech and outlined the agenda for the meeting. Being embodied by and simultaneously embodying this entirely new room, inhabited by people I did not yet know, in a meeting which was new to me, I was thrown back into my childhood and the first day at preschool in the year of 1968.