During the 2021-22 academic year, I received a Magnus the Good Collaborative Fellowship together with Cullen Hauck (’23). Cully wanted to continue the research he had started during a Directed Undergraduate Research course that I was able to run in January of 2021. Through the DUR, Cully had started collecting opinion journalism published in Sweden, but he wasn’t able to get access to many newspapers, and he was only able to get started on the project. Magnus the Good gave him the funds to travel to Sweden and find many more sources–far more than we were able to get through during the Independent Research course he did in January 2022. It was really fascinating to sift through these sources together, looking for patterns in the language and arguments used. We ended up focusing on what opinion writers viewed as her leadership qualifications (or lack thereof), but many other themes emerged that we could have explored, including the idea of school strikes as civil disobedience, which I found really interesting. We ended up using a small portion of our research that focused on heroic figures that Greta was compared to in Swedish opinion journalism from August 2018 to March 2019. These included Pippi Longstocking, Joan of Arc, even Greek heroes, and contemporary figures such as Malala Yousafzai. We presented our results at the annual meeting of the Association for Scandinavian Studies in Canada and will also be developing this presentation into a book chapter for a volume on ecology and teaching.

The St. Olaf communications team also wrote about Cully’s activities through Magnus the Good.