With a cultural canon in focus

This year's Cultural Heritage Forum highlighted the concept of canon from different perspectives and reflected on what counts as common cultural heritage. Led by moderator Lena Ulrika Rudeke, operations and program manager for the University of Gothenburg's program activities at Jonsered Manor and coordinator, UNESCO City of Literature Gothenburg and member of the CCHS advisory board, Lars Trägårdh, Cornelius Holtorf, Karin Nilsson and Åsa Arping offered thought-provoking discussions about how canon is created, used and questioned today.

"A cultural canon for Sweden"

In his opening lecture, historian Lars Trägårdh, chair of the government-appointed committee behind Sweden’s proposed cultural canon, framed the initiative around education, community, and inclusion. Drawing on the Swedish tradition of popular education, he presented the canon as shared cultural capital intended to strengthen democratic participation. Trägårdh traced three phases in Swedish intellectual history: an early period with a relatively stable national canon, a late-20th-century phase marked by modernism and internationalism that fragmented common reference points, and a recent phase characterized by social division and declining trust. Against this backdrop, the cultural canon is presented as a form of “Folkhemmet 2.0” — not a fixed endpoint, but a shared point of entry into democratic dialogue.

Who decides what is valuable culture?

Literary scholar Åsa Arping emphasized that canon formation always involves power, exclusion, and conflicts over who defines cultural value. She showed how contemporary Swedish debates frame the canon as both an imagined community and a political instrument, shaped by ethics, aesthetics, time, and ideology. For Arping, the canon debate ultimately concerns what kind of society cultural heritage is meant to help create.

Karin Nilsson, director at ArkDes, questioned how a cultural canon relates to national museums, which have developed without a coherent canon-driven logic and lack responsibility for key areas such as literature and music. She warned against treating museums as canonizing institutions, stressing instead their role as open spaces for reflection and reinterpretation. Nilsson framed culture primarily as social practice and expressed skepticism toward using a canon to “educate” adults, while acknowledging its potential role in schools.

UNESCO Chair Cornelius Holtorf introduced the idea of a future-oriented canon, focused not only on the past but on shared responsibilities, hopes, and long-term thinking. Such a perspective, he argued, could foster cohesion and agency in the face of global challenges.

The concluding panel highlighted persistent tensions around power, identity, nostalgia, and responsibility. While participants agreed that cultural heritage always involves selection and valuation, they disagreed on whether a state-led canon is a constructive response to contemporary social challenges. The discussion ultimately underscored that the debate itself — about culture, community, and inclusion — may be more important than any definitive list of works.

Text: Vivian Smits, koordinator Kulturarvsakademin