| 1. |
- Vesterberg, Viktor
(författare)
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Ethnicizing Employability : Governing the Unemployed in Labour Market Projects in Sweden
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation analyzes labour market projects co-financed by the European Social Fund (ESF) targeting unemployed migrants and ethnicized groups. The analysis is qualitative, discourse-oriented and based on Foucault’s concept of governmentality. More specifically, it is highlighted how the target groups are ethnicized through discourses of employability and learning. The thesis consists of four articles. In the first three articles, focus is mainly on how the projects present themselves through their project descriptions in the ESF project bank and the fourth article is mainly based on ethnographic material. Overall, this dissertation highlights different aspects of inclusion work directed towards migrants and ethnicized target groups that can be seen as problematic and sometimes contradictory. Tendencies to individualize unemployment and thus positioning the unemployed project participants as responsible for their situation is interrogated in the thesis. Further, it is analyzed how culture and ethnicity is used in ways that are likely to strengthen the target groups ‘Otherness’ in relation to a ‘Swedishness’ that often become synonymous with what is perceived as normal and thus widening the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ when the stated goal is the opposite. This dissertation can serve as a starting point to reflect on how inclusion efforts and labour market projects seeking to produce social inclusion and employability may be at risk to categorize people in different ways, which can sometimes be problematic in relation to what the efforts seek to achieve.
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| 2. |
- Svensson, Malin, 1976
(författare)
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Hoppet om en framtidsplats. Asylsökande barn i den svenska skolan
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis explores how accompanied refugee and asylum-seeking children experience everyday life in Sweden. During the asylum process, as part of a policy for promoting ‘normal life’, these children have the same right to education as permanently resident children. An ethnographic approach brought out data from combining interviews with participant observation and visual material produced by children. Methodological inspiration was sought in the new sociology of childhood and in its potential to make an eclectic analysis of the empirical data. Study I explores how spatial and temporal dimensions theoretically may guide dialogue with refugee children and interpretation of their visual material. The findings point to how children negotiate opportunities for the future where everyday life takes place, and how conditions for education are perceived in relation to their future prospects. Inquiring into the meaning of school, Study II explores the sense of possibility as perceived by asylum-seeking children, and shows how school is a social place that provides structure, a sense of belonging and a learning environment. Paradoxically, schools’ limited attention to the children’s predicament risked accentuating the ambivalent social position of being an asylum seeker and thus weakening the benefits of their right to education. Study III examines the challenges teachers face, as street-level bureaucrats, in catering to the needs of asylumseeking pupils and demonstrates how conflicting goals of education policy and asylum policy conditioned teachers’ work and risked undermining the compensatory pedagogical task. In sum, through analyses that encompass how an unsecured residence permit does not prevent children aspiring to their futures, as envisioned in the present, creating a home can be understood in terms of hope. While the asylum process conditions ideas of the future, the thesis contributes to an understanding of how it also shapes how children and teachers, as social actors, construct what is considered to be ‘normal life’ during the asylum process.
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| 3. |
- Ekström, Veronica, 1975-
(författare)
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Det besvärliga våldet : Socialtjänstens stöd till kvinnor som utsatts för våld i nära relationer
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I avhandlingen analyseras hur våldsutsatta kvinnors behov tolkas, omförhandlas och anpassas för att kunna hanteras inom socialtjänstens organisation. Avhandlingens övergripande frågeställningar fokuserar på insatser och behov, betydelsen av socialtjänstens organisering och betydelsen av socialarbetarnas handlingsutrymme. Avhandlingen baseras på kvalitativa analyser av statliga propositioner, intervjuer med socialarbetare och med kvinnor som varit utsatta för våld i nära relationer. Det teoretiska ramverket bygger bland annat på Frasers (1989) teoretiska perspektiv som tar sin utgångspunkt i samhällets tolkningar av människors/gruppers behov av stöd, nyinstitutionell teori och teorier om gatubyråkrater. Avhandlingen visar att socialarbetares tolkningar är centrala aspekter av förhandlingen om hur våldsutsatta kvinnors behov och rätt till stöd ska förstås. Ett viktigt resultat i avhandlingen är att stödet till våldsutsatta kvinnor blir så pass olika. Avhandlingen ger inga svar i kvantitativa termer på hur olikheten är fördelad, men den ger exempel på hur olikheten tar sig uttryck. I kommuner där specialiseringen innebär att socialarbetarna på socialkontoret i första hand utreder behov och fattar beslut om insatser, måste det också finnas adekvata insatser att besluta om. Saknas det så erbjuds inte heller något stöd. Stödet till kvinnor som utsatts för våld i nära relationer blir också olika eftersom socialarbetare ställer olika krav eller sätter upp olika trösklar för att kvinnor ska få stöd. Avhandlingen visar att både gemensam kunskap och gemensam syn på sociala problem är centralt för att samarbetet inom den specialiserade socialtjänstens ska fungera och i längden också för vilket stöd människor kommer att erbjudas.
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| 4. |
- McCrory, Gavin, 1990
(författare)
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The unseen in between: Unpacking, designing, and evaluating sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We live in a time of compounding ecological and social change. Given its uncertain and urgent nature, contemporary forms of governance are experiencing tension between controlling the present and nurturing collective capacities to enact transformative change. Amidst a wave of interest in transitions and transformations in-the-making, labs in real-world contexts have entered the discussion. Labs have emerged as appealing, novel and highly complex entities that situate and localize engagement around complex sustainability challenges. Labs carry a systemic view of change; they comprise alternative and experimental approaches; they carry a normative assumption that research has plural roles; and they hold an explicit learning orientation that infuses knowledge with action. Given the unfolding of labs in the real world, my involvement in their design, and ongoing interests in treating both meanings and processes of sustainability, this thesis is organized around a curiosity. Its overarching aim is to investigate how sustainability-oriented labs could be unpacked, designed and evaluated in the context of sustainability transitions and transformations. Underlaboured by a critical realist philosophy of science, this thesis investigates sustainability-oriented labs by way of a qualitative-dominant, case-based research strategy. It does this across three overlapping research phases, culminating in four appended papers. In research phase one, we adopt a systematic review of sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts, exploring and classifying a global sample of labs according to their engagement with sustainability. In paper I, we identify and unpack 53 sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we explore the distribution and diversity of these labs, discerning the research communities which conceptualize labs and the dimensions of their practice. In Paper III, we present an empirically grounded typology, arriving at six different types of sustainability-oriented labs: 1) Fix and control, 2) (Re-)Design and optimize, 3) Make and relate, 4) Educate and engage, 5) Empower and govern and 6) Explore and shape. In research phase two, paper II presents a qualitative case-based inquiry into Challenge Lab (C-Lab), a challenge-driven learning environment. Paper II conceptualizes challenge framing as embedded within an open-ended learning process, both on a level of practice and space. Experiences related to framing in C-Lab shed light on how students situate themselves and see their role within existing challenges, how they navigate limits to knowledge in complex systems, and how they self-assess their own sense of comfort and progress. In addition, we introduce three dilemmas that are not owned by teachers or students but emerge, as contradiction, within the learning space. In research phase three, paper IV presents a multi-case comparison of evaluation practices in various sustainability transition initiatives. We conceptualize and compare the role of evaluation as a tool that can enhance the transformative capacity of sustainability-oriented labs and its broader family of transition experiments. This thesis and its appended papers provide practical-experiential, empirical-conceptual and methodological contributions on the topic of sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts. In addition, it contains a layered account of an undisciplinary doctoral journey. I do this by (1) reflecting upon each research phase, (2) providing transparent accounts of positionality in relation to my research, (3) conceptualizing and reflecting upon undisciplinarity as a process of becoming, and (4) providing a mobile autoethnographic account of staying on the ground as part of a broader commitment to interrogate knowledge practices. Moving forward, I find myself motivated by three convictions: (1) transformations are needed, and labs are invitations in between dualisms, (2) invitations hold the possibility of flipping big assumptions and ethical practices, and (3) transformations presuppose fundamental change from within both research and education knowledge systems. They hinge upon the questioning of what both are, who they are for, and what they might need to become. In conclusion, they compel us to think big, start small, and act now.
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| 5. |
- Philipson Isaac, Sarah, 1990
(författare)
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Temporal Dispossession: The Politics of Asylum and the Remaking of Racial Capitalism in and Beyond the Borders of the Swedish Welfare State
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis sets out from the post-2015 Swedish asylum legislation, which made Sweden’s asylum policy among the most restrictive in the EU. The most decisive changes were the shift from permanent to temporary residence permits as the standard protection provided, along with the increasingly blurred lines between migration regimes and labour market policies. With temporary residence permits as the new norm, time and labour market productivity are central to the distribution of vulnerability and life chances, as labour market participation functions as the only means of qualifying for permanent residence. The policy shift can be seen as an institutionalization of temporality and deportability, as it carries the inherent risk of deportation if residence permits are not reissued upon renewal. Against this background, this thesis draws on temporal enactments of dispossession and racial capitalism as a theoretical framework to analyse how the control of time results in different forms of dispossession – a feature that is closely tied to the selection logics of late racial capitalism, namely: differentiation, devaluation, and competition. Although dispossession has been conceptualized as a mechanism of authoritative control over the spatial, emotional, and relational aspects of (neo)colonized subjects’ lives, research often fails to recognize the significance of time and temporality in understanding this process. Here, I seek to bridge this gap. Furthermore, where migration studies have been critiqued for perpetuating methodological nationalism, temporal dispossession foregrounds time as central to the distribution of rights to make visible how the control of time is an experience shared across multiple positions – citizens and non-citizens alike. While this directs our attention to the continuum of temporal control, those positioned as migrants are often experiencing the most acute effects of the temporal restrictions that affect access to rights. The thesis builds on four years of ethnographical engagements with interlocutors who sought asylum between 2015 and 2017, and interviews with street-level bureaucrats, from the Swedish Migration Agency, NGOs, asylum lawyers, to the Swedish Public Employment Service. Consequently, engaging with the interlocutors’ experiences through the theoretical lens of temporal dispossession is a means of centring time not only within the workings of racial capitalism, but also on how border regimes work to sustain racial capitalism and how labour market exploitation is exacerbated by the legal liminality the interlocutors inhabit. Chapter 5, on temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy, examines the temporal dimensions of the Migration Agency’s New Public Management (NPM) procedures as they assess asylum applications. It traces the enforced deceleration, interrupted by pockets of acceleration, that obscures the interlocutors from frames of intelligibility in the asylum process. Here, temporal dispossession consists of preventing those seeking asylum from making progress in their cases, using temporal means of discarding their need for protection and relegating them to a different pace of time as compared to the surrounding society, effectively positioning them as untrustworthy and thus as undeserving asylum subjects. Chapter 6 investigates ‘islands of dispossession’ where time and space merge in the analysis of the body as the most intimate scale of such islands, asylum camps and make-shift camps as the national scale, and enforcement archipelagos as the global scale. Together, these tease out the role of temporal dispossession in carceral geographies and the role of border regimes in sustaining racial capitalism. The chapter also engages with how interlocutors redefine and resist the spaces of the camp through community formations. The final analytical chapter on the workings of temporal dispossession in the labour market (Chapter 7) examines the productivity of time in the production of surplus, cheap, and disposable labour forces, where labour market participation constitutes the only means of securing permanent protection. This is examined through the interlocutors’ experiences navigating the informal labour market, ‘fast track’ labour market programmes, and their attempts to ‘switch’ tracks from asylum to labour market migration to secure their futures and reduce the pervasive threat of deportability. Taken together, the thesis seeks to contribute to research on how dispossession operates in and through the border regime, specifically through its temporal configurations, and how the latter is weaponised to dispossess people of their life chances. The thesis further seeks to contribute to research on the political economy of borders in the Nordic context by examining the operation of racial capitalism through the welfare state, where labour market exploitation is exacerbated by the precarity produced through its migration bureaucracies.
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| 6. |
- Nordh, Jonas
(författare)
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Social citizenship and people with dementia : Designing social care policies in Sweden
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- People with dementia are commonly in need of some form of social care from the social services in order to manage their everyday situations. However, social services are shaped by the construction of policy targets. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the social citizenship for people with dementia. Social citizenship for people with dementia is explored by studying how people with dementia, in policy documents, have been constructed as a target group and also by studying how policies are enacted in practice by care managers, in their work and in their meetings with people with dementia. This is illustrated by studying policy documents from national level which range over nearly 40 years and 19 interviews with care managers. It is shown that, if and when, people with dementia are visible in policy documents, they commonly have a negative construction based on their cognitive and communicative abilities, as a burden, disturbing and incapable. It is further investigated how street-level bureaucrats, in this case care managers, experience meeting with people with dementia when they apply for social services. It is shown that care-managers experience difficulties concerning this group comprised of the exchange of information between care managers and people with dementia, refusal of social services by the person, the influence of relatives and other professions as well as moral dilemmas, such as the relations between the person with dementia and their relatives. The study shows that care managers have little support from policies, e.g. legislation and guidelines, in how to handle these dilemmas, and must thus create their own local ways of handling these situations. Care managers are thus influential policy actors concerning the policy target group of people with dementia. The policy processes which this dissertation illustrates, affect the social citizenship of people with dementia. It is shown that they, to an extent, have difficulties in influencing their own everyday situation concerning social services. Finally, the policy processes, will affect their possibility to influence their social citizenship.
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| 7. |
- Stepanova, Olga, 1981
(författare)
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Conflict resolution in coastal management: Interdisciplinary analyses of resource use conflicts from the Swedish coast
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Natural resource use conflicts at urbanized coasts and their analysis and resolution are the main themes of this thesis. Based on the analysis of four conflict cases from the Swedish coast, I explore the ways the local management of coastal resources may be connected with a broader notion of sustainable resource management. Two questions guide this study. The first one is in regard to the theoretical and methodological development of coastal conflict research. It asks whether and how coastal conflicts can be analysed in an interdisciplinary manner. In answer to this research question, I developed an interdisciplinary conceptual framework for the analysis of local coastal conflicts. This framework is an example of the form that methodologies for interdisciplinary knowledge integration can take in a natural resource management study. The framework combined and integrated knowledge from different discourses and disciplines of environmental conflict research with the knowledge from empirical conflict studies and allowed for more integrated and complex conflict analysis. The second question is practice and management oriented and concerns how practical conflict resolution can be improved with sustainable coastal resource management as a goal. The findings highlight the importance combinations of formal and informal resolution strategies have, the key role of practices of knowledge use and the importance of power imbalances among stakeholders for conflict resolution. By setting out to link together the analyses of conflicts and conflict resolution in the practice of resource management and policy with the normative aspects of sustainable resource management, I highlight that interdisciplinary analyses of resource use conflicts and integrated approaches to conflict resolution should be incorporated in sustainable resource management and planning as a necessary part.
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| 8. |
- Lindén, Lisa, 1985-
(författare)
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Communicating Care : The Contradictions of HPV Vaccination Campaigns
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Denna avhandling undersöker tre statligt finansierade kampanjer mot human papillomvirus (HPV) i Sverige. Författaren visar att kampanjerna innehåller och artikulerar olika former av omsorg som inte är begränsade till att endast uppmana människor att ”ta hand om sig själva” eller ”bry sig om andra”. Istället studeras omsorg som något mångfasetterat och kontextuellt, och som något som innefattar såväl mänskliga som icke-mänskliga komponenter. I studien fokuserar författaren på hur aktörer möjliggör och problematiserar olika former av omsorg. Dessa aktörer inkluderar yrkesverksamma inom landsting som försöker kommunicera omsorg till tjejer och deras anhöriga, men också olika materiella ting, såsom en ”HPV-app”, en Facebook-kampanjsida och en vaccinationshusvagn.Kampanjmedia, intervjuer och textbaserade cancerberättelser analyseras med hjälp av teoretiska perspektiv från fältet feministiska teknik- och vetenskapsstudier (STS). Studien är situerad till forskning kring omsorgspolitik inom teknik och vetenskap, och bidrar till diskussioner om tidsmässiga dimensioner av omsorg. I kampanjmaterialet som studeras dominerar ett fokus på omsorg som något som skall göras nu för att möjliggöra en hälsosam och lycklig framtid. Genom att använda sig av ett ”etiskt-politiskt” ställningstagande, och en analytisk ansats, där fokus ligger på att synliggöra marginella, frånvarande och alternativa omsorgsformer problematiserar författaren sådana ”snabba” framtidsorienterade omsorgsvisioner enligt vilka omsorg ses som något som skall göras omedelbart i preventivt syfte. Detta görs genom ett synliggörande av ”långsammare” och sammanflätade ”omsorgstemporaliteter” som öppnar upp för osäkerheter, tveksamheter, obestämdheter samt för olika känslouttryck, och som möjliggör mer omsorgsfulla praktiker.
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| 9. |
- Mehrabi, Tara
(författare)
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Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD.
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| 10. |
- Malmborg, Katja, 1988-
(författare)
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How on Earth? : Operationalizing the ecosystem service concept for sustainability
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Production landscapes are at the center of many of the sustainability challenges that we face. The ecosystem service concept has risen in prominence over the last decades as a tool to support sustainable landscape management. Stewardship has been suggested as an approach that individuals and groups of actors can practice when striving for sustainability in complex situations. In this thesis, I explore how the ecosystem service concept can be used as a tool to support the stewardship practices of various local actors who are engaging in sustainable landscape management. The core of this thesis is a participatory resilience assessment conducted together with a diverse group of actors, all involved in different forms of landscape management in the Helgeå catchment in Southern Sweden. In Paper I, I describe the participatory ecosystem service bundles analysis that was part of the process. In Paper II, I describe the process as a whole and show how participating supported learning and articulation of complexity thinking. In Paper III, I compare this process with three other knowledge co-production processes from the Helgeå catchment, and trace how different theoretical approaches led to both similar and diverging ecosystem service knowledge outputs. Finally, in Paper IV, I use a photo elicitation exercise to articulate different narratives of how sense of home motivates private, non-industrial forest owners in the Helgeå catchment to engage in stewardship practice.Together, these four papers show that the ecosystem service concept can support sustainability by facilitating knowledge co-production processes about complex challenges in landscape management. In such settings, it can function as a pedagogical tool and bridging concept. For participating civil servants, ecosystem service knowledge and terminology were also used strategically when communicating with actors in their own organizations, effectively influencing their situated agency to practice stewardship. Finally, the ecosystem service concept has the potential to be useful in the dialogue between private land owners and other actors. However, some pathways to stewardship, such as those rooted in a sense for history and community, would be better represented by other, more relational human-nature conceptualizations. This means that while the operationalization of the ecosystem service concept can contribute to stewardship practices in pursuit of sustainability, there are also important limitations that need to be taken into account in each context of use.
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