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- Enlund, Desirée, 1984-
(författare)
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Contentious countrysides : social movements reworking and resisting public healthcare restructuring in rural Sweden
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The broader aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of the production and reproduction of spatial inequalities following from the restructuring of the public healthcare system. More specifically, by analyzing the contention around healthcare restructuring related to two cases spanning a longer period in northern Sweden, I aim to investigate the changing conditions for healthcare provision in rural and sparsely populated areas, and I explore the forms of collective action that local people engage in to sustain the access to healthcare, as well as how state authorities’ attitudes towards such collective action have shifted. In the context of larger public healthcare restructuring in contemporary Sweden, where the marketization and privatization of healthcare since the 1990s have impacted the provision of healthcare across the country, rural areas are experiencing deteriorating accessibility to both primary healthcare as well as emergency healthcare. This development is increasingly contentious, and is frequently met with resistance from rural populations as well as various strategies to rework these uneven conditions. The first case concerns the preceding protests as well as the occupation and opening of a citizen cooperative primary care center in Sollefteå, Västernorrland, in response to cutbacks at the local hospital. The second case follows the worker-cum-citizen cooperative primary and occupational healthcare centers in Offerdal, Jämtland. Through these two cases I explore people’s experiences of public healthcare restructuring, their motivations for engaging in contention around it, their experiences of self-organizing cooperative healthcare, as well as their visions and desires for a future healthcare.As shown throughout this thesis, healthcare restructuring is highly contentious and comes in many forms, ranging from protests, demonstrations, and occupations of healthcare facilities to the self-organization of healthcare services through worker and citizen cooperatives. Healthcare restructuring marked by spatial concentration and withdrawal has thus given rise to a number of drawn-out and spectacular collective actions in contemporary Sweden, but responses can also take the form of low-key efforts to maintain healthcare provision. The healthcare authorities’ attitude towards such low-key efforts by not-for-profit healthcare providers has shifted from a favorable approach in the 1990s to emphasizing their role in safeguarding fair market conditions in the healthcare market. This shift has created a more hostile welfare state landscape for not-for-profit healthcare providers in rural areas, which exacerbates the already unfavorable conditions they operate under. Rural populations’ efforts to remedy the withdrawal of public healthcare are thus highly precarious. While reworking uneven healthcare provision, they operate in this increasingly hostile welfare state landscape, which is not adapted to either rural areas or not-for-profit healthcare. In practice, public healthcare restructuring and withdrawal amount to a cutback in healthcare provision for rural populations. This transfers the work of sustaining social reproduction to the private sphere, in this case not-for-profits healthcare providers. The public healthcare restructuring and withdrawal outlined in this thesis thus present an example of a form of ‘rural neoliberalism’, whereby rural populations are dispossessed of welfare services that instead accumulate in urban areas, which both increases and is connected to larger questions around spatial (in)equalities and the restructuring of the public sector in contemporary Sweden. Nevertheless, those engaged in contention around and the self-organization of healthcare nurture visions and desires for a future healthcare system that would take a holistic approach to the patient and make possible a more equitable access to healthcare.
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| 3. |
- Sandberg, Linda, 1978-
(författare)
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Fear of violence and gendered power relations : Responses to threat in public space in Sweden
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on consequences of the kind of ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a larger group of people in a specific place. The concern of this thesis is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. This thesis explores some of the ways not only women but also men in Umeå responded to this specific situation, the threat from a single repeat offender, and how fear of crime and changing public crime discourses influenced gendered power relations. The thesis examines different aspects of fear and safety in public space, such as the views of those who are fearful; of those who are feared; perceptions of both women’s and men’s bodies; their emotions and experiences in relation to fear of violence in public spaces; and the significance of space and place for our understanding of fear. The empirical data of this thesis consist of in-depth interviews with a total of 47 women and men in Umeå.The thesis is based on four empirical studies. The first (Paper I) sought to identify similarities and differences across narratives in terms of the major components of young people’s talk about fear. In their stories women positioned themselves as fearful and in need of protection, while men in their stories positioned themselves as fearless protectors. Men and women reproduced ways of speaking considered appropriate to their gender, thus performing masculinity and femininity through their talk. Paper II, examines consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon on constructions of white masculinities. Three masculine positions; the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector were identified. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut or ‘belonging’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. Paper III, focuses on changing perceptions and representations of female and male bodies, and illustrates how a change took place; from a focus on how women should conduct themselves to be safe, towards men’s bodily behaviour in order to present themselves in non-threatening ways. In Paper IV, women’s fear of violence is discussed in relation to Swedish gender equality discourses and contextual constructions of femininity. The results show the difficulties of claiming the official position of a gender-equal femininity. Several female respondents expressed an ambivalent attitude about their own fear; they felt afraid, but also felt that as (equal) women they should be able to do what they wanted, whenever they wanted. Result from this thesis shows that this situation produced a shared approach to fear for women of different ages, classes and ethnicities in Umeå. The similarity in the women’s responses to the threat from the Haga Man is as an expression of a normative femininity. The male respondents did on the other hand express complex emotional positions as they talked about their own fears, women’s fear of unknown men and how they felt they were under suspicion and compared to the perpetrator. As this thesis provides an understanding of how men and women responded and reacted to the threat from the Haga man, it contributes to a better understanding of how fear of violence affects people in their everyday lives.
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