| 1. |
- Gunnarsson, Karin, 1975-
(författare)
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Med önskan om kontroll : Figurationer av hälsa i skolors hälsofrämjande arbete
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i två sammanvävda tendenser, den ökade förekomsten av psykisk ohälsa bland unga och skolors uppdrag att främja hälsa. Larmen om att ohälsa bland unga ökar har skett i takt med att skolans hälsofrämjande arbete allt starkare efterfrågas. Hur skolans hälsofrämjande arbete på så vis fått en alltmer generell prägel som innefattar hela skolan och alla elever samt vad detta innebär för skolans verksamhet är frågor som diskuteras i denna avhandling. Forskningsfrågorna formuleras såsom hur produceras hälsa som olika figurationer i skolors hälsofrämjande arbete och vad producerar i sin tur dessa figurationer. Figurationer förstås här som samtidigt stabila och temporära figurer eller uttryck. De sätter fokus på göranden som formar hälsa till olika formationer, språkligt och diskursivt men också materiellt och affektivt utifrån ett post-konstruktionistiskt perspektiv (Lykke, 2010). Inom ramen för detta perspektiv sammankopplas teorier och begrepp från Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Bruno Latour och Ann-Marie Mol. Det formar en teoretisk apparatur med möjligheter att undersöka hälsa och skolors hälsofrämjande arbete genom att utmana uppdelningar av ting, texter, kroppar, känslor och diskurser. Här blir inte bara människor utan också materialiteter aktiva aktörer i produktionen av hälsa. Det görs med ett etnografiskt tillvägagångssätt där fenomenet hälsa spåras i två skolpraktiker, skol- och hälsopolitiska policytexter och ett manualbaserat hälsofrämjande program kallat DISA (Depression in Swedish Adolescens).Spårandet följer fyra figurationer av hälsa; hälsa som plats, hälsa som kompetens, hälsa som känslor och hälsa som könad kropp. Genom dessa figurationer återkommer komponenterna kontroll och förändring. Hälsa produceras i relation till kontroll och förändring som en förmåga att kontrollera och förändra såväl egna tankar och känslor som omgivning. Spårandet av hälsa har skett i och genom praktiker som syftar till förändring, en förbättrad hälsa, men som genom en önskan om kontroll framförallt producerar stabiliserande och faslåsande effekter. Hälsa, känslor och lärande blir genom spårningen ytterligare sammanvävda aspekter vilket i avhandlingen förstås som en hälsofiering av skola där ett hälsofrämjande arbete ska vara del av hela skolan och riktas mot alla elever. Samtidigt spåras hur materiella, diskursiva och affektiva aktörer är delaktiga i händelser som inte går att förutse, bestämma eller kontrollera. Det formades händelser där texter, rum, manualer, spiraler, lappar, soffor och kroppar blev aktiva genom att koppla samman, beröra och producera hälsa. På så vis framträdde hur önskan om kontroll både är tillfällig och imaginär. Avslutningsvis konstrueras och diskuteras begreppet tekno-biopedagogik och hur det kan göra det möjligt att undersöka hur pedagogiska praktiker tillsammans med kroppar och materialiteter formar biopolitiska processer. Därutöver artikuleras en figuration av hälsa som omsorg med en utvidgad teoretisk diskussion om vad den skulle kunna innebära, dels sammankopplat med skolors hälsofrämjande arbete, dels sammankopplat med en forskningspraktik.
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| 2. |
- Holmqvist, Diana, 1984-
(författare)
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Adult Education at Auction : On Tendering-Based Procurement and Valuation in Swedish Municipal Adult Education
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Our understanding of adult education’s purpose and value is linked to how we think ‘good’ education should be organised and provided. This thesis explores the interplay between organisation and values by looking at how conceptualisations and valuations of adult education are affected when private providers become involved in public education.For this purpose, the study draws on the example of Swedish municipal adult education (MAE). On the one hand, Swedish adult education is organised to compensate for structural inequalities and mitigate barriers to participation in education for citizens. On the other hand, private providers are allowed to make profits from their involvement in public education. Sweden’s combined commitment to universal welfare and the market make this a particularly interesting case to examine. Mainly contracted through tendering-based procurement, for-profit companies (and to a lesser extent non-public organisations) now service almost half of all MAE course participants. The thesis explores how municipalities construct the value and purpose of MAE when placing orders with private providers, and how teachers working in MAE reflect upon the purpose and value of MAE.Drawing on empirical data from both procurements and interviews, the study shows that municipalities use tendering-based procurement to shape the public-private partnership and promote different values. On a national level, this creates a heterogenous landscape of adult education provision and valuations. Furthermore, the study shows that there are tensions between MAE teachers’ professional self-conceptualisations and the realities put forth by policy or constructed in the procurement process. Analysing how teachers navigate these tensions, the study shows that teachers work to resist reformation, while they also become complicit in enforcing values promoted through policy and procurement.
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| 3. |
- Mufic, Johanna, 1991-
(författare)
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“Quality Problems” in Swedish Municipal Adult Education : The Micropolitics of Quality Construed in the Audit Society
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis was to analyze and critically scrutinize how quality is construed in an audit process in Swedish Municipal Adult Education (MAE) and the discursive effects. Drawing on adult education policy documents and observations of a quality audit process, as well as the Swedish Schools Inspectorate’s (SSI) Day, this study also contributes to the uncharted field of how the micropolitics of “quality” is being produced in the Audit society within adult education. By applying Carol Bacchi’s post-structural, Foucault-influenced ‘What’s the “problem” represented to be?’ approach, it became possible to analyze the politics of “quality” on a micro level. The results indicate that quality seems to be construed as a ‘lack’ or a ‘problem’ in Swedish MAE policy and during the quality audit that SSI carried out in MAE. Moreover, principals, teachers and heads of education seem to be held responsible for this lack as the increased need for flexibility and individualization is stressed as a solution to the ‘quality problem’. There also seems to be an ambiguity of how quality should be addressed, defined, audited, and produced in MAE, as the SSI seem to struggle with making quality measurable for it to be auditable. The analysis shed light on two different logics that underpin the way that quality is construed; on the one hand, it is construed as something elusive that can be used to pinpoint quality in teaching and schools. And on the other hand, it is construed as something quantitative and limiting that has effects on what can be said and done in MAE. There also seems to be a hierarchy between different ‘problems’ during the SSI’s audit of MAE which also have consequences for what can be said and done about quality in this context.
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| 4. |
- Schoultz, Magnus, 1989-
(författare)
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Seniorers lärande : Intrinsikala värden som hälsoresurs
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis focuses on older adults’ participation in non-formal education where learning does not lead to qualifications for a vocational career. In recent decades learning has been discussed in relation to older adults, where concepts like lifelong learning have been put forward as instruments for facing challenges such as demographic changes and ageing. Research demonstrates that intrinsic aspects of learning, such as the joy of learning, are important for older adults’ participation in education. However, research seldom considers intrinsic values of education as a point of departure. Against this background, the aim of the thesis is to develop a deeper understanding of older adults’ experiences of intrinsic values in organised educational activities and their significance for older adults’ health.The thesis consists of three articles. One article is a review focusing on how the research field has explained the relation between learning and health for older adults. The other two articles focus specifically on the educational practice. One of the articles explores older adults’ experiences of intrinsic values, while the other looks at the teachers’ didactical principles for organising education for older adults. To fulfil the purpose of the thesis and facilitate an in-depth understanding, a synthesis is created based on the three articles, didactic theory, John Dewey’s theory of values and his conceptualisation of experience and Aron Antonovsky’s salutogenic perspective on health. By synthesising the results from the articles and the theories new theoretical explanations emerge as to how older adults’ learning can contribute to their health. With support from the concepts intrinsic values, interaction, continuity, health resources and sense of coherence, the synthesis emphasises that older adults’ experiences of intrinsic values in education can be understood as health resources that contribute to their sense of coherence.
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| 5. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(författare)
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Impossible Interculturality? : Education and the Colonial Difference in a Multicultural World
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.
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| 6. |
- Bredlöv, Eleonor, 1982-
(författare)
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Shaped for beauty : Vocational and gendered subjectivities in private education for the beauty industry
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis was to answer the question: How are vocational, gendered subjectivities produced in vocational education for the beauty industry? Drawing on Foucault and poststructural feminist theory, this question is answered in four papers, in which the material consists of beauty-school recruitment and marketing material, interviews with skin and spa therapy students and observations of practical skin and spa therapy training. These are educational arrangements that are closely bound to the economic sector of the beauty industry, and they have remained remarkably unexplored. Various aspects of subjectivity production are explored throughout these papers: Paper I shows how the potential beauty student is shaped through processes of responsibilising and individualising in recruitment; Paper II shows how a scientific and caring professional emerges; Paper III shows how students learn to adopt a critical gaze towards bodies; and Paper IV shows how students are produced as emotional workers and learners, taking Hochschild’s term “emotional labour” as a point of departure. The results show how (medical) scientific knowledge becomes a resource in the production of the skin and spa therapy professional, mobilising gender relations of power, and neglecting other types of skills and knowledge. However, relational and caring aspects of work and learning emerge in the study through the way in which wider discourses of femininity inform the ways in which students are produced as professionals.
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| 7. |
- Mbabazi, Penelope B.
(författare)
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Quality in Learning in Rwandan Higher Education : Different stakeholders’ perceptions of students’ learning and employability
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of the thesis is to investigate quality in learning in higher education in Rwanda by focusing on students’ learning and their employability. This focus allows for an understanding of key challenges for Rwandan higher education to emerge, at a time when more and more students are enrolling. Higher education is being rebuilt after the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda and the focus on quality in learning and preparing students for work life is thus timely and important. The empirical material comprises interviews with students, teachers and employers. Interpretation of this material is guided by perspectives on quality in learning: students’ approaches to learning, learning as transformation and employability. A meta-ethnographic analysis of the four articles on which the thesis is based generated five themes as central quality aspects of learning that could enhance the employability of graduates: becoming professional, skillful practices, becoming a learner, becoming responsible and international experience. The results illustrate that students have to some extent different views from employers and teachers regarding questions about quality in learning. Thus, it could be of value for policy makers and teachers to listen to what the students have to say when designing policy and curriculum in higher education in Rwanda.
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| 8. |
- Nordmark, Jonas, 1978-
(författare)
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Med en framtida demokrat som adressat : Föreställningar om framtid i svenska samhällskunskapsböcker 1992-2010
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is a critical study on conceptions of future in swedish social studies textbooks for primary secondary school, and a discussion on discourses of the young person as a future political subject. The main part of the thesis is a discourse analysis of textbooks published within the timeframe 1992 through 2010. The demarcation of the two decade timeframe stems from a critical discussion within educational research on political and educational discourses about individual and common future in recent years. I mainly draw my critical theoretical argument from a discussion on what in radical democratic theory is referred to as a post-political state within late liberal democracies. Much of the future oriented educational research is implicitly rooted within this discussion, where the possibility of understanding the young person as a future political subject to a great extent is scrutinized. The method through which the textbooks are read is discourse analysis, mainly inspired by deconstruction, focusing social and political logic within normative texts. My findings are that future in large parts of the textbooks is put forth as dependant on the single individual´s commitment to making the future democratic society possible through political engagement, but also her adaptation to an already well ordered democratic society. Commitment and adaptation take form in two, what I call, ontopolitical discourses about the young person as a future partaker of democratic society. The first discourse delineate the young person as partaker in an already initiated course onto a better common future. As an individual the young person is put forth as part of an overarching common shared temporal movement towards future for the society as a whole. Earlier books seem to suggest this temporalization of the common, to a higher extent than later. Later books suggest the idea of the young person as possible part to either a positive common future full of personal opportunities at hand, or a negative common future, shared by those without same life opportunities. This second discourse render threats towards the future democratic society, as such individuals without ability to fulfil their aspirations. Being unemployed at the outskirts of society both put a strain on the ordered society and also implies that those without means to take care of themselves might in fact become dangerous. Through French thinker Jacques Rancière I suggest that these implications should be understood as a view on future society where all are included, but some are included through defining them as excluded within society.
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| 9. |
- Rahm, Lina, 1973-
(författare)
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Educational imaginaries : a genealogy of the digital citizen
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis makes use of a genealogical approach to map out and explainhow and why computers and citizenship have become so closely connected.It examines the historical continuities and disruptions, and the role thatpopular education has played in this interrelation. Drawing on previousresearch in the overlap between Swedish popular education history andhistorical computer politics, this thesis adds knowledge about howimaginaries of popular education, operating as silver bullet solutions toproblems with computerization, have had important functions as governingtools for at least 70 years. That is, Swedish popular education has since the1950s been imagined as a central solution to problems with computerization,but also to realize the societal potentials associated with computers.Specifically, this thesis makes two contributions: 1) Empirically, the thesisunearths archived, and in many ways forgotten, discourses around thehistorical enactment of the digital citizen, and the role of popular education,questioning assumptions that are taken for granted in current times; 2)Theoretically, the thesis proposes a conceptual model of educationalimaginaries, and specifically introduces the notion (and method) of‘problematizations’ into these imaginaries.
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| 10. |
- Sandberg, Fredrik
(författare)
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Recognition of Prior Learning in Health Care : From a Caring Ideology and Power, to Communicative Action and Recognition
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the last decades Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) has become a more frequently used method to recognise adult’s prior learning. This thesis analyses a process of RPL in health care, where health care assistants are assessed against subjects in the upper-secondary health care program. Prior research on RPL is to a high degree non-theoretical and focus is primarily on policy level research. This thesis adds to the field by progressing a critical social theory perspective on RPL. In the thesis the RPL process is analysed through Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Axel Honneth’s Recognition theory. General questions posed are: What are the power issues in the RPL process? What implications does the tension between the lifeworld of work and the system of education have? What consequences does mutual understanding and communication have for the outcome of the RPL process? What part does recognition play for the participants? The results disclose the power relations that emerge in the relationship between participants and teachers. A caring ideology is developed and problematized. Further, the importance of mutual understanding between participant and teachers in the assessment of prior learning is discussed focusing on the consequences a lack of mutual understanding could have for the outcome in such assessments. On a macro level the analysis demonstrates the tension between the participants prior learning and the educational systems demand for formalising prior learning. In addition, analyses of a more developmental character that intends to show the potential for critical learning, change and recognition are progressed.The results suggest that communicative action can be used to develop RPL into processes focusing on critical learning and change. Recognition of traits and abilities could also enhance individual’s positive relations with the self. Such recognition could develop self-confidence and thus RPL could encourage learning and cultivate continuing self-realisation through work.
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