| 1. |
- Philipson Isaac, Sarah, 1990
(författare)
-
Temporal Dispossession: The Politics of Asylum and the Remaking of Racial Capitalism in and Beyond the Borders of the Swedish Welfare State
- 2024
-
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.
|
|
| 2. |
- Johansson, Maria
(författare)
-
Business as Usual? : Doing gender equality in Swedish forestry work organisations
- 2020
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The title of this thesis is Business as usual? Doing gender equality in Swedish forestry work organizations and while the latter part, the subtitle, is rather self-explanatory, the former part can be read in different ways. The aim of the thesis is to increase the understanding of the doing of gender equality in the male dominated work organizations of the Swedish forestry sector, and thereby contribute both theoretical and empirical understanding regarding how doing gender equality in the forestry sector relates both to notions of gender and notions of organizations. Forestry has traditionally been characterized by physically demanding, manual harvesting work, with practical and symbolic associations with men and certain forms of masculinity. The forestry sector still remains one of the most gender segregated labour forces in Sweden, all while gender equality has been addressed to some extent during the 2000s. The theoretical frame of reference of the present thesis is rooted in feminist organizational research and the doing gender framework. Based on a perspective of reality as socially constructed and by deploying a feminist participatory action research methodology, my analysis focuses on how complexities of meanings are ascribed to the actions and processes, that are framed as gender equality and I have qualitatively analysed empirical material, such as policy documents, interviews and written testimonies of sexual harassment, that explicate these aspects of doing gender equality in organizations. The thesis is built experiences from two different research- and development projects and consists of 5 articles and a synthetizing chapter.The results highlight how doing gender equality relates to notions of gender as well as notions of organization. In both Article I, where policies were studied and in Article II, that builds on interviews, women are in general constructed as the “other”, as people who lack (forestry) skills and competences and who are in need of help or as contributors of social and emotional competence. Men and masculine norms are mainly absent from the doing of gender equality in this material, just as notions of the organization. But, deploying a feminist participatory action research methodology can bring forward other perspectives on gender equality, as shown in Articles IV and V, such as the articulations of men and masculinities. Further, this thesis shows that gender equality is in general understood by the organizations studied as a process that regards gender, predominantly women, rather than the organization. Put differently, gender equality work in the forestry sector does not to any significant extent, affect what is perceived as the core activities in these organizations. However, the overarching depoliticized and degendered business case framing that mainly evades accounting for the role of the organization when doing gender equality, is disrupted by the testimonies of #slutavverkat explored in Article III. Here, the political dimension of gender equality is highlighted by stories of men’s behaviours (reprehended but at the same time sanctioned) in organizations that come at the expense of women’s rights to a workplace free from condescending comments, harassment and sexual violence. While previous research has pointed to the importance of gender awareness, and gender aware leadership, in organizations that wish to succeed with their gender equality work, this thesis suggests that there is also a need for “gendered organization awareness” in order to understand and discuss not only how gender is done in organizations but also how everyday organizational life, such as notions of competence, is done and how that in turn relates to gender and power. This underlines the need for organizations to make room for conflicts and politics and to let the otherwise marginalized voices contribute to more nuanced interpretations of gender equality.The title Business as usual? encompasses the starting points for the thesis work as well as the main findings. Read with an emphasis on business, the seemingly all-embracing business case rhetoric’s that encloses the official narratives of gender equality in the forestry sector are visualized, while emphasizing as usual denotes to the sectors resistance to do other than what it usually does. Read as the hole saying, business as usual, that title signals that gender equality work is done in ways that not interfere with forestry core activities, thus making gender equality work in the organizations side streamed or de-coupled. Yet, read with emphasis on the question mark, opens up for the subversive potential that nevertheless exists when more multifaceted ways of making sense of gender equality are articulated and as the findings suggests that there are ways to re-gender and re-politicize organizational gender equality work in the context of forestry work organizations.
|
|
| 3. |
- Ekström, Veronica, 1975-
(författare)
-
Det besvärliga våldet : Socialtjänstens stöd till kvinnor som utsatts för våld i nära relationer
- 2016
-
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.
|
|
| 4. |
- Otto, Opira
(författare)
-
Trust, identity and beer : institutional arrangements for agricultural labour in Isunga village in Kiryandongo district, midwestern Uganda
- 2013
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores the role and influence of institutions on agricultural labour transactions in Isunga village in Kiryandongo District, Midwestern Uganda. It primarily focuses on how farmers structure, maintain and enforce their labour relationships during crop farming. The study is based on semi-structured interviews of twenty households and unstructured interviews with representatives of farmers associations. These interviews show that other than household labour, the other common labour arrangements in the village include farm work sharing, labour exchanges and casual wage labour. Farm work sharing and labour exchanges involve farmers temporarily pooling their labour into work groups to complete tasks such as planting, weeding or harvesting crops on members' farms in succession. This is done under strict rules and rewarded with 'good' beer and food. Against this background, the study asks what institutions really are, why they matter and what we can learn about them. Literature suggests that institutions influence labour transactions by their effects on transaction costs and the protection of contractual rights. However, literature does not suggest which institutions are best for agricultural labour transactions. Taking institutions to be the 'rules of the game', with farmers as 'players' who strategically use these rules to their advantage, the study focused on the interaction between institutions and farmers. The major findings of the study are: (a) farmers' choices of institutions are influenced by the characteristics of transactions, the costs of using institutions for handling labour dealings, the fairness and predictability of the outcome of contract enforcement mechanisms, and socio-cultural factors such as kin/ethnic status, morality and affection, (b) formal institutions in Isunga are either weak, ineffective or absent. So, farmers rely heavily on institutions embedded in social norms and networks to structure their transactional relationships, to ensure the performance of the respective parties, and to settle disputes if they arise. The study concludes that agricultural labour transactions in Isunga involve judgements of personal characteristics and social roles expressed as reputation and trustworthiness.
|
|
| 5. |
|
|
| 6. |
|
|
| 7. |
- Eidevald, Christian, 1973-
(författare)
-
Det finns inga tjejbestämmare : Att förstå kön som position i förskolans vardagsrutiner och lek
- 2009
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Previous research studies have shown that in their address and behaviour towards girls and boys, pre-school staff apply stereotyped gender concepts, thus reinforcing rather than challenging stereotypes. The present thesis therefore focuses on which of children’s positions that are accepted or that face resistance from the staff. In this way, children’s gender-based "identity-formation" can be critically analyzed based on different possible descriptions of how it is to be a girl or a boy, and what unaware assumptions about gender representations that in this way may be made in different ways by both children and adults.The theoretical point of departure is feminist poststructuralism; and the analysis focuses on variations found between the groups of girls and boys, as well as within these groups, and within individuals. The empirical data consists of video-taped sessions from two teams working with children aged 3-5, and focus groups interviews with the adult. Then different "readings" of the empirical material have been conducted based on different assumptions (discourses); i.e. assuming that girls and boys "really" are different or equal, different behaviours will appear as more or less obvious and natural. By showing that several different discourses are present at the same time, gender-based "identity-formation" is described as a very complex process. The analyzed situations show that girls and boys in pre-school are defined and treated in stereotyped ways, however, there is a large hidden variation of how different girls and different boys positions themselves in different contexts. Pre-school teachers thus work actively to distinguish between girls and boys based on how they are being perceived as either girls or boys. Teachers’ expectations then become decisive of how different children are addressed and treated in different situations. To conclude, the pedagogical consequences of this are discussed with regard to gender equality work in which also alternative discourses are formulated.
|
|
| 8. |
|
|
| 9. |
- Landzelius, Michael, 1958
(författare)
-
Dis(re)membering Spaces: Swedish Modernism in Law Courts Controversy
- 1999
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation addresses the public controversy, as reflected in newspaper coverage, over the 1936 Law Courts Annex in Göteborg, Sweden. The controversy is conceived as a tension-filled, multi-layered conjuncture of urban rivalry within the nation-state. The politico-differential pair modernism/conservatism and the spatio-differential pair Stockholm/Göteborg are traced out and shown to be formative for subject positions both in the controversy, and in scholarly work during the subsequent six decades.To disentangle the conjuncture, subjects’ spatial sense-making is contextualized with respect to a politicized built environment, and to practices characterized by polysemy, contestation and resemanticization, through which volatile meanings and identity effects are continuously renegotiated. This understanding is elaborated in relation to a notion of power as concerning asymmetries of spatial reach with regard to individuals’ influence and control over practices.From this position, the law courts controversy is unfolded through a multi-factor analysis on several spatial scales, from the nation-state to architectural solutions. It is demonstrated that in the Swedish 1930s, no building but the Law Courts Annex was executed in overt modernism on a site of key symbolico-political significance. The established projection of modernism onto Stockholm and conservatism onto Göteborg is deconstructed. The study shows how the law courts project crystallized into a unique conjuncture entangled in questions of: national and local struggles between fractions of the dominant class; governmental efforts to impose new norms and forms of dwelling and discipline; aesthetic purification and élitism; and conjoined interests of real estate capitalists, functionalist planners, and reformist politicians.The law courts controversy is shown to have been embedded in transpositions of ethics, politics, space and aesthetics. New spaces of commoditized visibility were related to the Law Courts Annex, and a gendered imagery of buildings and female human bodies as homologous were invoked together with notions of sexual and bodily hygiene. The controversy is unfolded as concerned with conditions of identity formation and subjectivity in a space of unseen visibility, and the building is unveiled as a classed and gendered space for the production of humans as mass ornaments with apractic postural models.In conclusion, established scholarly discourse on the Law Courts Annex and the controversy is unveiled as a third-order simulacrum through which the annex since the late 1930s has been produced and preserved as a counterfeit, as a historical simulacrum of the particular imagery of a discourse disconnected from existing traces of the past.
|
|
| 10. |
- Mechkova, Valeriya, 1989
(författare)
-
Understanding the Conditions and Consequences of Women’s Political Representation
- 2022
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent decades, women’s ability to engage in politics and civil society has risen dramatically across the globe. What has the increase in the number of women in politics, their “descriptive representation”, meant in substantive terms for women-citizens but also for societies in general? This dissertation contributes to clarifying the effects of descriptive representation of women on substantive representation, defined as the policy areas women tend to prioritize to a higher degree than men. The papers in the dissertation compare the effects of female representation on a comprehensive set of results: from policy inputs such as spending priorities to policy outcomes like infant mortality rates. Further, the dissertation theoretically clarifies and empirically tests the societal and institutional conditions that make it more or less likely for this descriptive-substantive link to work in practice. Across five papers utilizing comparative and historical datasets, I show that institutional efforts to increase representation (e.g., gender quotas) lead to gains in substantive representation. My findings also indicate that women rep- resentatives are successful in advancing the priorities of women as a group in both autocracies and democracies. This positive effect is partially explained by the activism of women-led civil society organizations. However, widespread corruption can undermine these efforts, and even lead to dimin- ished development outcomes. In sum, my dissertation demonstrates that women’s political representation can advance women’s priorities, but this is unlikely to happen absent certain societal and institutional conditions.
|
|
