1.
Urban, Susanne, 1966-
(författare)
Att ordna staden : Den nya storstadspolitiken växer fram
2005
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The sociology of the city has two faces: one of threat and one of promises. Originally, the city was portrayed as a threat to social life and individual identity, while, in contrast, the neighbourhood was seen to include the promise of restoring basic social relations to the web of city life. Later, the neighbourhood itself came to be perceived as a threat, as it was seen to separate people from one another. The solution to this dilemma was that the neighbourhood should be an arena for meetings between different groups, supplying not strong ‘excluding’ bonds, but subtle ‘bridge-building’ ones.The aim of the first part in the thesis is to study the public view of the neighbourhood and its significance for social integration. The aim of the second part is to investigate the new metropolitan policy approach to attain the challenging goal of integration at the local municipal level. This is explored using the theoretical model of a democratic welfare society, as developed by Jürgen Habermas.Ethnic housing segregation, as a social problem, has evolved in several stages. In 1990 the promise became to combat ”problem areas” through various methods for integration, commitment, improved reputation, an increasing sense of community and environmental improvement. More recently, since 2000, the question of ethnic housing segregation appears to be being dealt with through a process of delegation of responsibility to various authorities with different areas of expertise and to local municipal authorities. This suggests a possible fragmentalization of approaches to ethnic housing segregation. In official discussion of ethnic housing segregation, an acknowledgement of the relational approach has been severely lacking. A review of the literature of neighbourhood effects shows that ethnic clustering can result in positive as well in negative effects. In a relational perspective, local networks are one of several other relations that, in combination with different structures and power distributions, effects integration between ethnic groups in the society.Principles from new metropolitan policy, referred to as ”bottom-up”, are similar to Habermas’ ideal. However, the concrete experiences highlight the difficulty in offering possibilities for rational communication, development of communicative knowledge, and even less communicative power. The new metropolitan policy has posed a new formulation of threat and promise. The dichotomy of segregation versus integration has developed into one of exclusion versus participation. The ideal has changed from formal to subjective integration, which includes civil participation in state business. The neighbourhood has served as one arena to start inclusive processes. The practice, on the contrary, is still dominated by measures aimed at making society work more efficiently through state intrusion into private matters i.e. governmentalization.
2.
Lundström, Catrin, 1970-
(författare)
Svenska latinas : Ras, klass och kön i svenskhetens geografi
2007
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation examines diasporic narratives of Swedish national belonging among a group of young women of Latin American descent, born and/or raised in Sweden, and adoptees. Based on individual interviews, pair interviews, and focus group discussions with twenty-nine high school girls in the Stockholm region, the study aims to understand how mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion operate through intersecting power structures of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age, in the increasingly multi-ethnic Sweden. The analysis suggests that the imagined community of Sweden was constructed mainly around boundaries of whiteness, with non-whiteness becoming the main marker for non-Swedishness, meaning "foreign". The borders of whiteness appeared most salient for the adopted girls who identified themselves as culturally Swedish, yet experienced exclusion from national belonging on racial grounds. Swedishness and the sense of national belonging further operated through notions of space and place. In multi-ethnic contexts, the young women could identify themselves as Swedes in relation to other ethnicities, while they encountered scrutinity and a sense of being "out of place" in Swedish-dominated settings. The girls raised in middle-class environments in the "white" inner-city area, however, could use this background and transform it into an ethnic symbolic marker of Swedishness. Thus, race, class, and place were for them intimately intertwined as markers of difference and social stratification in the Swedish society. Another arena for identification was found in the emerging popularity of Latina artists in Sweden. While the Latin music boom had the ability to evolve transnational diasporic links, it was nonetheless fused with projections of exoticism and contrasted to Swedish white subjectivity in ways that contributed to a sense of otherness. Appearing Swedish thus required distancing themselves from Latin American cultural arenas, pointing to the need to critically approach the role of stereotyping discourses in the process of subject formation.
3.
Svensson, Lotta, 1959-
(författare)
Vinna och försvinna? : Drivkrafter bakom ungdomars utflyttning från mindre orter
2006
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Starting in the everyday life of Söderhamn’s youth, this thesis presents the driving forces that affect youth as they make decisions to stay in or to leave their home region.The research has been done with an interactive approach in close collaboration with youth and adults, and a number of different methods have been used. Based on the interviews, essays, questionnaires, conversations and meetings that underlie this work, the ambition has been to participate and contribute to the formation of knowledge in dialog with the youth and the adults who surround them.The dissertation (thesis) shows that society’s basic structures have great influence on youth’s decision whether to stay or leave. Important factors are actual circumstances, such as the access that youth have to resources – economical, social, and cultural. Society’s gender order has a big impact on the question whether to move or stay. Likewise, the tension between center and periphery plays an essential role – where the power to define what is “right” and “natural” coincides with values on how youth “are” and “should be”.The dissertation (thesis) shows that the interplay between these factors appears different for different individuals and groups, and that the interplay has significance both for the move/stay –decision and for the youth’s desire and possibility to participate in and have influence over society’s development in the region.
4.
Carlestål, Eva, 1951-
(författare)
La Famiglia : The Ideology of Sicilian Family Networks
2005
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Anthropological data from fieldwork carried out among a fishing population in western Sicily show how related matrifocal nuclear families are tightly knit within larger, male-headed networks. The mother focus at the basic family level is thereby balanced and the system indicates that the mother-child unit does not function effectively on its own, as has often been argued for this type of family structure. As a result of dominating moral values which strongly emphasise the uniqueness of family and kin, people are brought up to depend heavily upon and to be loyal to their kin networks, to see themselves primarily as parts of these social units and less so as independent clearly bounded individuals, and to distinctly separate family members from non-family members. This dependence is further strengthened by matri- and/or patrivicinity being the dominant form of locality, by the traditional naming system as well as a continual use of kin terms, and by related people socialising and collaborating closely. The social and physical boundaries thus created around the family networks are further strengthened by local architecture that symbolically communicates the closed family unit; by the woman, who embodies her family as well as their house, having her outdoor movements restricted in order to shield both herself and her family; by self-mastery when it comes to skilfully calculating one's actions and words as a means of controlling the impression one makes on others; and by local patriotism that separates one's co-villagers from foreigners. Hospitality, which brings inclusion and exclusion into focus, is shown to be a means of ritually incorporating non-kin and thus containing the danger the stranger represents. The author aims to answer the question of whether the social and physical boundaries around the family network, together with the distrust towards non-family members referred to by the informants themselves, constitute a hindrance as regards collaboration with non-kin, or if collaboration beyond the family boundaries is possible and, if so, whether or not this has to lead to the family's losing its position.
5.
Lundgren, Silje, 1978-
(författare)
Heterosexual Havana : Ideals and hierarchies of gender and sexuality in contemporary Cuba
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Drawing on two periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Vedado, Havana, in 2004–2007, this dissertation analyses the interconnections between gender, sexuality, and heterosexuality. With theoretical inspiration from the works of Stevi Jackson and Beverley Skeggs, it discusses how the logics underlying heterosexual relations also regulate hierarchical gendered ideals. It examines how gendered conceptions of sexuality confirm a position of heterosexual desirability, and traces a specifically heterosexual gender construction of men and women as oppositional forces, glued together in a relationship of eroticized complementarity.Moreover, the dissertation shows that the everyday negotiation of ideals around gender and sexuality is characterized by constant hierarchization. It explores how the emic concept of ‘cultural level’ is used in a process of othering to mark moral distance and create a position of superiority. It also suggests that in post-crisis Cuba, the body has become a new site on which to inscribe distinction and mark privilege, as a way of navigating in a context of new and unfamiliar differentiations.The dissertation demonstrates how female eroticism, male eroticized performances in street interaction, and the female body ideal are central sites for establishing an image of national particularity. In this historic moment, these have also become sites for marking difference and creating hierarchies. The dissertation argues that inclusive and unifying conceptions of ‘Cubanness’ are both delineated and reinforced through exclusion and the demarcation of difference within this collectivity.This notion of the nation carries gendered and sexualized inscriptions. It has been constructed through the historical exclusion of non-heterosexuality, which has been closely connected to the consolidation of a specific ideal of masculinity. The dissertation analyses the destabilizing potential of a shift in Cuban sexual politics during the last two decades and explores how this might imply a new configuration of the relationship between gender and sexuality.
6.
Nilsson, Elin, 1981-
(författare)
Facing dementia as a we : Investigating couples’ challenges and communicative strategies for managing dementia
2018
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
We live longer than ever before, which means that we also live longer with disorders such as those connected with dementia. Most people diagnosed with dementia live in ordinary housing for a long time, relying on their social network for support, mainly involving spouses or adult children. There is limited research on how families and couples manage daily life with dementia, and social workers may only have knowledge and skills at a general level about older people with the condition.The aim of this thesis is to investigate how couples manage dementia-related challenges, as well as whether and how these challenges and ways of managing relate to aspects of couples’ we-ness. This aim has been specified in terms of research questions which involve the couples’ communicative management of dementia-related challenges, and how they approach and talk about sensitive topics connected with dementia. An additional question involves how the couples relate to and use their we-ness in managing dementia. Multimodal conversation analytic theory and methodology has been adopted to study sequences from 15 video-recorded joint interviews involving couples where one of the partners had a diagnosis of dementia.The articles demonstrate how the spouses managed dementia jointly, and how they used their common ground as a couple as an important resource for telling stories and remembering. When the spouses without dementia approached sensitive topics related to dementia, they made use of strategies such as mitigating talk, or touching the partner with dementia as they spoke. The spouses without dementia approached the issue of the future carefully, whereas the spouses with dementia were more direct in the way they talked about the future. A final finding involves the spouses without dementia using strategies such as giving clues or prompting to help their partner with dementia remember. However, this was seldom successful, and may even have had face-threatening effects. Taken together, the different aspects of this thesis emphasise the challenges faced by the couples and the communicative strategies they used, as well as the abilities and agency which surfaced during a micro-level analysis of their interaction. The results are further discussed in the light of implications for social work education, practice and theory, largely highlighting the importance of adopting a couplesensitive approach in which relational and interactional aspects are emphasised.
7.
Wernesjö, Ulrika, 1980-
(författare)
Conditional Belonging : Listening to Unaccompanied Young Refugees’ Voices
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis explores negotiations of belonging among unaccompanied young refugees in Sweden. The thesis further aims to shed light on methodological aspects of bringing out their voices. The analysis draws on postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches to belonging and relates belonging to the concepts of home, place, racialization and notions of “Swedishness”.The thesis analyses qualitative interviews with 17 young people, who arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors and have been granted permanent residency. The interviews are complemented with walk-alongs and photography-based interviews.Paper 1 gives an overview and discussion of research on unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors. I argue that there is a lack of their voices in the research, and that their own agency and perspectives are not addressed due to a focus on vulnerability and emotional health (or lack thereof). Paper II, which is delimited to participants in a rural village, shows that they negotiate belonging and a sense of home related to places but that othering is constraining. In paper II and III I suggest that the participants’ belongings and position in Sweden can be understood as conditional due to othering and racialization. In paper III, I argue that expressing gratitude can be understood as a form of impression management and, thus be a strategy to negotiate their position in the interview setting as in the host country.I finally argue that in order to understand the participants’ negotiations of belonging attention has to be paid to their agency as well as the conditioning of belonging in discourses and in interactions on the local level.
