1.
Wennerhag, Magnus
(författare)
Global rörelse : Den globala rättviserörelsen och modernitetens omvandlingar
2008
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
A basic premise of this dissertation is that social movements are political and social actors expressing the centrality of autonomy in modernity. To grasp the nature of the relation between politics and social movements, the latter has to be related to the profound transformation in the forms of politics implied by the breakthrough of modernity, and the subsequent transformations within modernity. Following Peter Wagner’s theory and periodization of modernity, a central premise of this dissertation is that the tension between liberation and order—or between liberty and discipline—is to be conceived of as a foundation for the cultural self-understanding as well as the transformations of modernity. When the premises for this tension is challenged and renegotiated during the crises of modernity, social movements have often played a prominent role, in creating solutions, drafting utopian projects, making social experiments and bringing forward new values and forms of action. The dissertation is divided in two parts. The first is oriented towards social theory and social movement theories, while the second part is more empirically oriented, studying the contemporary global justice movement, the activists of the movement and one of its primary forms of mobilization: the social forum. The empirical data primarily concerns the Swedish part of the movement, using activist interviews and survey data, but similar survey data from other countries is also used in order to make a comparative analysis possible. In the first part of the dissertation I offer a survey of various social movement theories since the conceptualization of the emerging worker’s movement during the mid-19th century, to the theories on new social movements created from the 1960s onwards. In particular, the theories of Lorenz von Stein, Gustave Le Bon and Alain Touraine are focused. From these discussions, I derive three persistent problématiques that I consider to be central in the study of social movements, when it comes to grasping their relation to politics and autonomy, making either mediation, collective action or creativity the explanatory basis for understanding the evolvement and political role of social movements. Using the perspective established in the first part, I focus on the global justice movement in the second part of the dissertation. Here, I show that the global justice movement is characterized by a complex relation to institutionalized politics, by a global perspective on issues about democracy and social justice, by its organizational and political diversity, by its creation of new political spaces (especially the social forums) and its transgression of the national political context. At large, it is claimed that the global justice movement can be said to embrace a “participatory democratic” view of politics, rooted in the institutional transformations created by globalization and the cultural changes connected to the individualization of our time.
2.
Elvhage, Gudrun
(författare)
Projekt som retorik och praktik : Om utvecklingsarbete på särskilda ungdomshem
2006
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The thesis deals with development work within institutional care for young people. The Swedish National Board of Institutional Care (SiS) grants tens of millions of Swedish crowns to development projects to their institutions. Since the mid-1990s major investments have been made in order to develop the institutions? competence in family-work and networking. The aim of this thesis is to study the government's intentions in backing the development work of specially approved youth care. The thesis consists of two empirical studies, partly a document study that gives a historical perspective over the growth of development work in Sweden with an emphasis on institutional care, and partly a case study of how development work has been carried out within five governmental youth institutions. The document study shows that development work within the social field started to gain importance in the mid-1940s. At this time governmental institutions with responsibility for experimental work and research were established. During the 1970s development work started to become more commonplace within youth care and a number of major development projects were initiated. Development work that builds upon central initiatives is still the prevalent form of development work within youth care. The case study of the five youth homes demonstrates the difficulty of anchoring development projects in the personnel. This difficulty has led to many of the projects failing to reach their objectives. As a part of the development work the youth homes have received contributions for educational efforts. Even if these efforts have contributed to knowledge and methodological development the personnel in some cases have had difficulties in assimilating the training. At some of the youth homes several of the projects have not worked according to plan, which has led to the personnel becoming sceptical and mistrustful of the possibilities of the projects. From an organisational theory perspective, development funding is an informative means of control and functions as an administrative way of governing youth care. For the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care there exist reasons of both legitimacy and function in initiating development projects. For the youth homes it is mainly a question of function, namely obtaining more resources for the operation.
3.
Widholm, Christian
(författare)
Iscensättandet av Solskensolympiaden. Dagspressens konstruktion av föreställda gemenskaper vid Stockholmsolympiaden 1912
2008
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis analyses the renegotiation of Swedish national identity in newspapers’ coverage of the Olympics of 1912. The “sun-shine Olympics”, as Swedes have come to term the event, idealises early twentieth-century Sweden and early sports events. Researchers have shown that this era was far from idyllic in Sweden: it was characterised by various battles concerning the proper national community. Not much has, however, been said about the impact of “apolitical” events and the role played by newspapers in defining this community. Using constructionist theories of identity and linguistic theories on media texts I analyze how three journalistic genres co-created national collectives. The first analysis deals with how the press represented two inaugurations. The genre was a semi-sacral idiom, utilized by newspapers reporting on both right- and left-wing public events around the last turn-of-the century. This genre included a number of apolitical elements, which functioned to legitimise that which was described: for instance romantic references to nature and descriptions of lovely women. This genre, I conclude, demands that its readers conform to certain norms; it tends to silence alternative perspectives. The reports on the inaugurations constructed a patriarchal order’s self-image. They constructed a male collective through a theatrical display which involved, while implicitly “othering”, foreigners, women and children. The second analysis deals with a physical genre, sports journalism. The bodies represented in this genre loaded the imagined community with substance, and gave the texts an “authentic” aura. Those outside the readers’ imagined community were given another sort of body – a body appropriate to ethnic others. Sports journalism also included articles describing the audience. These confirmed the readers’ middle-class identity through clichéd stories about working-class public and an over-aestheticized elite. I conclude that the authentic aura around sports journalism became a way of defending the genre against the accusation that the imagined community that it generated was a mere cultural construction. The visual language is the last genre examined. Pictures representing the male athletes were different from those which usually represented public men. A new masculinity, I conclude, was launched. Action pictures supposedly represented reality. The bodies represented were no longer simply “our boys”, but our heroes. The middle-class male heroes gained a new body, replacing more traditional heroic bodies. Women athletes were also pictured, and the new masculinity was in implicit contrast to the femininities portrayed. The pictures of women, however, present no easily-decipherable pattern, but a series of ambiguities. The pictures also established the national male collective as “white”. Visualisations of foreigners, presented an ”appetizing otherness”, implicitly fixed that which was particularly Swedish.
