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Redmalm, David, 1981-
(författare)
An animal without an animal within : investigating the identities of pet keeping
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
If the human is an animal without an animal within—a creature that has transcended the animal condition—what is a pet? This creature balancing on the border between nature and culture, simultaneously included in and excluded from a human “we”, is the focus of this thesis. The thesis analyzes the discourses and normative frameworks structuring the meaning of pets in people’s lives. By extension, it analyzes how the boundary between “human” and “animal” is produced, negotiated, and challenged in the relationship between pet and owner.Each of this thesis’ four constituent studies focuses on an aspect of personal relationships between humans and pets: pets as figures for philosophical thinking, the dual role of pets as commodities and companions, the grief for lost pets, and the power issues at play in the everyday life of pet and owner. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach, crossbred with Donna Haraway’s material-semiotic perspective, the analysis exposes the powers allowing pets to occupy these various positions.The thesis demonstrates that pets occupy a special position as boundary creatures in the lives of humans, allowing humans to play with and thus reproduce dichotomies inherent to the contemporary Western worldview, such as human/animal, person/nonperson, subject/object, and friend/commodity. However, pets’ conceptual transgressions may also challenge this worldview. On the one hand, pets are bought and sold as commodities, but on the other, they are widely included in the human sphere as friends or family members. This paradoxical position is accentuated in the construction of a more-than-human home, and it is also visible when pets pass away. This thesis argues that pets, these anomalous creatures, may help humans understand that there are no humans or animals within, only relations between them. Based on this argument, this thesis develops a sociological approach for analyzing the production of humanity and animality in relations between humans and other animals.
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Salmonsson, Lisa, 1978-
(författare)
The 'Other' Doctor : Boundary work within the Swedish medical profession
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis is about medical doctors with immigrant backgrounds who work in Sweden. Based on 15 qualitative interviews with medical doctors with immigrant backgrounds, this thesis explores the medical doctors’ feeling of professional belonging and boundary work. This thesis focuses mainly on the doctors’ experiences of being part of the Swedish medical profession while, at the same time, being regarded as ‘different’ from their Swedish medical counterparts. It starts off with the idea that medical doctors with immigrant backgrounds may have, or could be regarded as having, contradictory social positions. By virtue of being part of the Swedish medical profession, they belong to one of the most privileged groups in Swedish society. However, due to their immigrant background these doctors do not necessarily occupy a privileged position either within their profession or in society in general. This thesis shows that doctors with immigrant backgrounds feel that they are not perceived as full-fledged doctors, which seem related to how they are somewhat ‘othered'. The results show that these doctors cope with being seen as different from doctor with non-immigrant backgrounds, by using the notion of ‘migranthood’ as a resource in negotiations in everyday work life but they also do what they can to overcome the boundaries of ‘Swedishness’. Belonging should therefore be seen as having a formal and an informal side, as getting a Swedish license does not automatically mean that you feel belonging to, in this case, the Swedish medical profession. This seems to put doctors with immigrant backgrounds in a somewhat outsider within position, which seems having to do with boundaries between who is included in the ‘us’ and in the ‘them’. Lastly, these findings indicate that sociologists need to expand the understanding of professional groups to also include boundary work within these groups. In order to do so, this thesis argues that sociological theory on professional groups could be combined with sociological theory about social positions as that is one way to understand the outsider-within position that these doctors (and presumably other skilled migrants) have to cope with.
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Pasquini, Mirko, 1991
(författare)
The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
2021
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Urgency in a hospital Emergency Room (ER) is not a self-evident state. Urgency is made, by establishing priorities, distributing attention and material resources, and deciding who and what needs to be attended to first – and, simultaneously, who and what has to wait. The process of determining urgency is known as “triage” (from the French verb, trier, “to choose”). This thesis is about the vicissitudes of triage in an Italian ER. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when urgency is at stake; when it is contested and caught up between different, and frequently conflicting, perspectives. It explores how urgency is determined in practice, and shows how triage always is a vulnerable process of negotiation guided by economies of attention. How is urgency actually shaped in interactions between patients, their families and friends, and the ER staff? The different chapters explore how time in the ER is created through shifting registers of attention, and how attention in the ER is affected by widespread economic and social precarity, and neoliberal national policies of governance. It discusses how triage increasingly is structured by attitudes of mistrust; and also by potential or real outbreaks of violence. Addressing the particular positioning of the ER as a thick space of conjunction between neoliberal state politics and people's increasing need for care and recognition, the thesis aims to contribute to medical anthropology literature by analyzing triage not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference. It explores both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention.
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Iversen, Clara, 1981-
(författare)
Making Questions and Answers Work : Negotiating Participation in Interview Interaction
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The current thesis explores conditions for participation in interview interaction. Drawing on the ethnomethodological idea that knowledge is central to participation in social situations, it examines how interview participants navigate knowledge and competence claims and the institutional and moral implications of these claims. The data consists of, in total, 97 audio-recorded interviews conducted as part of a national Swedish evaluation of support interventions for children exposed to violence. In three studies, I use discursive psychology and conversation analysis to explicate how interview participants in interaction (1) contribute to and negotiate institutional constraints and (2) manage rights and responsibilities related to knowledge.The findings of study I and study II show that child interviewees actively cooperate with as well as resist the constraints of interview questions. However, the children’s opportunities for participation in this institutional context are limited by two factors: (1) recordability; that is, the focus on generating recordable responses and (2) problematic assumptions underpinning questions and the interpretation of interview answers. Apart from restricting children’s rights to formulate their experiences, these factors can lead interviewers to miss opportunities to gain important information. Also related to institutional constraints, study III shows how the ideal of model consistency is prioritized over service-user participation. Thus, the three studies show how different practices relevant to institutional agendas may hinder participation.Moreover, the findings contribute to an understanding of how issues of knowledge are managed in the interviews. Study II suggests the importance of the concept of believability to refer to people’s rights and responsibilities to draw conclusions about others’ thoughts. And the findings of study III demonstrate how, in evaluation interviews with social workers, children’s access to their own thoughts and feelings are based on a notion of predetermined participation; that is, constructed as contingent on wanting what the institutional setting offers. Thus, child service users’ low epistemic status, compared to the social workers, trumps their epistemic access to their own minds. These conclusions, about recordability, believability, and predetermined participation, are based on interaction with or about children. However, I argue that the findings relate to interviewees and service users in general. By demonstrating the structuring power of interactive practices, the thesis extends our understanding of conditions for participation in the institutional setting of social research interviews.
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Sirén, Sebastian, 1985-
(författare)
Social Policy in Development Contexts : Drivers, Mechanisms and Outcomes
2022
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Economic growth amidst staggering inequality in many low- and middle-income countries makes the quest to end global poverty more topical than ever. Calls to leave no one behind in the course of development underscore the need to reconsider the role of policy frameworks in emerging economies. Social policies have been expanded across the Global South during the last decades, and social protection is increasingly highlighted as a fundamental component of the global sustainable development agenda. This thesis, comprising three self-contained studies, analyses the drivers, mechanisms and outcomes of social policy reform in development contexts, asking which economic institutions could enable more rapid advancement towards ending poverty and reducing inequalities, and what conditions promote the expansion of such institutions?Study I investigates the driving forces of changes in social spending across 46 more recent democracies, with particular attention to the role of partisan politics. Using data from 1995 to 2015, multivariate fixed effect regressions reveal a positive association between left government and public social expenditures, also when controlling for structural and institutional factors. This finding indicates that interests and ideologies, articulated through partisan politics, matter for the evolution of social policy, also in development contexts.In light of the findings from this quantitative analysis, Study II investigates the mechanisms driving, and hampering, progress towards social policy expansion in a specific case. The politics surrounding a healthcare reform with the ambition to universalise access to public healthcare in Bolivia is examined using theory-guided process tracing methods. The study highlights how policy is shaped through an interaction between societal and state actors as well as how interests and ideas are intertwined in the process, but also how policy legacies give rise to reactive sequences militating against change.In Study III, the focus is on the outcomes of social policy. The study presents analyses of how government cash transfer systems moderate the effect of economic growth in both absolute and relative child poverty. Longitudinal data from 16 low- and middle-income countries included in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) are analysed by means of descriptive statistics and multivariate regression techniques. Findings show that both economic growth and the expansions of transfer schemes are associated with declining absolute poverty. Meanwhile, growth is found to be related to reductions in relative child poverty primarily when combined with sufficiently extensive systems of government transfers, thus pointing to the relevance of social protection for inclusive growth.The findings from the three studies illustrate that central concepts from comparative welfare state research can be employed also in development contexts, converging on an analytical approach where changes in poverty and inequality are influenced by politics. Continued comparative analyses of social policies and their determinants in development contexts can accordingly generate much-needed insights into the causes of global poverty and inequality. Future research should further explore feedback effects of policy on politics and consider the potential synergies between social policy, equality, and economic growth.
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Bergman Blix, Stina, 1971-
(författare)
Rehearsing Emotions : The Process of Creating a Role for the Stage
2010
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis takes as its starting point the dramaturgical metaphor of the world as a stage, which is used in sociological role theories. These theories often presume what stage acting is about in order to use it as a simile for every day acting. My intention is to investigate how stage actors actually work with their roles, in particular how they work with emotions, and how it affects their private emotions.The thesis draws on participant observation and interviews with actors during the rehearsal phase of two productions at a large theatre in Sweden. The results show that the inhabiting of a role for the stage is more difficult and painstaking than has been assumed in role theories so far. Shame and insecurity are common, particularly in the start up phase of the rehearsals. Interestingly, these emotions do not disappear with growing experience, but instead become recognized and accepted as part of the work process.The primary focus is the interplay between the actors' experience and expression of emotions, often described in terms of surface and deep acting, concepts which are elaborated and put into a process perspective. Analysis of the rehearsal process revealed that actors gradually decouple the privately derived emotional experiences that they use to find their way into their characters from the emotions that they express on the stage. Thus private experiences are converted to professional emotional experiences and expressions, triggered by situational cues. When the experience has been expressed the physical manifestation can be repeated with a weaker base in a simultaneous experience, since the body remembers the expression. It is important though, that the emotional expression is not completely decoupled from a concomitant experience; then the expression looses its vitality. The ability to professionalize emotions makes the transitions in and out of emotions less strenuous but can infiltrate and cause problems in the actors' intimate relations.
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Gäddman Johansson, Richard
(författare)
Managing Vulnerability : Everyday Interaction in Sheltered Accommodations
2021
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to develop our understanding of the performance and management of vulnerability in social interaction. The term vulnerability is used frequently within a wide range of scholarly fields, however common conceptions of vulnerability have been criticized for containing normative assumptions about our propensities for being exposed to and capabilities for dealing with adverse events and experiences. Through ethnographic investigations carried out in sheltered accommodations for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Sweden, the dissertation seeks to challenge how scholarship on care and disability has approached matters of vulnerability. The analysis shows that vulnerability was performed in two distinct overarching forms: 1) vulnerability related to “situational uncertainty” perceived as a threat to individuals’ health and personal safety and 2) vulnerability related to “ritual automatization” perceived as a threat to individuals’ personal freedom and well-being. The study found that pervasive institutional demands for transparency, accountability, uniformity and self-monitoring were loudly echoed to be the formally sanctioned best course of action for managing vulnerability in the context of sheltered accommodations. However, the analysis suggests that these types of strategies only address vulnerabilities related to situational uncertainty, whereas they may do more to exaggerate vulnerabilities related to ritual automatization. By performing and managing vulnerability, service users and support workers participated in “interaction rituals” with socially stratifying effects based on the individuals’ perceived or assumed competences. By considering the positions, relationships, and encounters between service users and support workers who engage on an everyday basis in sheltered accommodations which are conceptualized as “vulnerability-based” and “chimeric” interventions for care and service provision, the dissertation opens new perspectives on the performance and management of vulnerability in social interaction.
