1.
Winter, Katarina, 1982-
(författare)
Everybody knows? : Conversational coproduction in communication of addiction expertise
2019
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The coproduction idiom within Science and Technology Studies (STS) centers on how science and society produce knowledge together. The current thesis explores expert communication – which is immersed in the relationship between science and society – as a case for understanding such coproducing processes. Expert communication is often characterized as a democratic initiative of knowledge enlightenment. But we know less about the consequences that communication initiatives bring. For instance, while groups of publics and experts are large and heterogeneous, expert communication often involves simplified and dichotomized relationships between these groups. The aim of this thesis is to understand the practice of expert communication in terms of how expertise is communicated and received. Who gets to represent experts and publics, in what ways and in which situations, and how do they engage with expertise?Expert communication takes place in all kinds of fields. The focus of this thesis is communication of addiction expertise. The addiction field makes a suitable case for studying co-constitutive practices of communication, as it is broad and disparate, and filled with different contradictory perspectives, actors and relations. The current study explores communication of addiction expertise through three cases that involve different types of experts and publics, as well as different dimensions of the expert/public relationships and of communication as a process of coproduction: Newspaper readers’ interpretations of media representations of biomedical addiction expertise, conference participants’ collaboration within a conference on codependency, and civil servants’ and politicians’ interaction within county council committee meetings. Drawing on STS approaches of coproduction of knowledge and classical sociological conversation analysis, the thesis explores questions of how, what, and whose knowledge is communicated and received, and what activities and actors are involved in these processes. A specific focus is put on how sociability in the form of conversational routines is productive, as sociability carries expertise and establishes relations between actors involved in coproducing processes of communication.Publics are not only recipients of expertise but also active enablers of how expertise comes into being in the everyday society, as publics engage with expertise through filtering and intertwining expertise through and with their personal experiences. Expertise, at least regarding human and social activities such as addiction, is thus bound to everyday experiences and lives. It is also shown how certain expertise, certain experiences, and certain actors and victims of addiction related problems are included while others are excluded. For example, biomedical explanations such as the reward system and the brain disease model seem to co-exist well with peoples’ personal experiences in contrast to social scientific explanations. Moreover, certain actors manage to draw on personal experiences in multiple roles as both experts and publics. Introducing the concept of conversational coproduction, the studies also highlight the sociability and conversational routines involved in expert communication as crucial for (de)establishing relations and making expertise flow or freeze in local coproducing processes as well as for understanding consequences of expert communication and its relation to public participation and democracy.
2.
Roumeliotis, Filip, 1980-
(författare)
Ideological Closure : Drug Prevention in a Post-political Society
2016
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The aim of this thesis is to critically examine drug prevention as a field of problematizations – how drug prevention becomes established as a political technology within this field, how it connects to certain modes of governance, how and under which conditions it constitutes it’s problematic, the questions it asks, it´s implications in terms of political participation and representation, the various bodies of knowledge through which it constitutes the reality upon which it acts, the limits it places on ways of being, questioning, and talking in the world.The main analyses have been conducted in four separate but interrelated articles. Each article addresses a specific dimension of drug prevention in order to get a grasp of how this field is organized. Article 1 examines the shift that has occurred in the Swedish context during the period 1981–2011 in how drugs have been problematized, what knowledge has grounded the specific modes of problematization and which modes of governance this has enabled. In article 2, the currently dominant scientific discipline in the field of drug prevention – prevention science – is critically examined in terms of how it constructs the “drug problem” and the underlying assumptions it carries in regard to reality and political governance. Article 3 addresses the issue of communities’ democratic participation in drug prevention efforts by analyzing the theoretical foundations of the Communities That Care prevention program. The article seeks to uncover how notions of community empowerment and democratic participation are constructed, and how the “community” is established as a political entity in the program. The fourth and final article critically examines the Swedish Social and Emotional Training (SET) program and the political implications of the relationship the program establishes between the subject and emotions.The argument is made that, within the field of drug prevention, questions of political values and priorities in a problematic way are decoupled from the political field and pose a significant problem in terms of the possibilities to engage in democratic deliberation. Within this field of problematizations it becomes impossible to mobilize a politics against social injustice, poverty and inequality. At the same time, the scientific grounding of this mode of governing the drug “problem” acts to naturalize a specific – highly political – way of engaging with drugs.
3.
Edman, Johan
(författare)
Stadsplanering som professionellt verksamhetsfält : En studie av yrkesgrupper och deras arbete
2001
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to study how the relation between professions and their work is created, developed and reproduced at the interprofessional level. With reference to Andrew Abbott's theory of the system of professions, the relation is analyzed using a conceptual framework that entails three main concepts: professional structure, task area, and jurisdiction. The conceptual framework is articulated in a model, then applied to the historic development of urban planning in Sweden. The empirical analysis goes back to the seventeenth century. The results show that professional groups establish and maintain control of their work through jurisdictions, which are regarded as distributive channels of public acceptance, required by every profession. In other words, the interconnections between a profession and its work should not be recognized as direct and unconditioned. Furthermore, the study shows that professional action is dependent on the structure of the professional system of which it is a part. For instance, a multiprofessional structure is likely to first develop into a segmented structure before it turns into a uniprofessional one. This fact will sometimes restrict the freedom of action for professionals. The analytical model developed promotes a focus on interprofessional, rather than intraprofessional, social relations. Consequently, the professionalization processes of individual professions appear to be of less importance on the explanatory level. The dissertation also shows how contrafactual methods can be used in order to clarify factual outcomes in relation to analytically possible ones.
