1.
Michelson, Stina, 1979-
(författare)
Att navigera svåra barndomar : Barns perspektiv och narrativa praktiker när vardagen påverkas av vuxnas psykosociala problem
2023
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Children experiencing family-related adversity have their own stories to tell about themselves and the challenges they face. Qualitative inquiry into children’s personal narratives is important for social work practice and for the pursuit of matching support to children’s needs. While previous research has contributed important knowledge on what children say about experiencing family-related adversity, less attention has been paid to how children handle and make sense of their situation through their telling. The purpose of this thesis is to explore children’s perspectives on how their childhood is affected by adult family members’ psychosocial problems. The primary focus is directed towards children’s narrative project of handling suffering and orienting towards enhanced well-being – albeit in difficult life situations. In connection to this, intergenerational support is studied, with a specific focus on whether the supportive context may have significance for children’s self-narration. Theoretically, the thesis draws upon a childhood sociological perspective on children as social actors within social structures that can either promote or constrain their agency. The thesis also draws upon narrative theory and its focus on the significance of personal and cultural narratives for children’s project of handling and making sense of their situation. The empirical material comprises 42 interviews with 22 children, aged 6–17 years, and 10 interviews with 10 professionals who have personal experiences of difficult childhoods. Both the children and the professionals were recruited from two Swedish non-governmental organizations offering support to children experiencing family-related adversity, such as a parent’s/other adult family member’s alcohol or drug abuse, mental ill health and/or incarceration. The findings show that children navigate difficult childhoods through their telling. They need to navigate both relational challenges and problematic cultural narratives about norm and deviance. In the children’s telling, a number of narrative practices become visible. These practices illustrate various ways in which children negotiate relationships, positions and understandings. Children’s narrative practices can be understood as internal resources that can develop over time, if those children receive adequate support and knowledge. There are also external resources that may help children navigate their childhoods. Here, adults who recognize children as unique individuals and child-centered supportive contexts stand out as central. Alternative cultural narratives can offer children an expanded repertoire of positions. If these narratives are centered around children’s needs, they may contribute to the children’s project of handling suffering and navigating towards well-being – albeit in difficult life situations.The core contribution of the thesis is an in-depth insight into children’s perspectives and narrative practices when everyday life is affected by adults’ psychosocial problems. It adds to previous research on what children tell by focusing on how children may handle and make sense of the situation through their telling. The thesis shows that children relate to cultural narratives about children and childhood in their telling. This has implications for social work practice because it highlights that organizational perspectives on children may influence how children narrate, and make sense of, themselves and their opportunities.
2.
Flinkfeldt, Marie, 1982-
(författare)
Legitimacy Work : Managing Sick Leave Legitimacy in Interaction
2016
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis studies how sick leave legitimacy is managed in interaction and develops an empirically driven conceptualization of ‘legitimacy work’. The thesis applies an ethnomethodological framework that draws on conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis. Naturally occurring interaction is examined in two settings: (1) multi-party meetings at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, in which participants assess and discuss the ‘status’ of the sick leave and plan for work rehabilitation; (2) peer-based online text-in-interaction in a Swedish forum thread that gathers people on sick leave.The thesis shows how mental states, activities and alternative categories function as resources for legitimacy work. However, such invocations are no straight-forward matter, but impose additional contingencies. It is thus crucial how they are invoked. By detailed analyses of the interaction, with attention to aspects such as lexicality and delivery, the thesis identifies a range of discursive features that manage sick leave legitimacy. Deployed resources are also subtle enough to be deniable as legitimacy work, that is, they also manage the risk of an utterance being seen as invested or biased.While legitimate sick leave is a core concern for Swedish policy-making, administration, and public debate on sick leave, previous research has for the most part been explanatory in orientation, minding legitimacy rather than studying it in its own right. By providing detailed knowledge about the legitimacy work that people on long-term sick leave do as part of both institutional and mundane encounters, the thesis contributes not only new empirical knowledge, but a new kind of empirical knowledge, shedding light on how the complexities of sick leave play out in real-life situations.Traditional sociological approaches have to a significant extent treated legitimacy as an entity with beginnings and ends that in more or less direct ways relate to external norms and cognitive states, or that focus on institutions, authority or government. By contrast, the herein emerging concept ‘legitimacy work’ understands legitimacy as a locally contingent practicality – a collaborative categorially oriented accomplishment that is integral to the interactional situation.
3.
Jurkane-Hobein, Iveta, 1984-
(författare)
I Imagine You Here Now : Relationship Maintenance Strategies in Long-Distance Intimate Relationships
2015
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Today, individuals can relatively easily meet and communicate with each other over great distances due to increased mobility and advances in communication technology. This also allows intimate relationships to be maintained over large geographical distances. Despite these developments, long-distance relationships (LDRs), i.e. intimate relationships maintained over geographical distance, remain understudied. The present thesis aims to fill this knowledge gap and investigates how intimate partners who live so far away from each other that they cannot meet every day make their relationship ongoing beyond face-to-face interaction.Theoretically, this study departs from a symbolic interactionist viewpoint that invites us to study phenomena from the actor’s perspective. Conceptually, the thesis builds on the recent development in sociology of intimate lives that sees intimacy as a relational quality that has to be worked on to be sustained, and that focuses on the practices that make a relationship a relationship. Empirically, the thesis is based upon 19 in-depth interviews with individuals from Latvia with long-distance relationship experience.The thesis consists of four articles. Article I studies the context in which LDRs in Latvia are maintained, focusing on the normative constraints that complicate LDR maintenance. Article II analyses how intimacy is practiced over geographical distance. Article III examines how long-distance partners manage the experience of the time they are together and the time they are geographically apart. Article IV explores the aspect of idealization in LDRs. Overall, the thesis argues for the critical role of imagination in relationship maintenance. The relationship maintenance strategies identified within the articles are imagination-based mediated communication (creating sensual/embodied intimacy, emotional intimacy, daily intimacy and imagined individual intimacy); time-work strategies that enable long-distance partners to deal with the spatiotemporal borders of the time together and the time apart; and creating bi-directional idealization. The thesis is also one of the few works in the field of intimate lives in Eastern Europe and analyses the normative complications that long-distance partners face in their relationship maintenance in Latvia.
4.
Skerfving, Annemi, 1946-
(författare)
Barn till föräldrar med psykisk ohälsa : Barndom och uppväxtvillkor
2015
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The aim of this doctoral thesis is to – from a child perspective and with children as informants – describe and analyze childhood conditions for children whose parents suffer from severe mental illness. The method used is qualitative – 28 children, 10 boys and 18 girls, 7–18 years old, were interviewed about their parents’ mental disorder; the family situation and their own personal life – in school and during free time. The analyses are based on Sociology of Childhood and Family Sociology. Previous studies have, to a great extent, focused on the risk the children run of developing mental health- and social problems and what helps them to grow up healthy. The increased risk of mental health- and social problems has been well confirmed, but also that preventive interventions can contribute to resilience in the children. Although some studies have explored children’s experiences of their parents’ mental illness and the challenges they meet, research from a childhood perspective, has so far been scarce. The results of this study reveal different degrees of emotional, physical and social exposure for the children. Their childhood conditions were related to gender, relations, communication, problem load and social situation of the family. If the parent with a mental illness was a woman, the situation for the child was often more exposed than if it was the father – most likely due to parental roles and expectations on men and women in the Swedish society at that time. Girls seemed more emotionally involved in the parents’ problems than boys, especially if the parent with a mental illness was a father. Most of the parents were divorced or had never lived together. Parental conflicts complicated the life of the children, who were expected to have maintained relationships to both parents. Lack of communication about the parent’s mental disorder in - and outside the family - was common. The children were often uninformed about the parent’s problems. If hindered to pass information between and outside their two homes, they were left to handle difficult, sometimes dangerous, situations with the mentally ill parent, alone. The home was not always the safe place for rest and recovery, as homes are expected to be. The heavier the total problem load of the family, the more exposed was the child. Most exposed were children whose both parents had severe problems – mental illness or addiction. They were often placed in out of home care, for longer or shorter periods. The kind and degree of exposure the children experienced varied. Four kinds of childhood sceneries could be recognized: (1) the well organized childhood, where the parent’s mental health problem was mainly an emotional burden for the children; (2) the complicated childhood, where the parents conflicts and inability to protect the child made the child either too involved or too lonely in handling the problems that the parent’s mental illness caused them; (3) the problematic childhood where the parent’s mental illness was not the only problem in the family, but factors like the other parent’s drinking, siblings’ problems, social and economical difficulties added to the burden and (4) the exposed childhood where none of the parents was able to take care of the child. Knowledge and openness, about the parents’ problems, seemed to increase competence and decrease feelings of guilt and responsibility for the parent. All of the children stood forward, not as passive victims, but as competent agents in their own lives – although often more or less powerless because of their dependence of their parents and other adults around them. It was clear, though, that there is a need for professionals in adult psychiatry, social services, school and preschool, to pay attention to the children of parents with mental health problems and see to that they get the information and support they need. Keywords: Children, childhood conditions, children as agents, parental mental illness/mental disorders, mental health knowledge, exposed life situations, competence.
5.
Berggren, Kalle, 1980-
(författare)
Reading Rap : Feminist Interventions in Men and Masculinity Research
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The present thesis explores how masculinity is constructed and negotiated in relation to race, class and sexuality in hip hop in Sweden. Theoretically, the study contributes to the increasing use of contemporary feminist theory in men and masculinity research. In so doing, it brings into dialogue poststructuralist feminism, feminist phenomenology, intersectionality and queer theory. These theoretical perspectives are put to use in a discourse analysis of rap lyrics by 38 rap artists in Sweden from the period 1991-2011. The thesis is based on the following four articles:Sticky masculinity: Post-structuralism, phenomenology and subjectivity in critical studies on men explores how poststructuralist feminism and feminist phenomenology can advance the understanding of subjectivity within men and masculinity research. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, and offering re-readings of John Stoltenberg and Victor Seidler, the article develops the notion of “sticky masculinity”.Degrees of intersectionality: Male rap artists in Sweden negotiating class, race and gender analyzes how class, race, gender, and to some extent sexuality, intersect in rap lyrics by male artists. It shows how critiques of class and race inequalities in these lyrics intersect with normative notions of gender and sexuality. Drawing on this empirical analysis, the article suggests that the notion of “degrees of intersectionality” can be helpful in thinking about masculinity from an intersectional perspective.‘No homo’: Straight inoculations and the queering of masculinity in Swedish hip hop explores the boundary work performed by male artists regarding sexuality categories. In particular, it analyzes how heterosexuality is sustained, given the affection expressed among male peers. To this end, the article develops the notion of “straight inoculations” to account for the rhetorical means by which heterosexual identities are sustained in a contested terrain.Hip hop feminism in Sweden: Intersectionality, feminist critique and female masculinity investigates lyrics by female artists in the male-dominated hip hop genre. The analysis shows how critique of gender inequality is a central theme in these lyrics, ranging from the hip hop scene to politics and men’s violence against women. The article also analyzes how female rappers both critique and perform masculinity.
6.
Lassinantti, Kitty, 1968-
(författare)
Diagnosens dilemman : Identitet, anpassning och motstånd hos kvinnor med ADHD
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis explores the increasing medicalization of society, the process whereby social phenomenon are transformed into medical problems. Alike the general tendency of neu- ropsychiatric diagnoses, the number of people with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactiv- ity Disorder) has increased and expanded from a boys’ diagnosis to include both adult men and women. Studies on the latter category is however scarce. The objective of the thesis is to contribute with a micro sociological and critical perspective on the effects of the biomedicalization process, by focusing women's experience of getting and living with ADHD. The empirical material consists of narrative interviews with sixteen women, diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood. The participants, age 20 to 50, were enrolled via Swedish NGO:s in 2010 and 2013.The thesis resides on four analytical themes: biomedicalization, pharmaceuticalizaton, functionality and gender. It shows how diagnostics evokes processes that involve learning and using a biomedical terminology to describe and understand oneself. ADHD is, in general, depicted as diffuse, expansionary, masculine and deviant sociability and cognitiv- ity. Unlike depression and anxiety, described as temporary and unwanted illnesses, the ADHD-diagnosis embraces the whole personality. Hence, the women find it difficult to identifying and separating ADHD from the self. Furthermore, categorizations of oneself as a ‘woman with ADHD’ imply constructions of individual and collective identity that has ideological implications, i.e. the individual narratives are related to grand narratives. These contradictory grand narratives bring about ideological dilemmas that are handled rhetorically in the women's everyday life. The masculine connotation of ADHD, for ex- ample, render the women experiencing themselves as transgressing not only femininity but also ADHD-personhood. Additionally, as social actions are attributed to the ‘ADHD brain’, the brain is portrayed as a pathological deviant and dysfunctional object for phar- maceutical intervention. Nevertheless, this discourse is also contested by the women by pointing to 1) positive aspects of the ‘ADHD-brain’ in everyday life, or 2) gender inequal- ities and demands of the late-modern society. Concluding, the women in this study are not only victims of their bodies or societal norms, but also agents negotiating– adapting and opposing to – expectations of how to be an ideal citizen or woman.
7.
Löfmarck, Erik, 1974-
(författare)
Den hand som föder dig : En studie av risk, mat och moderskap i Sverige och Polen
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This is a study of how mothers of young children relate to risk in everyday life, with an emphasis on the invisible risks associated with modernity in general, and with food in particular. It explores variations and similarities in how mothers deal with risk in two cultural contexts: Sweden and Poland. The study is based on twenty qualitative interviews with university educated mothers of small children in Stockholm and Warsaw. While risks more generally challenge how we “get on” with our lives, mothers of young children in particular have a special relationship to risk. During pregnancy and breastfeeding they are subject to all kinds of risk minimization efforts, and mothers are ultimately held "infinitely responsible" for their children's welfare by society. Women's transition to parenthood then makes for a particularly interesting case as to how risks manifest in everyday life. The theoretical framework draws on modernization theory, combined with insights from cultural theory. In addition, various contributions from sociological and psychological risk research, family sociology and research on parenting and motherhood are used to highlight contextual aspects and to interpret the empirical results. Two aspects of the mothers’ relationship to risk and food are examined in this study: firstly, their risk constructs, i.e. what they perceive as ‘risky’ with regards to food; and, secondly, their risk management strategies, i.e. how they deal with identified risks on a practical and cognitive level. The overall risk management depicted in this study is characterized by reflexivity, critical thinking, information retrieval, attention to scientific evidence, purposely transferred trust, confidence and the ability to make fairly sophisticated tradeoffs between risks and other aspects of life. Neither the Swedish nor the Polish mothers then conform to popular notions of ‘security junkies’ or ‘paranoid parenting’. Nonetheless, the comparative approach demonstrates how contextual differences, such as general trust levels and family policy, influence both the risk constructs and the employment of different risk management strategies.
8.
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.
9.
Egeberg Holmgren, Linn, 1979-
(författare)
IngenMansLand : om män som feminister, intervjuframträdanden och passerandets politik
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis explores constructions of gendered and gender political positions and practices of men identifying as ‘feminist’. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 28 men aged 20-34. At issue is how seemingly contradictory positions for men as feminists are made comprehensible in theory and practice. An introduction showcase theoretical discussions on gendered experiences and the possibilities of men being feminist, mainly from standpoint, radical feminist and poststructuralist radical constructionist perspectives. Men doing feminism emerge as an unresolved complex matter. This is followed by a critical discussion of state feminism, double emancipation and research on men and masculinities in the welfare state. The support for men’s participation, predominantly as white heterosexual fathers, in the Swedish gender equality project has consequences for the construction of men as potentially ‘new’, ‘good’ gender equal feminist subjects. In the construction of profeminist positions in interview performances, interviewees are located in-between the radical feminist, poststructuralist and gender equality perspectives on men, masculinity and feminism. Two themes involve an implementation of the concept of passing and introduce the analytical concept of co-fielding. Passing consists of the microsociological process of making radical and deconstructive profeminist positions authentic and yet being able to manage masculinity in homosocial contexts. Co-fielding refers to the conjoint interlacing of experiences, knowledge and meaning-making in interview interaction where relations of researcher-researched are characterized by discursive closeness and overlapping positions. Co-fielding practices affect the outcomes of co-construction of interview performances, the negotiation of gender and power relations and the reflexive use of (in this case feminist) knowledge in qualitative interviews. In analyzing the presentations of self, ambiguous meanings of profeminist positions emerge and the doing, undoing and redoing of feminism and masculinity appear multi-faceted. Radical feminism and radical constructionism seem intersected in making men’s feminist positions comprehensible. Such rebellious positions emerge as oxymoronic and, when critically brought into the gender equality context, located in a no man’s land out of place. In all, the thesis seeks to bring together theoretical, national and empirical locations of profeminist men, and in a concluding chapter also explore issues of ethics in feminist research and cross-gender interviewing.
10.
Mjöberg, Jessica, 1977-
(författare)
Innerlighetens tid : En sociologisk undersökning av intimitet och senmodernitet
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Due to a recent increase in usage of the concept of intimacy within social scientific research, the overarching aim of this work is to investigate its meaning and significance in contemporary social life. The first part of the thesis reviews research on intimacy. Intimacy is perceived as being vaguely defined as a concept, leading to insufficient discussions concerning the significance of intimacy both as a social concept and as a social phenomenon in contemporary western society. In order to become more clearly defined as a social concept to use in future research, intimacy needs to be investigated as a social phenomenon. The second part explores and analyses intimacy as a social phenomenon by way of three partly phenomenological and partly theoretical analyses: the phenomenology of intimacy, the arithmetic of intimacy and the dark sides of intimacy. The three analyses result in a definition of intimacy understood as a kind of sociality, or mode of social being, characterized by an oceanic experience, mutual and complete directedness between the ones being in relation, an experience of mental as well as physical closeness, and an experience of time as “durée”. The third part discusses the proposed definition of intimacy as sociality in relation to contemporary social theory. In relation to an understanding of contemporary western society as late modern or radicalized modern, intimacy as sociality is discussed as a radicalization of a rational sociality, characteristic for modern society. The discussion takes the form of a dialectic critique of modern dualistic theories, proposing a triadic (dialectic) alternative for understanding basic forms of sociality and social relations. The vague notion of intimacy as a concept suited to characterize social life in contemporary western society is supported by this proposition.
