1.
Bengtsen, Peter
(författare)
The Street Art World
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
In recent years, street art has become embedded in popular culture and received growing attention from the art market and art institutions. Work by street artists has entered galleries, auction houses and museums, and some artists have been given the opportunity to create large-scale sanctioned public art projects. Simultaneously, widespread photographic documentation of street artworks and the circulation of images online have provided artists with a potentially global audience. The Street Art World investigates street art as a relatively newly established field within contemporary art. With the American sociologist Howard S. Becker’s notion of “art worlds” as a central point of departure, the book seeks to characterise street art by studying and participating in the everyday interaction among the artists, gallerists, collectors, critics, curators, bloggers and street art enthusiasts that make up the social environment (the street art world) in which the term street art is continuously given its meaning. Major themes addressed in the book include: (1) The social construction of the meaning of the term street art and the resulting difficulties in formally defining what street art is. (2) The often contradictory attitudes within the street art world towards art history and the institutions of art. (3) The relationship between street art, the art market and the institutional art world. (4) The relationship between street art and public art. (5) Street art’s potential to affect the viewer’s perception of public space, and the possible challenges the increasing digital mediation of street art may pose to bringing this potential to fruition. While the book presents central characteristics of the street art movement, it also acknowledges that it is not feasible to pin down the nature of street art once and for all, since street art is a product of complex social processes.
2.
Vilhelmsson, Andreas
(författare)
A Pill for the Ill? : Depression, Medicalization and Public Health
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Mental disorders, especially depression, have been increasingly described as a growing burden to global public health. Critics argue, however, that the use of mental health surveys, underlying these descriptions, tends to overestimate the prevalence of mental disorders by not distinguishing everyday experiences of distress from pathological conditions. This medicalization of public health is believed to narrow the focus of public health practices. The aim of this thesis is twofold. The first objective is to describe and analyze experiences with antidepressant treatment for depression as expressed in adverse drug reaction (ADR) reports from patients, i.e. “consumers reports.” A second goal is to conduct a theoretical discussion, by looking at broad societal changes, and analyzing the consequences of mental ill health as a significant public health problem. Special attention will be given to medicalization. Reports of suspected adverse reactions regarding antidepressant mediations were submitted from 2002 to 2009 to an open Internet-based reporting system in Sweden. These were analyzed according to common psychiatric reactions and narrative experiences. Furthermore, a literature overview in a broad and general sense was performed to underpin a theoretical discussion on health, public health, mental ill health and medicalization. The main findings of this thesis were that patients reporting to an open Internet-based system in Sweden seemed, to a large extent, to experience psychiatric ADR symptoms of mental disturbances (sometimes severe), which affected them in many different ways, especially during discontinuation. These reports also suggested a negative doctor-patient interaction from the patient’s perspective. Risks leading to increased medicalization as a result of overdiagnoses of depression were found. Pharmaceuticalization resulting from overprescribed antidepressants was also deemed problematic. According to a theoretical discussion on public health and medicalization, increased medicalization as a result of excessive diagnosing risks individualizing mental problems and may divert the focus from the social and political context of public health. According to patient reports, there seems to be a potential problem as to how patients are diagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressant medication in the medical encounter. Increased drug treatment risks lead to increased health care costs and potential harm from adverse drug reactions. Overdiagnosis and overtreatment may in turn lead to diminished trust in the health system. If depression is going to be viewed as a growing public health problem, it, therefore, calls for a distinction between ill health problems that are medical and those that are not. Arguments for increased medication must be related to a possible danger of medicalizing social problems and life crises.
3.
Hedlund, Anna
(författare)
Exile Warriors : Violence and Community among Hutu Rebels in the eastern Congo
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation is an anthropological study of war and violence in the volatile eastern territories of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The ethnographic focus is on one of the largest rebel groups currently operating in the Congo conflicts, the Hutu-dominated Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). These Hutu rebels arrived in the Congo in 1994, after the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Whereas the leadership of the FDLR is implicated in genocide and war crimes in Rwanda, the majority of the combatants and their family members are now second-generation refugees living in exile. For 20 years, the Hutu rebels have lived in the mountainous forests of the Congo, fighting with and against various state armies and local militias, as well as carrying out violence against the Congolese civilian population. Fieldwork with the soldiers in this Hutu rebel camp reveals a long and complex history of violence that begins in neighboring Rwanda and continues in the eastern Congo in various forms. Based on participant-observation and interviews with high-ranking rebel leaders, combatants, child soldiers, and their family members inside a rebel military unit, this study shows how individuals perceive their own life conditions in war and in everyday life. The study is moving beyond stereotypical labels of this group as ‘perpetrators.’ Instead, it describes the rebels’ worldview as exiles and the micro-politics and practices of everyday life in a military camp. By analyzing narratives and experiences of history, war, and violence, this study shows how individual and collective identity is constructed inside the rebel camp. In the social practices of a rebel community, reconfigurations of memory and history, including the memory of genocide, structure the way in which ideologies of war are produced and maintained. The study further shows how a rebel community is socially organized. This organization is more than simple military hierarchy. Social order goes hand in hand with the mundane routines of everyday life. Hence, this study explores religious, political, and military practices, how individuals deal with the surrounding emergencies of war, and how physical violence can explode in specific contexts. Finally, the study shows that although some individuals might profit from procuring and distributing scarce resources in a conflict situation, the majority of the soldiers and their family members are caught up in a political and structural conflict where individuals find few exits. For many of these Hutu rebels, soldiers, and their families, their everyday life is at the most marginal of levels, reduced to a life of war and violence in the forest.
4.
Sandberg, Johan
(författare)
Social Policy of Our Time? : An Inquiry into Evidence, Assumptions, and Diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation presents an inquiry into existing evidence, underlying assumptions, and the rapid diffusion of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in Latin America. Equally concerned with empirical research on CCTs’ assumed capabilities and the programmes’ political economy and social policy contexts, this inquiry combines systematic analyses and case studies from field work in Uruguay and Guatemala. In essence, it inquires into what the programmes are in terms of social policy, how effective they have been in reducing poverty and enhancing human capital investments, which evidence exist to support long-term impacts and how plausible are their underlying assumptions, and why the programmes have risen to prominence in Latin American social policy development. The empirical case studies specifically analyse CCTs’ capabilities to enable a break in intergenerational transmission of poverty, to simultaneously pursue income maintenance and human capital investments through a hybrid design, and to minimise policy politicisation. The inquiries into existing evidence reveal that CCTs’ proven impact pertains exclusively to short-term effects whereas their alleged long-term capabilities lack empirical foundations. Such capabilities are further challenged since they turn out to rest on some rather dubious theoretical assumptions. Furthermore, this dissertation finds that CCTs’ diffusion throughout Latin America could be explained by a historical convergence between various domestic and foreign factors, enabled by particularly salient programme characteristics.
5.
Söderberg, Maria
(författare)
Hänsynstagandets paradoxer : Om äldre, närstående och biståndshandläggare vid flytt till särskilt boende
2014
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Many older people express strong preferences to remain in their own housing as long as possible. Due to declining health they may, however, become dependent on others for their daily care, eventually reaching a point where they consider relocation to a residential home. The overall aim of the dissertation is to reveal the process preceding older people’s potential relocation from ordinary housing to a residential home in a societal context, and to study how older people, their family members and care managers experience and describe the process individually and in relation to each other. The first article of the dissertation is based on older people’s perspective, the second on family members’ perspective, and the third on the care managers’ perspective. In the fourth article a theoretical model is used in order to focus on why the care managers tend to apply a restrictive approach in their occupational exercise. An analysis based on a holistic perspective is presented in the introductory chapter of the compilation thesis. To try to understand what happens when older people consider relocation from ordinary housing to a residential home, various theoretical approaches have been applied. Altogether 21 older people, 17 family members, and seven care managers have contributed to the empirical material, mainly in interviews. From a holistic perspective, attention is drawn to expressions of “consideration” as a prominent feature in the process when older people’s potential relocation to a residential home comes to the fore. As a result, different expressions of consideration reveal that those involved use the ideals of older people’s independence and self-determination in order to justify personal actions and attitudes. By consideration, nobody is prepared to take the full responsibility for the decision, and instead the responsibility for a potential relocation decision is located at somebody or something else. The ideals of an older person’s independence and self-determination are promoted, at the same time as the application of these ideals in reality becomes significantly limited, like in “paradoxes of consideration”.
