1.
Pauletto, Franco, 1968-
(författare)
L’ordine sociale a tavola : L’interazione tra genitori e figli in famiglie italiane e svedesi
2017
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation examines mealtime conversations between parents and children in eight Swedish and eight Italian middle class, dual-earner households, exploring the ways in which children are engaged in the cooperative construction of social order. The study is part of an international project (cf. Aronsson & Pontecorvo, 2002), coordinated with prior work in the US (cf. Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013).Study I explores how children’s accounts work during family dinner conversations. So called proto-accounts (laments, multiple repeats, want-statements) and varied verbal accounts are analyzed in relation to age class or prior language socialization experiences.Study II focuses on the use of endearment terms in directive sequences between parents and children. The findings show an asymmetrical distribution of endearment terms, in that only parents make use of them when interactional problems – children’s non-compliance with parental requests in particular – arise. Study III examines the ways in which Italian parents deploy the discourse marker dai (‘come on’) in directive sequences. This is a flexible linguistic resource that is employed by parents as a cajoling token when children fail to comply with parental requests, hindering the advancement of the in-progress activity.This thesis describes family mealtimes as parent-directed activities where sociality, morality and local understandings of the world (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) are collaboratively re-created and enacted. This confirms the crucial role of everyday family meals as rich cultural sites (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) for reasserting moral attitudes of the family: participants learn moment by moment how to be competent actors that are able to choose between alternative courses of action and that can therefore be held accountable for their actions (Bergmann, 1998: 284). From this point of view, a dinner is paradigmatic of the deep moral sense that permeates the making of a family.
2.
Lutz, Peter A.
(författare)
Tinkering Care Moves : Senior Home Care in Practice
2016
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation builds on the current anthropological studies of care relations in practice. It draws inspiration from science and technology studies (STS) and postfeminist technoscience. A qualitative ethnographic approach grounds the empirical data collection and analysis. This entails ethnographic fieldwork with senior home care in the United States and Sweden during 2007–2008 and 2011–2012. Analytical attention centers on how movements situate various tensions of senior home care in practice. Four interrelated published works comprise the main thematic chapters. Each article exemplifies how human and nonhuman relations move and mediate care. They develop several heuristic terms that advance ideas about how older people, aging bodies, technologies, spaces, and times that tinker each other through movements of care in practice. The comprehensive summary frames these articles with an overview of the primary thematic orientations and methodological concerns. A discussion of the main contributions and implications of the dissertation concludes the work.
3.
Borelius, Ulf, 1961
(författare)
Om befrielseteologins uppkomst i Latinamerika. En sociologisk analys av religiös förändring. : On the Rise of Liberation Theology in Latin America. A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change.
2016
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The overall purpose of the present study is to contribute to our understanding of religious change and to an explanation of the phenomenon. The emergence of the theology of liberation is an important case of religious change in Latin America during the 1960s. Hence, the focus of this study is on how and why the theology of liberation emerged. The theoretical framework is primarily based on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s key concepts of field, habitus and capital. This framework is used as an alternative to the dominant theories of religious change, that is, the secularization theory and the theory of religious economies. The data come from a variety of sources, including interviews, electronic and conventional letters, archives, books and articles. The most important conclusion is that Liberation Theology emerged within the Catholic Student Movement, as a product of collective work. More specifically, it arose as part of a reproduction strategy, aimed at defending the Church’s position in the national fields of power and at strengthening the Catholic Student Movement in the struggle for symbolic power at the universities. In the early 1960s, the Catholic Student Movement thought that the primary threat to the Church came from Marxism and Marxist groups. This threat was fought by means of involvement in the struggle for social change and development. Later, the commitment to development became a commitment to liberation. This commitment was shared with Marxist groups, but the Student Movement members simultaneously distinguished themselves from these groups as militant Catholics. The theology of liberation emerged when the Catholic Student Movement discovered new aspects of the Gospel as a result of its commitment to liberation, of its efforts to mobilize more Christians in the struggle for liberation, and of its pastoral care for radical Catholic students.
4.
O’Hagan, Lauren Alex, 1991-
(författare)
Class, Culture, and Conflict in the Edwardian Book Inscription : A Multimodal Ethnohistorical Approach
2018
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This study draws on theories and methodologies from the fields of multimodality, ethnography and book history studiesto explore class conflict and social mobility in Edwardian Britain (1901-1914). Using a dataset of 2,998 book inscriptions, this work investigates the types of inscriptions present in books bought and exchanged in Edwardian Britain; the ways in which inscriptive practices varied according to location, gender, age, social class and occupation; the material and semiotic features of inscriptions; and their communicative and performative purposes. The findingsr eveal that inscriptive choices were primarily influenced by ‘class-based affordances’ that centred on the social status and wealth of book owners, as well as Edwardian social conventions and the specific, well-established norms of each inscription genre or sub-genre. For the working classes, inscriptions represented pride at owning a book for the first time, while the lower-middle classes primarily used inscriptions as symbolic gestures of social mobility to gain social capital and respect from peers .In contrast, the upper classes, who feared the collapse of hierarchical society, saw inscriptions as a way of advertising their wealth and high social status. However, there is some indication that the upper-middle classes were slightly more willing to embrace lower-class inscriptive practices. These findings suggest that we must reframe current conceptions of hegemony as the transmission of values from a dominant social group to a subordinate one, and view it, instead, as a continuous two-way process between different groups .Overall, the study demonstrates how blending multimodal analysis with ethnohistorical methodologies can uncover the important role of the inscription as a material microcosm of the social tensions that existed between class groupsin early twentieth-century Britain.
5.
Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986
(författare)
Chocó challenges : communities negotiating matters of concern and care on Colombia’s margin
2018
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Chocó is a remote and biodiverse region located on Colombia’s Northern Pacific Coast. The region is home to indigenous Embera and Afro-descendant communities. Both communities share and contest a legacy of colonisation, violence, dispossession and discrimination. This thesis explores the ways in which the local communities of Chocó challenge and transform the matters that concern them. It focuses on their concerns over the effects of biodiversity conservation, development, and drug trade on their communities. It first investigates the challenges associated with doing research concerning both global and local concerns. Then, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chocó, it develops a methodology to address environmental value conflicts over the use of Utría National Park, located in the region. Third, the thesis studies the social protest of both local communities for the construction of a small hydroelectric power plant inside the park, finding that this protest for electricity reflects a complex post-colonial politics complementary to the discourse concerning political resistance as expressed by local and indigenous communities protesting against development. Fourth, drift-cocaine has been arriving recently to the coastal region of Chocó as a side effect of the country’s war on drugs. In Chocó, this phenomenon is referred to as the White Fish and is investigated here by situating its associated practices and transformations within the local context. Fifth, Utría National Park is explored visually as a place of rhythms and temporalities. Lastly, it argues that the mechanisms, grounded in concepts of solidarity and co-existence, which are employed by the local communities in negotiating the matters that concern them, provide alternative narratives to the ones often used to described them as in “poverty” and in need of “development”.
6.
Al Khalidi, Marwa
(författare)
Influential Moments in City Planning Meetings : A Study of Decision-Making Situations in a Jordanian Municipality
2018
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The shaping of a city and its future relates to official decisions made in city planning meetings, where daily planning matters and decision-making processes adapt to changing societal circumstances. The interest of this research lies in how planning is officially established, managed and practiced in the setting of a Jordanian city, and its local districts. This interest leads the research to observational studies of the mechanisms of municipal council meetings and of the institutional setting of official city planning. One important backdrop for this research are the conditions of the study context tied to rapid changes that have been made to planning objectives due to changing geo-political circumstances and large numbers of migrants. More directly, the research has the basic purpose of improving the understanding of the manifold aspects that surround and make up a decision process, by including actors or relations of various kinds that can have an influence on the procedures.Through participant observations and drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), this research looks closely into how decision-making agency can be both formally and informally delegated to human actions, to material objects, to technologies, and to the rules and modes of institutional ordering. These heterogeneous aspects are studied in relation to, but also derivedfrom, empirical investigations of the planning culture that, as I see it here, encompasses the norms, values, and historical significance that may influence and define how planning is practiced. I investigate the conditions on which the meeting – as the most common decision-making body – depends to proceed in normal and destabilised situations. The observations are presented as narratives that convey situations of destabilization that were observed and selected through applying a ‘lens of controversy’ as a methodological tool. The analytical discussions that follow these narratives bring new insights by reflecting on the observed meetings, actions, and institutional environments with the help of architecture- and design-oriented actor-network-theory and relational planning theory, as well as organisation theory, decision-making studies and meeting studies. The detailed and situated studies in this thesis focus on the important role of the material and spatial components of the planning setting. They also highlight the importance of the setting as a flexible network that supports decision-making processes with various types of delegation from inside and outside the meeting room. This has for instance led to views on the temporal territorial productions that are created in interaction with the setting of the planning institution. The results also highlight the heterogeneity of actors with influence, and how time-related features such as timeliness and durabilization in meetings can influence the decision-making process. The research concludes in elevating several networked mechanisms and principles of influence. Principles like ‘redundancy delegation’, ‘transistor tactics’ and ‘recovering destabilizations’, and concepts such as ‘temporal institutional territorialisation’, and ‘state of predisposition’ represent such significant figures of thought that are found to be of interest, and that could be given further attention in the theoretical as well as practical analysis of planning and planning settings. This research hopes also to contribute to discussions regarding how to cope with emergent situations using long- and short-term planning in the development of policies and means for future modes of planning.
7.
Holm, Marie-Louise
(författare)
Fleshing out the self : Reimagining intersexed and trans embodied lives through (auto)biographical accounts of the past
2017
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis explores how current ways of imagining possibilities for intersexed and trans embodied lives within medical contexts might be informed by and reimagined through the historical lived experiences of intersexed and trans individuals as they have been articulated in autobiographical accounts.Postmodern, queer, intersex, and trans researchers and activists have criticised existing standards of intersex and trans healthcare for limiting the possibilities for diverse embodied lives by articulating certain forms of embodiment and selfhood as more likely to enable a liveable life than others. This has often been done in a medico-legal context by referring to experiences in the past of the unliveability of corporealities and gendersexed situations that differ from privileged positions. With a point of departure in these critiques, this thesis reopens questions about how intersexed and trans people may be embodied and have relations with others by reflecting upon the period of the first three-quarters of the 20th century, when the present standards of care and diagnostic categories were emerging, but had not yet become established.Drawing upon a unique set of historical source material from the archives of the Danish Ministry of Justice and the Medico-Legal Council, intersexed and trans persons’ life stories are rearticulated from their own and medico-legal experts’ accounts written in relation to applications for change of legal gendersex status and medical transition. In this way, the process is traced through which these life stories have been repeatedly rearticulated in order to become a usable basis for diagnosis and decision-making. At the same time, the stories are unfolded once more in a rearticulation focusing on their complexity and diversity.
8.
Keshavarz, Mahmoud
(författare)
Design-Politics : An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders
2016
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis is an interrogation of the contemporary politics of movement and more specifically, migration politics from the perspective of the agency of design and designing. At the core of this thesis lies a series of arguments which invite design researchers and migration scholars to rethink the ways they work with their practices: that states, in order to make effective their abstract notions of borders, nations, citizenship, legal protection and rights are in dire need of what this thesis coins as material articulations. The way these notions are presented to us is seldom associated with artefacts and artefactual relations. It is of importance therefore, as this thesis argues, to speak of such material articulations as acts of designing. To examine the politics of movement and migration politics from such a perspective, this thesis focuses on practices that shape specific material articulations such as passports, camps and borders. At the same time, it discusses the practices that emerge from these articulations. By doing this, it follows the politics that shape these seemingly mundane artefacts and relations as well as the politics that emerge from them. Consequently, it argues that design and politics cannot be discussed and worked on as two separate fields of knowledge but rather as interconnected fields, as design-politics. This thesis unpacks this claim by focusing specifically on the lived experiences and struggles of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants as well as rearticulating some of the artefacts and artefactual relations involved in the politics of movement and migration.
