| 1. |
- Gradin Franzén, Anna
(författare)
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Disciplining Freedom : Treatment Dilemmas and Subjectivity at a Detention Home for Young Men
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This ethnographic study explores treatment practices and staff-resident interaction at a detention home for young men, drawing on video recorded conversations and interviews. It investigates ideological dilemmas inherent in the institutional setting and how these produce complex subject positions to uptake, negotiate or refuse. Study I explores a core treatment dilemma: coercion vs. freedom, involving the dual institutional goal of coercing residents into norm abiding behavior and of producing individuals who behave "properly" out of their own free will. It focuses on staff members’ talk about token economy, illuminating rhetorical resources deployed to avoid the troubled subject position of a disciplinarian. Study II investigates disciplinary humor, illuminating how humor is used both to impose and disrupt social order. It shows how staff members and youths skillfully deploy humor in negotiating local hierarchies related to authority, generation, and age. Humor was also found to be a useful way of navigating ideological dilemmas. Study III explores behavior modification practices, focusing on how selfassessment practices can be conceptualized as responsibilization that emphasizes self-regulation. It documents the participants’ engagement in strategic deployment of specific subject position relations, “young boy”-caregiver rather than delinquent-disciplinarian. In brief, the thesis shows that subject positions are essentially co-constructed, and how positions related to age are highly relevant in this institutional setting. Paradoxical aspects of subject positions provide discursive resources that can be deployed to navigate ideological dilemmas such as that of coercion vs. freedom, but also to handle issues of authenticity.
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| 2. |
- Gradin Franzen, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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From punishment to rewards? : Treatment dilemmas at a youth detention home
- 2014
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Ingår i: Punishment & Society. - : SAGE Publications. - 1462-4745 .- 1741-3095. ; 16:5, s. 542-559
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present article analyses staff members' discourses on the treatment method token economy, as it is implemented at a detention home for young men. The study draws on interviews with eight staff members and on participant observations at the detention home. Using discursive psychology, the analysis centers on the staff members' own constructions of token economy as well as paradoxes and dilemmas that appear in their talk. Two paradoxes were found: (1) paradox of transparency and interpretation; token economy is objective and transparent, but requires interpretative work over time; and (2) paradox of rewards and punishments; tokens are rewards, but they can be zeroed' or withdrawn in order to limit undesirable behavior. Further, the analysis showed that both paradoxes invoke a principal ideological dilemma of control - freedom, which staff members attempt to resolve by positioning the young men as responsible for their own actions and themselves as subordinate parties in the outcome of objective' token economy practices.
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| 3. |
- Gradin Franzén, Anna
(författare)
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Responsibilization and Discipline : Subject Positioning at a Youth Detention Home
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary ethnography. - : SAGE Publications. - 0891-2416 .- 1552-5414. ; 44:3, s. 251-279
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Responsibilization has been seen as a major technique for society's governing of troublesome youth, yet few previous studies have investigated responsibilization in practice. This article explores a behavior modification program at a youth detention home, specifically how involved self-assessment practices can be conceptualized as a responsibilization strategy (aimed at producing free and self-governing subjects). The study documents and explicates this complex discursive setting, where responsibilization practices are combined with rigorous control. Drawing on video-ethnographic methods, the analyses explore how responsibilization is attempted and resisted in interaction. Institutional rules and manuals were used by residents both to enact resistance and to position themselves as responsibilized, in which self-assessment practices make out a kind of technology of the self (Foucault). Further, the study concludes that both staff and residents at times strategically positioned residents as children, something that ultimately could be conceptualized as both parties jointly enacting resistance in response to the dilemmatic discursive setting.
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| 4. |
- Gradin Franzen, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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Teasing, laughing and disciplinary humor : Staff-youth interaction in detention home treatment
- 2013
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Ingår i: Discourse Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1461-4456 .- 1461-7080. ; 15:2, s. 167-183
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study explores how disciplinary humor is deployed to shape and reshape social order in inter- generational encounters. Data are drawn from an ethnographic study of staff–resident encounters at a treatment home for boys (including about 30 hours of video recordings), focusing on sequential patterns in the local design of jokes and teasing, analyzing language and multimodal interaction in detail. It was found that staff and boys recurrently laughed together and teased each other by invoking local hierarchical positions such as child–adult. The intrinsic ambiguity of humor and teasing allowed staff members to engage in temporary breaches of social order, while simultaneously enforcing local rules of conduct. Similarly, the boys would joke with the staff, exaggerating or transgressing institutional and generational divides. But, ultimately the joking could also be seen to remind the participants of the very hierarchies that separate staff from residents, and men from boys, or adults from children.
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| 5. |
- Gradin Franzen, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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The beauty of blood? : Self-injury and ambivalence in an Internet community
- 2011
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Ingår i: Journal of Youth Studies. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1367-6261 .- 1469-9680. ; 14:3, s. 279-294
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present article analyzes how young self-injuring women and men construct themselves as ‘cutters.’ The study draws on observations of a Swedish Internet community connected to self-injurious behavior and departs from a poststructuralist framework in order to analyze how members position themselves and others in relation to cultural discourses on self-injury. Two main discourses are identified in the Web community: the ‘normalizing’ and the ‘pathologizing’ discourses, which give contrasting versions of self-injury, self-cutters, and their scarred bodies. Within the normalizing discourse, self-injurious behavior is regarded as a legitimate practice for dealing with mental health problems, ‘cutters’ are resilient, and their blood and scars are beautiful. In contrast, within the pathologizing discourse self-injurious behavior is understood as morally reprehensible, self-cutters are pathological, and their bodies are repulsive. In the Web community, members invoke both discourses, which leads to ambivalent subject positions. This study shows that the seemingly contradictory subject positions of the two discourses in fact are interdependent on each other as members draw on both the normalizing and the pathologizing discourses in order to become ‘authentic cutters.’
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| 6. |
- Jonsson, Rickard, 1971-, et al.
(författare)
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Making the threatening other laughable : Ambiguous performances of urban vernaculars in Swedish media
- 2020
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Ingår i: Language & Communication. - : Elsevier BV. - 0271-5309 .- 1873-3395. ; 71, s. 1-15
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The threatening young man who speaks Rinkeby Swedish has become a culturally recognizable ‘figure of personhood’ (Agha, 2007) of linguistic and ethnic otherness in Sweden. Drawing upon Billig's theory of humour, we illustrate how this characterological persona is not monolithic; nor does it remain uncontested but is constantly being (re)negotiated in the media. By drawing attention to those humorous performances that rhetorically make fun of entrenched stereotypes, the article explores the subversive, as well as disciplinary, potentials of this kind of humour. Read together, the examples in this article indicate that the ‘exemplary speaker’ (Androutsopoulos, 2016) of Swedish contemporary urban vernaculars can be laughed at and with but cannot easily be fixed into a unified homogenous figure.
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