| 1. |
- Dimitrievski, Ivanche, 1988-
(författare)
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Accounting the Future : An Ethnography of the European Spallation Source
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis investigates the social processes involved in the practices of futuring. It addresses the question of how social practices contribute to the production and maintenance of robust versions of the future. It asks how best we should study futurity, including expectations, imaginations, promises and visions. Existing research tells us rather little about how ordinary practices render the future as a particular, publicly available and accountable presence or absence. In what ways do people achieve situated performances of certainty about the future? The thesis addresses these questions by drawing upon recent theoretical themes in Science and Technology Studies (STS), notably accountability relations and mundane practices in science and technology. The empirical focus of the thesis is an extended ethnographic study of the European Spallation Source (ESS) – a major neutron-based science research facility currently under construction in Lund, Sweden. The methods used are a combination of participant observation, interviews, documentary analysis, and ethnomethodologically inflected textual analysis. The thesis reports findings in relation to each of four aspects of ESS work: 1) the textual practices rendering the future of the ESS in local newspaper coverage; 2) documentary analysis of a 2014/2015 Call for ESS Instrument Proposals; 3) observations from visits to ESS and participation in staged “future walks” and 4) the mundane laboratory practices of measuring thickness in an ESS Detector Coatings Workshop in Linköping. The results of these empirical analyses are used to argue for the importance of generating and sustaining accountability relations in futuring practices, for understanding how the future is imagined and made to come about. The thesis concludes that looking at practices in this way has political implications – among other things, it allows to see how agency and capability-to-affect the future is distributed, built, eroded and attributed.
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| 2. |
- Thunberg, Sofia, 1994-
(författare)
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Companion Robots for Older Adults : A Mixed-Methods Approach to Deployments in Care Homes
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores, through a mixed-methods approach, what happens when companion robots are deployed in care homes for older adults by looking at different perspectives from key stakeholders. Nine studies are presented with decision makers in municipalities, care staff and older adults, as participants, and the studies have primarily been carried out in the field in care homes and activity centres, where both qualitative (e.g., observations and workshops) and quantitative data (surveys) have been collected. The thesis shows that companion robots seem to be here to stay and that they can contribute to a higher quality of life for some older adults. It further presents some challenges with a certain discrepancy between what decision makers want and what staff might be able to facilitate. For future research and use of companion robots, it is key to evaluate each robot model and potential use case separately and develop clear routines for how they should be used, and most importantly, let all stakeholders be part of the process. The knowledge contribution is the holistic view of how different actors affect each other when emerging robot technology is introduced in a care environment.
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| 3. |
- Gröndal, Hedvig, 1983-
(författare)
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Unpacking Rational Use of Antibiotics : Policy in Medical Practice and the Medical Debate
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rational use of antibiotics–using antibiotics only when needed and in the right way–is a prioritized goal in policy aimed at preventing antimicrobial resistance. A vast body of research is devoted to understanding why unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed. However, this research tends to treat the definition of rational prescribing as an unproblematic fact, which is given by evidence.The thesis aims to sociologically unpack rational use of antibiotics as medical knowledge and a policy goal. One study examines how rational use of antibiotics in health care was established as a crucial part of AMR prevention in Sweden, and three studies, drawing on different materials, look at how rational antibiotic use for everyday infections is negotiated and performed in medical practice and the medical debate in Sweden. The thesis makes theoretic use of material semiotics and critical policy studies, which enables examination of how medical knowledge, medical objects and policy are performed in webs of relations between human and non-human actors.The studies show that rational use of antibiotics for everyday infections is characterized by uncertainties and tensions. These cannot be reduced to medical professionals’ ignorance, or to how non-medical factors influence medical practice. This implies that social factors are not enough to explain why medical professionals dismiss specific policy definitions of medically appropriate prescribing. Instead, the uncertainties and tensions characterizing rational antibiotic prescribing can be traced to the complex and contingent nature of medical knowledge and medical objects, as well as to the potentially conflicting risks that antibiotic prescribing involves. As a consequence, deviance from, or critique of, a specific definition of rational use of antibiotics may constitute a performance of rational use of antibiotics as a policy goal. In medical practice and the medical debate, rational use of antibiotics as a policy goal can draw on and work with mutable medical knowledge and objects, as well as conflicting medical risks. It is concluded that sociologists need to continue entering the seemingly pure medical sphere to critically investigate policy and policy goals that draw on medical knowledge and that, as such, appear to be neutral and undisputable.
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| 4. |
- Lindén, Lisa, 1985-
(författare)
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Communicating Care : The Contradictions of HPV Vaccination Campaigns
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Denna avhandling undersöker tre statligt finansierade kampanjer mot human papillomvirus (HPV) i Sverige. Författaren visar att kampanjerna innehåller och artikulerar olika former av omsorg som inte är begränsade till att endast uppmana människor att ”ta hand om sig själva” eller ”bry sig om andra”. Istället studeras omsorg som något mångfasetterat och kontextuellt, och som något som innefattar såväl mänskliga som icke-mänskliga komponenter. I studien fokuserar författaren på hur aktörer möjliggör och problematiserar olika former av omsorg. Dessa aktörer inkluderar yrkesverksamma inom landsting som försöker kommunicera omsorg till tjejer och deras anhöriga, men också olika materiella ting, såsom en ”HPV-app”, en Facebook-kampanjsida och en vaccinationshusvagn.Kampanjmedia, intervjuer och textbaserade cancerberättelser analyseras med hjälp av teoretiska perspektiv från fältet feministiska teknik- och vetenskapsstudier (STS). Studien är situerad till forskning kring omsorgspolitik inom teknik och vetenskap, och bidrar till diskussioner om tidsmässiga dimensioner av omsorg. I kampanjmaterialet som studeras dominerar ett fokus på omsorg som något som skall göras nu för att möjliggöra en hälsosam och lycklig framtid. Genom att använda sig av ett ”etiskt-politiskt” ställningstagande, och en analytisk ansats, där fokus ligger på att synliggöra marginella, frånvarande och alternativa omsorgsformer problematiserar författaren sådana ”snabba” framtidsorienterade omsorgsvisioner enligt vilka omsorg ses som något som skall göras omedelbart i preventivt syfte. Detta görs genom ett synliggörande av ”långsammare” och sammanflätade ”omsorgstemporaliteter” som öppnar upp för osäkerheter, tveksamheter, obestämdheter samt för olika känslouttryck, och som möjliggör mer omsorgsfulla praktiker.
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| 5. |
- Mehrabi, Tara
(författare)
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Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD.
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| 6. |
- Schimmer, Robyn, Doktorand, 1979-
(författare)
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Between health and healthcare : a lifeworld perspective on personal informatics
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores the role of technology in digitized life focusing on lived experiences of personal informatics technologies in health and healthcare contexts. The work departs from an interest in how digital technologies affects us as individuals in contemporary life. The use personal informatics and self-tracking technologies are explored both in everyday and healthcare contexts. These technologies are used to support self-monitoring and behavioral change, both to improve general health and for patients with chronic illness. In the thesis, personal informatics technologies are studied in the contextual transition between health to healthcare with the purpose of providing a deeper understanding of how these particular kinds of digital devices affect human experience in everyday life.This research is based on four empirical studies addressing different aspects of how personal informatics technologies redefine the understanding of self at the intersection between health and healthcare contexts. Data was analysed in two steps: an inductive analysis followed by a deductive analysis based on a postphenomenological framework. Findings from the inductive analysis give support for the existing critique of personal informatics being too much concerned with metrics, behaviour and a simplified understanding of self. Applying a postphenomenological framework to the empirical material demonstrates how personal informatics technologies mediates experiences of self, health and healthcare. The analysis also reveals the bidirectional nature of technological mediation making particular experiences foregrounded and more accessible, while downplaying other experiences as less visible and accessible. This lifeworld perspective opens up for understanding the lived experiences of personal informatics technologies in everyday life. This is a contribution to understanding the role of technology in digitized life. It is also a contribution to user experience design as the lifeworld perspective opens up several design challenges concerning how design of personal informatics can shift its focus from the user to the everyday life of a person.The design challenges found in this thesis are closely related to fields such as norm-critical design, norm-creative design and speculative design, aspiring beyond normative understandings of technology use and design. The postphenomenological analysis suggest four dimensions for further scrutiny in health and healthcare contexts. The dimensions are ontological, epistemological, practical and ethical. For each of these dimensions there are bidirectional aspects that can be used in order to deliberate on implications for design. It is about what is revealed and concealed, what is magnified and reduced, what is enabled and constrained and finally what involves and alienates when people engage with personal informatics technologies. The thesis concludes that the lifeworld perspective on personal informatics, including the postphenomenological analytical framework, supports further critical examinations of the role of technology in digitized life.
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| 7. |
- Johansson Palmkvist, Åsa, 1980-
(författare)
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Tekniker i människans tjänst : En feministisk analys av återskapande och förändring inom forskning på inflytelserik teknik
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis takes its starting point in the massive attention paid to artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years, especially the reporting on how AI maintains and reinforces power imbalances linked to gender and other categories. The aim is to examine and problematize relations between influential technology and gender from a feminist perspective. More specifically, the focus is on how co-productions of technology and gender are reproduced and changed in contemporary technology research that in various ways links to AI. The theoretical framework consists primarily of feminist science and technology studies (STS). Thus, the overall theoretical starting point is that technology and gender are “done” in relation to each other in ways that involve notions, and values about what is important. In addition, some concepts and perspectives from feminist organization studies are used, especially the concept of gender structure and centre-construction. Empirically, the study is based on semi-structured interviews with researchers and doctoral students in two academic technology research environments, and on observations of their everyday research practices. At both of these environments’ respective universities, the work on gender equality was extensive by international standards. The gender structure of the environments differed: where one of the environments was numerically male-dominated in general and had no female assistant professors, associate professors or full professors, the other environment had a relatively high proportion of women, especially among the full professors.Central to the thesis is how the researchers and doctoral students made a distinction between traditional and new/contemporary AI. Whereas traditional AI was articulated as a delimited technology discipline with the aim of imitating humans, the new form of AI was articulated as disciplinarily vaguer and as striving to support humans; the new AI was articulated as technologies in the service of humans. Based on this division, the thesis examines which technologies, which humans and what kinds of services the articulation of the new AI refers to. It also explores the norms and ideals of being a researcher or doctoral student in the two technology research environments. The thesis highlights some specific ways in which structural and discursive aspects can impact upon how gendered norms and ideals are reproduced and challenged in technology research on influential technologies. The findings indicate that a disruption of the conventional male-dominated gender structure of technology research enables alternative understandings and ways of conducting such research. By examining how interviewees from different gendered technology research directions described their research’s relationship with AI, the thesis also illustrates how researchers’ and doctoral students’ ways of relating to emerging technological phenomena can be understood as parts of wider negotiations about the status of gendered research directions. Furthermore, the thesis discusses how the interviewees’ articulations of the potential benefits of influential technology were influenced by both power-blind and power-critical discourses. This highlights nuances in how researchers and doctoral students engaged in technology research on influential technology understand the relationship between technology research and the wider context of technology. These nuances enable a situated criticism, with greater potential to be heard from within the field itself.
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