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- Anne, Ouma, 1963-
(författare)
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From Rural Gift to Urban Commodity : Traditional Medicinal Knowledge and Socio-spatial Transformation in the Eastern Lake Victoria Region
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- As we celebrate all the dynamic and dramatic improvements in human health care in the 21st century, life in much of Africa begins with and is sustained with the support of traditional medicinal knowledge. Research on traditional medicinal knowledge (TMK) is extensive, but rather few studies have been written about Traditional Healers' (THs') own perceptions about TMK and practices in relation to changing societal dynamics.The aim of this thesis is to examine how THs perceive on going socio-spatial transformation, including contemporary processes of urbanization, migration, commercialization and commodification of TMK, as well as changing dynamics of learning and knowledge systems between generations and genders and how these affect their medicinal healing practices in time and space.The thesis consists of four main empirical chapters, which derive from different data sources including literature, documentation review and qualitative interview material. The findings in this thesis can be summarised as follows: First that TMK today exists side by side with modern health systems, in what are seen as complex patterns of medical pluralism that provide evidence of an evolving role the TH plays in primary health care, in the rural and urban space. Youthful migrating population dynamics that are linked to historical processes, have effectively carved an emerging cross-sectoral role of the TH in the formal space.Secondly the developing legislation on IPR and ABS in parallel with the representation of an earlier official formal governance around TMK in Tanzania; and the difference in the sectors where TMK is anchored in the two contexts, could have paved way to some earlier collaborative mechanisms, that today provide space to enable a more natural engagement between formal and informal organizations involved in the governance of TMK in Tanzania. Thirdly, the practical ways in which TMK learning processes, which are characterized by learning systems in place, being sent and visiting sacred places that are lived by an apprentice over a number of years, have increasingly come under pressure. Fourthly the thesis shows approaches by THs, encouraging the youth to access conventional medicinal education followed by, or in parallel with TMK learned through traditional pedagogies employed by the THs themselves. The youth’s keen interest in learning TMK is seen to increase when they view improved livelihood possibilities due to the commercialization of medicinal plants. The future of TMK learning processes may be limited unless incentives are put in place for the youth regarding their future livelihoods. Fifth, gendered and generational dimensions suggest that older and some younger female THs reemphasize the values of the gift and TMK in a climate of increased commodification and commercialization of TMK, where TMK increasingly meets neoliberal processes, engaging an alternative paradigm than the gift economy, where a predominance of male TH’s in the urban space and places, increasingly define the diversification of the TMK livelihoods. The gift provided by a higher power and which is embedded in a particular cosmological view, to be used as a social service to help the community, is increasingly evolving as an emerging tested force in a changing ideological climate, with an increasing awareness of commodification, commercialization, IPR and ABS issues surrounding TMK. It implies awareness in relation to the increased benefits of commoditized and commercialized medicinal plant knowledge (which THs hold) for other individuals and institutions.The TH profession and TMK is seen as entering a contested IPR/ABS arena at a time when increasingly socio-spatial transformations are modifying its role from that of a gift to an owned commodity. However while the practice of TMK has changed over time and space, presenting new challenges as well as opportunities, it is also seen as a threat that anyone today can sell and market TMK products.
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| 4. |
- Enlund, Desirée, 1984-
(författare)
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Contentious countrysides : social movements reworking and resisting public healthcare restructuring in rural Sweden
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The broader aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of the production and reproduction of spatial inequalities following from the restructuring of the public healthcare system. More specifically, by analyzing the contention around healthcare restructuring related to two cases spanning a longer period in northern Sweden, I aim to investigate the changing conditions for healthcare provision in rural and sparsely populated areas, and I explore the forms of collective action that local people engage in to sustain the access to healthcare, as well as how state authorities’ attitudes towards such collective action have shifted. In the context of larger public healthcare restructuring in contemporary Sweden, where the marketization and privatization of healthcare since the 1990s have impacted the provision of healthcare across the country, rural areas are experiencing deteriorating accessibility to both primary healthcare as well as emergency healthcare. This development is increasingly contentious, and is frequently met with resistance from rural populations as well as various strategies to rework these uneven conditions. The first case concerns the preceding protests as well as the occupation and opening of a citizen cooperative primary care center in Sollefteå, Västernorrland, in response to cutbacks at the local hospital. The second case follows the worker-cum-citizen cooperative primary and occupational healthcare centers in Offerdal, Jämtland. Through these two cases I explore people’s experiences of public healthcare restructuring, their motivations for engaging in contention around it, their experiences of self-organizing cooperative healthcare, as well as their visions and desires for a future healthcare.As shown throughout this thesis, healthcare restructuring is highly contentious and comes in many forms, ranging from protests, demonstrations, and occupations of healthcare facilities to the self-organization of healthcare services through worker and citizen cooperatives. Healthcare restructuring marked by spatial concentration and withdrawal has thus given rise to a number of drawn-out and spectacular collective actions in contemporary Sweden, but responses can also take the form of low-key efforts to maintain healthcare provision. The healthcare authorities’ attitude towards such low-key efforts by not-for-profit healthcare providers has shifted from a favorable approach in the 1990s to emphasizing their role in safeguarding fair market conditions in the healthcare market. This shift has created a more hostile welfare state landscape for not-for-profit healthcare providers in rural areas, which exacerbates the already unfavorable conditions they operate under. Rural populations’ efforts to remedy the withdrawal of public healthcare are thus highly precarious. While reworking uneven healthcare provision, they operate in this increasingly hostile welfare state landscape, which is not adapted to either rural areas or not-for-profit healthcare. In practice, public healthcare restructuring and withdrawal amount to a cutback in healthcare provision for rural populations. This transfers the work of sustaining social reproduction to the private sphere, in this case not-for-profits healthcare providers. The public healthcare restructuring and withdrawal outlined in this thesis thus present an example of a form of ‘rural neoliberalism’, whereby rural populations are dispossessed of welfare services that instead accumulate in urban areas, which both increases and is connected to larger questions around spatial (in)equalities and the restructuring of the public sector in contemporary Sweden. Nevertheless, those engaged in contention around and the self-organization of healthcare nurture visions and desires for a future healthcare system that would take a holistic approach to the patient and make possible a more equitable access to healthcare.
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| 5. |
- Eriksson, Madeleine, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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From blueberry cakes to labor strikes : Negotiating “legitimate labor” and “ethical food” in supply chains
- 2019
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; :105, s. 43-53
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Swedish wild-berry industry has become increasingly dependent on migrant workers. As the world market's demand for health and food ingredients increased, Swedish forest berries are exported to China to become nutraceutical products, while most berries consumed in Sweden now are imported cultivated berries. These changing geographies of production and consumption have resulted in a system of supply chains, that reproduce and manage difference between groups of workers and thus, make it difficult to safeguard labor rights. Moreover, this new“global standard” has great impacts on the cultural and political meanings of food. The aim of this paper is to study new emerging practices within the industry and to shed light on the production of representations of certain types of workers and work, and how this relate to supply chain capitalism. From the starting point of narratives collected within the different nodes of the supply chain, the paper focuses on the production, distribution and consumption of berry products as means to address how meanings of work and berries are negotiated. A specific focus is put on the narrated events during and after a strike where migrant workers tried to fight for better wages and living conditions. The workers not only lost the battle, but they were also expelled from Sweden without being paid. The work of the pickers and their agency is disconnected from discourses of labor and from Swedish laws and regulations, and the injustice is further justified and obscured through the lens of memories and nostalgia among Swedish consumers of berries.
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- Eriksson, Madeleine, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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New figurations of labor in gendered global circuits : migrant workers in the forest berry industry in Norrland, Sweden
- 2015
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Ingår i: Remapping gender, place and mobility. - Farnham, Surrey, UK : Ashgate. - 9781472429698 ; , s. 127-142
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Contemporary global processes of industrialisation in Asia and de-industrialisation in the rural periphery of Scandinavia produce connections and new figurations of labour that need to be studied in order to tell effective stories about our contemporary world. While urbanisation, industrialisation and labour struggles and organization are increasingly taking place in East Asia (Therborn 2013), some groups of workers engage in international labour migrations to the natural resource based economies of rural Northern Sweden. These industries depend heavily on, primarily, male migrant workers. The ‘coeval multiplicity’ and ‘radical contemporaneity’ (Massey 2005) of rural-urban changes in Asia and transformations in the peripheries of Scandinavia link in complex ways the lives of Asian migrant workers to the rural North of Sweden, through for instance, global production networks and supply chains, and social networks and recruitments by intermediaries. The purpose of this study is, by way of studying representations in media, examine globalist strategies within these rural areas as we argue these areas both function as contrasts, and make up important modernization projects for the global capital and globalist planning (Tsing, 2000). Furthermore, global processes make certain futures possible for different places and people and these processes are transforming relations of class, gender and race/ethnicity. Hence, by analysing the narratives of workers and different actors in natural resource based industries in northern Sweden, we examine the new figurations of labour and the ways in which international labour migrants are implicated in these new figurations; through their everyday practices of work, family life and political agency.
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- Eriksson, Madeleine, 1978-
(författare)
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(Re)producing a periphery : popular representations of the Swedish North
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The discourse on Norrland (literally ‘North land’ in English) as essentially ‘different’ has been(re)produced in literature, politics and science for as long as the idea of ‘Norrland’ has existed. Thus,when investigating the discourse that constructs the identity of Norrland in opposition to a Swedishnational identity, it is important to connect these representations to their contemporary (andchanging) political-economic contexts. The aim of this thesis is to analyze contemporaryrepresentations in news, film, advertising and interviews to show how representations constructstereotypes informed by neoliberal ideals and internationally familiar stereotypes of a traditionalintransigent population positioned in Norrland and a modern and progressive population in theurban South. The findings in this thesis can be summarized as follows. First, Norrland has beenconsistently reproduced, resisted and reworked through various discursive networks and practicesover centuries, as simultaneously authentic and obsolete. Drawing on these discourses makes therepresentations of Norrland in the news become part of a wider discursive network that representsNorrland as an ‘internal other’ within Sweden. Secondly, discourses on Swedish modernity and onneoliberal growth and competition reproduce Norrland and its people as inferior to the rest ofSweden. These representations are reworked and resisted and result in ‘real’ material effects in, forinstance, the news media, place marketing and film. Thirdly, in order to resist these representationsand become part of the ‘modern’, progressive world, places and people need to adjust to neoliberalideals of competitiveness and growth. And, finally, people’s identities are affected by theseneoliberal ideals as they have to relate and react to the representations of different places andpeople and the discourse on the urban as progress. This results in different strategies in theconstruction of narrative identities. I conclude by arguing that these representations serve not onlyas contrasts but also as strategies in the quest to scapegoat certain groups for problems that initiallyoriginated in unequal opportunities and structures of power related to, for instance, ethnicity, class,gender and disabilities – something that is exacerbated by neoliberalist policies and ideologies. Themore pressure is put on individuals and places to produce constant growth, the more certain peopleand places are viewed as ‘unproductive’ and problematic. The problems of depopulation anddiminishing job opportunities in the inland areas of Norrland are thus blamed on the population through the representations of Norrland as an internal ‘other.’
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| 10. |
- Eriksson, Madeleine, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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The production of the rural landscape and its labour : the development of supply chain capitalism in the Swedish berry industry
- 2018
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Ingår i: Bulletin of Geography. Socio-Economic Series. - : De Gruyter Open. - 1732-4254 .- 2083-8298. ; 40:40, s. 68-81
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Increased commercial interest in wild berries in Northern Sweden's resource periphery has connected places and people to a global berry supply chain that produces goods for world markets. As a part of a wider global food chain, every link in this chain is deeply insecure and partly marked by secrecy and mystification. Contemporary representations of the Norrlandic landscape tend to obscure and hide economic conflicts and power relations connected to resource exploitation and corporate concentration, neglecting workers and local communities. This paper examines how globalization, neoliberal policies and the development of supply chain capitalism drive changes in labour markets and migration policies, which in turn shape/and are shaped by both material and immaterial aspects of the Norrlandic landscape. While many studies of global food chains have focused on abstract patterns of chain governance, business economics and logistics, we analyse the wild berry industry by centring on migrant workers and the production of a distinct spatiality through interconnectedness and historical conjuncture, with a starting point in a particular place in the interior of Norrland. We thereby contribute to a different narrative of the Norrlandic landscape, making visible power and labour relations.
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