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- Nilsson, Elina, 1984-
(författare)
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Thai Surrogate Mothers’ Experiences of Transnational Commercial Surrogacy : Navigating Local Morality and Global Markets
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Transnational commercial surrogacy is an arrangement where a woman gestates and delivers a child for intended parents from another country in exchange for money. This thesis explores the experiences of women who have acted as surrogate mothers in Thailand. Based on in-depth interviews with twelve former surrogate mothers, the thesis analyses their accounts in relation to gendered, local, and global dimensions of transnational commercial surrogacy. More specifically, it investigates how surrogacy has affected the women materially, socially, and personally; how they understand and negotiate family, kinship, and relationships in connection with their surrogacy experiences; but also how the global surrogacy market and local context interact in shaping the conditions for surrogacy in Thailand. The thesis engages in dialogue with research on commercial surrogacy in other settings, and draws upon theoretical frameworks of gender, motherhood and kinship, local moral economies, and precarious intimate labour. The analysis explores, first, how the women’s decisions to undertake surrogacy, and, for some, further involvement in surrogacy are enabled through women’s social networks and family relationships. Second, it investigates how, through the framing of surrogacy as primarily an opportunity to earn money for their own family but also as an act of making merit, the women draw upon material and religious rationalities as well as gender ideals that allow them to live up to their obligations as mothers and daughters. Third, it explores how their trajectories are marked by im/mobility and flexibility, taking shape in relation to the global reproductive market as well as local and national conditions. Finally, it demonstrates how the women use strategies of de/kinning that both align with and resist the idea that the surrogate mother is not related to the child. The results highlight the precariousness of these women’s labour and how surrogacy stretches into their lives beyond the nine months of pregnancy. Results also focus the women’s own decision-making and negotiations within the context of constrained but real agency. This thesis contributes knowledge about the situation of surrogate mothers post-pregnancy, and also in a context where surrogacy is illegal. It also contributes to the research fields of transnational reproduction, gendered and global division of intimate labour and feminist discussions on motherhood.
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| 2. |
- Wahlgren, Catarina, 1967-
(författare)
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En bild säger mer än tusen ord : Barns perspektiv, positioner och påverkansmöjligheter i förskolans dokumentationspraktik
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall aim of this thesis is to examine children's perspectives, positions and possibilities for participation in Swedish preschool documentation practice. The empirical data consists of 1575 photographs from six preschool classes located in different suburban areas. The thesis includes four articles that examine different aspects of the practice of pedagogical documentation. In the first article the children's own stories about the photographs are analysed. In the second article, notions of the child from photographs presented on the preschool walls and from the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool are compared. The third article examines the content and circulation of digital photographs. Finally, the fourth article explores how children are portrayed in photographs of outdoor activities. All articles are grounded in theories about power and knowledge production, such as discourse theory, and discuss intersections between age, gender, ethnicity and class.The results show that children are capable of creating their own stories in interaction with photographs. However, their stories tend to be gender specific although the photographs mediate gender neutrality. The children mainly described their mutual relationships and, to a lesser extent, the displayed activities. The photographs align with trends of schoolification and masculine-coded production and accomplishment, while care and play are made invisible in the photographs. However, the outdoor photographs, stand out in the sample as they make children visible as sensitive and closely attached to nature. Unlike indoors photographs, outdoor photographs visibilized feminine-coded values as desirable. Outdoor and digitally circulated photographs often displayed children as anonymous, and as neutral in terms of gender and ethnicity. This could be positive since children were able to include themselves in activities represented in the photographs. At the same time, the photographs became impersonal and sometimes insipid; as the anonymisation made children's experiences and knowledge production invisible.The thesis concludes that notions of the child, communicated in preschool photographs, are conform and make competence appear as production and accomplishment, while alternative ways of being a preschool child are made invisible. Therefore, a feminist definition of professionalisation is suggested in order to increase children's participation and incorporate alternative stories in preschool knowledge production, which, in turn, can challenge the notion of the competent child.
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