| 1. |
- Wallsten, Björn
(författare)
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The Urk World : Hibernating Infrastructures and the Quest for Urban Mining
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This PhD thesis concerns urban mining, an umbrella term for different recycling strategies aimed to recover materials from the built environment. More specifically, it focuses on hibernating urban infrastructures, that is: cables and pipes that have been left behind in their subsurface location after they were disconnected. I term this subsurface urban realm of system rejects the “Urk World”. “Urk” is short for “urkopplad”, the Swedish word for “disconnected”, an abbreviation often found on old infrastructure maps denoting discarded system parts. Since urks contain high concentrations of copper, my normative stance is that the Urk World should be “mined” as a contribution towards diminishing the persistently wasteful handling of mineral resources in society.The thesis has three focus areas. The first of these discusses how the Urk World has emerged, that is: how the creation of urks is sustained in sociotechnical processes related to infrastructure’s provision. The second concerns the potential of urk mining, how much copper the Urk World contains, where these quantities are located and by which implications they could be recovered. The third focus area is devoted to the politics of urks, and is concerned with the political embeddedness of infrastructure and where politics might intervene for the sake of increased urk recovery.Five papers complete the thesis. The first paper investigates how much copper, aluminium and steel there is in the Urk World of the Swedish city of Norrköping, and how these quantities are spatially dispersed in the urban environment. The second paper is based on interviews with system owners and repair crews, and investigates how urks come into existence in relation to three different infrastructural processes: maintenance, larger installation projects and shutdown. The third paper describes how environmental systems analysis can be beneficially coupled with theories and methods from the social sciences to create knowledge useful to aid the development of urk recycling schemes. The fourth article makes use of the inherent ambiguities of urks to investigate a spectrum of locations where politics aimed for increased urk recovery can intervene as well as what is at stake there. The fifth and final paper investigates urks in Linköping’s power grid in spatial and weight terms, and analyses the implications of urk recovery from several different viewpoints.In overall terms, the major contribution of the thesis is how it improves the knowledge of societal stocks of materials, thereby giving an increased recognition of the built environment as a resource base. In overall scientific terms, it sets an example of how a coherent interdisciplinary research design can provide knowledge useful for the implementation of urk recycling schemes as well as for political decision–making for increased urk recovery.
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| 2. |
- Pavli, Antonia, 1984-
(författare)
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Creative Disability Classification Systems : The case of Greece, 1990-2015
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Disability classification systems belong to the core of states’ social/disability policies through which persons with disabilities are classified as eligible or ineligible for having access to disability allowances. The study of disability classification systems has stimulated the interest of several scholars from the broader area of disability studies. Either by conducting comparative studies between different states and describing the similarities and differences of these systems around the world or by conducting studies focusing on the politics and semantics in the development of disability classification systems in specific states, all studies have shown a pluralism in the systems for assessing and certifying disability. In Greece, the development of disability classification systems for social welfare reasons emerged as a controversy that lasted for almost twenty years. One factor that strengthened the controversy was the outbreak of the economic crisis late in 2009 followed by the announcement by the governmental authorities of the enactment of a new system for assessing and certifying disability as part of the austeritydriven policies that the Greek state would enact for facing the consequences of the economic crisis. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, the overall aim of this study is to describe and analyze the enactment of disability classification systems in the context of Greek social policy from 1990 to 2015. For the collection of empirical material, a qualitative research method was employed, consisting of interviews, written material, and newspaper articles. The main findings of this thesis are: I) the involvement of the political parties in the development of the systems for certifying and assessing disability; II) the involvement of the disability movement in policymaking; III) the “creative” use of statistics by governmental authorities for the enactment of disability/social policies; IV) how the concept of “disability fraud” has been constructed as a “threat” to the society; and V) the vulnerability of disability classification systems in times of austerity.
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| 3. |
- Wallsten, Anna
(författare)
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Assembling the Smart Grid : On the Mobilization of Imaginaries, Users and Materialities in a Swedish Demonstration Project
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Influential actors refer to smart grids as a revamped version of the energy systemwhen they argue for alternative energy pathways, and assign demonstration projects with the task of turning prospects about the future into functional configurations. This thesis explores notions of the smart grid future that are implicitly conveyed in Swedish smart grid strategy and planning documents. The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyse how a smart grid is assembled in a Swedish demonstration project. Inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS), it explores this process through interviews, document studies and participant observation. By combining concepts such as sociotechnical imaginaries, material participation and translations, this study sheds light on the negotiations, tensions and struggles at play in the process of making smart grids functional. This study examines how included and excluded users make sense of the smart grid and of their own role in shaping the future. What imaginaries do the actors involved in the project draw on? What materialities take part in shaping the smart grid, and what user engagements are encouraged? The aim of the study is to seek an enhanced understanding of how smart grids are made, of the different forces that shape this process and, ultimately, of the reality of Swedish households as part of a smart grid in the making. This study shows that making a smart grid functional is not as feasible as the smart grid imaginaries suggest, and it finds potential in user engagements that are suppressed within the current market regime, which is primarily arranged around economic incentives.
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