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- Berg, Annika, 1973-
(författare)
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Den gränslösa hälsan : Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the mutual life project of Signe (1896-1988) and Axel Höjer (1890-1974), a married couple who were key actors in the construction of the Swedish welfare state. It emphasises the ways in which they went about asserting a special public health expertise in different contexts. As starting points I take the malleability of the concept folkhälsa (people’s health or population health) and the centrality of expertise in the governance of modern societies. Theoretical concepts such as gender, policy transfer, biopower and governmentality are central to the analysis. The dissertation includes three parts. The first part investigates how the Höjers agreed to coordinate their work and how they, with reference to ideas picked up in France and England at the end of World War I, attempted to reform mother and child health care in Sweden. Their strategies where rhetorical but also practical, using Hagalund outside Stockholm as their experimental ground. The second part investigates, firstly, how Axel Höjer, as General-Director of the Medical Board of Sweden (1935-52) asserted a sociomedical expertise, integrating the emerging social sciences and universalist views on the organisation of the welfare state into the realm of medicine, in order to launch ideas of a thorough reorganisation and expansion of the Swedish health care system. His focus was on preventive medicine and health care, with the complete physical, mental and social health of the whole population as an explicit goal. Secondly, it explores how Signe Höjer at the same time tried to launch ideas on health and wellbeing as a social politician and a public committee member. She also tried to define family policy as a specific policy area. However, despite her training as a nurse and a social worker, she was largely confined to asserting a particularly ”female” expertise, which made her position rather ambiguous in terms of authority. The third part investigates how the Höjers, in the 1950s and 60s, worked with international health, Axel mainly for the WHO in India and Ghana, Signe as a policy entrepreneur, primarily in the fields of childcare and family planning. My findings partly confirm theories that see development aid as an extension of domestic social policy, but they challenge the view of aid as a simple one-way process. I demonstrate how the Höjers at least tried to adapt their projects abroad to meet local circumstances, and also show how they brought lessons from the third world to a domestic public. In the latter case they did not primarily act as experts of Swedish-style social policy, but as experts on the developing countries and on development aid.
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| 2. |
- Björk, Maria, 1978-
(författare)
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Problemet utan namn? : Neuroser, stress och kön i Sverige från 1950 till 1980
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Focusing on Sweden between 1950 and 1980, this doctoral dissertation analyzes and problematizes the process in which a discourse about neurosis and nervous troubles gradually evolved into a discourse about stress. The thesis aims to show how the medical and general discussion about diffuse or vague symptoms transformed and rearticulated ideas and views on society and man, citizenship, gender roles, and medicine. It shows how the discourse on neuroses tended to locate sickness and deviance in the individual, whereas its subsequent transformation into a discourse on stress located the pathological in an external, societal sphere.A particularly prominent issue in the study concerns the role that gender, and in particular female gender, has played in these discourses, and how the place of the feminine can be understood in relation to stress and neuroses. The dissertation shows that female gender was not central to the discourse on neuroses and stress during the studied period. On the contrary, gender was subordinated to ideas about man and citizenship within the greater context of society and culture.The dissertation takes its starting point in the Swedish 1950’s, often characterized as the era of ”The Strong Society” or ”The People’s Home”. During this period, the neurosis discourse was fixed and remained unchanged. In practice, neurosis was a diagnosis that provided such symptoms that were otherwise difficult to measure and assess with a theory of origin. Neuroses were believed to principally affect a certain category of individuals, who, due to their constitution or disposition, were held to be particularly susceptible to neurotic sufferings.During the 1960s the belief in The Strong Society and its notion of ideal citizenship began to crumble. It was against this background that the Swedish medical profession started discussing ”stress”. Stress, in contrast, could afflict anyone and everyone, according to “the father of stress” Hans Selye and Swedish stress researchers. Stress was assumed to be a potential cause of ”nervous troubles” and disease, but was never considered to be a disease in itself. The concept of the individual as a citizen now gave way for the notion of the individual as a primarily biological organism. Within the stress discourse in the 1960s, the primacy of the universal normal (male) man was a recurring focal point.In the 1970s, the stress researchers distanced themselves from Selyes’ concept of stress by focusing on individual factors. In the discussion about stress during the 1970s, the ”constitutionally weak” individual of the 1950s and the biological organism of the 1960s blended into a hybrid construction of a unique, biological individual.
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