1.
Bäckström, Hanna, 1986-
(författare)
Att hjälpa andra : gåvans, rättvisans och medkänslans aporier i frivilligarbete
2020
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The thesis addresses the issue of social work in Swedish civil society, focusing on the ambition and practice of helping others as an existential as well as a social, political and cultural phenomenon. The aim is to study the ambiguities and aporetic conflicts that imbue helping activities and the desire to help others, using ethnographic as well as philosophical method. An interview study comprising of 12 volunteers and activists, all working with begging EU-citizens in Sweden, was carried out between 2015 and 2016. The interviews aimed to gather context specific experiences of helping others from a vulnerable group, especially concerning questions of power asymmetry and moral and political dilemmas. Subsequently, a reading of the participants’ narratives informed by Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction was performed. Following Derrida’s understanding of deconstruction as a bipartite process, focusing on genealogy and representation as well as the logico-formal paradoxes, aporias or ‘undecidables’, that characterise certain phenomena, two strands of research questions guided the analysis: Firstly, how do the participants understand and create meaning regarding their helping activities? And secondly, what seemingly impossible paradoxes, aporias, emerge in the constituting ideas and practices of helping, as they are expressed in the participants' narratives?Resulting from this reading and a parallel literature study, three main areas of conflict were identified: altruistic gift-giving vs. reciprocity and exchange, objective and structural justice vs. personal relations and exceptions, and lastly, the meaning of empathy as well as the difficulty of representing the suffering of others. The main theoretical sources are Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hélène Cixous and Jessica Benjamin, whose writings on economy, gifts, responsibility, desire and intersubjectivity respectively, are employed to understand and theoretically develop the participants' experiences.Connecting the difficulty of doing a good deed to feminist ethical elaborations on care and justice, I conclusively argue for a deconstructive ethics of care, that takes the aporetic character of helping others into account, while not relinquishing the responsibility towards the other and the possibility of solidarity.
2.
Kjellgren, Maria, 1973-
(författare)
Skolkuratorns samtalspraktik : en studie om individuella samtal med barn i den svenska grundskolan
2024
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis fills part of the existing knowledge gap regarding school social workers (SSW) individual counselling practice. The overall aim is to investigate the individual SSW counselling in Swedish elementary schools, as part of the pupil health team (PHT). This will be achieved by exploring the following three basic research questions: What characterizes school social work regarding structure, process and interventions in individual counselling sessions held by SSWs with children? How do SSWs describe the difficulties and opportunities in school social work, interventions and performance, and collaboration with other actors in pupil health teams? What characterises SSWs’ individual counselling according to the adolescents’ experiences and expressed needsThis thesis consisted of four research studies. The first one concentrated on SSWs personal experiences of counselling children, in which focus group studies were conducted with 22 SSWs (four groups). In the second study, the SSWs described their experiences of being a part of a multi-disciplinary team, the PHT, during the focus group interviews. These two studies were analysed by content analysis. The third study consisted of a quantitative protocol study regarding child characteristics, counselling strategies and interventions analysed by descriptive statistics. The purpose on the fourth study was to increase knowledge about the individual counselling from the adolescents’ perspective. Individual interviews were conducted and analysed through content analysis.This thesis highlighted the necessity for children to express themselves, in regards to their life situation, concerns and problems. SSWs could be one prominent actor in the children’s lives by providing individual counselling sessions. SSWs are described as the PHT psychosocial expert with specialised knowledge regarding the impact of negative psychosocial factors on children.In addition, this thesis concluded that available regulations and guidelines meant insure that children are listened and able to express their narrative in a safe and trustful school counselling environment are limited.
