| 1. |
- Chan, Elton
(författare)
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The Last Urban Frontier : Commodification of Public Space and the Right to the City in Insurgent Hong Kong
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores the production and transformation of public spaces in Hong Kong, a city that is steeped in neoliberal ideals and has seen substantial deterioration in terms of democratic rights and freedoms in recent years. As a result of the expansion of neoliberal capitalism, commodification of urban space has not only exacerbated, but also become more far-reaching and indiscriminate. While existing lines of enquiry such as privatisation and commercialisation remain highly important, it could be argued that they may no longer suffice to encapsulate the exploitative motives and practices of public space due to the growing importance of public space in urban development, as well as the increasingly complex and dynamic models of funding, ownership, and management. Rather than fixating on certain characteristics like public ownership and commercial use of public spaces, the thesis argues that a broadened conceptualisation of public space commodification will be key to not only unpacking its multi-scalar socio-spatial impacts, but also revealing its connection to other urban processes. By rethinking commodification processes in relation to public space, this thesis sets out to establish the linkages between capitalist productive forces and the development and production of public space. Moreover, drawing upon recent protest movements in Hong Kong and the ways in which protesters appropriated and transformed different urban spaces into spaces of public discourse, the thesis argues that everyday contests over public space use and development are imperative to the city’s future political struggles. It is for this reason that the thesis started by examining the commodification of everyday public spaces in Hong Kong, and while inspirations for an alternative public space can be drawn from the sites of political struggles and contestations, it is ultimately in the spaces of everyday life where the right to the city can be formulated and enacted. The empirical cases are centred on three different public spaces in Hong Kong, as well as the protest sites of both the Umbrella Movement and the Anti-ELAB protest movement. By adopting a combination of both on-site and digital ethnographic approaches, this study examines the social production of different public spaces in Hong Kong. The main sources of data for this study include participant observations, interviews, documents, live stream footages, and online forums. The cases are analysed and presented across the four papers included in this thesis.
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| 2. |
- Franzén, Alexandra
(författare)
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Brottslingar av en mycket speciell sort. : Spionskandalen som en maktkamp mellan visselblåsare, grävande journalister och underrättelsetjänster.
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Spy scandals in Western democracies can be seen as a power battle between three actors: investigative journalists, whistleblowers and the intelligence organizations at the center of the scandal. It is a conflict played out both within and outside of the court-house as the actors try to claim the label “hero” for themselves while actively trying to repudiate other labels, such as “traitor”, “spy” or “criminal”. This study investigates three particular cases of spy scandals in Western democracies: the IB-scandal in Sweden in 1973, The Guardian’s Snowden–publications in 2013 and the Danish daily newspaper Politiken’s publication of the book Seven years for PET – The time of Jakob Scharf in 2016. Researchers within political sociology have paid very little interest to spy scandals and the role of security and intelligence services in Western democracies. This research field is both understudied and undertheorized. This research project is developed along two tracks. In the first part of this dissertation, the three empirical case studies of the IB, Snowden and PET spy scandals are presented. Wilhelm Agrell’s concept of the “legality paradox” of security and intelligence agencies in Western democracies and Carl Schmitt’s thoughts on the state of exception are particularly useful perspectives here. In the second part of this dissertation, I conduct an analysis of the vocabularies of motives of the key actors in the three spy scandals. The vocabularies of motives are examined using reference group theory as developed by Robert K. Merton and Malin Åkerström. Both social scientists and legal researchers have written extensively on the topic of press freedom versus state security in Western democracies. In general, the legal research on the subject is intellectually more advanced than its equivalent in the social sciences: the latter is often burdened by the Foucauldian perspective that all security and intelligence services are by default illegimate and should be abolished. One of the main objectives of this doctoral dissertation is to bring together these two different research traditions, political sociology and legal research, to investigate intelligence organizations and spy scandals in four Western democracies.This dissertation advances new empirical and theoretical insights by drawing on previous research, legal and archival documents from the three case studies as well as thirteen interviews with key actors. It is argued that the absence of explicit laws regulating security and intelligence services in Western democracies, in addition to the states’ rhetorical definition of the spy scandal as an act of espionage or terrorism, tend to produce a partial state of exception. It is also shown that investigative journalists and whistleblowers, on the one hand, and intelligence organizations and courts, on the other hand, fundamentally disagree on the intended audience of the published spy scandal. The former argue that the general public is the audience of the spy scandals, whereas the latter counter that the state’s security policy enemies are the true audience.
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| 3. |
- Klitgaard, Vibeke
(författare)
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Social (u)orden i distriktspsykiatrien : En systemteoretisk analyse af psykiatriske patienters kommunikation og adfærd samt stigmatisering fra omverdenen
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation looks into everyday life at two day-care centres of community psychiatry in the municipality of Copenhagen. More specifically, it is about the patients' communication and behaviour, and about the stigmatization fromthe outer world they experience. The empirical material is based on three years of participant observation. The two daycare centres and their districts were situated in opposite ends of the socioeconomic scale within the municipality, one of them in the district of the highest socioeconomic status in the municipality, the other one in a district of very low socioeconomic status. The socioeconomic distance caused marked differences in the patients' communication and behaviour patterns, which had to do with the patients' orientation. In the day-care centre placed in the low socioeconomic status district the patients focused mainly on the patient community, whereas the patients at the day-care centre in the district of high socioeconomic status were oriented towards normality. I analyze patients’ communication and behaviourin line with the communication part of Luhmann’s systems theory approach. The patients expressed varying degrees of communication disturbances: some major, when they could not express themselves in a comprehensible way and therefore could not interact with other patients; some minor, which enabled them to interact with other patients even if they expressed for instance singular delusions. I focus on the day-care centres' double status as places of refuge and as stigmamarkers. They were places of refuge where the patients could talk freely about their symptoms and the effects of psychopharmaceuticals. However, the day-care centres were also stigma-markers because the patients were subjected to stigmatisation and moral judgment as a consequence of their mere contact with the psychiatric treatment system. The literature on stigmatisation describes how the discrimination against psychiatric patients influence their chances in more or less all life areas: Income, education, job and employment, psychological well-being, housing status, medical treatment, health and satisfactory relations. On top of the above-mentioned, psychiatric patients are at severe risk of excess mortality, as recently documented in a forensic autopsy study.
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| 4. |
- Quaglietta, Oriana
(författare)
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In Her Words: Women’s Accounts of Managing Drug-related Risk, Pleasure, and Stigma in Sweden
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- When it comes to the field of drug studies, researchers have tended to privilege men’s perspectives and experiences, assuming women to be mostly marginal, as primarily victims and accomplices. Further, when women’s experiences are taken into account, a view of them as only women has tended to be pushed to the forefront. As such, we are sorely lacking research departing from women’s own recollections of their involvement with drugs that also considers how social location from the intersection of multiple categories of being (e.g. gender, class, type of drug involvement, etc.) characterises these experiences.This dissertation contributes to the literature on drugs and drug involvement by drawing on the accounts of a group of twenty-six women who have, at some point in their lives, used, bought, shared, and/or sold drugs in Sweden. The overarching objective has been to understand why participants started, continued, and sometimes stopped being active with drugs and how they managed drug-related risk, pleasure, and stigma in the contexts in which they were located. Participants’ accounts were analysed through a theoretical lens developed from a synthesis of social constructionism, intersectionality, and symbolic interactionism, thus making it possible to see how their experiences were embedded in specific contexts and how respondents described navigating and managing the challenges these posed.It emerged that respondents discussed their involvement with drugs as being considerably pleasurable and meaningful, but also heavily tinged by the risk of violence and stigma experienced in the illicit drugs market and in conventional society. Participants described developing numerous tactics to attempt to counter some of these risks and stigmatisation processes and, consequently, meanings because of and despite the circumstances they faced. Drugs and drug involvement gave respondents an opportunity to feel alternatively (dis)empowered, (in)capable, and (un)worthy of respect. These practices and meanings were necessarily mediated through participants’ social location, but resourcefulness and creativity also played an important role. Ultimately, respondents’ accounts show that they were simply doing what they could to create meaningful lives for themselves with the resources available to them.
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| 5. |
- Sahlin Lilja, Hanna
(författare)
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The Emergence, Establishment och Expansion of Fear of Crime Research in Sweden
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this dissertation is to construct an historical account of the emergence, establishment, and expansion of fear of crime research in Sweden. This dissertation aims to answer questions about the function, spread, and high level of institutional engagement of fear of crime research by analyzing the literature and examining the methodological, theoretical, and epistemological origins of fear of crime research itself. What happened when fear of crime was translated as "otrygghet", a word with a previously established meaning in Swedish? The analysis on the emergence of fear of crime in Sweden is based on documents, a survey of Swedish municipalities, and key informant interviews. The question of conceptual change is addressed through comparing how "otrygghet" is used by Socialdemokraterna and Moderaterna in motions and bills from the Swedish Riksdag across five time periods: 1978, 1988, 1998, 2008 and 2018. The dissertation is theoretically inspired by a Foucauldian interest in the intersection of power and knowledge and by an interest in historicizing the sociological and criminological development that this thesis depicts, using the work of Stuart Hall. The analysis of conceptual change is inspired by the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck. The results show a rapid and striking expansion of fear of crime measurements during the 2000s. From 2003 to 2007, the number of national surveys containing fear of crime indicators grew from one to six, to include The Survey of Living Conditions that premiered in 1978, the Local Youth Politics Survey in 2003, The National Public Health survey in 2004, The Citizen Survey in 2005, The Swedish Crime Survey in 2006, and The Swedish Contingencies Agency Survey in 2007. For the municipalities, the period with the most dramatic increase in fear of crime measurements happens in the 2010’s, The percentage of municipalities that don’t do fear of crime surveys decreases from 98 percent before 1995, to 94 percent in 1995–1999, 74 percent in 2000–2004, 51 percent in 2005–2009, 30 percent in 2010–2014 and only 16 percent durign the last examined period, 2015–2018. The analysis also shows that the meaning of "otrygghet" has undergone significant changes. From being used as a descriptive term commonly signifying economic and materialist unpredictability, over time "otrygghet" has come to be used almost exclusively in a crime context. The concept is exclusively used to argue for increased measures of police control and judicial expansion during the last examined period of 2018. This dissertation argues that the development and expansion of fear of crime research can be understood by examining the function that fear of crime research fulfils in legitimizing an increased level of state control, which makes it a good fit for the penal politics of late modernity.
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| 6. |
- Crusefalk, Lars
(författare)
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Financial journeys : Reasoning about debt and money among young adults in Sweden
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Young adults are often mentioned as among the most financially vulnerable groups, and Sweden is often characterized as being one of the countries in the EU with the most indebted households. While this houshold indebtedness mainly is linked to home loans, also other forms of credit usage have become increasingly common. Given the increasing access to readily availabe consumer credits, a difficult housing market with fewer smaller rental apartments, and a tendency for postponed entry into adulthood, how do young Swedes navigate these circumstances?This study draws on interviews (focus group, dyadic and individual) with thirty-three young adults aged between 18 and 29 (24 women and 9 men) from five cities in Sweden and with various social class backgrounds in order to explore their reasoning on money, consumption, debt and credits. The empirical material also includes survey data collected in conjunction with the interviews, photos of advertisements, and information on 'financial solutions' in the five Swedish cities. A key finding in this study is that these young adults refer to what can best be described as a form of money talk etiquette when talking about money. Understanding this code of conduct is closely related to the transition into adulthood and what it means to be a responsible financial subject. A second key finding involves how these young adults refer to their own and others’ financial reasoning and practices in terms of financial journeys. These financial journeys are temporally situated socialization processes unfolding biographically within the respondents’ own life-course trajectories. A third key finding is the entrepreneurship of the self, a form of investment which stresses the importance of personal growth, self-realization, gaining new experiences, and increasing knowledge. Finally, a fourth key finding shows how these young adults attribute great importance to money in terms of its enabling properties. Young adults refer to different types of financial means as granting them the freedom to control, maintain, and shape the life that they want to live in terms of their own tastes, wants, needs, identities, and lifestyles.The study argues for the importance of shifting between different theoretical perspectives and analytical tools in order to better understand young adults’ reasoning about money, credit, loans, and personal finance. In the study a combined theoretical perspectve is used, comprising of theories on moral economy, on the cultural and social meaning of money, on the financialization of everyday life, on the significance of everday life, on the life course, and on consumption and its social significance.
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