| 1. |
- Andersson, Maria
(author)
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Arbetslöshet och arbetsfrihet : Moral, makt och motstånd
- 2003
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Unemployment is constructed as a problem by institutions and individuals, at a structural as well as individual level. In the "black discourse" of unemployment, power is produced by talking and naming, by symbolic images, by dichotomisation and hierarchisation of categories based on the fundamental dichotomy of nature/reason, but also by feelings, actions and bodies. The well-being of the unemployed is constantly threatened by this discourse, yet they nevertheless reproduce it when necessary. But there is resistance to all this. First, there is a resistance against politicians and former employees in particular and elites in general. Then there is a reflexive resistance, characterised by a critique and de-legitimation of the myths of unemployment and thereby the modern work ethic. This depreciation of values and a relativistic standpoint is seen here as a sign of a representational crisis. In the practising of a life free from work, I also see a kind of resistance. The women seem to need what I call an "existential space", sometimes fulfilled in unemployment. The men living happily without work seem to need an ideological legitimation of this, rejecting the materialistic lifestyle in the contemporary western world. Finally, I see a kind of "practised resistance" (often unintended) in alternative outcome, such as the mutual help in a "moral economy", small-scale cultivating, fishing and hunting and economic strategies. Since the discourse of unemployment is motivated by the relation between the modern institutions of wage labour and capitalism, the activities based on other relations, such as reciprocity and non-consumption in this case, can be defined as a kind of resistance. It is a resistance readable in the effect, not the intention, of it.
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| 2. |
- Berglund-Lake, Håkan
(author)
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Livet äger rum : Försörjning och platstagande i norrländska sågverkssamhällen
- 2001
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study is concerned with the people who settled permanently near the sawmills of Västernorrland during the expansion of the sawmill industry in the latter half of the 19th century. The basis of, and a prerequisite for this resettlement and the life thus built up was the permanent employment and wages earned by the men at the sawmills. The purpose is to study the pattern of subsistence and the process of place making among the permanent working population in the early sawmill community. The focus is placed on what possibilities and limitations a settlement in the sawmill communities had for the permanently employed sawmill workers and their families - wives and children, and what material and symbolic resources they created and gained access to in order to build up a new life in a place where they had no previous social contacts. An adaption to the context of the sawmill implied many mental and practical transformations, but at the same time a learning process; they had to learn to handle the diversity of people, commodities and objects in a new physical environment. They had to take place in a space and in a context that was unfamiliar and predictable. Following themes are discussed in the dissertation: the pattern of subsistence, dwelling and meaning, the relation between the permanent workers population and the sawmill-owner and the process of place making, temporalization and social identification. The main sources of information consist of autobiographies and recorded life- stories, but even contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, judicial records, estate inventories, official records and reports from county sheriffs, enforcement officers, clergymen and district medical officers. in the rich detail of these texts, in these fragments of life, I find the data upon which I build a narrative by means of a series of interpretations with the aid of different theoretical tools, in collaboration with other interpretations and my own intuition.
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| 3. |
- Bodén, Daniel, 1983-
(author)
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Systemmänniskan : En studie om människan, automationen och det senmoderna förnuftet
- 2016
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- How did the conformist “organization man” of modern welfare society turn into the restless and flexible market-rational individualist of late-modernity? And what role did technology play in this transformation? Drawing from inquiries like these, this doctoral thesis deals with topics such as technology, culture, and the production of social consciousness. The aim of the study is to elucidate the historical emergence of late-modern reason, visible in the socio-material process of automation.The study takes two mundane technical innovations as starting points to investigate dominant social values and rationalities embedded in, and emerging from material transformations in the production process of two late modern, Swedish organizations. Covering a period of roughly fifty years (1960–2013), the analysis relies on the interpretation of a variety of both contemporary and archived sources, including interviews, observations, witness accounts and archived material in the form of staff magazines, newspapers, photographs and official documents.While following a hermeneutical tradition of European ethnology the study is also an attempt to enrich its synchronous cultural analysis of everyday life with theory grounded in historical (dialectical) materialism. Along this line of thought the thesis suggests that many of the qualities, values and everyday experiences attributed to late-modernity, such as “flexibility”, “creativity” and “flat organizations” depend on the reification and embedding of modernist social forms, ideas and relations, such as instrumental rationality, routine labour and bureaucratic taxonomy into the material foundation of daily life.
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| 4. |
- Ek-Nilsson, Katarina
(author)
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Teknikens befäl : En etnologisk studie av teknikuppfattning och civilingenjörer : [an ethnological study of the understandings of technology and engineers]
- 1999
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of this Thesis is to analyse technology as a domain for knowledge and cultural experience among Swedish engineers during the 20th century. The aim is to examine how the concept of technology and the engineering profession are related in literature and films as well as in biographies, written by engineers themselves. Ever since engineering and technology became recognised as an independent field of knowledge at the end of the 18th century, engineers have been seen as key actors in the industrialisation and modernisation of Sweden, as indeed also in other Western countries. The idea of technology thus can be looked upon as a symbol for modernity and the engineers as creators and managers of this idea. The main material for this study consists of life-history scripts and biographies written by around seventy engineers for Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet) in Stockholm. Using themes such as willingness to break away and change, future-orientation and rationality, the thesis discusses how individuals deal with, and describe, their supposed role in Swedish modernity. Other important materials used are films and literature that show the image of technology and the engineering profession in popular culture. The founding of a royal academy of engineering sciences (Kungliga Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademien) and a technical museum (Tekniska museet) around 1920 were important steps in the professionalisation ofengineering in Sweden. Their importance in the understanding of the concept of technology and engineering is discussed. There are three theoretical perspectives in this thesis: modernity, gender and class. The thesis is an analysis of modernity as a cultural construction, which is related to class and gender, with Swedish engineers as examples. The material shows how engineers are clearly orientated to values central to modernity, viz. the individual's responsibility and possibilities, future-orientation and rationality. The engineers' life-history scripts reveal that these are values they expect from themselves. The engineers belong mainly to the upper middle-class. This thesis discusses how middle-class values am transferred and reproduced in the educational situation as well as in their professional role. Technology has been, and still is, a male domain. This study analyses how technology culturally expresses masculinity, and what strategies women use when entering and positioning themselves in this field.
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| 5. |
- Engblom, Rikard, 1988-
(author)
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Time Warps : Refugees and the Experience of Waiting in Rural Sweden
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis explores the ways in which refugees’ experience of time is warped when they come to Sweden. It is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Avesta, a small municipality in rural Sweden.Refugee reception and immigration control in Sweden is characterized by humanitarian ideals that exist in tension with practices and policies aiming to restrict immigration in the name of security and stability. Each chapter of this thesis documents a different combination of these ideals and concerns, examining how they generate particular configurations of waiting. For many refugees in Sweden, everyday life is characterized by waiting—waiting to have their asylum application processed; to receive a residence permit, which grants them the right to work; to be reunited with their families to find a place in Swedish society. This process often takes several years, during which the conditions for receiving residence permit may suddenly change or be made more difficult. The thesis is a contribution to the recent “temporal turn” in migration studies through its focus on waiting as a productive phenomenon in vulnerable circumstances. The increased presence of refugees has given rise to anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden, but it has also generated welcoming, compassionate responses. By addressing not only how refugees cope with living in a continual state of waiting under precarious conditions, but also how bureacracies, civil societies, and individuals respond to this waiting, the thesis discusses the sociological and ethical implications of refugees’ waiting. Time Warps demonstrates the importance of unpacking combinations of humanitarianism and securitarianism when developing a deepened understanding of refugees experience of waiting in rural Sweden.
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| 6. |
- Ericsson, Urban, 1969-
(author)
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Belägrade människor – Belägrade Rum : Om invandrargöranden och förorter
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis analyses the notion of so-called “Invandrartäta förorter” [“Immigrant-dense suburbs”]. The aim of the study has been to analyse the haunting imagery of the Suburb and the Immigrant as portrayed in the Swedish media. The notion of a fantasy-frame is related to the “Invandrartäta förorten” [“Immigrant-dense suburb”] which is, in the main, a fantasy. Nevertheless, the study shows that the imagery is powerful in its racialised and discriminatory practice.In the first part of the study the main focus is on the media narratives of the suburbs. Illustrations of how the idea of the “Invandrartäta förorten” [“Immigrant-dense suburb”] was created and how this place was, and still is, made to perform Otherness, are described. In the latter part of the study, the interwoven relationship between the fantasy-frame of the suburb and the mediated immigrant-made subject is in focus. Here the focus is on studying the attention and space of appearance that the media imposes on the immigrant-made individual when she or he is presented as representing this space.By taking into account the media's editing techniques in press material, ways of interpretation and the recurring themes concerning this space of appearance, the analysis tries to shed light on the conditions of attention for the one who is portrayed in relation to this fantasy space. Such representations mix fear with enticing elements of the exotic. The imagery of the suburban fantasy-frame materialises in the individual portraits and daily life of the people who are depicted in relation to this space.In the final part of the thesis, the notion of mime is used to describe a form of subversive strategy in relation to the imagery that the portrayed is evoked to display.
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| 7. |
- Eriksson-Aras, Karin
(author)
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Ljudrum : En studie av ljud och lyssnande som kulturell praktik
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of the thesis is to investigate how sound creates distinct, cognitive and spatial entities, sound spaces, and to find out how sound spaces constitute forms of human interaction. A further aim is to establish concepts used when studying sound spaces, thus contributing to a Swedish terminology for describing and analysing sound and sound spaces. The analysis follows a hermeneutic spiral, alternating between inductive and deductive methodology, between the individual and the general. Conclusions are transferred from Istanbul to a broader level; to people in general.Forms of representation are developed by composing an exposition of pictures, maps, graphs, notes and links to acoustic files, alongside the written account. The study is based on well-established music and acoustic terminology. Terms that are used in the thesis are explained in information boxes. Altogether, this constitutes an attempt to build a comprehensive cultural analytical vocabulary to describe in text what a sound space sounds like.The study shows how sound has much to tell about the lived life in a large city, here represented by sound spaces in Istanbul. Sound is greatly significant in people’s lives. Sound spaces can be regarded as arenas for communication between people and are included in a world of sound containing interaction and crucial information.By investigating and bringing attention to spaces of sound that are shaped by their users in such places as urban environments, insights are won concerning the significance of everyday life in the city environment. With emphasis on the importance of sound, the interconnection between the subjective and the objective world of sounds is studied, contributing to enhance the understanding of how the world functions through sounds. The sound spaces of Istanbul are the sounds of a metropolis, which means that the study not only portrays and analyses sound spaces in general, but stresses metropolis sound spaces, and conditions for listening, being heard and communicating in large cities. The study contributes to bringing attention to and clarifying the knowledge that can be extracted by recognising the value of sound and listening in the research of cultural studies.
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| 8. |
- Herlitz, Gillis, 1944-
(author)
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Mors Dag och Halloween : Festseder i förändring
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation strives to describe and analyse two celebrations imported from USA in the 20th century, namely Mother's Day at the beginning of the century and Halloween towards the end. What were the reasons for their succesfull introduction and, in the case of Mother's Day, continuous life in Sweden? My objective is to analyse this using the tool "spirit of the age". What does the introduction of Mother's Day in 1919 tell us about the ideas of the time and would it have been possible to introduce Halloween in its present form at the beginning of the 20th century considering the spirit of the age? The thesis also discusses criticism of the two customs, again by analysing from the point of view of the spirit of the age. When discussing Mother's Day the thesis mainly focuses on the main population issues of the course of the 20th century. When birth rates plummeted to an alarmingly low level, the pressure on women to become mothers was at its highest, and subsequent peaks of celebrating Mother's Day can be noted. Population issues do not only deal with population quantity, however, but also with quality. Interesting discussions could therefore take place regarding which mother was the one to be celebrated. When it comes to Halloween the main focus is on the development of the experience industry towards the end of the 20th century. The thesis is a contribution to the discussions of celebrations in a societal context not only in terms of their form but also their content.
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| 9. |
- Ljung, Anna
(author)
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Bortom oskuldens tid : En etnologisk studie av moral, trygghet och otrygghet i skuggan av hiv
- 2001
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of this doctoral thesis is to investigate how the Swedish press coverage of AIDS reflects cultural assumptions about morals, security and insecurity and how these representations affect the lives of people who are HIV-positive. It is clear that HIV-positive people are affected by such representations. Images that make some people feel secure have the opposite effect on others. But I have also shown that their lives are not totally constricted by these values. They try to create alternative truths about AIDS. Working from this assumption it has been important to investigate how people try to create meaning and defeat meaninglessness in difficult life circumstances.A further ambition has been to investigate how the body can be viewed as an active part in cultural processes. I argue that it is necessary to adopt a holistic view in cultural conceptualisations of the human body, where physical reactions, emotions and reason are seen as a whole, not ordered hierarchically. My thesis shows that people use different kinds of reasoning in different situations. Knowledge about the actual transmission of the virus, plays a minor part in my informants’ accounts. In some situations a body-based logic dominates, based on fear of transmission through everyday body contact. I argue that trying to suppress or hide bodily signs of the virus is not only a way of avoiding stigmatising behaviour from others, but also a way of achieving control or being able to participate in social situations on the same premises as other people.
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| 10. |
- Ljungström, Åsa
(author)
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Öster om Arlanda : En etnologisk studie av berättelser och föremål i en hemslöjdsinventering
- 1997
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation lies in the crossroads between the study of artifacts and the studyof verbalizations. Its purpose is to investigate how artifacts, retrieved for ahandicraft inventory, inspired their owners to narrate and interpret values, lifecontexts and moral problems connected with the social and historicaltransformation of the twentieth century. The informants illuminated questions ofidentity, morality, gender roles, class relations, sense of place, and historicalpreservation. The right to dignity permeated the informants' accounts of life anddeath, reproduction, caring, work, and history. At the root of their world view, layan unexpressed understanding of justice, that was a part of their attempts tomaintain human dignity. These attempts were carried out partly through a malecode which maintained individual rights and integrity, and partly through aphilosophy of female caring, based on responsibility for the needs of others.Previous class divisions were illuminated when informants contemplated objectsonce used in the preparation of food. In the linen cupboards, even in well-to-dohomes, sorrow, pain and anger lay hidden in the sheets as traces of life events.Competence in work was important to the informants. The good life was to be ableto work. The linkage of artifacts and narrative experiences show how feelingstranscend time. The stories can be interpreted as the narrators' paraphrases of lifein the temporal dimension of poetry and history.
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