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- Bäckström, Hanna, 1986-
(author)
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Att hjälpa andra : gåvans, rättvisans och medkänslans aporier i frivilligarbete
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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.
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- Edenheim, Sara, 1975-, et al.
(author)
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Akademisk feminism : Institutionalisering, organisation och kritik
- 2014
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In: Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap. - : Uppsala Universitet. - 1654-5443 .- 2001-1377. ; 35:1, s. 99-121
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article is an examination of what consequences our passion for critical research has had on our relation to Gender Studies as a discipline. The examination begins with the exclusion from, and escape from, another discipline, to the space and possibilities offered by Gender Studies. This move is, however, also an escape into a new discipline and a new order of normativities. We move on to identifying these normativities: 1) Gender Studies as constituted through a compromise with research ideals, where, for example, the concept gender (genus) is depicted as more inclusive than other concepts, and Gender Studies as less critical and political than Feminist Studies, 2) the dogmatism of sisterhood, as an identity based limitation for research, and 3) the constant mix-up with, and adaptation to, both governmental gender equality politics and activist organisations outside the university. In order to exist, Gender Studies has, in some way or another, compromised with all three of these normativities. We do not assume that this development is automatically bad or good – the normativities do not always reinforce each other, incongruences and gaps sometimes appear when they meet, and a compromise also implies that there still remains something of that which is ‘other’, of that which was ‘too much’ and had to be compromised. However, for the moment they seem to interact with a neo-liberal governmentality that restructures politics, activist demands, and identifications as well as research focus and university organisation. Hence, we see a need for a re-organisation of academic feminism, using Gender Studies as a platform, but constituted by neither the traditional object of study (“women/gender”) nor the idea of infinite inclusion and flexibility (“intersectionality”). Instead we propose that passion for critical research (including responsibility of that research), organised around the untimely idea of a non-competitive collegium, constitutes the guiding rules for a non-nostalgic and non-identical academic feminism.
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- Edenheim, Sara, 1975-
(author)
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Arkivfantasier : begäret till ett dokumenterat förflutet som ett problem inför framtiden
- 2013
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In: Lychnos. - Uppsala : Lärdomshistoriska samfundet. - 0076-1648. ; , s. 229-239
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- As most historians are well aware, an archive is always founded with the future in mind. Even though most archives do not exist for the historian, they have a bureaucratic function directed towards guaranteeing a "recollection" of a certain institutional organization and societal status quo. However, even the most radical and social constructivist of historians tends to foreclose this obvious notion in her quest for hermeneutical understanding. Through a critical analysis of a quote from the art exhibition "Lost and found. Queering the archive", this article suggests a problematization of the common use and definition of the archive based on a radical (non-)historiography where neither the future, nor history, can serve as legitimate ontologies for research or identity claims.
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- Edenheim, Sara, 1975-
(author)
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Att komma till Scott : teorins roll inom svensk genushistoria
- 2012
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In: Scandia. - : Sekel Bokförlag. - 0036-5483. ; 78:2, Supplement, s. 22-32
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The author discusses the specific contribution of theory to the field of Swedish gender history, and especially in relation to one dominant paradigm coined by the historian Yvonne Hirdman in the early 1990s. Scholars working in this field frequently refer to the American historian Joan Scott, but almost exclusively as the author of the article "Gender: a useful category for historical analysis". It is suggested that this limited reading of Scott is symptomatic of a tendency towards protectionism and stagnation. In order to effect a change, the suggestion is that more recent works by Scott be included in the general reading, not only for historians of gender, but for historians in general, and likewise that the field of history should be more alert to critical theory.
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- Edenheim, Sara, 1975-, et al.
(author)
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Avskaffa jämställdhetspolitiken!
- 2012. - 1
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In: Det heter feminism!. - Stockholm : Hallongrottan. - 9789198002027 ; , s. 22-27
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Book chapter (pop. science, debate, etc.)
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