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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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| 2. |
- Bodin, Maja, 1984-
(author)
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To Plan or Not to Plan : Gender Perspectives on Pregnancy Planning, Fertility Awareness and Preconception Health and Care
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The level of pregnancy planning is of importance to the well-being of parents and children. Unintended and/or unwanted pregnancies are often associated with less health promoting behavior during pregnancy, poorer health of the new born, and relationship dissatisfaction. Preconception care is a health service with the purpose to encourage people to become mindful about their reproductive intentions and raise fertility awareness, in order to maintain or improve reproductive health.Reproductive health is a highly gendered area, both due to biological conditions and social expectations on gender. In most cases, the focus of reproductive health and health promotion is on cis-women and their bodies. This thesis mainly focuses on persons self-identifying as men. The aim is to scrutinize the area of preconception health, investigate what pregnancy planning means to men and explore the relationship between pregnancy planning and fertility awareness.In Study I, 136 couples who attended their first antenatal visit answered questions about pregnancy planning. Most pregnancies were planned and couples had similar perceptions of the level of their planning. Study II describes pregnancy planning behavior and fertility knowledge among 796 recent fathers. Also in this study, most pregnancies were planned and 17% of the men had made at least one preconception lifestyle adjustment to improve health and fertility. Fertility knowledge varied greatly, although men with higher education demonstrated higher knowledge. Study III explores if Reproductive Life Plan-based counselling during a sexual health visit could increase men’s fertility awareness. The counselling had a moderate effect on participants’ fertility knowledge but managed to raise new thoughts about their own fertility, and was well received. Study IV follows up on the results from the first three studies, through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 25 men aged 23-49. Most participants took their fertility for granted. To cis-men in heterosexual relationships, the meaning of pregnancy planning usually meant taking the decision to try to become pregnant, and not much more. Trans-men and gay men where more invested in practical planning issues. In conclusion, this thesis shows how pregnancy planning is gendered, and that it is a more complex phenomenon than previously acknowledged.
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| 3. |
- Andén, Lovisa
(author)
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Litteratur och erfarenhet i Merleau-Pontys läsning av Proust, Valéry och Stendhal
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to explore the relation between literary expression and experience in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The principal focus is Merleau-Ponty’s investigations into literature, in two of his first courses at Collège de France, 1953- 1954: Sur le problème de la parole (On the Problem of Speech) and Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage (Research on the Literary Use of Language). While the former remains unpublished, the latter was finally published in 2013. At the time of his premature death, Merleau-Ponty left thousands of pages of working notes. They were supposed to contribute to a major philosophical work, the planned title of which was Être et monde (Being and world). Merleau-Ponty had planned to undertake an extensive examination of language in the last part of the work. However, in the absence of this text, the courses on literary language afford us the possibility of sketching the direction that this research might have taken.The examination of literary language use is, for Merleau-Ponty, made possible by an understanding of language found in Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Saussurean linguistics anticipates the structuralist reading that was later to dominate the intellectual scene. Instead of reading the linguistics of Saussure in opposition to phenomenology, he finds in the former an ally that allows him to think Husserlian phenomenology further.In the course notes, Merleau-Ponty explores the relation between sensible experience and linguistic expressions through close readings of Proust, Valéry and Stendhal. In the writing of Marcel Proust, he finds a writer that perpetually examines his experience, searching for expressions that are capable of bringing it forth. In Stendhal’s writing, Merleau-Ponty finds a literary method that makes the world appear through the “small true facts” that describe it. Finally, in Paul Valéry’s poetic writing he finds a writer superimposing words over other words, in order to create new significations. In their literary writing he finds a capacity to seize the world anew, beyond our habitual preconceptions of it, thus bringing us closer to the experience we already perceive.
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| 4. |
- Pröckl, Maria, 1964-
(author)
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Tyngd, sväng och empatisk timing : förskollärares kroppsliga kunskaper
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In what way is knowledge embodied and what role does embodied knowledge play in interpersonal professional practices? In this thesis, practical and embodied knowledge of preschool teachers is investigated as an example of a profession where relational and bodily situated knowledge is significant.The questions, from where my point of departure is taken, are for instance: How does a skilful preschool teacher act? What approach in terms of embodied knowledge is needed if one wants to give care, trust and offer a child a sense of we? Are there dimensions of embodied knowledge that are present only in situations that appear negative? This thesis belongs to the academic discipline The Theory of Practical Knowledge. Practical Knowledge in often described as experience based, bodily carried, situated and tied to our emotional life. The Theory of Practical knowledge tries to frame and explain these aspects of knowledge in the situations and contexts where they occur. The importance of embodied knowledge, as a form of practical knowledge in relation to preschool teachers professional development, is not a theme that has been scrutinized in other research. In the light of a presupposition that knowledge is bodily carried (a presupposition that is founded in experiences of dance and a phenomenological influenced theoretical base) and that practical wisdom and skill in interpersonal practices exists only in action, this thesis is built upon a concern regarding whether values embedded in these practises could be threatened as a result of the difficulty to grasp them. The forms of embodied knowledge possessed by the preschool teachers in this study appear as relational and situated in the co-embodied space in between the preschool teacher and the child, or, more correctly, between everyone in the group. In the interaction enabled by the good relationship the embodied forms of knowledge express themselves as mastery, a skill honed by care that I have chosen to describe using terms such as groove, weight, and empathetic timing.
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