| 1. |
- Perez-Ramos, María Isabel, 1984-
(författare)
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A QUEST FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SOVEREIGNTY : Chicana/o Literary Experiences of Water (Mis)Management and Environmental Degradation in the US Southwest
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The U.S. Southwest is a semi-arid region affected by numerous environmental problems. Chicana/o communities have been directly affected by such problems, especially ever since the region was annexed from Mexico by the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. From this moment onwards they lost their environmental sovereignty, mostly through their dispossession of the natural resources. This environmental humanities dissertation focuses on the ethics, politics, and practices around water (management), for water is a key natural resource and a central element of Chicana/o cultural identity. It explores the ways in which Chicana/o culture is interconnected with environmental practices and sites in subaltern literary works about the Chicana/o experience. It investigates how the hegemonic Anglo-American environmental, political, and economic practices have challenged and undermined Chicana/o culture, identity, and wellbeing, and how this has been addressed in fiction; and it questions whether establishing such a connection adds any useful insights to the larger discussion on the global socio-environmental crisis. This dissertation also analyzes the writer activist character of the subaltern narratives of the corpus, with attention to the relevance of rhetoric in subverting and constructing environmental discourses and ethics. By examining regional and border narratives, as well as fiction and non-fiction narratives about the socio-environmental struggles of other ethnic minorities in the Southwest and in other parts of the world, this dissertation puts literature about the Chicana/o experience in a regional, national, and transnational context. It moreover explores the pivotal role of literature in reclaiming environmental sovereignty, in asserting cultural identities, and in countering the environmental crisis by imagining alternative managerial practices and socio-environmental relations, as much as in challenging cultural hegemonies.
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| 2. |
- Röver, Corinna, 1987-
(författare)
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Making Reindeer : The Negotiation of an Arctic Animal in Modern Swedish Sápmi, 1920-2020
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Arctic has long been perceived as a static, timeless place of shielded wilderness. This perception extended to the reindeer as both part of the Arctic environment and of traditional Indigenous livelihoods. Physically, the reindeer of Swedish Sápmi looks largely the same today as it did a century ago - an animal ostensibly unaltered and unchanged.Nevertheless, this thesis argues that the reindeer has undergone a number of fundamental shifts of meaning in Swedish Sápmi over the past century. The dissertation asks how the reindeer's roles and functions evolved in Swedish Sápmi from ca. 1920 to 2020 and examines how, why and by whom the reindeer has been negotiated. It explores the changing understanding of the reindeer's role in society, studies emerging idea(l)s and purposes, and considers what mark they left on the animal.This study is a history of the ideas, discourses and practices that shaped the modern reindeer. It examines ways of understanding and making reindeer. At different points in time, varying combinations of actors have sought to control, shape and re-define this Arctic animal. The meaning attached to it changed as a result, and with it reindeer-related policies. Swedish state policies towards the Sámi and reindeer husbandry have especially deeply impacted the way reindeer were understood and governed. Over the course of a century, policy efforts aimed to control the reindeer's movements, health, reproduction and death, with varying success. Discourse and associated practices generated multiple versions of the reindeer. In terms of these changing versions, the thesis conceptualizes the reindeer as a changing technology and a socially constructed resource.Five empirical chapters trace how the reindeer was negotiated, especially between the Swedish state and Sámi herders. They show how the reindeer's role and purpose has been under repeated negotiation and discuss some of these roles. Restrictive border and grazing policies made the reindeer a trespasser at the turn of the twentieth century. From the 1950s onwards, a modernist improvement project envisioned it as economic resource. In the course of such rationalization efforts, the reindeer became an object of techno-scientific interest. Improvers attempted to transform reindeer into productive, reliable meat machines. These efforts faced a severe setback when the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 contaminated considerable numbers of reindeer, turning it into a toxic animal and a threatened bearer of Sámi culture. In more recent years, we find the reindeer at an intersection of consumer demand for natural foods and Sámi agency. It has become a symbol for claims to self-determination. Sámi champions of food sovereignty and land rights have started to reclaim and promote the reindeer as traditional and wholesome source of food through the Slow Food Sápmi movement.A closer look at these re-definitions reveals that the reindeer is no timeless, passive backdrop to human action. The reindeer itself has history - it is a historical animal with agency of its own, able to challenge efforts of control. Nevertheless, the different notions of the reindeer materialized into policies and ways of governing not only the reindeer but also their Indigenous herders. The (re)negotiations of what reindeer are or ought to be provide insights into the relationship between representatives of the Swedish state and of Sámi reindeer husbandry, as well as colonial legacies and persistently unequal power relations.
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| 3. |
- Allen, Irma
(författare)
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Dirty coal: Industrial populism as purification in Poland's mining heartland
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the second half of the 2010s, far-right populist parties gained increasing power and influenceacross Europe, and around the world. Core to their ethnonationalist, anti-elite agenda, and theiremotive politics, has often been a defense of fossil fuels, threatening action to address the climatecrisis and raising the spectre of fascism. Increasingly-perceived-as-‘dirty’ coal, the raw material thatmade the industrial modern world order possible and contributed most to its mountingcontradictions, has acquired a special status in contemporary far-right ideology. What is theemotional intersection between them at a time of far-reaching economic, environmental and energyinstability and change, when coal has not only been losing its material value and its symbolic link tomodernity, but is increasingly widely deemed immoral too?To date, studies of far-right populism have largely overlooked how energy and environmentalchange feature in their present rise. This reflects how these issues have been largely treated astechnical matters, and therefore relegated to the domain of scientific expertise, rather thanrecognized as inherently social, cultural and political concerns. Tending to adopt a macro-levelapproach, far-right studies have also not yet fully addressed the historically, geographically, andculturally-situated reasons for this success, particularly among the (white, male) industrial workingclass.From a bottom-up, ethnographic perspective, the role of intersectional (class-based,occupational, gendered, racialized regional and national) ecologically-positioned embodiedsubjectivities and identities and their emotional lived experience remains to be considered.This PhD thesis, set within the concerns of a transdisciplinary environmental and energy humanitiesframework, addresses this lacunae in the context of Poland; the most coal-dependent country in theEuropean Union where a pro-coal platform unexpectedly helped the far-right populist party Lawand Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) into majority government in 2015. It is primarily based on ayears’ ethnographic research conducted in 2017 with both residents and particularly coal miners andtheir families in a minescape in Upper Silesia, the nation’s, and one of Europe’s, last remainingmining heartlands. Adopting a postcolonial postsocialist perspective, and drawing on rare empiricaldata from participant observation and qualitative interviews, the thesis explores the politics ofincreasingly ‘dirty’ coal expressed in localized conflicts over air pollution, domestic heating, andthe meaning of work, dignity, respectable personhood, the economy and community, setting themwithin their historical context. The rapidly shifting material and symbolic meaning of coal withinthe context of Silesia’s long-standing troubled history is particularly studied in light of Europeanintegration, a post-industrial, neoliberal, ‘green’-cosmopolitan project that links East and West in anunequal relationship. The naming of coal and its way of life as increasingly ‘dirty’ in newlystigmatizing senses from ‘outside’, is found to be experienced by the mining community as an eliteimposedprocess of ecological dispossession. This generates a toxic intersectionally-andecologically-mediated shame in the bodies of those that particularly labour intimately with itsmaterial touch; a shame that resonates with what this thesis terms industrial populist politics and itsemotive charge as a felt common sense. In the postsocialist context of the marginalization anddevaluation of industrial working-class lives, and pervasive and normalized orientalist classismexperienced as an attack on one’s ecologically-enmeshed Silesian-Polishness, the relational longingfor a sense of a purified home, that can cleanse dirt’s discomforting and shame-inducing stigmas inoverlapping economic, social, cultural and environmental terms by refusing and reversing itsdesignation, is proposed as lying at the heart of industrial populism’s visceral draw.
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| 4. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, 1972-
(författare)
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In Rhizomia : Actors, Networks and Resilience in Urban Landscapes
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- With accelerating urbanization it is crucial to understand how urban ecosystems play a part in generating ecosystem services for urban dwellers, such as clean water, spaces for recreation, stress relief and improved air quality. An equally important question relate to who gets to enjoy these benefits, i.e. the distribution of ecosystem services, and how issues of power and equity influence the management of ecosystems. Through case studies from the urban landscape of Stockholm, this doctoral thesis engages with these perspectives through combining ecological theory with social theory, including social network analysis, actor-network theory and social movement theory. Strategies for how to improve urban ecosystem management are presented along with frameworks for how to analyze issues of power and equity in relation to natural resource management.Paper I shows that ecosystem management can be studied through analyzing the structure of social networks, i.e. the patterns of relations between agencies, stake-holders and user groups. Paper II and Paper III analyze, based on a network survey of 62 civil society organizations and in-depth interviews, a transformational process of how an urban local movement managed to protect a large urban green area from exploitation (The Stockholm National Urban Park). Paper IV discusses, based on several case studies from Stockholm, a conducive network structure for linking managers and user groups (e.g. allotment gardens, cemetery managers, and urban planners) across spatial ecological scales so as to improve urban green area management. Paper V presents a framework to analyze the social-ecological dynamics behind the generation and distribution of ecosystem services in urban landscapes.The thesis points towards the notion of "a social production of ecosystem services" and argues for deeper engagement with urban political ecology and critical geography to inform governance and collective action in relation to urban ecosystems.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Isberg, Erik, 1994-
(författare)
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Planetary Timemaking : Paleoclimatology and the Temporalities of Environmental Knowledge, 1945-1990
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis concerns the history of paleoclimatology in the postwar period. It follows the trajectory of two climate proxy records – ice cores and deep-sea cores – in the North Atlantic region, from their emergence as scientific objects in the 1940s to their incorporation into Earth System Science in the 1980s. In doing so, the thesis highlights how scientists have used these records to produce time and how this has affected the temporalities of the environment as a scientific and political concept. As anthropogenic impact on the planet arose as a political problem, the vast timescales of paleoclimatology became increasingly interwoven with climate modeling and environmental policy. Often, the records were understood as “natural archives”, providing unmediated access to past environmental conditions. This thesis shows how the times of ice- and deep-sea cores were, on the contrary, constantly re-shaped by scientific practices, institutional frameworks andcompeting temporal sensibilities in different scientific fields.With the rise of the Anthropocene concept in the last two decades, historians have begun to question the division between historical and natural times. Scientifically produced times, such as those made by ice- and deep-sea core drilling, have permeated discussions about the properties of historical time in the twenty-first century. Yet, the origins of thesetimes often remain out of view. This thesis argues that environmental historians and historians of science can contribute to these discussions by treating environmental times as objects of historical inquiry. Looking beyond planetary-scale models and following environmental times in situ, as they emerge, form and travel, can open up for more multi facettedapproaches to historical time in the proposed new geological epoch. The history of postwar paleoclimatology is therefore both a history of how scientists have produced environmental times and how planetary pasts enter the political present.
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| 7. |
- Meijling, Jesper, 1969-
(författare)
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Marknadisering : En idé och dess former inom sjukvård och järnväg, 1970-2000
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Denna avhandling undersöker hur marknadisering introducerades som idé i offentliga verksamheter i Sverige från 1970-talets början till omkring år 2000. Marknadisering definieras här som processen att göra verksamheter som inte tidigare var marknadsorganiserade eller marknadsstyrda mer marknadsliknande, och att detta framförallt handlade om offentliga verksamheter. Undersökningen tar fasta på historiskt förlopp, översättningsprocesser och konkret verksamhetsperspektiv. Den analyserar marknadisering som en translokal idé med ursprung hos ett antal engelskspråkiga författare och ekonomer under främst 1950- och 60-talen, vilken spreds – översattes – vidare och mötte konkreta, lokala kontexter i offentliga verksamheter och institutioner i Sverige genom initiala, förslagsmässiga appliceringar på initiativ av enskilda svenska aktörer. Ett centralt begrepp för idén är analogi, som innebär att man betraktade offentliga verksamheter liknelsemässigt, som marknader. Det ger i sin tur upphov till ett annat begrepp, terräng, som beskriver hur aktörer betraktade, bearbetade och bedömde verksamheters möjligheter och resurser för marknadsorganisering. Avhandlingens frågor är bland annat hur idén fångades upp av aktörerna, hur de gick tillväga, och vad de utvann ur verksamheterna/terrängerna som kunde bli marknadsfunktioner. Vidare vilka former som framträdde i deras arbete med verksamheterna och om det går att konstatera mönster i marknadiseringen. Jämförandet mellan de två terrängerna sjukvård och järnväg i undersökningen ger bland annat möjlighet att studera huruvida det var en modell som breddes ut, eller var mer beroende av individuella aktörer och terrängförutsättningar och därmed en mer oförutsägbar process, och hur den utföll. Undersökningen för samman studiernas nära, market studies-inspirerade perspektiv med den idéhistoriska kontexten. Ett generellt mönster som framträder är uppdelningar av nya komponenter ur verksamheterna, en process vars resultat skapade basen för nya ekonomiska och organisatoriska definitioner och funktioner som förde marknadiseringen vidare.
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| 8. |
- von Heland, Jacob, 1980-
(författare)
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Rowing social-ecological systems: morals, culture and resilience
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The shift from management and governance of ecosystems to relational complex adaptive social-ecological systems (SES) emphasizes a dynamic and integrated humans-in-nature perspective. Such a shift also needs to investigate how diversity and differences in cultures and morals relate to the existence of SES. The papers of this thesis relate these dimensions to SES resilience theory. Paper I analyzes cultural and landscape ecological aspects of trees and tree planting in Androy, Madagascar. Culturally, planting trees serves as a symbol of renewal, purification, agreement and boundary-making. Ecologically, planting trees contributes to the generation of ecosystem services in an otherwise fragmented landscape. Paper II tests the role of forest patches for generating pollination services to local beans that constitute an important protein staple in Androy. The results indicate a significant effect of insect pollination on bean yields and a strong spatial pattern of locating bean plots closer to forests than expected by chance, improving rural food security. Paper III addresses the adaptive capacity of the indigenous forest management in Androy with regard to religious and climatic drivers of change. Paper IV is concerned with cultural analysis of the robustness of provisioning ecosystem services in Androy and the interdependence of morality, cultural practices and generated ecosystem services. Paper V explores how social-ecological memory (SEM) can be seen both as a source of inertia and path dependence and a source of adaptive capacity for renewal and reorganization in the emerging theory about social-ecological systems. Paper VI analyses the film Avatar and discusses ethical–epistemic obligations of researchers as cross-scale knowledge brokers in emerging forms of global environmental politics. The thesis has interdependencies between the social and the ecological and shown that cultural and moral analyses bring important insights and challenges to resilience thinking.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Henningsson, Malin, 1983-
(författare)
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Organising the academic career: Organisational inconsistencies as problems and solutions
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The work of this thesis is sprung from a reflection I had in my daily work at a funder of research and education: How can the academic career be so problematic? Difficulties concerning the academic career in Sweden have been discussed for a long time with several problems discussed continually over time. Among these difficulties are the lack of a coherent career system, too many temporary employments and time-consuming recruitment procedures. In this thesis, the pluralism of ideals and systems in university organisations, as articulated in the academic career, is studied and conceptualised. The overarching research question is: How are tensions in the organisation of the academic career manifested and handled? The empirical material is presented in four papers, which explore the organisation of the academic career in Sweden. This research takes a qualitative approach, with interviews and documents as sources. By applying the perspective of institutional logics, the results of this thesis describe the academic career as located in a tangle of different ideals and systems that create tensions. Six sets of ideals and systems, institutional logics, are identified: state, academic, managerial, market, community and family. The logics are reflected in the structures and processes around the academic career and used by various actors to motivate action. The importance of academic and community logics, with the ideals of meritocracy, elitism and taking care of one’s group, is highlighted regardless of the rise in managerialism and marketisation in the last decades. A framework of institutional logics in the academic career is developed and put forward as the main theoretical contribution of the thesis, for use and further development in future studies, as a source of inspiration for how to study institutional complexity at universities, and for discussion with practitioners. The results also enhance understanding of how universities handle tensions by incorporating inconsistencies in the organisation of the academic career through inclusion of conflicting parties in decision-making, nurturing of numerous ideals, and separation of talk and action, so called organisation of hypocrisy. These organisational inconsistencies are presented as both problems (due to possible inertia for change and hard-to-predict consequences of change initiatives) and solutions (to continue generating support and resources from different actors). To further handle the tensions, actors are reconciling them through microlevel discussion and collaboration.
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