| 1. |
- Berg, Annika, 1973-
(författare)
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Den gränslösa hälsan : Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the mutual life project of Signe (1896-1988) and Axel Höjer (1890-1974), a married couple who were key actors in the construction of the Swedish welfare state. It emphasises the ways in which they went about asserting a special public health expertise in different contexts. As starting points I take the malleability of the concept folkhälsa (people’s health or population health) and the centrality of expertise in the governance of modern societies. Theoretical concepts such as gender, policy transfer, biopower and governmentality are central to the analysis. The dissertation includes three parts. The first part investigates how the Höjers agreed to coordinate their work and how they, with reference to ideas picked up in France and England at the end of World War I, attempted to reform mother and child health care in Sweden. Their strategies where rhetorical but also practical, using Hagalund outside Stockholm as their experimental ground. The second part investigates, firstly, how Axel Höjer, as General-Director of the Medical Board of Sweden (1935-52) asserted a sociomedical expertise, integrating the emerging social sciences and universalist views on the organisation of the welfare state into the realm of medicine, in order to launch ideas of a thorough reorganisation and expansion of the Swedish health care system. His focus was on preventive medicine and health care, with the complete physical, mental and social health of the whole population as an explicit goal. Secondly, it explores how Signe Höjer at the same time tried to launch ideas on health and wellbeing as a social politician and a public committee member. She also tried to define family policy as a specific policy area. However, despite her training as a nurse and a social worker, she was largely confined to asserting a particularly ”female” expertise, which made her position rather ambiguous in terms of authority. The third part investigates how the Höjers, in the 1950s and 60s, worked with international health, Axel mainly for the WHO in India and Ghana, Signe as a policy entrepreneur, primarily in the fields of childcare and family planning. My findings partly confirm theories that see development aid as an extension of domestic social policy, but they challenge the view of aid as a simple one-way process. I demonstrate how the Höjers at least tried to adapt their projects abroad to meet local circumstances, and also show how they brought lessons from the third world to a domestic public. In the latter case they did not primarily act as experts of Swedish-style social policy, but as experts on the developing countries and on development aid.
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| 2. |
- Johansson, Gun-Britt, 1956-
(författare)
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Synderskan och lagen: Barnamord i tre Norrlandslän 1830-1870
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- ABSTRACTMany studies have been conducted on infanticide and child homicide. Researchers have approached the subject with different theoretical frameworks and explored it from different dimensions, geographical areas, and time periods. As much as the questions have varied so have the answers. This study contributes to greater clarity on the causes of infanticide. Despite numerous studies on the subject, there is still no consensus its causes. My aim has been to combine different strategies for understanding the subject. I have used material both from an aggregated level and from an individual level. The main question I sought to answer was whether social causes rather than individual factors force or trigger women to kill their newborn child? Court material also provides for an in-depth understanding of our history. The social sciences have frequently drawn sketches of the social world with big lines. These lines have been necessary and useful to point at large-scale transformations of civilisation and modernisation but, in terms of understanding real life, they can provide us with a foggy and even mistaken picture. When social scientists enter the historical archives and similar sources, we often blunder in its richness and variation. Society may, in any case, have always been complicated and the every day life for each person as well.My findings show that infanticide signals low tolerance. In general, the women did not want to kill their own children. Moreover, my findings, like the results of other studies before mine, demonstrate that women who carry out infanticide represent normal women. To my knowledge, there isn’t one study on infanticide that claims the women were not normal. Women who committed infanticide did so out of fear: fear of losing their social bonds. They killed their children if the existence of the bonds was endangered or threatened. Often social bonds were related to their work situation as maids in farming households. If they couldn’t stay in the household after having the baby, many women had no where else to go. Their parents – poor, elderly or deceased – were unable to help. Sometimes the social bonds were threatened by other factors, often related to the child’s father. If he was already married or had a close relation with the woman’s family, their relationship could in fact, break her bonds to her own family and other relatives. Some women already had an illegitimate child. With a child out of wedlock, they had a difficult time getting work and housing. If they got pregnant again and the father to the new child refused to marry her or to support the child, she could in fact lack any resources for handling the situation.Finally: the findings talk about honour and infanticide. It was always shameful to get a child out of wedlock. But demographic research from North of Sweden has shown that these children had almost the same chances of survival during their first year as legitimate children. Sexuality outside marriage was not respected but much discussion around honour was more related to how the women would manage with the child. In my findings, shame seems to be related to having no support. Extramarital relations were not accepted but people probably didn’t care to much about it as far as they managed on their own. Being rejected, helpless, not able to work and not able to take care of the child that was what shame was about.Keywords: Infanticide, child homicide, illegitimacy, social bonds, shame
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| 3. |
- Lee, Jenny, 1972-
(författare)
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The market hall revisited : Cultures of consumption in urban food retail during the long twentieth century
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In today’s consumption landscape the market hall is a place of luxury and authenticity. However, the idea of the market hall has changed several times during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the first market hall was constructed in Stockholm, in 1875, the objective was to provide the consumers with safe food in a neatly organized environment that would foster civic pride and propel Stockholm into modernity. By the 1930s, the market halls in Stockholm were rundown and outmoded. These rundown retail spaces had been replaced by neighborhood stores at a convenient distance from the consumer. The market halls seemed like old dinosaurs, waiting to be swept away by the river of time. But the market halls remained, and in due course experienced a renaissance as sumptuous food temples, more genuine and inviting than the bland standardization and cold rationality of mainstream food retail.To address the long time-period, the dissertation is divided into three separate parts, with different methods and materials. The first part is a historical exposé based primarily on archival material. The second part relies more on secondary sources, but draws on contemporary documents as well. For the third part ethnographic fieldwork was the chosen method.This dissertation examines the role of the market hall in Stockholm and how the links between production, distribution and consumption of food have been organized in time and space during the past hundred and fifty years. How was the market hall recoded during this period? The relevance of this question lies in what this can tell us about urban food retail and the cultures of consumption linked to it. It also allows us to reflect upon the effects of the choices we make for the future of food production, distribution and consumption.
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| 4. |
- Rehn, Helena, 1966-
(författare)
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Framväxten av sjuksköterskan som omvårdnadsexpert : Meningsskapande om vård under 1900-talet
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertion is focused on the concept of caring and its historical development. The aim is to examine the meaning making processes involved in shaping the caring practice in the twentieth century by pointing out and analysing conceptions of caring in texts. The study is based on analyses of union publications, textbooks and texts produced by Swedish governmental committees. Theoretically and methodologically this study is inspired by Norman Fairclough, his critical discourse analysis and his views on meaning, language, change and power relations. The analysis shows that two separate constructions of meaning have dominated the twentieth century. During the first half of the twentieth century, medical science was the chief influence on caring, the idea being that caring should be supplementary to medical practice. Both nurses and nurse's assistants have contributed to this concept of meaning. In the sixties, however, something happened. Old and predominant views on caring are being rejected and questioned by the nurses. The dominant medical discourse is being problemized. Ideas from discourses formally marginalized are being employed by nurses and the governmental committees. The importance of satisfying needs, not just medical ones, and a holistic view on caring are now being stressed. The patient, not the doctor, is thereby focused in the caring practice. The meaning of caring changes from a doing with the body inte a special attitude to the patient. "Omvårdnad" (nursing) is more and more the term around which meaning is evolving.
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