Between Care and Punishment : Fantasies of Change and Progress in Ethnographies of Compulsory Care

• My research is focused on giving new perspectives on staff culture in secure units in Sweden. The aim of this article is to analyse how staff members understand change and progress in treatment work. How does staff imagine how change comes about in treatment work with problematic teenagers? How is change conceptualized and understood by the people working in institutions for compulsory care? I shall elaborate on what I refer to as logics in my material, and I shall also discuss the role of fantasy in institutional work. The focus on staff is based on my interest in power relations, and on an identified research gap in this field. Most of the previous research on secure units focuses on the young people; on various aspects of their lives such as their life-stories (see Berglund 1998), and on the methods and techniques that work in helping them to change their way of life (see Andreassen 2003). Little attention has been directed towards the staff, even though they are a large and important part of the care given in the institutions. In what follows I will map out my theoretical framework, discuss the methods used and give a brief contextualizing background to my empirical field of institutional care in Sweden. Thereafter I will move on to the analysis of the empirical material, and finally to a concluding discussion.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Etnologi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Ethnology (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)