This literature review summarizes findings from 63 articles published between 2001 and 2020 that study discretion of frontline workers at migration control. The results demonstrate that discretionary practices in various migration control situations (e.g., border zones, migration agencies, courts, public welfare services, and detention centers) are widespread but share common patterns. Frontline workers’ racialized prejudices and perceptions of migrant deservingness were the most dominant patterns found in the data, although there were some disagreements about which were most influential. Discretion of frontline workers was described as foremost detrimental to migrants, as itamplified the migrants’ vulnerable situations, even if it occasionally could increase individual migrants’ room for agency and strategic maneuvering. Contrary to the assumption underpinning the control gap-thesis in immigration policy literature that governments’ capacity to control migration is hampered by the significant discretion at the frontlines, many studies in our sample describe how governments shape the discretionary practices of frontline workers through informal, subtle, and opaque governing strategies. These informal governing strategies enable central governments to deflect responsibility for discriminatory and inhumane policy outcomes. 

This article aims to expand both the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies and anthropological interests in the field of transnational think tanks, advocacy and policy advice. Drawing on ethnographic data from three such organisations, itinvestigates secrecy practices within transnational think tanks, focusing on how everyday practices undertaken in secrecy amount to discreet diplomatic efforts. In a variety of ways, secrecy is utilised as a resource in foreign relations and diplomacy, thereby aiming to leverage status and influence. Although outwardly striving for transparency, secrecy practices are thus vital in the striving of transnational think tanks to establish themselves as actors of consequence in foreign relations and diplomatic circles. It is argued that practices of secrecy are part and parcel of the power games played, in which all participants learn and master what to discuss and what not to display. These practices, however, also imply a challenge in terms of accountability and transparency.  

This anthropological essay investigates the meaning for a recovering drug addictto be free from drugs. The paper includes three semi-structural interviews withrecovering addicts as well as material from one podcast, to investigate theconcept of being free from drugs from recovering addicts perspectives. To helpinvestigate the subject further, research regarding dominating Swedish politicalnorms is being presented in this paper. The essay consists of a theory- andliterature overview regarding addiction and recovery to help understand whatbeing clean from drugs means for a recovering addict. This essay ultimatelyargues that being free from drugs can mean being functional, living withouthighs and spirituality and meaning.

A constant increase in droughts in Eastern Africa has impacted the region's agricultural sector. Small-scale farmers produce most of Kenya’s agricultural output and are particularly vulnerable to drought. They also play a crucial role in combating such environmental shocks. This thesis aimed to explore how drought affects small-scale farmers in Kenya and what coping mechanisms they use. It further studied what was needed for small-scale farmers to implement adapting and mitigating strategies. These objectives were examined through the cases of Narok County and Nakuru County. An ethnographic field study was conducted to collect data through the qualitative methods of observations and semi-structured interviews. Finally, the findings were analyzed using a Political Ecological framework to explore drought’s social, economic, and political implications and the importance of indigenous knowledge systems and local perspectives. 

The findings showed that drought affects small-scale farmers through lower yields, fewer income opportunities, financial strains, food insecurity, and impaired well-being. The coping mechanisms small-scale farmers use are mainly indigenous agricultural conservation practices. They also use more technical equipment and non-agricultural solutions to cope. Financial, material, and information resources combined with local participation to create enabling policies and favorable environments are needed to implement adapting and mitigating strategies. Accountable networks are also needed, focusing on government support and the assistance of international actors. However, these networks showed to be influenced by economic and political interests relating to mainstream ideas of development. 

I den här studien undersöks vilken social och praktisk funktion en ideell verksamhet fyller för personer i social utsatthet. Syftet med studien är att ge en holistisk bild av vad verksamheten betyder för besökarna, och hur den platsen formas av de som är där. Studien ger dessutom en förståelse för vilken roll delar av det civila samhället fyller för både individer, och för samhället i stort. Empirin som ligger till grund för studien baseras på observationer och samtal som gjorts under ett två månader långt fältarbete på en ideell verksamhet i Stockholm. Empirin analyseras med teorier om socialt kapital, sociala nätverk, fiktiv familj, tid, plats och agens. Studien visar att det är sociala behov som motiverar människor i social utsatthet att besöka verksamheten, och verksamheten som undersöks beskrivs som en social plats med specifika normer och regler som besökarna tillsammans upprätthåller. Dessutom ges flera exempel på hur verksamheten kan öka besökarnas sociala nätverk och sociala kapital. Den ideella verksamheten jämförs med en fiktiv familj, eftersom relationerna som formas där liknar biologiska familjerelationer i fler avseenden. Därtill visar studien att personalen på verksamheten går utanför sina officiella arbetsuppgifter och ger en dold hjälp, vilket innebär social och praktisk hjälp som inte är synlig för resten av samhället. 

This thesis examines feminist commodity networks through an ethnographic case study of QVWC SHOP in Melbourne, Australia. The work is built through an emic perspective on the understanding of selling, producing, and buying through the QVWC SHOP. The emic perspective is also connected to the larger systems, such as social networks and community building. QVWC SHOP is a store focusing on selling locally made items by women, including cis, trans and nonbinary. QVWC SHOP is part of the Queen Victoria Women’s centre in Melbourne, which is a non-profit building that rents space for different organisations for women’s needs. The centre is also an important cultural space, organizing events and exhibitions around the year. In 2020, the Women’s centre opened the QVWC SHOP, that they promote as a feminist shop selling goods made by women, for women. The focus in this thesis is on understanding how the shop builds a community for the women involved with the store, reflect over what feminist commodities are and what it means to be a producer, employee, or consumer at the QVWC SHOP. The reflections are built through data from participant observation and semi-structured interviews with interlocutors from the field, as well as relevant theoretical works. Furthermore, themes of care, sustainability, attachment, and solidarity are all important in the work. Overall, this thesis focuses on the processes of creating social networks and community building in the context of a feminist shop.

Purpose - This paper explores practices of foresight within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) program Futures Literacy, as a form of transnational governmentality–founded on the interests of “using the future” by “emancipating” the minds of humanity.

Design/methodology/approach - The paper draws on ethnographic material gathered over five years within the industry of futures consultancy, including UNESCO and its network of self-recognized futurists. The material consists of written sources, participant observation in on-site and digital events and workshops, and interviews.

Findings - Building on Foucault's (1991) concept of governmentality, which refers to the governing of governing and how subjects politically come into being, this paper critically examines the UNESCO Futures Literacy program by answering questions on ontology, deontology, technology and utopia. It shows how the underlying rationale of the Futures Literacy program departs from an ontological premise of anticipation as a fundamental capacity of biological life, constituting an ethical substance that can be worked on and self-controlled. This rationale speaks to the mandate of UNESCO, to foster peace in our minds, but also to the governing of governing at the individual level.

Originality/value - In the intersection between the growing literature on anticipation and research concerning governmentality the paper adds ethnographically based knowledge to the field of transnational governance. Earlier ethnographic studies of UNESCO have mostly focused upon its role for cultural heritage, or more broadly neoliberal forms of governing.

This thesis examines the intricate relationship between mangroves and humans in Shyamnagar, Bangladesh. Mangroves in Shyamnagar are found both in the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest on earth, and in adaptation projects called nature based solutions (NbS), framed by the resilience narrative. The first part offers an introduction to these discourses, including the role of NGOs and governmental institutions, and critically analyzes the ways in which capitalist and modernist worldviews have influenced the establishment of new interaction zones between humans and mangroves through NbS projects, highlighting the omission of power dynamics and histories of dispossession. The second part delves into the nuanced relationships with the mangrove that transcend dominant global and organizational discourses. By emphasizing the agency of the mangrove as an active participant and co-creator of society in Shyamnagar, the boundaries between humans and nature, and communities and non-humans, are blurred. This challenges the notion of human exceptionalism and underscores the interconnectedness of all beings in shaping local landscapes, dynamics, and identities. The final part explores the relationships of care between humans and mangroves, recognizing the significance of care and affect in shaping human subjectivities and relationships with the biophysical environment. This thesis thereby emphasizes the importance of maintaining multispecies care even within practices that introduce anthropocentric, capitalistic, and market-oriented worldviews. By critically examining these dimensions, this thesis offers insights into the complex interactions between mangroves and humans in Shyamnagar, ultimately contributing to a broader understanding of the interplay between nature, society, and resilience. 

The Lipa Temporary Reception Centre is a transit camp, located in the North-West part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for only single men who cross the Balkan Route to enter the European Union territory through the Croatian border.

This thesis aims to describe the life inside the camp, combining an analysis of Lipa architecture with the experiences of the people who transited through there. A focus on space and relationships will then drive this thesis, reflecting on how the transit camp features and stylistic decisions affected people's experiences: discussing how places and individuals mutually influenced each other in such a context. More specifically, it will highlight the broad political implications that led to the opening of migrant reception centres like Lipa and discuss their hypothetical temporary nature, studying the roles played by European Union Institutions and non-governmental organizations within the field.

This research is the outcome of ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside the Lipa Temporary Reception Centre from November 8th until December 19th and from the investigation of the existing literature regarding the design of camps and the Balkan Route. 

This text explores locally recruited staff within a growing category of organisations in the international aid industry: Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). DFIs are banks that offer risk capital to development projects in the global South, increasingly using tax-funded aid money. Based on interviews with 13 DFI investment managers, I show how Kenyan DFI staff challenge three of the signature attributes commonly assigned to local development professionals: their 'local' expertise does not contrast with or preclude international expertise, but rather overlaps with it; their formal authority and career ladders are not restricted to technical or support positions - many field offices are headed by local employees; and they rarely face job insecurity given their competitive qualifications and permanent employment contracts. Meanwhile, decisions on investments are rarely taken by these field office staff but by their colleagues at headquarters, and unlike the latter, even those local recruits who head their field offices usually lack a secure place in the global organisation of their DFIs. This suggests that structural inequalities between donor and recipient country staff - integral to the development industry - have not disappeared in DFIs but rather relocated: from within the walls of field offices to the relationship between these offices and headquarters.

Modern hunting is an ambivalent practice, torn between leisure and labor. Nowhere are these conflicting dimensions better manifested than for wild boar—a simultaneous game and pest species in many countries. Here, we consider the sociological, political and cultural phenomenon of wild boar hunting from a change perspective, starting at its historical roots to future implications concerning the changing demographics, drivers, needs and practices of a modernizing hunting community. Using the case context of France, we present an approach to deconstructing each component of wild boar hunting firstly, and subsequently the external forces that change the nature of hunting. The objective of this manuscript is to discuss of the wild boar optimal harvesting to be applied in changing social and ecological environment. Findings show that the challenges facing wild boar management will likely intensify in the future, especially under the spotlight of a controversial public debate.

This thesis dives into the future imaginaries of blockchain professionals in Hanoi and Saigon. Looking at sites of futures enactment, and constant negotiations around an emerging technology, economy, and start-up ecology. The blockchain industry has risen to prominence in the socio-economic and technological imaginary of geeks, financial speculators, and states around the globe. In this thesis, I investigate a hitherto underexplored context of technological imagination. Based on physical and digital ethnographic fieldwork among blockchain professionals in Hanoi and Saigon and through an amalgamated theoretical lens with nodes in the anthropology of future imaginaries, emerging technologies, digital materiality, and anthropological theories of value, I set out to map and critically engage with the modes by which professionals in and around the Vietnamese blockchain industry imagine the future. These future imaginaries appear not only in speculative, predictive, and hopeful proclamation but too in present enactment; thus, doings in real time become crucial in this investigation. Technologies of imagination often deviate in form and teleology, so consequently, processual negotiations are continually unfolding. Convoluted alliances within actors are often placed at odds, or in line, with broader imaginaries predicated on different levels of social scale. These spaces between imagined future and enacted reality, along with how these are negotiated amongst, ultimately provide complex embedded contexts through which socio-technical assemblages, conceptualizations of value, and emerging phenomena can better be known in ways beyond techno-solutionist or -determinist narratives and critiques of multiple futures.

As living beings, seaweeds exist at the periphery of people’s awareness, and not much is known about what they mean to people, and the relationships we can have with them. They are useful, versatile commodities, and multitask as foodstuffs for people and other beings, as sources of biofuel and medicinal compounds, and the list goes on... but, what else?

This work seeks to shed light on the kinds of relations that people can have with seaweeds when relationships of use are purposefully bracketed out, in order to understand their social and symbolic worlds. To this end, during the months of November through January, the author discussed the perceptions of seaweeds with the neighbours of the area of Loch Hourn, a sea-loch (fjord) in the western seaboard of the Scottish Highlands, and some other nearby townships. The present study interlaces participant observation nuanced by the winter and the weather, and interviews, to explore how, through relations of biosociality, companionship, awareness and interanimation of the environment, alternative configurations of knowing, Gaelic tradition, symbolism, and hope, seaweeds embody different aspects of the meaning of‘sanctuary’.

The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of “shock mobility” as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emergency flights from epicentres, mass repatriations, lockdowns, quarantines. Patterns of shock mobility and immobility are not new categories of movement, but rather are significant alterations to the timing, duration, intensity, and relations among existing movements. Many of these alterations have been induced by governments’ reactions to the pandemic in both migrant-sending and receiving contexts, which can be especially consequential for migrants in and from the Global South. Our interventions explore these processes by highlighting experiences of Afghans and Kurds along Iran’s borders, Western Africans in Europe, Filipino workers, irregular Bangladeshis in Qatar, Central Americans travelling northwards via Mexico, and rural-urban migrants in India. In total, we argue that tracing shocks’ dynamics in a comparative manner provides an analytical means for assessing the long-term implications of the pandemic, building theories about how and why any particular post-crisis world emerges as it does, and paving the way for future empirical work. 

In this article, we study polarization within civil society. While earlier research on civil society has shown that civil society organizations can be divisive, research on polarization has only paid scant attention to the role of civil society. We bring these two aspects of the literature together to develop a framework for analyzing social capital in a polarized context. The framework helps identify practices that organizations may engage in when shaping social capital and working with others: facilitating the flow of information; providing credentials for actors; influencing agents; and reinforcing identity and recognition. Importantly, while originally developed for a fundamentally positive analysis of the mechanics of social capital, this framework includes inverted practices. In our analysis, we observe a bifurcation of actions depending on what role they play in the polarization dynamic – integrating relations within the poles or separating relations between the poles. In this sense, social capital contributes to intensified polarization. Empirically, the article is based on a dataset of 30 interviews with 24 policy-oriented civil society organizations (CSOs), here termed think tanks, in Poland. 

1. The public may sometimes resist orders to cull wildlife, even when these pose a biosecurity threat. Managers and researchers desire to know why this is so.
2. Research overwhelmingly focuses on the role of the species in conditioning resistance but our approach also shows the circumstances, settings, people responsible and methods used that undermine the legitimacy of the cull.
3. We bring these together and use a social licence to operate (SLO) framework to demonstrate how support for wildlife culling in the context of biosecurity may be revoked. In the absence of SLO, resistance to wildlife culling can range from personal unease at seeing a cherished species or a neighbourhood fox being culled, to openly confronting the municipal hunter.
4. By interviewing (n = 32) and following (n = 4) municipal hunter in Swedish cities who cull wildlife individuals or populations deemed to pose a threat to public health, safety or other societal interests, we uncover parameters by which culling wildlife are deemed to be problematic: who performs the culling, when the culling is done, how it is done and where it is done. This leads us to the concept of necroaesthetics: taboo ways of taking animal lives. In a unique perspective, we apprehend two forms of resistance: one that hunters attribute to the public and that of hunters' own unease at performing certain culling interventions. While the public and municipal hunters disagree, they also have similar criteria for opposing culls.
5. We conclude by considering the future of the SLO of culling wildlife for biosecurity, including the subjective nature of its Revocation. This goes toward identifying parameters that make culls likely to produce controversy, hence granting some predictive value for managers in their planning.

This thesis explores Zanzibari fishing practices and the fishermen’s relation to the ocean, within the context of the global political economy. The study focuses on catching small pelagic fish, locally known as dagaa, which has become vital for food security in Zanzibar. By combining anthropological theories of phenomenology and political economy, the thesis identifies capitalism and the need for cash as constituting a metabolic rift that alienates fishermen from the ocean, where the ocean is seen as more of an industrial landscape to earn a wage rather than a landscape to dwell with. The thesis further expands the analysis to discuss overexploitation in relation to the global economy with a worldview of unlimited goods.

EU formas av sina kriser och utgör summan av de lösningar man funnit för kriserna. Så skrev en av EU:s pionjärer, fransmannen Jean Monnet, i sina memoarer. Historien har givit honom rätt. Den ekonomiska krisen i spåren av coronapandemin är den senaste i raden av kriser som historiskt har avlöst varandra. Hur den europeiska integrationen fördjupas i framtiden återstår att se, men vad som är uppenbart är att EU:s återhämtningsfond Next Generation EU markerar ett skifte i EU:s ekonomiska styrning. Men hur kan det gå till när den europeiska ekonomiska integrationen fördjupas?  Genom en utfallsförklarande processpårning söker studien svar på hur nyinstitutionella teorier kan förklara varför Sverige röstade för Next Generation EU i juli 2020, trots tidigare motstånd mot avgörande delar av stödpaketet. Aspekter av förhandlingarna har tidigare undersökts, men forskning saknas kring Sveriges agerande som medlemsland, och inom ramen för den frugala fyran bestående av Österrike, Nederländerna, Sverige och Danmark. Studien prövar historisk institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism och sociologisk institutionalism för sig. Resultatet visar Sveriges spårberoende och att coronapandemin som ett potentiellt kritiskt moment påkallade förändring. Sverige agerande genom preferensmaximering för att tillgodose sina behov, men lämplighetslogiken påverkade vissa avgörande preferensförändringar. De nyinstitutionella teorierna förklarade förtjänstfullt olika aspekter av utfallet, men ingen enskild teori kunde ensamt förklara utfallet. Därför kombinerades teorierna och de luckor som uppstått kunde täppas till.

Mellan 1881 och 1914 beräknas mellan 3 000 och 5 000 svenskar ha migrerat tillBrasilien. Trots att det inte handlade om någon massutvandring i jämförelse medutvandringen till Nordamerika fick denna migration stor uppmärksamhet i densamtida svenska pressen. Brasilien framstod som ett exotiskt resmål men emigrationendit hamnade också i en relativt livlig debatt som handlade om det överhuvudtagetvar lämpligt för svenskar att bosätta sig i Brasilien. Denna studie byggerfrämst på publicerade brev och dagboksanteckningar från svenskar som emigrerattill Brasilien och hur de i dessa texter framställt sina migrationsprojekt i det nyalandet.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among the Lulesámi, a subgroup of the indigenous Sámi of northern Fennoscandia, this article explores the relationship between indigenous identity and dress. The gáppte, traditional dress, is a central visual marker of the Sámi, yet on a personal and everyday basis this symbolism enters into dialogue, and sometimes conflict, with people’s life experiences, emotions, interests and expectations. Understandings and experiences of the gáppte are placed within a context in which the Sámi community at times is experienced as fragmented and where a history of colonialism and discrimination has left lasting imprints. As shown in the article, narrations of dress unfold how relationships that for long have been marked by oppression and discrimination raise specific forms of awareness as well as questions around what constitutes the self, and how such self can or should be expressed. Through ten different perspectives of the gáppte, the article reveals how different ways of being Sámi become negotiated and materialized through dress. 

Money can be understood as a disembedding mechanism, detaching social relations from a spatiotemporal context. However, different infrastructural instantiations of money make visible–and invisible–different qualities of money. Through a two-month ethnographic study of El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as a complimentary legal tender, I show how Bitcoin in El Salvador functions as a technology of the imagination that brings future-making and deterritorialization into the forefront of money infrastructure(s). 

The thesis is divided into three main parts. First, I briefly introduce how people leverage Bitcoin as a tool for shaping subjective attitudes towards time, and consequently–to inspire hope. 

Then, I show how foreigners travelling to El Salvador to use Bitcoin are not doing this out of economic considerations. Rather, this transnational group of Bitcoiners can be characterised as a recursive public that utilises Bitcoin to escape the formation of the nation-state and form a deterritorialized community around shared speculative visions of the future. Bitcoin also allows them to make general infrastructural features of money visible and to contest these. The prime example being money’s disciplinary effects on subjective attitudes towards time.

In the last part, I show how deterritorialization and speculative futures also come to the forefront of Salvadoran imaginaries of Bitcoin. We can understand attitudes of fear and attitudes of hope as responses to this imaginary. The thesis concludes by arguing that Bitcoin’s materiality affords imaginaries of disembedded social landscapes, thus rendering visible preexisting infrastructural features of money. However, in the specific context of El Salvador Bitcoin also works as a tool for re-embedding, but only for the Bitcoiners.

Bipolar disorder is a condition rarely approached in anthropological research, and even less so through the eyes of people living with the disorder. Therefore, to focus on understanding the experience of the state in-between episodes, here referred to as a “white space”, is rare and in need of further examination. The aim of this study was to explore the various experiences of a “white space”, how it is constructed, disrupted, and maintained. The thesis is also an attempt to look at what factors affect these experiences using the anthropology of becoming, and concepts of power and agency. With the interviews of eleven individuals that have experienced different lengths of “white spaces”, a representative of a non-profit organization, a clinical psychologist, and minor participant observation, the author explores the complex views, interpretations, and experiences of a life within a “white space”. Apart from the sub-field of medical anthropology, the thematic framework and concepts involve the anthropology of becoming, agency, and power to explain and discuss the “white space” experience. The analysis shows that a “white space” has many different forms and that agency and power have a great impact on the experience. What the author also discusses in the analysis is the dynamic between what they define as knowledge-production and knowledge-sharing, alongside agency and power in relation to these “white space” experiences. The author emphasizes the importance in using these concepts to further understand and affect the experiences of “white spaces” positively. The conclusion summarizes the findings and emphasizes the need to explore this form of research further.

This master’s thesis will be discussing how nuanced experiences affects the crafting of identity among transnational and/or transracial adult adoptees raised in Sweden from an anthropological perspective.The purpose of this thesis is to show that adoptees craft their identity in numerous and complex ways, one as unique as the other. The nuanced experiences are important to underscore since the adoptee demographic is vast and it consists of multiple individuals with unique lives, and if these distinctiveness are ignored, we run the risk of depicting a flawed picture of the adoptee experience. In an attempt to avoid doing so, this thesis will use an intersection of different theoretical frameworks from previous literatureon adoption and identity, which are belonging, body, and kinning, with additional theoretical concepts on materiality to complement. This paper follows eight adoptees, who share their individual narratives that revolves around the crafting of their Swedish, Adoption, and Ethnic identity. I will bring their experiences to life by putting them in relation to each other to showcase their uniqueness. Keywords: Adoption, Belonging, Body, Kinship. 

This essay discusses the lived experiences and opinions of people living or working in so-called “vulnerable areas” in Sweden, predominantly in relation to issues of immigration and organized crime. Theoretically, the study uses Pierre Bourdieu’s framework surrounding capital and habitus and Norbert Elias concept of “the outsiders and the established”, while also drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, Edward Said and more. This discourse analysis is based on empirical findings and interviews from fieldwork made in vulnerable areas in and around the Stockholm region, and aims to problematize the general discourse surrounding immigrants and their place in Swedish society by contrasting the views of the local population to the general narrative surrounding the areas. Generally, in Swedish media and amongst political representatives, vulnerable areas are often portrayed as dangerous areas inhabited primarily by immigrants, that culturally differs from the rest of Sweden and thus is seen to exist outside of general Swedish society. This essay argues the point of the studies respondents, which is that while it is to an extent understandable that these areas are associated with gang violence and disarray, it is highly stigmatizing and further drives a dichotomization between swedes and “non-swedes”. It also overlooks decades of exposure to segregation and socioeconomic disadvantages that migrant populations in Sweden have been subjected to, that has led to poverty and a subsequent rise in crime, as well as the emergence of parallel societies within Sweden.

Det har gått några år sedan en ny riksväg anlades ute på den svenska landsbygden. Det kom att påverka invånarna i ett samhälle där riksvägen tidigare passerade. Den här uppsatsen handlar om deras upplevelser av den nya vägen. Syftet med studien är att undersöka vad som sker med ett samhälle ute på den svenska landsbygden som nås av en modern infrastruktur. I uppsatsen diskuteras hur ett samhälle som präglas av det förflutna påverkas av en modern infrastruktursatsning, ortsbornas längtan efter en levande landsbygd och på vilket sätt vägen exkluderar ortsborna, vilket i sig blir en fråga om medborgarskap då det handlar om huruvida ortsborna har rätt till att nyttja vägen lika mycket som andra människor i landet. Empirin som presenteras i uppsatsen består av material från intervjuer, samtal och deltagande observation. Materialet har analyserats med hjälp av antropologiska begrepp/teorier om nostalgi och planering/konstruktion av vägar. Trots att samhället i fråga värnar om sitt förflutna hoppas ortsborna på att vägen kan leda till positiva förändringar i samhället, även om de är oroliga för att samhällets verksamheter och arbeten kan försvinna och därmed en del av samhällets förflutna.

Digital surveillance technologies enable a range of publics to observe the private lives of wild animals. Publics can now encounter wildlife from their smartphones, home computers, and other digital devices. These technologies generate public-wildlife relations that produce digital intimacy, but also summon wildlife into relations of care, commodification, and control. Via three case studies, this paper examines the biopolitical implications of such technologically mediated human-animal relations, which are becoming increasingly common and complex in the Digital Anthropocene. Each of our case studies involves a different biopolitical rationale deployed by a scientific-managerial regime: (1) clampdown (wild boar); (2) care (golden eagle); and (3) control (moose). Each of these modalities of biopower, however, is entangled with the other, inaugurating complex relations between publics, scientists, and wildlife. We show how digital technologies can predetermine certain representations of wildlife by encouraging particular gazes, which can have negative repercussions for public-wildlife relations in both digital and offline spaces. However, there remains work to be done to understand the positive public-wildlife relations inaugurated by digital mediation. Here, departing from much extant literature on digital human-animal relations, we highlight some of these positive potentials, notably: voice, immediacy, and agency.

A core tenet of social work is that clients should be helped to work on themselves so they can improve their lives and their abilities to a point where they are no longer reliant on social services for support. To make this possible, social workers have different models at their disposal. While the clients are ostensibly governed by these techniques, models of social work also shape the subjectivities of the social workers applying them. In this chapter, our focus is on the effect of these models on social workers. Our ethnographic approach allows for a more nuanced exploration of how a technology of governmentality is received by those subjected to it, in this case, the social workers. The study highlights that the effects of the same model on practices and perceptions in the same social context differ between individuals, and allows a nuanced understanding of the effects of governmentality in practice.

Arrangements for collaboration in knowledge production across academia, government, non-governmental organisations, and corporations have several names, such as citizen-science, community-based participatory research, engaged research and hybrid forums. The multiplicity of schemes does not lie only in the high number of names for various versions of collaborative knowledge production. Different scholars also use concepts in multiple ways, depending on their individual choices, mother disciplines, and the problem area in which collaboration occurs. At the same time, there is a lack of analytical tools that address the full range of collaborative research schemes and provide a systematic set of questions to learn about the schemes, challenges, and opportunities. Based on our review of academic journal articles highlighting collaborative research schemes, this paper aims to analyse three parameters which it is fair to say that virtually all arrangements of collaborative knowledge production ought to consider when making decisions, parameters that are often partially missed or misunderstood: (A) epistemic-procedural, (B) exclusive-inclusive and (C) aggregative-integrative. By examining the three parameters, their political theory origins, and how they connect to and challenge existing schemes of knowledge collaboration, we provide analytical tools that could facilitate processes of developing and scrutinising arrangements of collaborative research. 

The territory of the Republic of Croatia has historically been a place of forced and economic migration, mainly consisting of population movements between former Yugoslav states and other neighbouring European countries. Since the 2000s, these borderlands have become sites of continuous transit migration from the Middle East and Africa. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zagreb over several periods between 2016 and 2020, this thesis seeks to understand how non-European migration and places of transit in the Balkans interrelate and transform each other. Thus, the study explores how different migrants’ trajectories meet, and how they interact with the spaces and people in Zagreb as the country prepares to enter the Schengen area of free movement, and the city is absorbed into the European border regime. The focus on ‘migrant’ and ‘non-migrant’ relations in a transit area presents a particular viewpoint on the mediated dynamics of large-scale migration into Europe. The thesis argues for a study of migration and emplacement as entangled with borders, the histories of transit localities, relations within them, affects in everyday encounters, and structures of precarity. As a contribution to the anthropology of transit migration, three interrelated concepts are formulated. First, ‘precarious emplacement’ captures the complexities of moving and staying on the European periphery by taking these (im)mobilities to be embedded in local spaces, relations and histories. Second, by highlighting the relationality of emplacement, the concept of ‘wavering reception’ is developed to depict the discourses, practices and orientations of local residents. These fluctuate between hospitality and hostility, and therefore form a complex affective landscape in the urban spaces where migration is prevalent. Third, the thesis develops the concept of ‘the Gap’ as an indeterminate and ductile space between individuals and groups. It is used as an analytic for exploring the qualitative shifts in position, perceptions and feelings that produce these vacillating relations of proximity and distance which are central to emplacement. This conceptual framework illuminates the changing dynamics of transit migration in Croatia, as well as the various processes and transformations which emerge as (im)mobilities interact with transit areas.

Since the 1950s, the city of Detroit has declined in terms of demography and economic prosperity.  Once among the wealthiest and largest cities of America, Detroit now continually ranks as one of nations poorest, Blackest and most abandoned urban areas. 

This dissertation studies urban change by focusing on the emergent reversal of the city’s long-term decline, exploring the period of time when both whites and wealth were returning to the city. As this moment of return is closely aligned to local notions of “comeback” and that the city was “coming back”, the thesis examines the reflections and contestations of the city’s contemporary comeback and the relations of power that frame this process. 

The first part of the thesis examines how the city has changed in the past, and the ways in which this past has furnished particular understandings of the present. Racial and class struggles have defined the city’s trajectory and these struggles have shaped a cosmology of division and separation, informing everyday life and mundane relations, while being mirrored and expressed through the material city. In the second part, the thesis concentrates on the temporal, spatial and demographic dimensions of comeback and the emergence of a “New Detroit”; a city that is whiter and wealthier than before. By examining the subjects said to be returning, and how both the city’s spaces and futures are molded around them, the study inquiries into how comeback and a New Detroit is made to emerge. The third part of the thesis explores how Detroiters come to labor collectively, through ritualized events, with a city that is changing. It is in ritualized events that Detroiters come to experience diversity and community, integrating what is otherwise divided, while articulating both morality and legitimacy in relation the city’s comeback. 

This essay takes a starting point in the well-known tension between the media logic and the scientific logic and the challenges when communicating science in a mediatized society. Building on the experience of engaging in research comics, both as a method for communicating science and a creative example of a meeting between science and art, we introduce a framework — a pedagogical tool — for how science communication can be understood through the two competing logics. We contribute to literature about the balancing act of being a ‘legitimate expert’ and a ‘visible scientist’, and suggest that the meeting between science and art can be understood as a lens for how to communicate science that goes beyond the deficit model.

What happens to wild animals that are at the wrong place at the wrong time? Whom do you call when a moose wanders into someone’s garden, a city swan shows increasing aggression to passers-by, and a family of feral rabbits have taken up residence in a children’s daycare center? The project “License to Cull: Rural and urban geographies of wild animal culling” investigates the vernacular experiences of municipal hunters, pest controllers and professional cullers at estates whose job it is to dispatch of unwanted wildlife species, populations and individuals. The talk, synthesizing the project findings, presents the following themes: 1) Cull: wildlife whose categorical or situational predicaments render them ‘killable’; 2) Communicate: wildlife with whom one attempts non-lethal management, including using cues, repellents, and deterrents in the landscape to communicate to them to ‘stay in their lane’; 3) Animal labour, to which we include the increasingly inventive ways in which animals as used against other animals in ‘Judas’ capacities, as biosensors of invasive species, as predators of unwanted wildlife and as protectors warding off dangerous wildlife, and finally 4) Wildlife rescue, a tendency for out-of-place, injured, abandoned or problematic wildlife to be rescued and rehabilitated. The talk concludes by engaging in discussions about the ethics of removing these animals seen from the perspective of cullers and wildlife rescuers. Within this, I draw attention to the current societal values around for example biosecurity and aesthetics that motivate the removal of certain wildlife in the first place. My talk is intended to stimulate further discussion on urban wildlife management, pest control, the trend to broadcast in social media happy wildlife sanctuary stories, and animal labor.

L’article retrace l'histoire du premier système d’aide sociale étudiante de l'État-providence social-démocrate suédois, un système sélectif d’aides, réservé aux étudiants issus des classes populaires. Moins connu, ce système sélectif introduit en 1939, a précédé le système actuel du prêt étudiant, établi en 1965 et conçu pour toucher les étudiants de toutes les classes sociales. Cette étude présente les raisons qui ont présidé à la mise en place du système sélectif, la manière dont il a atteint l'objectif d'élargissement du recrutement social des étudiants et les arguments mis en avant pour justifier son démantèlement. Si l'effet égalisateur du système sélectif était significatif, les prêts étudiants semblaient néanmoins plus compatibles avec l'idée émergente, importée de l'école de Chicago, que l'éducation pouvait être considérée comme un investissement dans le capital humain, générateur de revenus futurs (et donc finançable par un prêt) plutôt que comme un droit. Le cadre théorique de l’institutionnalisme historique permet d’analyser le passage entre deux modèles diamétralement opposés, au sein du même régime social-démocrate.

This paper explores the river landscapes and concomitant values resulting from tensions between floodmanagement and visions of a River City. The aim is to contribute to an understanding of the management of urbanwaters as valuation practices. We regard valuation practices as co-constitutive of current and future riverlandscapes. Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, is located next to the sea, and the Göta River, Sweden’slargest water system, runs through it. Our empirical focus is on how this city approaches increasing risks of flooding.We explore three approaches that have been formulated in relation to flood management: defend, retreat andattack. We ask how these approaches are applied in the management of Göta River flooding and in the city’s visionof a future Gothenburg that embraces the river as a genuinely positive aspect of urban life. We present the case asa journey that takes us upstream from the river’s sea inlet port and through Gothenburg. During our kilometre bykilometre journey, the river’s appearance shifts. The varied river landscape mirrors the diversity in how its watersare valuated, both historically and in present times. The perception of urban waters is shaped by practices ofvaluation. These valuations are generative. They connect the value of water to other entities, actors, plans, activitiesand buildings, and they are thus key to the river landscapes that will eventually be realised. By way of conclusion,we identify a number of governance challenges that are particularly relevant to urban rivers.

This chapter describes the design and the contextual backgrounds of the societies of settlement and the immigrant groups involved in the ICSEY project. The cultural principle requires the elaboration of some features of the societies of settlement, and of the immigrant groups that have come to settle in them, and an account of the nature of their intercultural relationships. Although the percentage of immigrants residing in a society is one indicator of cultural diversity, other indicators are available in the literature. Australia has a high level of immigration, with 24.6% of the population of nearly 20 million not born in the country. Israel is a country of high immigration, with 37.4% of its population of almost 6 million having been born abroad. Israel is thus high on actual diversity. Two thirds of the US population believe that rates of immigration should be reduced.

This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.

This thesis aims to investigate digital accessibility in the making through the theoretical lens of the assemblage theory. Digital accessibility is a characteristic of digital products and services like websites that allows people with disabilities to access and use them. Although its relevance, digital accessibility is not present in many technological objects. This work intends to describe the adoption of accessibility practices in developing projects and products, focusing mainly on design activities. My leading field site was a tech company located in Stockholm, Sweden, where I observed the “accessibility project” for almost three months, from October to December 2021. During this period, I followed how the company, particularly one of its teams, reacted to new environmental factors, the challenges they faced, and how the process of incorporating these new elements was, from not having accessibility presented in the produced artefacts to incorporating accessibility as a routine. In addition, the study also counted on the participation of Brazilian design practitioners through interviews. The methods were observant participation, semi-structured interviews, and oral accounts. 

The main theoretical frameworks were the assemblage theory developed by Manuel DeLanda (2016) and the theory of affordances by Jenny L. Davis (2020). I attempt to analyse the organisation and its nested structures as assemblages, and the processes of changes in their parameters, creating new territory and new code through the adoption of accessibility repertoire. I furthermore analysed the relations between the affordances of technological objects produced by the company’s assemblage, as well as the affordance of accessibility frameworks. 

Procedural planning experiments often attempt to influence how planning actors think through producing physical and social environments that affect how they feel. In this paper such experiments are conceptualized as attempts at generating atmospheric “bubbles” through the engineering of affective atmospheres. Our empirical examples show that purposeful affective engineering is very difficult to achieve – and one cannot expect that their eventual outcomes can be predicted on the basis of the ambitions that underpin them. Therefore, it is crucial to remain attentive to questions concerning the variegated, distributed and often unexpected effects of such endeavors. 

En berättelse om organisering blandar organisationsteorins grunder med berättelsen om modeföretaget Mess. Genom skildringen av människorna och händelserna i och runt företaget ser vi framgångar, konflikter och utmaningar i organisationsteorins ljus. Mötet mellan den fiktiva berättelsen och organisationsteorins grundläggande teman ger en förståelse för vad en organisation är och vad organisering betyder – och vilken betydelse det har för att förstå vårt samhälle. I den här andra upplagan har boken kortats och omdisponerats så att några av de tidigare temana har vävts samman med de övriga. För att komplettera och stärka berättelsen om Mess har exempel – både från praktiken och från aktuell forskning – genomgående uppdaterats.

Although hunting is declining in western countries, the number of people taking the hunting exam in Sweden are stable, and new demographic groups are becoming hunters. Through interviews done in Sweden with both new and experienced hunters, as well as focus groups with young hunters at agricultural colleges, we investigate how they navigate praxis and ethical frameworks taught in hunting. Using theories on moral learning, as well as Walzer's thick and thin moral argument, we contrast the views of these young hunters with the ethical principles outlined in the educational literature for the hunting exam. We then present how young hunters reasoned around issues regarding hunting ethics, animal welfare and the place of hunting in modern society, both inside and outside the classroom. The young hunters we spoke to acted as moderators of modern trends in hunting, often bringing 'destabilising' influences like social media and female hunters. Young hunters are enculturated into traditional hunting structures and, in the process, caught in a dialectic between modern influences and traditional hunting culture. Our findings highlight challenges such as 'false consensus' and 'ethical trade-offs' in the learning of hunting ethics, which emerge potentially due to a lack of space for deliberation on hunting ethics.