Swedish family policy and law are based on assumptions of gender equality, shared parenting, and amicable separation. However, these assumptions do not always correspond with the heterogeneous lived realities of separated parents in Sweden. This misalignment raises questions about the capacity of the current legal and policy framework to adequately support all families and to prevent social and economic disadvantage among those who do not conform to these ideals. This thesis addresses these misalignments by examining how the Swedish legal system responds to parents who bring conflicts over child custody and child maintenance to court. The aim is to integrate insights from sociology and law to provide an overview of the issues separated parents bring to court, how these are handled and adjudicated, and what barriers parents encounter when asserting or contesting their parental rights and responsibilities. The thesis builds on large and diverse sets of court decisions and includes both parents’ and children’s perspectives.

Studies I and II concern child maintenance. Study I focuses on liable parents (fathers) who dispute their child maintenance obligations under the guaranteed support scheme and explains why these parents contest their liability despite being legally required to pay. The data build on court decisions on guaranteed support from all of Sweden’s administrative courts, 2014–2019 (n = 723). The findings show that economic inability is a primary reason for non-compliance, often arising from a mismatch between how the agency assesses ability to pay and parents’ economic circumstances. Study II shifts the perspective to resident parents (mothers) who seek to secure their right to child maintenance through the private law maintenance allowance scheme. It explores whether parents’ relative resources affect the monetary outcomes of disputes, comparing cases resolved through mediation and court adjudication. The data consist of court decisions on maintenance allowance from all of Sweden’s district courts, 2016–2020 (n = 327). Results show several barriers to pursuing maintenance allowance in court, suggesting that the system has limited capacity to safeguard children’s rights to higher payments unless the liable parent complies.

Studies III and IV focus on disputes concerning child custody and draw on the same dataset: court decisions on child custody, residence, and visitation from 35 of Sweden’s 48 district courts in 2021 (n = 535). Study III centres parental conflict and analyses the arguments parents use when disputing custody, as well as which argumentative patterns are most likely to lead to sole custody. Five patterns of parental argumentation are identified: ‘Victim-Offender’, ‘Mutual High-Conflict’, ‘Parenting Capacity Concerns’, ‘Lone Carer’, and ‘(Re)-Litigating Non-Resident Parents’. Applicants are most likely to be awarded sole custody in the ‘Victim-Offender’ and ‘Lone Carer’ contexts, and less likely in the ‘Mutual High-Conflict’ context. Study IV addresses the perspective of children and explores their opportunities to have their participation rights realized in custody disputes. The findings suggest that children’s views are most likely to be reported in contexts characterised by ‘Mutual High-Conflict’, and least likely to be included in the ‘Lone Carer’ context.

The combined results of the four studies lead to policy implications spelled out in the introduction.

In a time marked by ecological and social uncertainty, there is a growing need for educational practices that foster hope, agency, and embodied engagement with the future. This doctoral thesis explores how applied drama can serve as a resource in sustainability education. The study investigates how university students and young adults engage in embodied and imaginative practices that enable them to relate to sustainability issues in new ways. The research is conducted within the framework of drama education and is based on drama interventions with students in a university course and participants in a youth project. Of the 85 participants in four groups, 36 volunteered to be interviewed afterwards about their experiences. The transcribed interviews and other documentation were analysed through an approach that evolved from qualitative to post-qualitative, including arts-based elements. Additionally, the thesis contains autoethnographic traces and reflections from clown work related to sustainability issues.

The findings show drama to be a powerful, yet demanding, pedagogical tool in environmental and sustainability education. It enables emotional expression and embodied and collective reflection in the creation of imagined futures. It also fosters group cohesion and a sense of hope in the face of complex challenges. However, drama as a teaching method requires not only knowledge of both drama and sustainability but also participant willingness, psychological safety, and time to build trust. The research further demonstrates that drama and creative processes can contribute in a meaningful way to knowledge production, particularly when addressing existential and societal crises. The aesthetic dimension is revealed as valuable in order to remain open, playful and creative in the midst of uncertainty.

The ambition of chemical exposomics to measure all environmental exposures throughout the lifecourse brings analytical challenges because of the large number of environmental chemicals, their diverse physicochemical properties, their dynamic occurrence, and presence in blood at 1000-fold lower concentrations than endogenous metabolites. Gas chromatography high resolution mass spectrometry (GC-HRMS) complements liquid chromatography (LC) by expanding chemical-space coverage into neutral, hydrophobic and semi-volatile substances. However, development of GC-HRMS chemical exposomics has lagged behind LC-, and workflows are still required for sensitive and quantitative detection for multiple priority chemical classes while simultaneously enabling the discovery of novel exposures by nontarget acquisition, robust data processing and appropriate structural annotation frameworks. In Paper I, an actionable annotation scoring framework was developed to incorporate unique GC-HRMS information into annotation confidence level assignments, these GC-specific criteria were applied in Papers II, III and IV.

In Paper II, I developed and validated a chemical exposomics method using isohexane (H) to quantitatively extract prioritized analytes from protein-free acetonitrile-plasma (A-P), which significantly reduced coextracted lipid interference and enabled large-volume injections (25 µL) to GC. The resulting HA-P method enabled highly sensitive and quantitative detection, achieving a mean method limit of quantification (MLOQ) of 0.09 ng/mL from only 200 µL of human plasma. Application to 32 individual samples (100 µL) allowed quantification of 51 targets and a nontarget molecular discovery of 112 additional substances (Level 2, 12.8% high annotation rate). In Paper III, the HA-P method was then applied in a longitudinal study of 46 healthy individuals in a multiomics cohort, whereby each participant donated 6 plasma samples over 2 years. Overall, the GC chemical-exposome was longitudinally unstable, with mean intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) of 0.24, significantly lower than for other omics profiles measured (i.e., proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics and microbiota). Molecular networks and hierarchical clustering analysis revealed structural similarities and correlated co-exposures for numerous chemical classes that may share common exposure sources.

To enable comprehensive chemical exposomics, in Paper IV I developed and validated an integrated sample preparation method that produces two extracts from a single plasma sample, enabling high sensitivity target/nontarget analysis of separate polar and nonpolar analyte fractions. Application to 32 plasma samples allowed overall identification of 204 chemicals at Level 1 covering a wide chemical space, e.g., 11 orders of magnitude in water solubility. Hierarchical clustering of 348 total annotated features revealed a broad range of common or rare co-exposures, many of which were unique to specific individuals or correlated with endogenous metabolites, thereby revealing a high-relevance to precision public health. Overall, the combined methods and frameworks provide new tools to study the human chemical exposome, and the unprecedented datasets from their first applications will guide sampling design (based on low ICCs), comprehensive analysis and data exploration in future studies.

Sectoral Shocks and Gender Differences in Field-of-Study Choice: Evidence from the Dot-Com Collapse

This paper studies how sector-specific shocks shape gender differences in field-of-study choice. I examine the collapse of the dot-com bubble as an exogenous shock that increased uncertainty in the Information Technology (IT) sector. I develop a theoretical model of field choice under uncertainty in which students differ in risk aversion by gender. When sectoral risk rises, more risk-averse individuals are disproportionately deterred from entering that field, leading to lower female participation, stronger positive selection among those who remain, and reallocation toward close substitute fields. Using Swedish administrative data and a difference-in-differences design, I find that the gender gap in IT graduation widens by about 4.2 percentage points following the bust, a relative increase of roughly 50 percent. At the labor market entry margin, a negative and statistically significant gender gap emerges for later cohorts, with women less likely than men to enter IT employment, conditional on holding an IT degree. Women who select into IT become more positively selected, with their average GPA rank rising by about three percentile points relative to men. Cross-field evidence shows that women shift toward engineering, a close substitute but with lower exposure to the shock. These findings provide evidence consistent with a mechanism in which sector-specific shocks amplify gender segregation by altering both participation and the allocation of talent across fields. More broadly, the results suggest that gender differences in field-of-study choice evolve with economic conditions: sectoral downturns may reinforce existing disparities by diverting relatively high-ability women away from more volatile but promising fields.

Property Rights, the Intra-Couple Wealth Gap, and Family Outcomes: Evidence from China

This paper documents intra-couple housing wealth gaps in China and examines their consequences for household decisions. I exploit the 2011 Marriage Law reform, which replaced equal division at divorce with a registered-owner rule, as a natural experiment. Using spouse-level panel data and a difference-in-differences design, I find that the reform increased the husband–wife legal share gap by 28.3 percentage points and generated an average housing wealth gap of CNY 63,667, approximately ten times the wives' annual income. The wealth gap persisted and widened as housing prices rose, even as legal share gaps narrowed over time. In the second stage, 2SLS estimates show that a one-unit increase in the husband’s relative ownership share reduces divorce probability by 6.75 percentage points, raises the wife's probability of employment by 6.8 percentage points, and increases her weekday housework by approximately one hour. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the reform lowers divorce probability regardless of which spouse holds the title; female employment rises when the husband’s relative ownership increases but no significant change when the wife's does; and wives' housework burden rises in both cases. Standardized comparisons show that wealth gap effects exceed share gap effects across all outcomes, indicating that the economic magnitude of housing inequality, not just formal ownership status, amplifies bargaining consequences. The findings show how a formally gender-neutral legal reform can reinforce intra-household inequality when layered onto pre-existing gendered ownership norms.

You Are the Elite Now: Admission Effects of an Excellence Initiative in the Chinese Higher Education System

with Tianze Liu

This paper examines how university applicants respond to government policies that label specific programs as centers of excellence. Such policies, increasingly common worldwide, aim to enhance human capital and global competitiveness by directing students toward high-priority fields. We study this question in the context of China’s excellence initiative, which designates selected university-discipline units as First-Class Disciplines (FCDs). Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that designation attracts higher-ranking applicants, raising admission competition by about 1.5 percentiles in exam rankings, equivalent to surpassing roughly 1,800 additional peers per province. Importantly, we also find strong spillover effects: non-designated disciplines within the same universities become more competitive, suggesting that quality signals extend beyond the targeted programs. By increasing competition in designated fields, this policy not only reallocates top students toward strategic areas but also improves the supply of skilled students in priority fields. Our findings provide the first evidence that university-discipline-level excellence initiatives can shape talent allocation, amplify institutional reputation, and ultimately influence the future composition of a country’s human capital

Atmospheric methane is rising rapidly due to a combination of anthropogenic and natural methane emissions. Uncertainties in the contributions of especially natural sources are high, while these emissions may alter in the near future due to climate change-induced feedback mechanisms. Permafrost regions are considered a natural source of methane, and thawing permafrost and associated greenhouse gas emissions represent a potential biogeochemical tipping point for climate change.

About one-seventh of the world’s permafrost area is situated below sea level, predominantly on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). The ESAS sea region is the world’s largest shelf sea system and was formed by sea level rise during the last deglaciation. This shelf seabed hosts large yet uncertain amounts of organic matter and methane in different deposits. While elevated methane concentrations have been observed in this region for more than two decades, the methane source and magnitude of methane emissions have been poorly constrained. Uncertainty in the methane sources limits the ability to estimate the magnitude of methane releases and expand these into future projections.

This PhD thesis focuses mainly on the knowledge gap on methane sources. The sedimentary drape contains fossil gas reservoirs, methane hydrates, preformed methane trapped by permafrost, and organic matter in frozen, thawed, and recently accumulated sediments that can be degraded to methane. The dual stable isotopic composition of methane (δ¹³C_CH4 and δ²H_CH4) is indicative of its formation pathway and potentially of partial degradation. Methane’s radiocarbon content constrains the age of the methane precursor. Therefore, triple-isotopic analyses of both seawater-dissolved and ebullitive methane were used to quantify the relative contributions of different methane sources to the observed elevated methane levels in both phases. To this end, a new preparation method for radiocarbon analysis of aqueous methane was developed. A second part of the thesis focuses on the fate of methane in both bubbles and seawater.

It was found that multiple methane sources contribute to the elevated methane concentrations across the ESAS, while at all hotspots, methane was dominantly old (¹⁴C_age > 48000 y before present). Microbial methane from subsea permafrost environments was the major methane source at methane hotspots in the inner Laptev Sea. In the East Siberian Sea and the outer Laptev Sea, fossil gas seeps of different origins were identified. The isotopic fingerprints of both dissolved and ebullitive methane in surface and bottom waters were similar and persistent over multiple years. In combination with concentration patterns, it was inferred that ebullition is an important source of methane to the water column. In the outer Laptev Sea, methane is oxidized in sub-pycnocline waters to measurable extents. In the inner Laptev Sea, no direct indication of strong methane oxidation was found. The high methane concentrations measured for surface bubbles (80±22%) show that methane is also directly transported from the seabed to the atmosphere. This ebullitive flux bypasses microbial degradation in both sediments and seawater. The implication of these results is that both ebullition and the multitude of methane sources across the ESAS need to be incorporated into future modeling efforts and included in methane release estimates for the ESAS region.

The interplay between the microbiota and host in health and disease is being extensively studied and the field is expanding exponentially. The microbiota is in symbiosis with its host and, especially during early life, actively influences the development of the host immune system. Disturbances of the gut microbiota during this window of opportunity can alter the microbial metabolism to an extent that it affects the host development for years thereafter. Dysbiosis or shifts in gut microbial composition have been shown to correlate with childhood allergy and asthma development. Together, these observations suggest that the microbiota is one of the driving forces for immune development and long-term memory.

In Paper I, we showed that early-life immune and gut microbiota signatures are associated with allergic asthma in young adulthood. By only selecting individuals who were genetically prone to become allergic, we could limit genetic variability and study the association of the early-life microbiota with young adulthood allergic asthma. Microbial composition development during the first 2 years of life differed between individuals who had developed allergic asthma in young adulthood compared to those who did not. Additionally, at age 2, we observed different immunological patterns in both dendritic cells and in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) transcriptomic profiles, with increased RNA processing and reduced immune pathway activity. Interestingly, these differences were less pronounced at 20 years of age, once asthma had developed, pointing to early life as a critical period during which microbiota-immune interactions may influence later asthma risk.

In Paper II, we connected specific gut microbial compositions with murine metabolic profiles linking the microbes with the host phenotype. Allergy-associated microbiota (AAM) fecal water stimulation induced inflammatory immune responses in PBMCs, while non-allergy associated microbiota (non-AAM) fecal water stimulation induced regulatory pathways. After transplanting the human early-life allergy associated and non-allergy associated fecal matter into germ-free mice, different metabolic patterns were observed in the intestine and distant organs. Increased levels of long acylcarnitines and sphingolipids were associated with the AAM transplanted mice, while non-AAM mice had higher levels of tryptophan and its derivatives. Our results suggest that the metabolites produced by non-AAM have a regulating, anti-inflammatory effect both in vitro and in vivo, despite adaptions in the microbial composition due to change of host environment.

In Paper III, we focused on isolating the microbiota from any host factors by developing a cost-efficient anaerobic bioreactor for culturing of complex microbial communities derived from intestinal samples. We managed to preserve the majority of the original microbial diversity and were able to establish a stable community to test the influence of antibiotic treatment on the dynamics. The magnitude of the perturbation by the antibiotic treatment depended on the original composition.

In summary, this work provides a glimpse into different ways of studying the gut microbiota-host associations and dynamics in relation to allergy and asthma.

Trapped ion systems are at the forefront of the development of various forms of quantum technology. Continuing to improve and establish new devices and techniques for the control of trapped ions is a vital element of ongoing research. In this thesis, a range of experiments which aim to expand the quantum toolkit of trapped ion systems are presented. These results primarily focus on the control and detection of bound motional states of a single trapped ⁸⁸Sr+ ion for the purposes of quantum simulation and computation. We demonstrate how the interference between motional modes can reveal an interesting new interpretation of the mechanism behind light-matter interaction and introduce two separate techniques for the detection of motional states, based on the Autler-Townes effect and the use of composite pulses respectively. Additionally, we introduce a novel method to perform micromotion compensation and build upon previous works studying the effects of trapping electric fields on a single trapped Rydberg ion, observing the second-order quadrupolar response of the ion with a highly precise sensitivity.

This dissertation explores the role of opposition parties in autocratisation, focusing on Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). By examining the CHP during the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule from 2002 to 2023, it reveals the complex roles and strategies of opposition actors. It challenges the binary view of opposition success or failure, suggesting that opposition parties like the CHP are dynamic entities within autocratic regimes. They can both combat and contribute to autocratisation through their discourse, policy decisions, and actions. By analysing the CHP’s evolving strategies, alliances, and discourse, the research underscores the opposition’s pivotal role in shaping Turkey’s political landscape. Employing a diverse methodology, including 20 elite interviews, 10 focus group discussions with 60 participants, archival research, and participant observation, the thesis introduces two new concepts: rigid opposition and flexible opposition. Initially, the CHP maintained a rigid opposition characterised by identity-based polarisation. However, over time, the party shifted to a more flexible approach, forging strategic alliances and adopting an inclusive discourse. This transformation underscores the adaptable nature of opposition strategies. However, the dissertation also notes that, while flexibility is essential in countering autocratisation, it also poses a risk of diluting party identity. Additionally, the dissertation examines the evolution of the CHP’s discourse. By comparing election campaigns and protests, the study shows how the CHP’s shift from an exclusionary to an inclusive discourse challenged the ruling AKP’s polarising populist narrative, while the previous exclusionary approach contributed to political polarisation. This inclusive discourse played a crucial role in the CHP’s success in the 2019 local elections. Furthermore, the thesis investigates the CHP’s strategic alliances and opposition coordination, probing the motivations and challenges encountered by CHP political elites. It identifies the primary challenges encountered by the CHP in maintaining cohesive opposition alliances and elucidates how these challenges affect the process of autocratisation in Turkey.

This thesis argues for the integration of a human subjective dimension within posthuman theory and philosophy, particularly in conjunction with educational theory and practice. The thesis consists of three articles, each centered around a principal concept relevant to the overarching inquiry: the significance of subjectivity, thinking, and origin stories. In the first article, I examine the notion of subjectivity and its transformation within the framework of posthumanism, proposing that an expanded conception is necessary - one in which the thinking subject incorporates the "materiality" emphasized by posthumanist perspectives. Drawing on the scholarship of Katherine Hayles, I demonstrate that while cognitive capacities depend on foundational mechanisms, the interplay between these mechanisms and subjective experience necessitates an exploration of distinct levels of abstraction and agency. While this aligns with key objectives of posthumanism, I contend that the interplay needs to be further concretized to be both philosophically and educationally relevant. The second article centers around the concept of thinking as meditated on by philosophers Hannah Arendt and Gilles Deleuze. Their understanding of thinking bears many similarities as well as differences, and the tension between these is from where I construct a broad definition of thinking that entails imagination, meaning-making, judgment, common sense, abstraction of patterns, and action. Thinking thus becomes a multilayered dimension in which different components can be activated at different times, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. The definition of thinking that I construct based on the joint reading of Arendt and Deleuze is a continuation of my understanding of a vibrant posthuman subject that interacts as much with itself as with the surrounding world. While posthumanism focuses mostly on the importance of a subject-independent world, I argue that the active subject, as worldly, is the locus for educational change. In the third article, I consult the philosophy of Sylvia Wynter and center the discussion around my key concept of origin stories. Stories about ourselves and our communities, rooted in perceived origins, are shaped by both our biological and social development. Analytically separating these aspects allows me to highlight their interplay, which I propose is where opportunities lie to challenge our innate tendencies toward hierarchical categorization. Together, the three articles flesh out a philosophical-educational approach equipped to take on problems with in-built hierarchical taxonomies regarding people, nature, and technology. I demonstrate how the approach can be utilized by the examples of AI, data-driven methods in education, critical thinking and cultivation of judgment, and biological-racist views drawn from presumed origins. 

This dissertation builds on a study of provision of educational support in the Swedish education system, with a particular focus on lower secondary schools. The aim is to explore processes involved in the provision of educational support beyond pedagogical and didactical considerations. To this end, an initial analysis of the local use of a large-scale equity funding programme in nine Swedish municipalities was followed by a field study in lower secondary schools in two of them. Adopting an ethnographic approach over three semesters, classes and other domains of everyday life in the schools were observed. The study includes interviews with pupils, parents, teachers, special educators, and other school personnel, as well as administrators at local education agencies.

     Theoretically informed by Foucault, the concepts of problematisations, power, discourse, knowledge, and truths have been central to the inquiry. Adopting a critical approach aims to make visible the unseen and unexamined ways of thinking and the practices they render, in order to expand the limits of our thinking.

     The findings of the present study are contingent on historical processes in the Swedish education system and its relation to special education, within a continuum of categorising groups of pupils as responsible for their own school failure and rationalising the provision of educational support through medical diagnoses and moralising judgements. The findings are also understood in light of the Swedish welfare state’s striving for equity and its historical ambiguities. As this study shows, the provision of educational support is conditioned by far more than pupils’ educational needs, compromising educational equity.

     The concept of equity has been left open to interpretation in policy, practice, and thinking about educational support. Given this, and in a context in which school personnel experience time poverty and pressure to act within dynamics of accountability and against their professional judgement, the understanding of school failure is simplified. This enables the deferral of responsibility to pupils and their families and thwarts efforts to reverse school failure. While actors such as school personnel often act unintentionally or without awareness in the observed processes, these processes ultimately operate in ways that compromise equity in the education system. In the practical doing of equity through the organisation and provision of educational support, professionals in the education system are also undoing equity.

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly central role in enabling autonomous decision-making in complex, uncertain environments. Many modern systems must optimise multiple, often conflicting objectives while operating under dynamic resource constraints and incomplete knowledge of system dynamics. Classical approaches such as dynamic programming, constrained stochastic optimisation, and static multi-objective scalarisation provide principled solutions when accurate models are available. However, in distributed and stochastic environments such as the Internet of Things (IoT), system dynamics are often unknown, non-stationary, and resource-limited, making purely model-based methods difficult to apply.

Reinforcement learning (RL) and online learning offer an alternative by enabling policy adaptation through interaction rather than relying on explicit system models. Within multi-objective settings, existing approaches often assume fixed scalarisation weights or externally specified preferences and typically focus on learning policies for given trade-offs. In dynamic IoT systems, however, both resource constraints and preference parameters may vary over time, requiring algorithms that can adapt efficiently without repeated retraining or centralised coordination.

This thesis investigates how AI-based methods, with a primary focus on reinforcement learning and complementary distributed learning techniques, can support adaptive multi-objective decision-making under communication constraints, explicit resource limitations, and dynamically changing trade-offs. The research is organised around three themes. First, communication-efficient distributed learning methods are developed to balance model accuracy and communication cost infederated learning through adaptive sparsification. Second, constrained bandit and reinforcement learning formulations are proposed to incorporate explicit and time-varying resource constraints while maintaining theoretical performance guarantees. Third, multi-objective reinforcement learning methods are designed to adapt routing decisions indistributed IoT systems under dynamically changing energy–reliabilitytrade-offs without retraining.

Overall, the thesis demonstrates that integrating communication awareness, constraint handling, and preference adaptation directly into learning algorithms is essential for reliable AI-based decision-makingin IoT environments. The results provide both algorithmic advances and a conceptual framework for designing autonomous systems that operate robustly under dynamic objectives and limited resources.

This thesis investigates several topics in actuarial mathematics and applied probability, including insurance valuation and reserving, regularisation of regression trees, and stochastic optimisation in an extended dividend problem. The thesis is based on four papers. 

Paper I provides a justification of the chain ladder predictor and Mack’s estimator for the prediction error within a classical compound Poisson model under large exposure, that is, when the number of contracts tends to infinity. Although the model does not satisfy the assumptions of Mack’s distribution-free chain ladder, both the predictor and the estimator are shown to arise in the large exposure limit.

Paper II studies the valuation of liability cashflows with capital requirements in a multi-period setting. Since explicit valuation is generally infeasible and Monte Carlo methods are often computationally challenging, an explicit and easily computable valuation formula is derived. The formula is obtained as a large exposure limit under a conditional weak convergence assumption on the liability cashflows.

Paper III introduces a regularisation method for regression trees based on node-wise statistical tests. At each node, a p-value is computed using a change point test, resulting in a regularised regression tree that is a deterministic function of the training data. Unlike cross-validation, the method avoids randomness from data splitting and ensures efficient use of the full dataset.

Paper IV revisits the classical dividend problem with ruin at zero by incorporating an additional default mechanism based on cumulative occupation time in a low-surplus region. This extension reflects realistic default triggers such as regulatory pressure or liquidity stress. The problem is solved explicitly, yielding closed-form expressions for both the optimal control and the value function. 

This dissertation studies what beads do, and what they do not do, as an archaeological source material. The study examines 338 excavated graves from a cemetery called Ihre (Ire) on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Ihre was excavated in several campaigns from 1933-1950 and is dated from the Roman Iron Age to the Early Medieval Period. For this work the full corpus of 5441 objects registered from the excavations have been used to determine patterns with regard to who was — and was not — buried with beads. Some 88 contexts (87 graves and one stray find) at Ihre contained a total of 3727 beads.

The beads have been sorted using a technological typology structured by a chaîne opératoire perspective, allowing their modes of production to be studied and discussed in detail. For this process the author draws on almost twenty years’ experience as a glass artist and beadmaker.

Both production methods and the origins of the beads, including a list of possible production centres, are examined. Based on current evidence, there is no support for the primary production of raw glass in Scandinavia, but imported raw glass was worked at several sites in what is called ‘secondary production’, where glass was formed into objects.

Moving on from production to consumption, the study includes a thorough examination of the graves that contain beads and considers whether there are patterns of gender or age that relate to beads. The largest assemblages of beads belongs to Vendel Period graves with no osteological determinations, but feminine-coded grave goods. This is followed by a group of four young girls who together account for 21% of the total number of beads from Ihre: their assemblages are large but contain less complex beads than those of adult women. The adult women of the Viking Period appear to have a smaller number of beads. This may be a result skewed by some Viking Period graves having been plundered, but it may also be related to a shift in fashion. No adult men buried alone were interred with beads, but masculine-gendered children up to the age of fourteen were sometimes buried with a small number of beads.

The ways beads were worn in relation to their human ‘host’ and the dress of Iron Age Gotland have also been examined. The feminine costume of Ihre was layered: first there was probably an underdress, followed by a peplos. These were held together at the shoulders by a pair of dress pins. On each side of the ribcage, underneath the arms, an animal-head brooch was used to pin together the sides of the peplos. A chatelaine was often affixed to the chest or arm to carry a knife and keys. An outer garment such as a shawl or possibly a kaftan was held together with a brooch under the chin. Beads were worn as necklaces, both multi-row bead collars with bead-spacers and stranded necklaces with pendants. There are no instances at Ihre where beads were arranged hanging from brooches or dress pins. In a few instances they may have been used as decorations on small bags or strings affixed to combs or knives.