Suchergebnisse

During the spring of 2020, the corona pandemic created an entirely new context for university employees to work within. In a matter of weeks, it became customary to replace physical meetings with digital alternatives whenever possible. Conferences, seminars, meetings and doctoral thesis defences – among other activities – were moved to digital platforms. Meanwhile, many activities were either postponed or cancelled. The crisis resulted in a vast decrease in air travel and significantly reduced physical mobility. Increased digitalisation and reduced emissions from aviation were central to SLU's policies and strategies prior to the corona pandemic. A part of SLU's ambition of becoming a climate-neutral university by 2027 is to significantly reduce emissions from business trips and, since 2016, SLU is requested by the Swedish government to increase the share of digital and travel free meetings. SLU is also developing a new strategy for 2021-2025. A better understanding of the implications of increased digitalisation is highly relevant in this work. This study aims to provide a better understanding of how SLU staff members experienced the drastic reduction in travel and the increased use of digital solutions during the spring of 2020. We also want to shed light on what types of activities – that originally were intended to include a business trip – could be replaced by a digital alternative with maintained or improved quality and what activities that on the contrary were difficult or impossible to carry out using a digital alternative. In order to fulfil our aims, we conducted a mixed-methods study based on semistructured interviews and an online survey. The results from the survey indicate that a majority (83%) of the respondents have experienced that their work in general was either mainly positively affected, equal parts negatively and positively affected, or not affected at all by the decrease in business travel and increase in digital meetings. The respondents also painted a picture as to what activities that can work well and what activities that will be difficult to perform digitally after the corona crisis. Fieldwork stood out as the least suitable activity to perform digitally, as 60% of the respondents could imagine replacing 0% or 0-25% of the fieldwork with digital solutions. What stood out on the opposite side was that a vast majority thought that between 50-100% of project meetings, administrative meetings and seminars could be replaced with digital options. As for workshops, conferences, and reviews and presentation of research, the opinions varied much more. These findings also resonate with the experiences that were brought up in the interviews. Summary Some of the main findings in the interviews was that digital meetings were perceived as more efficient, but that they lacked in terms of social and creative aspects. Furthermore, informants largely agreed that brainstorming, spontaneous discussions and forming of new relationships was harder to achieve digitally. On the other hand, well-structured interactions with a clear agenda between people that had previously met in person worked excellent on digital platforms. Many informants expressed that they were surprised regarding how well the digital meetings had worked and pointed to the many benefits of replacing travel with digital solutions in terms of increased equality, accessibility, efficiency, reduced stress and reduced emissions. Looking forward, participants talked about a better mix of digital and physical activities. Many believed that some activities – for example establishing new relationships and performing fieldwork – to a larger extent than other activities require travel for maintained quality. Other types of activities – such as administrative meetings, project meetings, seminars and presentations – were considered possible to replace with digital solutions to a higher degree with maintained, or even enhanced, quality of work and life. The study concludes: * A majority of the SLU employees that participated in our study reported that it in general had worked well to replace longer business trips with digital alternatives during the spring of 2020. * Our quantitative findings illustrate that an overwhelming majority of the respondents thought that their work and research either had been mainly positively affected, equal parts positively and negatively affected, or not affected at all by them not being able to travel. * Certain types of fieldwork and data collection, as well as activities requiring spontaneous discussions and networking were experienced as the most difficult to perform digitally. * Well-structured interactions with a clear agenda and people that had previously met in person, as well as activities such as administrative meetings, project meetings and seminars, were perceived as most suited to perform digitally. * The study recommends a better mix between digital and physical meetings in a post-corona context. SLU should strategically make use of digital solutions and replace longer business trips to improve the work situation of the employees, the quality of their work in addition to reducing GHG emissions.

The paper argues that policies towards upland communities in Vietnam tend to reinforce land use strategies that increase vulnerability to climate-related risk and undermine adaptive capacity of upland communities. It is argued that the division of land use between intensive agriculture/tree plantation and protected forest is increasing both livelihood- and environmental risk. Qualitative interviews and group discussion with upland villagers and local government staff in two districts of north and central Vietnam suggest that farmers are facing frequent loss and damage due to floods, storms and drought. Changing production patterns, together with the increase in climate-related hazards and stresses, is changing the character of vulnerability of upland communities. The study primarily explores village-level perspectives regarding impacts of hazards and stresses, ideas of how to reduce risk, along with how related policies and institutions influence local possibilities of risk reduction and adaptation. Our fieldwork results suggest that many villagers and local leaders see adaptation and risk reduction in terms of improved irrigation and in terms of access to land and forests for their livelihoods. The findings support arguments for more integration of agriculture and forestry land use, allowing for more flexibility in the development of upland livelihoods, with the aim of facilitating adaptation to climate change.

Because of population clustering, it is increasingly difficult for the rural poor to access land in Zambia. Such a clustered space is along the line-of-rail, where more people are looking to make use of land. Simultaneously, in a country where multiple political authorities can perform recognition of land, people also have to balance and navigate within this pluralistic political landscape to enjoy secure access and use of land. As such, property has the potential to improve security and create legitimacy to land. Within 100 yards along the railway, land is in administrative limbo due to the lack of effective control by its legal owner, the state. This thesis investigates the property production in land occupied by rural people along the railway in Southern Province, Zambia, through ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork. With a widened understanding of property that goes beyond juridical interpretations inseparable from law, I show how property making abandons formalised scripts, and instead is performed through contextual and localised orders. Occupants of land along the railway put labour and material investments into the land to reinforce legitimacy, both among each other as well as when facing political authority. With the state as formal owners of railway land, chiefs and headmen (i.e. customary authority) get squeezed by engaging in administering the land since it is outside of their legal jurisdiction. At the same time, state authority also administers and recognizes land, albeit implicitly, when maintenance workers survey the railway tracks. I conclude that these findings together create a whole greater than the sum of its parts of how property production can take place on land in limbo.

Adaptation research and practice too often overlooks the wider social context within which climate change is experienced. Mainstream approaches frame adaptation problems in terms of the consequences that flow from biophysical impacts and as a result, we argue, ask the wrong questions. A complementary approach gaining ground in the field, foregrounding the social, economic and political context, reveals differentiation in adaptation need, and how climate impacts interconnect with wider processes of change. In this paper, we illustrate how this kind of approach frames a different set of questions about adaptation using the case of Nepal. Drawing on fieldwork and a review of literature, we contrast the questions that emerge from adaptation research and practice that take climate risk as a starting point with the questions that emerge from examination of contemporary rural livelihoods. We find that while adaptation efforts are often centred around securing agricultural production and are predicated on climate risk management, rural livelihoods are caught in a wider process of transformation. The numbers of people involved in farming are declining, and households are experiencing the effects of rising education, abandonment of rural land, increasing wages, burgeoning mechanisation, and high levels of migration into the global labour market. We find the epistemological framing of adaptation too narrow to account for these changes, as it understands the experiences of rural communities through the lens of climate risk. We propose that rather than seeking to integrate local understandings into a fixed, impacts-orientated epistemology, it is necessary to premise adaptation on an epistemology capable of exploring how change occurs. Asking the right questions thus means opening up adaptation by asking: 'what are the most significant changes taking place in people's lives?', along with the more standard: 'what are the impacts of climate change?' Viewing adaptation as occurring between and within these two perspectives has the potential to reveal new vulnerabilities and opportunities for adaptation practice to act upon.

The imprint on rural areas from social change since the 1950s is a decline in population, farming and other local working places, services, political platforms and meeting places. The aim of the thesis is to understand how these changes have affected the interrelations between people, place and history. The fieldwork was conducted in Locknevi, a parish in Småland. Interviews and participant observation were undertaken for four months, during a span of five years. In spite of the impoverishment of rural areas inhabitants seek to maintain social and time-space relations through new practises, mostly in local associations. These associations were once an important arena for modernising both agriculture and rural life. Now they are divided into agricultural and community based associations. People moving into the community often engage in community based associations. Hence local communities are now upheld by activities within associations and among friends instead of by work within agriculture. Three cases from Locknevi are the basis for discussions of the effect of social change over the last decades. For example the school is an important institution and meeting place. Here the struggle to retain the village school shows that when meeting places are in danger of disappearing people tend to mobilize against deterioration in living conditions. Furthermore the church is an important local political arena, institution and meeting place. The conflict within church leadership represents divergent views in the community, namely the old independent view and the new view incorporated in a global world. Moreover the moose hunt as an institution serves to maintain the sense of community. In this regard the effects of change are manifested in the way the local hunting teams respond to the activities of hunting tourism. Here tensions often emerge between cultural/social and economic stakes within the community. The empirical findings shows no conflict between seeking to maintain a strong place identity and embracing an openness towards society. On the contrary, this combination could well be the fundamental driving force for building society. However it is hard to create a viable community in the absence of local subsistence, meeting places, institutions and a concrete use of place.

Emergent farmers have rapidly increased in numbers on the sub-Saharan African continent during the last couple of decades. The main interest in this study lies in how emergent farmers have materialised as a class in a political economic context and historical process and what societal impact they have had. Emergent farmers as a class are understood as capable of reproducing their means of subsistence and creating surplus value without having to own their means of production. Mkanda Extension Planning Area (EPA) in Malawi has served as the empirical area for this matter. During the fieldwork, 31 persons were interviewed. The interviews gave insights into farmers' living conditions. An explorative survey was also conducted with 31 informants, of which 13 persons also participated in the interviews. The explorative survey provided an overview of farm characteristics in the area. In addition, two focus group discussions were held to gain perspective on shared experiences among farmer groups regarding the positioning of emergent farmers, how they and other types of farmers can be classified and how the relationship between farmers appear. The field work was combined with a desk study to investigate political, socioeconomic and environmental conditions through which emergent farmers have materialised. Emergent farmers in Mkanda EPA have materialised through inheritance and acquisition of property such as land; other natural resources; material assets and technology. They have grown through extension service and credit regimes; sales of cash crops and livestock; agribusinesses; incomes from employment and off-farm activities. They have advanced through family and class support; labour power control; strategic utilisation of volatile agricultural markets and income diversification. They have progressed through agricultural institutions, political favouritism and resource exchange with state representatives; traditional authorities; traders; investors; large-scale buyers and other farmer groups. Emergent farmers have contributed to and been shaped by the development of the capitalist mode of production during Malawi's postcolonial history. The farmer class has enabled increased capital investments and accumulation and contributed to new businesses; production methods; market directions and means of livelihood in rural areas. They have provided links between local production conditions; extraction of raw material; capital exchange; means of profit and growth opportunities. At the same time, emergent farmers have constituted a minority that has served certain class interests. While emergent farmers have influenced the socioeconomic and ecological dynamics in rural places such as Mkanda EPA, the class has maintained structures that have reproduced inequality among the population.

"Riksäpplet deals with a shipwreck that has a neglected position in the grand narrative of the history of the Swedish navy. The story of its destiny and the missing accounts in scholarly and popular works in history says something about heritage processes within Swedish maritime archaeology. On 5 June 1676 Riksäpplet came loose and adrift from its moorings outside Dalarö Sea fortress. The hull struck a rock and sank. The loss was considered both ignominious and embarrassing and the ship's fate has been overlooked in all major history books. The rock onto which Riksäpplet sank was named 'Äpplet' after the incident, and the wreck itself has become an integrated component of the underwater seascape. As a consequence the wreckage has never enjoyed a proper 'discovery' or undergone documentation under the sensational forms that many other famous shipwrecks have, even though they have sunk in more inconvenient places.
In Eriksson's study the official handling of Riksäpplet's wrecked body is compared to the more wellknown ships Kronan and Svärdet, which both sank during battle only days before. Eriksson draws on different motifs and driving forces behind the study of naval wrecks from the period from his comparison, and the differences are discussed. Riksäpplet has never achieved a prominent position with the romanticising works of history that honour the national heroes and their deeds which are associated with this era of the Swedish Empire. The first half of the book thus sets out to unpack the ideas that have led to the relative disinterest in Riksäpplet in comparison to other shipwrecks.
The second half of the book sets out to analyse Riksäpplet from a specific archaeological perspective, with focus on the ship as material culture. Eriksson's departure is to explore the relatively low budget fieldwork that has been done at the wreck site. He the combines those facts with a survey of the artefacts recovered from the wreck, of which all are kept in museum archives and private collections. This, in addition to his studies of preserved written correspondence concerning the construction of the ship, has brought new insights into seventeenth-century shipbuilding and how the balance between the global political superpowers affected this trade. In this context Riksäpplet has great potential to show how military alliances are materialized through ships' architecture. - Riksäpplet: Arkeologiska perspektiv på ett bortglömt regalskepp handlar om kulturarvsprocesser inom svensk marinarkeologi. Men boken handlar också om ett skeppsvrak som hamnat en hårsmån utanför den stora vedertagna sjökrigshistoriska berättelsen: regalskeppet Riksäpplet. Den 5 juni 1676 slet sig Riksäpplet från förtöjningarna vid Dalarö skans. Skrovet högg i en klippa och sjönk. Förlisningen kom att betraktas som både snöplig och pinsam och har i efterhand kommit att förtigas i historieböckerna. Klippan bär idag namnet Äpplet och vraket har kommit att bli en integrerad och självklar del av landskapet. Som en konsekvens av detta har vraket inte kunnat påträffas och dokumenteras under de sensationella former som gällt för andra välkända skeppsvrak trots att de förlist på mer otillgängliga platser.
I boken jämförs hanteringen av Riksäpplets vrak med de mer välkända regalskeppen Kronan och Svärdet, vilka gick under i strid fem dagar före Riksäpplets förlisning. Utifrån jämförelsen diskuterar Eriksson motiv och drivkrafter som legat till grund för studiet av vrak efter svenska örlogsfartyg från stormaktstiden. Riksäpplet har inte kunnat erövra någon framträdande roll i den romantiserande historieskrivning som lyfter fram nationens hjältar och deras stordåd. Boken första hälft syftar till att synliggöra de mekanismer och drivkrafter som ligger bakom att Riksäpplet prioriterats bort till förmån för undersökningar av andra vrak.
Bokens andra hälft ägnas åt att fokusera på ett nytt, mer renodlat arkeologiskt perspektiv på skeppet som materiell kultur. Erikssons utgångspunkt är ett till resurserna tämligen begränsat arkeologiskt fältarbete på vrakplatsen som ändå har genererat stora resultat. Han kombinerar detta med en genomgång av de föremål som genom åren har bärgats från vraket och som finns arkiverade i olika museimagasin och hos privata samlare. Tillsammans med bevarad skriftlig korrespondens kring skeppets byggande väcks nya insikter om 1600-talets skeppsbyggeri och hur detta kunde påverkas av den globala politiska maktbalansen över världshaven. Satt i en sådan kontext har Riksäpplet stor potential att visa hur stormaktens militärallianser materialiserades genom skeppens arkitektur. "