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This chapter analyses how security has become a central topic for public transport in Sweden and how it can be understood in relation to people with disabilities who experience insecurity when traveling by bus or train. The chapter analyses public transport using Michel Foucault's concept of dispositif de sécurité, namely how institutions and administrative arrangements maintain and enhance a certain form of control to reduce uncertainty among those who travel. This perspective is used to better understand today's political goal that public transport should not only be accessible by being secure, but also by being usable for all. The chapter discusses the experiences of three individuals to show how uncertainty arises in everyday situations using public transport. It argues that there is a difference when it comes to security – on one side it is a feeling in people's everyday lives, and on the other it is a predictable and transparent perspective in a specific system. In this way, security – in relation to accessibility – is framed by transport organisations as something that people with disabilities can expect when they use public transport. At the same time, the individual experiences often only fit into the rhetoric if they are transformed into the organisations' way of looking at security, let alone as numbers in a diagram or as programme text.

Medical knowledge is always in motion. It moves from the lab to the office, from a press release to a patient, from an academic journal to a civil servant's desk and then on to a policymaker. Knowledge is deconstructed, reconstructed, and transformed as it moves. The dynamic, ever-evolving nature of medical knowledge has given rise to different concepts to explain it: diffusion, translation, circulation, transit, co-production. At the same time, its movements—and the ways in which we conceptualize and describe them—have material consequences. For instance, value judgements on the validity of certain forms of knowledge determine the direction of clinical research. Policy decisions are taken in relation to existing knowledge. The acceptance or rejection of treatment protocols based on medical 'facts' impacts on patients, dependents, health providers, and society at large. Simply put, knowledge and the movement of knowledge matter. How do they matter, though? The contributors to this volume examine the complexity of medical knowledge in everyday life. We demonstrate not only the pervasive influence of knowledge in medical and public health settings, but also the range of methodological and theoretical tools to study knowledge. Ours is a multidisciplinary approach to the medical humanities, presenting both contemporary and historical perspectives in order to explore the borderlands between expertise and common knowledge.

The rapid development in biomedicine creates knowledge-intensive policy fields on national and international arenas. In our ongoing project "Biomodifying technologies in change" we study presumably game-changing technologies such as CRISPR-cas9, iPS cells, xenotransplantation and 3D bioprinting. The project could be categorized as part of an "engaged program", using Sismondo's terminology (2008), in that we do not separate the epistemological dimensions from the political aspects of the science practices we study. Rather, we understand language and material processes in research as already in themselves always normative. Hence, the strife to make transparent and democratize scientific and technological processes, is somehow built into the research scope itself - even if not a directly activist agenda. One of the aims of the project is to understand how "responsible researchers" are fostered. We look into how ethical reflexivity is expressed, practiced and understood in the day-to-day of biomedical research environments. But what happens to our knowledge production when we make biomedical researchers engage in this bird's-eye view on their research and its socio-cultural circumstances? How can neither taking a distanced position, nor engaging in direct activism but rather pushing toward areas we consider possible hotbeds for public debate be further theoretically conceptualized? What does such an endeavor imply for our role as STS scholars? And how does that connect to the tendency to engage humanities and social science scholars as interpreters and mediators in cross-disciplinary projects in knowledge-intensive policy fields, such as ours ? In what way is the symmetry principle (Bloor, 1976) affected, when value-laden initiatives as ethical reflexivity and public engagement is treated as an inherent good or as "truths" to be pursued?

När covid-19-pandemin nådde Sverige mobiliserade kvinnojourerna snabbt eftersom de visste vad en nedstängning av samhället skulle kunna betyda för kvinnor och barn som lever under hot och med våld i sina hem. På kort tid kom myndigheternas rekommendationer om att arbeta hemma, upprätthålla social distans och undvika resor att minska möjligheterna till rörlighet. Detta gjorde det särskilt svårt för kvinnor som levde under hot och kontroll att komma i kontakt med myndigheter och kvinnojourer. Syftet med denna artikel är att förstå hur relationen mellan samhället och kvinnor som är utsatta för hot och våld i hemmet under pandemitider ser ut. Analysen utgår från en teoretisk modell för "det immunitära livet", för att förstå förhållandet mellan individ och samhälle. Studien består av telefonintervjuer som genomfördes våren 2020 med personal vid fem olika kvinnojourer. Ett viktigt resultat i studien är att misshandlade kvinnor under pandemin riskerar att berövas möjligheterna att skapa viktiga relationer med samhället, något som exempelvis kvinnojourer annars möjliggör.

In the early 1990s xenotransplantation (XTP) was a promising biotechnology, with many countries prepared to take this research to clinical trials. It was also a technology associated with so many problems and risks that the researchers sought financial support to continue their XTP research. This was, in many ways, an international concern, as the researchers tried to collaborate to overcome those problems and risks. But despite this international effort, the situation became a national policy process in many countries where researchers, politicians and stakeholders tried to find a solution and take the next step in XTP research. In this case study, we take a closer look at Sweden and how the national policy process took shape in the 1990s. As we will see in this case study, Swedish XTP researchers and politicians were involved in various international networks, but when it came to initiating a more formal policy process, the discussion became more or less national. Swedish law needed to change so that the country's XTP researchers could continue with their research and take it to clinical trials. The policy process was closely linked to the idea that Sweden as a nation could gain an advantage, both for the researchers and for the state. The new biotechnology could benefit the citizens and provide future funding for the welfare society. To achieve this, Swedish researchers needed to be the first to clinically introduce this technology. So this case study is about how a nation tries to gain advantages in an international research arena. It is also a case study of what role the citizens have in the policy process. Biotechnology that is problematic and risky, for various reasons, needs the approval of the general public, because they will be the end users. In this case study, we take a closer look at how researchers and politicians interacted with the citizens in the policy process.

AbstractThis study explores how social work professionals at women's shelters in Sweden experience, understand, and are responding to domestic violence under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative longitudinal research design was employed, and multiple semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 professionals at women's shelters over a period of one year. The results are presented in three overall themes; (a) professional challenges due to increased needs, (b) professionals' adjustments to new circumstances, and (c) professionals' attributions regarding client barriers to help seeking. The results show diverse and changing experiences among the professionals as the pandemic progressed. Clients and professionals have shared the same collective trauma associated with the pandemic, which has affected the professionals' understanding of and response to domestic violence. The professionals understand both clients and themselves as being more vulnerable and susceptible to risk under these new circumstances. Social work adjustments focused on maintaining contact, reducing risk and prioritizing safety, which had both positive and negative consequences for both clients and professionals. The study concludes that the professionals coped with the uncertainty they experienced during the pandemic by relying on both their previous knowledge and work experience of domestic violence and their experience of sharing trauma with clients.

"This book explores the societal resistance to accessibility for persons with disabilities, and tries to set an example of how to study exclusion in a time when numerous policies promise inclusion. With 11 chapters organised in three parts, the book takes a comprehensive approach to accessibility, covering transport and communication, knowledge and education, law and organisation. Topics within a wide cross-disciplinary field are covered, including disability studies, social work, sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, and history. The main example is Sweden, with its implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities within the context of the Nordic welfare state. By identifying and discussing persistent social and cultural conditions as well as recurring situations and interactions that nurture resistance to advancing accessibility, despite various strong laws promoting it, the book's conclusions are widely transferable. It argues for the value of alternating between methods, theoretical perspectives, and datasets to explore how new arenas, resources and technologies cause new accessibility concerns - and possibilities - for persons living with impairments. We need to be able to follow actors closely to uncover how they feel, act, and argue, but also to connect to wider discursive and institutional patterns and systems. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability studies, social work, sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, political science, and organization studies"--

This book explores the societal resistance to accessibility for persons with disabilities, and tries to set an example of how to study exclusion in a time when numerous policies promise inclusion. With 12 chapters organised in three parts, the book takes a comprehensive approach to accessibility, covering transport and communication, knowledge and education, law and organisation. Topics within a wide cross-disciplinary field are covered, including disability studies, social work, sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, and history. The main example is Sweden, with its implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities within the context of the Nordic welfare state. By identifying and discussing persistent social and cultural conditions as well as recurring situations and interactions that nurture resistance to advancing accessibility, despite various strong laws promoting it, the book's conclusions are widely transferable. It argues for the value of alternating between methods, theoretical perspectives, and datasets to explore how new arenas, resources and technologies cause new accessibility concerns — and possibilities — for persons living with impairments. We need to be able to follow actors closely to uncover how they feel, act, and argue, but also to connect to wider discursive and institutional patterns and systems. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability studies, social work, sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, political science, and organisation studies.

Accessibility today has a contradictory character. One the one hand, people with disabilities are welcomed and included, with ambitious promises in policies and declarations. On the other hand, they are still excluded in everyday practices. This volume explores this contradiction in three areas: city and transport, knowledge and education, and law, institutions and history. Sweden is the primary case, but the ambition is wider. The compilation includes studies rooted in disability studies, social work and sociology, as well as ethnology, cultural geography and gender studies, political science and law, architecture, history, anthropology and linguistics. It involves a range of theories and methods, from participant observation to historical analyses using archival data, from critical disability theory to ethnomethodology. Since resistance to accessibility today takes various forms, and transforms as society itself changes, we need to equip ourselves with a corresponding plurality and dexterity. Researchers have to be on the move, like the United Nations itself, whose 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities looks complete but requires constant monitoring to get nation-states to actualise its intentions. To study accessibility is to study exclusion and its constant drama, and in a democratic society this is highly relevant.

With the theme of the research conference of the NNHSH network we want researchers, both at doctoral and post-doctoral level, to reflect on how health practices and health policies in the Nordic Welfare States are being transformed and have been transformed in the past. The Nordic countries are all, more or less, in the midst of a transformation from a social democratic health care system, based on universal access for all citizens with no regard to their position, class or previous health practices, to a more neoliberal oriented health care regime with new - or perhaps in some ways very old - ideas about the body, health, and health care responsibilities. Sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt (1956) once suggested that the idea of "citizenship" in the development of a societal structure like the Western states of today served to establish a historically new position for individuals in preference to kinship and family status. Within different forms of government, such responsibilities are balanced differently between individual, family and state. For more than a century responsibility for health and healthiness in the Nordic countries has to a great extent been incumbent on the state. At the same time transformations of political ideologies have led to more pressure on individual - and familial - responsibilities. The conference aims at encouraging scholarly discussions highlighting the transformations of health politics in the Nordic countries and the consequences as observed and experienced by people in this context. Topics discussed can revolve around the role of governments in the furthering of transformations - be it regarding patient education, expectations of empowerment of the elderly in elderly care, or negotiations about the right to biological parenthood. It can also be about peoples´ embodied, verbalized and negotiated responses to the changes taking place. Furthermore, any health situation does not only concern patients or other people in need of care or help, but it also includes family-members as care providers, who may be drawn in to this role due to increasing expectations of kinship obligations and responsibilities.