Beyond the Minefield

In recent years mining has taken centre stage in rural development. In part, this is a consequence of the ‘green transition’, where the demand for minerals to develop new energy systems is increasing dramatically. Using ethnographic methods, I take my starting point in Storuman, a sparsely populated municipality in the rural North of Sweden where three potential mines are already reterritorialising property rights and access, and the governance of land is being reconfigured. With the aim to explore how extractive interventions shape rural places in times of transition, I ask questions about the entanglements between people and land, the reconfigurations of territory, and what large scale extractive interventions mean for the conceptualisation of rural development in Sweden and beyond. To understand how the ‘green transition’ impacts rural areas and what the future for rural development entails, I bring together research on resource extraction, rural development, and indigeneity. By doing so, I show how the potential mines are generating open moments, where a state of uncertainty becomes a central part of life. I uncover how rather than being passive receivers of state policies, people take charge of their situation in open moments to steer the outcome of events. I argue that there is an overarching critique of how state policies and practices treat communities at the edge of the state. The core of this critique lies at the intersection of past and future, as people make sense of what unfolds in the open moment both as the latest instantiation of repression in a long history of colonial practices, and as a desire to reevaluate what development is and can be

Acoustic shape optimization using energy stable curvilinear finite differences

A gradient-based method for shape optimization problems constrained by the acoustic wave equation is presented. The method makes use of high-order accurate finite differences with summation-by-parts properties on multiblock curvilinear grids to discretize in space. Representing the design domain through a coordinate mapping from a reference domain, the design shape is obtained by inversion of the discretized coordinate map. The adjoint state framework is employed to efficiently compute the gradient of the loss functional. Using the summation-by-parts properties of the finite difference discretization, we prove stability and dual consistency for the semi-discrete forward and adjoint problems. Numerical experiments verify the accuracy of the finite difference scheme and demonstrate the capabilities of the shape optimization method on two model problems with real-world relevance

Territorial narratives: Talking claims in open moments

In the rural inland of northern Sweden, three mining projects are making the future of the land uncertain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we show how these potential mining interventions create ‘open moments’, turbulent events that destabilizes established claims to land. We analyse how actors such as reindeer herders, indigenous groups, local and national government and mining companies make claims to land, (i.e territorialising it) by drawing on discourses on environmental responsibility, sustainability, indigeneity or growth. By paying attention to language and knowledge production, we show how a multiplicity of actors narrate territory into being, allowing us to go beyond conventional notions of territory as produced ‘from above’ by the state or by counterterritorial movements ‘from below’. By ‘freezing time’ in the unfolding of the open moments we lend all these ‘territorial narratives’ equal space, in order to analyse the connection between actors and their relation to land. This allow us to show connections between what might otherwise be perceived as locked and antagonistic positions, but also how ongoing processes of territorialisation are influenced by and change peoples’ subject positions as the open moment unfolds on the ground

Adjoint-based inversion for stress and frictional parameters in earthquake modeling

We present an adjoint-based optimization method to invert for stress and frictional parameters used in earthquake modeling. The forward problem is linear elastodynamics with nonlinear rate-and-state frictional faults. The misfit functional quantifies the difference between simulated and measured particle displacements or velocities at receiver locations. The misfit may include windowing or filtering operators. We derive the corresponding adjoint problem, which is linear elasticity with linearized rate-and-state friction with time-dependent coefficients derived from the forward solution. The gradient of the misfit is efficiently computed by convolving forward and adjoint variables on the fault. The method thus extends the framework of full-waveform inversion to include frictional faults with rate-and-state friction. In addition, we present a space-time dual-consistent discretization of a dynamic rupture problem with a rough fault in antiplane shear, using high-order accurate summation-by-parts finite differences in combination with explicit Runge--Kutta time integration. The dual consistency of the discretization ensures that the discrete adjoint-based gradient is the exact gradient of the discrete misfit functional as well as a consistent approximation of the continuous gradient. Our theoretical results are corroborated by inversions with synthetic data. We anticipate that adjoint-based inversion of seismic and/or geodetic data will be a powerful tool for studying earthquake source processes; it can also be used to interpret laboratory friction experiments.Comment: Updated title, added additional references, provided additional details in sections 1 and 5, fixed typo

Villages in the urban landscape : reconfiguration of the local urban communities through community gardens and homestead associations in the heart of Stockholm

Across Sweden different initiatives are currently forming urban based local groups or networks, engage in local, sustainable development and transformation of their local community. Guerrilla and community gardening, culture and art projects, environmental transition initiatives and platforms for local democracy, are projects that all seem to indicate that a local community landscape is on the rise within the urban areas of Sweden. In the heart of Stockholm, I will investigate three local initiatives are currently involved in activities that can be seen as examples of this phenomenon They consist of two community gardens and one homestead association. This study investigates how these initiatives through every day practices are transforming or striving to transform their neighbourhood, creating a sense of community and platforms for political action. In addition to the initial aim, there is also a discussion on how these initiatives have the potential to become, a new social movement. In order to answer these questions a theoretical compound based the concepts community, practice and meaning and social movement have been used as analytical tools on a qualitative empirical study based on three cases

Där traditionens ande talar...

Denna uppsats om 15 hp har syftet att undersöka hur man socialiseras in i rollen som student genom aktiviteter vid Ultuna Studentkår. Studentlivet kan sägas vara fullt av profana ritualer, rutiner och bär på ett utvecklat symbolspråk. Under sin studieperiod deltar många av studenterna i dessa aktiviteter. Med hjälp av handling och tal inbegrips de i, förvaltar och formar föreställningar om den egna rollen – deras identitet som studenter och som blivande yrkesutövare. Materialet till uppsatsen har i första hand samlats in genom kvalitativa metoder. Med hjälp av observationer visas hur vardag, byråkrati, fest och högtid gestaltar och bidrar till detta identitetskapande. Ett skapande som sedan kommer följa studenterna genom deras karriärer som akademiker

From sewage sludge ash to a recycled feed phosphate-digestibility of precipitated calcium phosphate in broiler chickens and growing pigs

Today, EU is largely (-92%) dependent on the import of phosphates as most mines are located outside Europe. Because of the limited availability, phosphorus (P) is included on the list of Critical Raw Materials. Precipitated calcium phosphate (PCP) recovered from sewage sludge ash is a novel and sus-tainable option to replace mined P as raw material in feed phosphates, e.g. monocalcium phosphate (MCP) or dicalcium phosphate, but the digestibility has not yet been tested in vivo. The aim was therefore to determine PCP and MCP apparent ileal digestibility (AID) of P in broiler chickens and apparent (ATTD) and true (TTTD) total tract digestibility of P in growing pigs. A chicken study comprised 240 Ross 308 chickens that were housed in groups of eight from day 21 to day 28. Five diets were used, a basal diet and two test diets, which contributed either 0.075% (low) or 0.150% (high) additional P for each of the test sources (MCP and PCP). The basal and test diets were composed to achieve increasing levels of P and AID was calculated with regression analysis. In the pig study, eight individually housed pigs were used in a change-over study with two experimental periods. The pigs were fed a basal P-free diet in a preperiod to be able to estimate endogenous P losses and then two different diets in two periods using a change-over design, where MCP and PCP were the only P source, providing in total 0.33 (basal diet), 4.42 (MCP) and 3.53 (PCP) g kg-1P, respectively. The AID of P in PCP and MCP for chickens was 58.4 and 75.1% (P = 0.166). The ATTD and TTTD of P in PCP for pigs were 58.4 and 67.2%, respectively, which was lower (P < 0.001) than the corresponding values for MCP (82.1 and 89.1%), respectively. The digestibility of calcium (Ca) did not differ in the chicken diets with high inclusion levels of PCP and MCP (54.7 and 55.3%, respectively, P = 0.535), but was lower for PCP than MCP in the pig study (57.8 and 70.8% respectively, P = 0.001). In conclusion, the digestibility of P in PCP for chickens did not differ from conventional MCP, whereas for pigs, it was lower, but could be a viable alternative to other common sources of P.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Animal Consortium. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Food Choices and Coronary Heart Disease: A Population Based Cohort Study of Rural Swedish Men with 12 Years of Follow-up

Coronary heart disease is associated with diet. Nutritional recommendations are frequently provided, but few long term studies on the effect of food choices on heart disease are available. We followed coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality in a cohort of rural men (N = 1,752) participating in a prospective observational study. Dietary choices were assessed at baseline with a 15-item food questionnaire. 138 men were hospitalized or deceased owing to coronary heart disease during the 12 year follow-up. Daily intake of fruit and vegetables was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease when combined with a high dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 0.39, 95% CI 0.21–0.73), but not when combined with a low dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 1.70, 95% CI 0.97–2.98). Choosing wholemeal bread or eating fish at least twice a week showed no association with the outcome