Love Should Be Fun: Mothering As a Practice

This paper illustrates how mothering can be conceptualized as practice and how consumption can be understood as something that this practice requires. It spotlights emotions and how mothering expresses love towards a needing child with the help of consumptionpractice performances many times facilitated by bringing in the fun

Food, love and meta-practices : A study of everyday dinner consumption among single mothers

The everyday dinner usually involves a number of different and sometimes conflicting ambitions that may include striving for self-fulfillment and striving to care for one’s family and society at large. To understand the consumption that occurs in connection with these ambitions, consumer researchers must understand the context surrounding the everyday dinner. In this dissertation theories of practice are utilized as a conceptual framework to emphasize the importance of context. Theories of practice have gained renewed interest within the field of consumption. Yet, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) has neglected practice theories’ ability to operationalize the consumption context. The aim of this dissertation is to develop further CCT’s practice perspective to increase the understanding of the consumption context and thereby better understand consumption as a social and cultural phenomenon. An ethnographic approach is employed to identify what practices operate within a complex consumption situation such as the everyday dinner among single mothers; how these practices incorporate consumption in their strivings and how the different practices operating within the consumption situation interact with one another. This new approach comes to the conclusion that mothering, defined as a meta-practice, dominated the consumption situation and organized the other practices involved. A meta-practice is one with major influence over consumption and thus a type of practice consumption researchers should look for. Furthermore in Western society consumption situations, like the everyday dinner, seem to be especially important when it comes to anchoring meta-practices and thereby the social order. A preliminary characterization of the meta-practice is proposed as consisting of four different traits: I) its impact on the social order; II) its generalizability, density and superiority; III) its regulation and IV) its stability or slow change. However, more studies are necessary to explore these characteristics further

Hero shots: involved fathers conquering new discursive territory in consumer culture

In this paper, we explore how visual expressions of culture offer new discursive territory within which consumer cultural ideals can be negotiated on a global scale. Through a critical visual analysis of the revelatory case Swedish Dads, we find hero shots depicting involved fathers where children’s needs and the hermetic confines of the home take center stage, as opposed to the traditional fatherhood ideals portrayed in western contemporary advertising, media, and popular culture. We demonstrate how the Swedish state’s gender ideology was encoded into a communicative event in the form of hero shots and subsequently dispersed by visual consumers as well as political and commercial stakeholders pushing this particular agenda and/or capitalizing on its tendencies. This in such a way that the event conquered new discursive territory fostering new types of consumer cultural negotiations on fatherhood ideals also in other cultural settingspublishedVersio

Digital self-care for sleep problems in simple English: increased accessibility for people with a mother tongue other than Swedish

Sleep problems in the form of insomnia (difficulties falling asleep or sleeping through the night) are common in the general population, and even more prevalent among minority groups. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is considered the first-line treatment for insomnia, but many individuals from minority groups who suffer from insomnia may not have access to CBT due to language barriers. We aim to bridge part of this treatment gap in Sweden by developing a version of FastAsleep - a digital self-care program based on CBT techniques to treat insomnia - in simple English. The English version of the tool will be tested in a pilot feasibility study with English-speaking individuals in Sweden. If the preliminary results are successful, this version of FastAsleep can be further evaluated and translated into other important minority languages in Sweden, potentially increasing accessibility to evidence-based interventions for insomnia among minorities residing in Sweden