Is the Arctic really urbanising?

L’anthropologie des sociétés inuit de l’Arctique perçoit de plus en plus une tendance générale à l’urbanisation à travers toute la région, tendance qui englobe les communautés locales à petite échelle aussi bien que les bourgades et les villes. Les Inuit migrent vers les villes extérieures à l’Arctique et vivent dans le Nord dans des conditions fortement teintées d’urbanisation. Les ouvrages universitaires et politiques suggèrent qu’il existe une relation de plus en plus étroite entre les résidents de l’Arctique et les villes. Après un survol historique des habitats permanents du Nunavut et du Groenland, afin d’illustrer l’intégration structurelle des sociétés arctiques, cet article démontre que l’urbanisation suit des trajectoires historiques spécifiques créant des situations urbaines différentes. L’auteure discute de la pertinence des concepts «d’urbanisation» et «d’urbanisme» lorsqu’on les applique à l’Arctique, et propose une perspective d’anthropologie urbaine susceptible de représenter une manière productive d’envisager les réalités sociales et culturelles mondialisées de l’Arctique contemporain.The anthropology of the Arctic (Inuit) societies is increasingly acknowledging a general urbanising trend throughout the region, encompassing small-scale, localized, communities as well as towns and cities. Inuit migrate to cities outside the Arctic and live in the North under circumstances strongly tinged by urbanism. Policy and academic literature suggests that there is an increasingly close relation between Arctic residents and cities. After an historic overview of permanent settlement in Nunavut and Greenland to illustrate the structural integration of Arctic societies, this article points to the fact that urbanisation follows historically specific trajectories and creates different urban situations. The author discusses the relevance of the concepts “urbanisation” and “urbanism” to the Arctic, and proposes an urban anthropological perspective that offers a productive way to approach the globalised social and cultural realities of the contemporary Arctic

Health Promotion in Denmark:from Critical Potential to Individualisation and Marginalisation

Health promotion has been a part of the policies, strategies and services of the Nordic welfare states since the beginning of the millennium. This article contributes to analyses of health promotion in political programs, institutions and practices in Denmark in later years, and holds a special interest in how inequality in health is addressed. In the Nordic countries, universalism has been a key tenet of welfare services, with great potential of guiding health promotion towards more equality in health. However, a neoliberal development over the last two decades has influenced the field of health and also the ideas, conceptions and strategies of health promotion. This article looks into how health promotion has taken form in Denmark, through conflicts of interest in health policies, and changes in central health promotion programs, that turn away from earlier universalistic and social political framing of health prevention and promotion. Health promotion in Denmark has been marked by years of conflicts and the interest in influencing the psychosocial environment of health to gain more equality in health has weakened. The analysis shows that central health promotion programs that direct local government practices, do not identify the characteristics of the psychosocial environments of health for various groups of citizens, but identify socially less privileged groups with potential health risks, and wishes to intervene into the social reproduction of unwanted health conduct. Health promotion plays an increasing role in the categorisation and discrimination of less privileged citizens on the background of their health conduct and social positions and situations. In institutional practices in child and family health promotion the article finds that inequality in health is not addressed as a professional problem, but is none the less present in the way citizens are deligitimised, categorised and marginalised. Health promotion institutions on this background distribute obligations and invite engagement of citizens in socially segregated ways. These categorising and discriminatory practices contribute to excluding and devaluating the problems of social inequality from health promotion in schools, kindergartens and health care institutions for children and parents. 

Deconstructing Gangsterism in the Western Cape Policy Response to the National Anti-Gangsterism Strategy

In the Province of the Western Cape in South Africa, gangsterism continues to be associated with issues of violence, crime and localised conflicts, affecting residents on the Cape Flats in particular. Although the country's legal framework promotes human rights and despite ongoing interventions by law enforcement, the effectiveness of government responses is still debated by politicians as well as the general public. Using Carol Bacchi's ‘What's the Problem Represented to Be' (2009) approach to policy analysis, the aim of this dissertation is to deconstruct the Western Cape's political problematisation and representation of the ‘problem' by analysing the Western Cape Provincial Policy response to the National Anti-Gangsterism Strategy. From a social constructivist angle, this dissertation presumes policy as prescriptive guidelines that dictate action. Further, the aim is to discover how the problem is understood and represented and thus analyse which discourses and material responses are generated and which are not. The findings confirm that there is a discrepancy between what is articulated in policy and what actually happens on the ground, i.e. between discourse and practice. Moreover, it will be argued that sustained anti-gang intervention demand that structural obstacles and inequality in lieu of the spill over from the Apartheid era are addressed. Taking notice of these aspects, the minor dissertation concludes that it is critical to figure out how best to transform conflict conditions in areas with high levels of gang violence with the view to allowing both youth groups and individuals to exert agency and become empowered in pursuit of individual and community resilience

La crisis del aprendizaje, el conocimiento profesional y el bienestar en el trabajo social y en el sector sanitario

Traducción del inglés: José González Monteagud

Struggles of professionalism and emotional labour in standardized mental health care

This article points out how recent public sector reforms under headings as New Public Management, Lean and Quality Reforms entail different forms for standardization, and examines how this development instigates a transformation of interdisciplinary and highly skilled emotional labor in mental healthcare. It is based on an ethnographic study of a Danish child psychiatric unit, which ‘produces’ diagnoses and treatment/therapy for children and their families. We illustrate how the enforcement of standardization upsets the balance between the humanistic and medical aspects of psychiatry as a discipline and field of practice, and show how this development challenges professional identities, interdisciplinary collaboration and hierarchical relations. The development is however negotiated, reformulated, and opposed, in teams of mental health professionals. In this context of increasing standardization, highly skilled emotional labor unfolds. We point out how acceleration and leaning of work procedures increases the emotional labor in relation to clients, partners, and colleagues. But paradoxically, at the same time, emotional labor becomes still more invisible as it is excluded from the standardized schemes. The study illustrates the crucial role of emotional labor in mental care work and points out how it is left to the professionals to negotiate paradoxes and make ends meet

Autoethnography and Psychodynamics in Interrelational Spaces of the Research Process

This article takes the stance that the subjectivity of the researcher is an integral part of the research process. It should be studied as a key to understanding the interrelational processes of meaning in an interview situation. The article demonstrates how the subjectivity of the researcher can be made accessible methodologically and methodically by combining a psychodynamic approach with an autoethnographic approach. The methodical question is therefore how the researcher can conduct introspection and at the same time reflect upon and analyse the central object of investigation. The approach is psychoanalytically informed, but autoethnography became the actual vehicle for moving beyond reflections on the psychodynamics represented in the texts. The researcher ventured into an introspection of not only the texts, but also her own feelings, fantasies, and bodily experiences at the time of the interview and also when bringing the data into new situations. The abstract reflections after the interview situation were left for a while, and instead a more experiential and sensual/bodily understanding appeared, based on narratives, feelings, and reflections from the research field. In doing so, the affective and experiential personal process became an important step in the interpretation