Speaking bodies – silenced voices: Child protection and the knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’

Amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal: Children’s moral status in child welfare

This article is a discursive examination of children’s status as knowledgeable moral agents within the Swedish child welfare system and in the widely used assessment framework BBIC. Departing from Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, three discursive positions of children’s moral status are identified: amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal. The findings show the undoubtedly moral child as largely missing and children’s agency as diminished, deviant or rendered ambiguous. Epistemic injustice applies particularly to disadvantaged children with difficult experiences who run the risk of being othered, or positioned as reproducing or accommodating to the very same social problems they may be victimised by

No Man´s Land? : En fallstudie av Zene Zenama - en gränsöverskridande kvinnoorganisation

Denna uppsats baseras på fältarbete i efterkrigstidens Bosnien & Hercegovina och handlar om gränsöverskridande samarbetsrelationer inom ramen för kvinnoorganisationen Zene Zenama. För en mer nyanserad illustration av organisationens multidimensionella samarbete utgår jag ifrån intersektionalitetsperspektivet som teoretiskt ramverk och huvudsakligen intervjuer som empiri. Jag söker även förstå kontexten och få svar på vilken betydelse kriget har för organisationen samt hur olika jämställdhetsfrågor legitimeras. Min analys visar att krigets betydelse inte kan underskattas i organisationens kamp för jämställdhet, vilken inte heller står helt opåverkad från det transnationella ekonomiska stödets premisser. Samtidigt som krigets konsekvenser verkar enande i kampen för kvinnors rättigheter och i stärkandet av en regional identitet tenderar de även att utesluta andra erfarenheter av utsatthet som inte direkt är förknippade med krigets förödande följder

(Bio)välfärd för barn och bortom : Intersektionella orättvisor i barndomar och den sociala barnavården i Sverige

The current thesis discusses how tools for analysing power are developed predominately for adults, and thus remain underdeveloped in terms of understanding injustices related to age, ethnicity/race and gender in childhoods. The overall ambition of this dissertation is to inscribe a discourse of intersecting social injustices as relevant for childhoods and child welfare, and by interlinking postcolonial, feminist, and critical childhood studies. The dissertation is set empirically within the policy and practice of Swedish child welfare, here exemplified by the assessment framework Barns Behov i Centrum (BBIC). It aims to explore how Swedish child welfare, as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowing subjects, constitutes an arena for claims and responses to intersecting social justice issues. The material consists of BBIC primers and selected samples from, a total of 283 case reports from a Swedish social service agency. The case reports address assessments of children (0­­–12 years of age). This dissertation is based on four qualitative studies using discourse analysis, as well as analysis inspired by thematic and case-study methodology. Two studies focus on child welfare discourses in BBIC documents involving social problems and violence, and two studies are based on child welfare case reports. Studies I­­-II address child welfare policy and practice by analysing the conditions required for children to participate, in terms of children’s moral status and in terms of status of ‘evidencing’ needs for protection. Studies III­­-IV explore this further from the perspective of intersecting and embodied social injustices in childhoods. Together, the studies interconnect child welfare as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowers with child welfare as a moral arena for claims to rights, recognition, and social justice. The synthesised findings point to child biowelfare, in which justice discourses are largely absent. Biowelfare is informed by a mode of knowing and ‘evidencing’ risks to children’s health and development, which are confined to scientific predicting-believing, seeing-believing by professionals and a moral economy of care, all of which constrain the idea that injustices are structural and intersecting. Biowelfare primarily responds to children as ‘speaking’ biological bodies, rather than as voices of justice. In this sense, injustices of an epistemological nature are interconnected with social injustices. When issues of justice are mobilised in case reports and policy, they come across as rather ‘unjust’, primarily confined to the sphere of the family home of racialised children and not connected to ‘general’ children. In addition to intersections of age, ethnicity/race and gender, class and health are fundamental to recognition and protection in biowelfare. Finally, the dissertation indicates the need for a moral economy which responds to intersecting social injustices such as racial, gender-based and ageist violence in childhoods, and violations of children’s bodily integrity. Key words: biowelfare, child protection, child welfare, critical childhood studies, critical social work, embodiment, epistemic injustice, epistemology, feminist theory, intersectionality, justice subjectivity, moral economy, moral subjectivity, participation, postcolonial theory, poststructural social work, social justice, violenc

(Bio)välfärd för barn och bortom : Intersektionella orättvisor i barndomar och den sociala barnavården i Sverige

The current thesis discusses how tools for analysing power are developed predominately for adults, and thus remain underdeveloped in terms of understanding injustices related to age, ethnicity/race and gender in childhoods. The overall ambition of this dissertation is to inscribe a discourse of intersecting social injustices as relevant for childhoods and child welfare, and by interlinking postcolonial, feminist, and critical childhood studies. The dissertation is set empirically within the policy and practice of Swedish child welfare, here exemplified by the assessment framework Barns Behov i Centrum (BBIC). It aims to explore how Swedish child welfare, as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowing subjects, constitutes an arena for claims and responses to intersecting social justice issues. The material consists of BBIC primers and selected samples from, a total of 283 case reports from a Swedish social service agency. The case reports address assessments of children (0­­–12 years of age). This dissertation is based on four qualitative studies using discourse analysis, as well as analysis inspired by thematic and case-study methodology. Two studies focus on child welfare discourses in BBIC documents involving social problems and violence, and two studies are based on child welfare case reports. Studies I­­-II address child welfare policy and practice by analysing the conditions required for children to participate, in terms of children’s moral status and in terms of status of ‘evidencing’ needs for protection. Studies III­­-IV explore this further from the perspective of intersecting and embodied social injustices in childhoods. Together, the studies interconnect child welfare as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowers with child welfare as a moral arena for claims to rights, recognition, and social justice. The synthesised findings point to child biowelfare, in which justice discourses are largely absent. Biowelfare is informed by a mode of knowing and ‘evidencing’ risks to children’s health and development, which are confined to scientific predicting-believing, seeing-believing by professionals and a moral economy of care, all of which constrain the idea that injustices are structural and intersecting. Biowelfare primarily responds to children as ‘speaking’ biological bodies, rather than as voices of justice. In this sense, injustices of an epistemological nature are interconnected with social injustices. When issues of justice are mobilised in case reports and policy, they come across as rather ‘unjust’, primarily confined to the sphere of the family home of racialised children and not connected to ‘general’ children. In addition to intersections of age, ethnicity/race and gender, class and health are fundamental to recognition and protection in biowelfare. Finally, the dissertation indicates the need for a moral economy which responds to intersecting social injustices such as racial, gender-based and ageist violence in childhoods, and violations of children’s bodily integrity. Key words: biowelfare, child protection, child welfare, critical childhood studies, critical social work, embodiment, epistemic injustice, epistemology, feminist theory, intersectionality, justice subjectivity, moral economy, moral subjectivity, participation, postcolonial theory, poststructural social work, social justice, violenc

From Asylum Back to Futurity

This qualitative study is inspired by queer-feminist elaborations on normative and queer temporality, where I seek a temporal terminology of displacement in the context of migration in Sweden. The focus is on former asylum seekers from the region of former Yugoslavia, who in the 1990s, had years-long periods of uncertain residence statuses and unemployment. This interview-based study deals with retrospective narratives of uncertain-futures, often described as wasted years. I consider temporal stasis and the narratives of loss in their intersections with timings in heteronormative life trajectories and logics of progress and futurity. This thesis indicates that the valuation of time operates through mechanisms of power, where the terminology of sooner-later gives character to re/integration and measurements of normativity in working-age adult life. In the year 2011 time has regained its value and meaning. Considering the current hectic lifestyles in employ¬ment and stable residence, time is no longer still but experienced as quickly passing and in short supply. Another indication is that temporal stasis can be linked to the contexts of refuge as well as to the ambiguities regarding the predictable and monotonous “work-home” schedules, which offer other dimensions to work and free time

"Kvinnor, invandrare & andra handikappade" En diskursanalys av "mångfald" och "jämställdhet"

Denna studie är ett alternativt synsätt på en kommuns mångfalds- och jämställdhetsfrämjande. Vår uppsats är en diskursiv analys av de normativa föreställningarna kring begreppen "mångfald" och "jämställdhet" med vilken vi uppmärksammar hur det till synes positiva mångfalds- och jämställdhetsfrämjandet i själva verket inbegrips av negativa inslag. Vi granskar inte bara hur interaktionen fungerar mellan dessa värdeladdade begrepp utan också effekterna därav. Studien avgränsar sig till Landskrona kommuns mångfalds- och jämställdhetspolicys, med intervjuer som kompletterande inslag, genomförda med strategiskt utvalda representanter från kommunen. Genom den här uppsatsen uppmärksammas de bristfälliga perspektiven som råder över begreppen "mångfald" och "jämställdhet". Dels belyser vi hur begreppen i sin samverkan interagerar som exkluderingsmekanismer och reproduktioner av rådande maktförhållanden. Dels uppmärksammar vi den kontradiktion som sker i samspelet och då policys motarbetar varandras respektive främjande. Som ett alternativt synsätt föreslår vi intersektionalitetsperspektivet, ett perspektiv med betydligt mindre benägenhet till exkludering, osynliggörande och stereotypisering av individer i samhället