Search

Riding became a widespread leisure activity for children in Sweden and Finland during the post-war decades through the emergence of riding schools. Drawing on books and comics published in Sweden and Finland from the 1960s to the present, together with interviews and observations at contemporary Swedish riding schools, we approach this development with a geographical, historical and sociological focus. We ask how children’s equestrian cultures were formed within the spaces of horse yards, especially riding schools, and how caring well was understood and negotiated through different types of knowledge and the idea and practice of horse ownership. As we show in the analysis, despite the increase of written knowledge about horses and their care, situated and relational knowledges based on interspecies interaction prevailed in children’s equestrian cultural spheres in which children had a chance to interact with animals and care for them outside the everyday spaces of family and school. In these cultures of interspecies care, ideas of horse ownership carried expectations of continuity where the child–horse relationship was secured and could develop. The entry to these spatial cultures was through rites of passage characterised by embodied interaction and hands-on care, where children learned to care for animals well.

Riding became a widespread leisure activity for children in Sweden and Finland during the post-war decades through the emergence of riding schools. Drawing on books and comics published in Sweden and Finland from the 1960s to the present, together with interviews and observations at contemporary Swedish riding schools, we approach this development with a geographical, historical and sociological focus. We ask how children’s equestrian cultures were formed within the spaces of horse yards, especially riding schools, and how caring well was understood and negotiated through different types of knowledge and the idea and practice of horse ownership. As we show in the analysis, despite the increase of written knowledge about horses and their care, situated and relational knowledges based on interspecies interaction prevailed in children’s equestrian cultural spheres in which children had a chance to interact with animals and care for them outside the everyday spaces of family and school. In these cultures of interspecies care, ideas of horse ownership carried expectations of continuity where the child–horse relationship was secured and could develop. The entry to these spatial cultures was through rites of passage characterised by embodied interaction and hands-on care, where children learned to care for animals well

Sewage management is crucial to the functioning of cities, yet, in the global North, seldom acknowledged in public. Wastewater infrastructures are mainly hidden underground and human excrement is considered a private matter. However, to make sanitation stay invisible, its dysfunctionality (e.g., leaking pipes, aging wastewater plants) is sometimes in acute need of being highlighted. Moreover, the work essential to keep the infrastructures maintained needs to be recognized and compensated for. Based on interviews with actors in the sewage management sector in Sweden, news articles, and public information campaigns, the present article explores how political action and public engagement are mobilized through moves between visibility and invisibility. The analysis focuses on four different modes of problematization: inproblematization, problematization, deproblematization, and unproblematization. Inscribed in the research fields of urban infrastructures and public engagement, the article sheds light on how the public secret of managing feces is upheld, through balancing acts such as creating discursive space, negotiating infrastructural disruptions, making problems treatable, and individualizing solutions. These different modes of problematization are crucial to achieving the right public attention and political measures.

Avloppshantering är en infrastrukturell fråga med avgörande betydelse för såväl vardagsliv som miljön. Men infrastrukturerna är sköra, och människors beteenden kan orsaka att de brakar samman. Medborgarna måste uppfostras, men samtidigt är avföring ett känsligt ämne och toalettbeteenden privata. Hur kan VA-branschen informera om sådant vi inte vill tala om och dessutom styra konsumenters toalettvanor i en tid präglad av det fria valet? Artikeln handlar om hur humor fungerar neutraliserande och möjliggör information om kiss och bajs. Informationen använder sig av rim, lek och komik för att på ett explicit sätt uppfostra vuxna människor, disciplinera deras handlingar och skapa önskvärda subjekt. Detta sker genom att avdramatisera det intima toalettbeteendet men även själva styrningen av människor. I denna genre är pekpinnar vanligt förekommande i form av en slags metaironisk styrning, det vill säga med ett ironiskt förhållningssätt till själva ironin. Toaletthumorn är övertydlig propaganda, och därmed ofarlig för det liberala subjektet.

Policies intended to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics have been promoted as a key to preventing antimicrobial resistance. However, reduction of antibiotic use in health care potentially involves tensions between health of the patient receiving care and the health of the (future) population. An analysis of general practitioners’ talk about everyday medical practice in relation to respiratory tract infections shows how they manage to move between policy and patient interests through ‘alignment work.’ Alignment work is the discursive strategies used to manage risks and demands related to antibiotic resistance as well as patients receiving health care. Through alignment work conflicting demands and risks can be juggled, and antibiotic prescribing becomes discursively doable. Alignment work is not solely a matter of making conflicting demands and risks coherent, but might also involve leaving tensions and ambiguities intact. It enables general practitioners to align with AMR policy and the imperative of being restrictive with antibiotics, while still managing the risks threatening individual patients. As a consequence, lapses from AMR policy do not necessarily undermine it, but can instead be crucial to allowing the policy to work in the context of actual medical practice and, as such, be crucial to the overall success of the policy.

Urban infrastructures such as wastewater services are essential to the functioning of cities. Through waste work, sewage gets transformed and revalued. Non-humans are potentially unruly agents in the transformation of “dirty” sewage into biogas, a “clean” energy resource in environmental terms. But these values are not given or applied in any simple sense. What goes on under the surface, beneath the street or inside a pile of dirt is the invaluable work that constitutes a city’s multispecies waste management. The article argues that rats, worms and microbes perform labour in the urban wastewater economy, as they eat, digest and breed. This article investigates the role of these non-human waste workers and the cultural and economic values they produce in the intersections between the socio-technical infrastructures where the urban and the animal meet. The article makes use of “trash-tracing” as a method and follows the multiple steps taken in the chain of sewage management in the city of Gävle, Sweden. It contributes new knowledge on the waste ecologies of cities by paying close attention to shifting and paradoxical valuations of wastewater, as it is configured through nonhuman work., Waste Work in the Sustainability Economy: Transforming Values of Biological Waste

Vision tends to be associated with the mind and theorized as the least bodily sense. Notably, the eye often symbolizes distance. Foregrounding the fleshy embeddedness of the gaze through an analysis of jitterbug, the present article stresses the bodily and intimate significance of vision in dancing. Analyzing ethnographic observation and interview data, we develop a phenomenological approach to dance and gaze that stresses the need to address multi-sensoriality, adding vision to the perspective of tactile-kinesthetic touch. However, the article develops a more-than-optic perspective on “dancing as vision.” The “sensing eye” is analyzed, first, as a body technique central to couple dancing and, second, as the use and meaning of vision across spatial distance, as between dancers and bystanders. Throughout the article, the dance floor unveils connections between eye and body, self and other, and passive and active and thus pushes notions of emplacement and embodiment.

This article unpacks the neat straightforwardness of the 'waste regime' of the circular economy of food waste and its main idea: 'waste as resource'. It explores the making of circularity by paying detailed attention to what is conceptualized as 'make-up' work, i.e. how interruptions and leaks along waste flows are handled in practice. Make-up work capitalizes on its double meaning. First, it highlights the covering of cracks needed in order to transform waste to energy. Second, make-up work pinpoints that the neatness of circularity is far from a straightforward technical system, but is continuously made. Through an interview-based study in Sweden, the article illuminates three steps of transformation of food waste into the commodity of biogas, analysing the material and cultural transformations, showing that the micro-management of preventing such interruptions is crucial. Problems such as lack of or misfit material, difficulties in sorting the substrate effectively, over/underproduction of gas and the political decisions steering the conditions for supply and demand are equally crucial and pose the threat that the production will be viewed as inefficient. Based on these results, the article emphasizes the need to problematize the paradigm of the circular economy and the zero-waste regime, on the one hand, and to recognize the work involved in striving for a sustainable society, on the other.

This book investigates death as part of contemporary everyday experience and practices. Through a cultural sociological lens, it studies death as it remains constantly at the edge of our consciousness, shaping the ways in which we move through social reality. As such, Death Matters is a significant contribution to death studies, going beyond traditional parameters of the field by addressing the cultural omnipresence of death.The contributions analyses several death-related meaning-making processes, arguing that meanings emerging from culturally shared narratives, social institutions, and material conditions, are just as important as ’death practices’ in understanding the role of death in society. Drawing on the related themes of places of absence and presence, disease and bodies, and persons and non-persons, the authors explore a variety of areas of social life, from haunting to celebrity deaths, to move the notion of death from the margins of social reality to on going everyday life.

In a time when we fear overstepping the planet boundaries, circular economy appears as important for a sustainable society. Promising economic and environmental gain, it is promoted by political bodies as well as business companies. In the circular economy trash turns into valuable treasures; waste is recycled and filled with economic and cultural value. In an ongoing project the transformations of biological waste are examined in urban contexts. This paper explores the flows of waste water in a municipal organization, from “shit” to new commodities on the market. Where are the leaks in this supposed circular economy? How is economic and environmental value added to/removed from sewage during the process? Through the methodology of “trash-tracing”, we follow how waste water is valued, from flushed down from toilet to its end-up products: biogas and fertilizer. The study is based on an ethnography of wastewater management in a Swedish municipality, including interviews with twenty “waste workers” and observations of a treatment plant, a land fill site and a biogas plant. During the transformation of wastewater into products conflicts appear between 1) public and private logics; 2) environmental and economic gain; 3) nature and society. In these conflicts valuation processes of waste are ongoing, branding the municipality as sustainable city, employing new waste workers, but with limited economic and environmental value in the final products. We discuss the inherent conflicts of the circular economy as well as methodologies to explore societal infrastructure through a micro-perspective on culturally hidden phenomena such as waste water.

Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous to our ‘human’ societies. Interdisciplinary human/animal research has - for 50 years - drawn attention to how animals are ever-present in what we think of as human spaces and cultures. Our societies are built with animals and through all kinds of multispecies interactions. From public spaces and laboratories to homes, farms and in the ‘wilderness’; human and nonhuman animals meet to make space and place together, through webs of power relations. However, the very spaces of these interactions are not mute or passive themselves. The spaces where species meet matter, and shape human/animal relations. This book takes as its starting point the relationship between place and human/animal interaction. It brings together the work of leading scholars in human/animal studies, from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. With a distinct focus on place, physical space and biocultural geography, the authors of this volume consider the ways in which space, human and nonhuman animals co-constitute each other, how they make spaces together, produce meaning around them, struggle over access, how these places are storied and how stories of spaces matter. Presenting studies thematically and including a variety of nonhuman creatures in a range of settings, this book delivers new understandings of the importance of nonhuman animals to understandings of place - and the role of places in shaping our interactions with nonhuman creatures. As pets, as laboratory animals, as exhibits, as parasites, as livestock, as quarry, as victims of disaster or objects of folklore, this book offers insights into human/animal intermingling at locales and settings of great relevance to many areas of research, including geography, sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, history and anthropology. This book meets the evolving interest in human/animal interaction, anthrozoology, and the environmental humanities in relation to the research o

How do riders valuate human and equine psyches and bodies? The paper builds on a study in which riding groups are followed before, during and after riding lessons. The analysis shows that early career riders view horses partly as passive tools and partly as threatening adversaries. After a while, riding school pupils come to see horses’ vulnerable position—more experienced riders explain that they try to understand the horses’ perspective of the riding school, which includes long days, difficult pupils and sometimes violent treatment. While riders increasingly come to think of horses as persons, they begin thinking of themselves as human animals—as corporeal rather than cerebral beings. The riding school is thus a place where humans are becoming horse, and the horses emerge as human-like creatures. But while most riders contrast the liberating environment of the riding school to the alienating conditions of the work-week, some also recognize that the riding school requires that the horses are alienated from their own equine selves. Ultimately, “good horses” are the ones seen as willing to accept these conditions. “Good riders” learn to benefit from those same conditions., Intimitetens sociala former

Despite experiences of controversies, other obstacles, and an endless need, why do people continue to feed street dogs? And what is the relationship between food, animals and place? Approaching the city through the lens of food has inspired this chapter in several ways, causing me to ask what is going on when street dogs are fed in public. First, I investigate how humans and animals meet in the urban space, through the act of giving and receiving food, and how these interactions themselves shape places and bodies. Second, by looking in particular at feeding practices in Kolkata, India and the interaction between canine street wanderers and their human caretakers, I discuss the relation between domestication/ferality and feeding. The third step is then to connect spatiality and ferality through the concept of ‘zoocities,’ problematizing certain normative orders of human/animal relations, places and food, thus, pointing at the potential subversiveness of ‘feral feeding.’ The chapter draws on online data from a large Kolkata Facebook group, and shows how feeders conceptualized as figures ‘moving quietly in the shadows,’ on the one hand themselves become feral, liminal creatures. On the other hand, they produce the commonplace image of Kolkata as a city that takes care of its poor souls.

In lieu of an abstract: This volume gathers Swedish and international Human Animal Studies scholars on the topic of human animal geographies., The Posthumanities Hub

Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous to our `human' societies. Interdisciplinary human/animal research has - for 50 years - drawn attention to how animals are ever-present in what we think of as human spaces and cultures. Our societies are built with animals and through all kinds of multispecies interactions. From public spaces and laboratories to homes, farms and in the `wilderness'; human and nonhuman animals meet to make space and place together, through webs of power relations. However, the very spaces of these interactions are not mute or passive themselves. The spaces where species meet matter, and shape human/animal relations. This book takes as its starting point the relationship between place and human/animal interaction. It brings together the work of leading scholars in human/animal studies, from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. With a distinct focus on place, physical space and biocultural geography, the authors of this volume consider the ways in which space, human and nonhuman animals co-constitute each other, how they make spaces together, produce meaning around them, struggle over access, how these places are storied and how stories of spaces matter. Presenting studies thematically and including a variety of nonhuman creatures in a range of settings, this book delivers new understandings of the importance of nonhuman animals to understandings of place - and the role of places in shaping our interactions with nonhuman creatures. As pets, as laboratory animals, as exhibits, as parasites, as livestock, as quarry, as victims of disaster or objects of folklore, this book offers insights into human/animal intermingling at locales and settings of great relevance to many areas of research, including geography, sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, history and anthropology. This book meets the evolving interest in human/animal interaction, anthrozoology, and the environmental humanities in relation to the research o, QC 20220329