Research
Research environments at the Department of Sociology
Everyday-life and life-world research
Director of research: Ann-Mari Sellerberg
Everyday-life and life-world research examines the things we all take for granted as we go about our ordinary lives. The members of our research group study how people relate to the world around them, a world in most cases not created by them. Our research centres on how people understand and manage their circumstances, circumstances that may well circumscribe their choices, yet can also offer opportunities. True, it is not only a matter of going over individuals' positive everyday strategies or refusal to accept their situation; all too frequently tragic limitations are at work, while people's creative practices can equally well lead to devastating failures. The central idea is that our behaviour in our ordinary lives has consequences for our behaviour in other situations, and for the future.
Criminology Research Network
Chairman: Malin Åkerström
The study of social deviance and social control are classic areas of interest for the social sciences. It includes fundamental issues of cultural understandings what is moral and what is immoral, what is normal and what is abnormal? What is considered crime, punishment and social problems? Which phenomenon is defined as deviant and how are such definitions created and sustained?
Network for Research in Criminology and Deviant Behaviour at Lund University was established in 1993 and has since then been an informal forum and meeting places for students and researchers from various faculties. We have been engaged in a plenitude of various research projects. The lack of fear of crime in the Finnish archipelago, narratives and accounts of bribes and corruption, drug users career, betrayal and treachery, staffs ambivalence towards new rehabilitation problems, crime during war, conflicts as ritual in prisons, nursing home scandals, police work with battered women, illegal immigration, studies of crime victims (victims as social work, victim shelters, etc) ”these are only a few illustrations of projects carried out by researchers associated by this network.
Politics: Categories of suffering
This field of research originally covered the psychiatric field, notably the neuropsychiatric or neurobehavioral diagnoses dominating both psychiatric research and socio-political practice during the past decade. Participants in the group have dealt with questions like the rapid increase in diagnoses and diagnostic practices, particularly in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, and also approached problems among the adult population, such as burn-out. What has been searched for, on another level, is the transition from psychodynamics to biologized psychiatry, often presented as new knowledge. This focus of attention still remains within the group, and new research agendas covering psychiatry are in progress.
Social Policy, Working Life and Global Welfare (SWG)
Chair and coordinator: Antoinette Hetzler
SWG has as its policy to be a research network center of excellence that ties together both an inter-disciplinary and a multi-problem focus over areas of contemporary social change. We have chosen three central areas, which in their turn function as spin-offs for a variety of research interests both theoretically and empirically. Starting with social policy, the mutuality of social policy and labor policy create an automatic emphasis on changes in working life politically, practically, and individually. Concepts such as de-commodification and re-commodification, paid and unpaid work, the nation state as regulator and/or redistributor, work and care, changing families and increased productivity, as well as social rights and the public identity become an intricate part of the SWG research environment. Work with social policy and working life leads inevitably to our third central area, global welfare. Developed welfare states faced with new challenges from globalization are being dichotomized into those that lower wages to keep jobs and those that increase productivity and support a growing group of œoutsiders. Both models are influencing the development of global welfare. The SWG research agenda is deliberately broad in order to contribute to theoretical development and to connect areas of related research.
Sociology of knowledge
Sociology of knowledge can be defined in a broad and a narrow sense. In the former sense, the subject is delineated to studies of the relationships between various kinds of human cognition and the social environment (organization, institution, group, class) in which they emerge and develop. In the broader sense which we employ here, sociological studies of meta-theoretical issues and issues belonging to the philosophy of science are included. This research environment has several purposes. One is to keep the department/seminar members a jour with international sociology of knowledge and sociological theory development. Another is to constitute a forum for examination of the participants research Ph.D. students as well as senior researchers. A third is to identify and develop cooperation that can form the basis for research applications.
Sustainable development
Chairpersons: Lisa Eklund and Mikael Klintman
This research group focuses on theoretical and empirical aspects of sustainable development understood as encompassing three interrelated components; economic, social and ecosystems sustainability. The focus is of particular importance given the global sustainable development agenda currently being shaped to replace the Millennium Development Goals agenda after 2015, as well as various national and local sustainable development initiatives, such as the Generational Goal established by the Swedish government in 2010. Recurrent themes under scrutiny concern, on the one hand, how the concept of sustainable development, its components, and its policy and practical manifestations at global and local levels are shaped by individual and collective action, and on the other hand, how policies and institutions framed within the sustainable development framework influence behaviours, identities, and strategies of various actors at different levels. Key areas of interest include social policy, environmental policy, water resource management, poverty reduction strategies, governance, migration, demographic transitions, gender equality, health, consumption and economic sociology.
Last updated: 2013-04-29
Website contact: Hanna Skoog