Publications

Conflicts over the management and governance of forests seem to be increasing. Previous media studies in this area have largely focused on analysing the portrayal of specific conflicts. This study aims to review how a broad range of forest conflicts are portrayed in the Swedish media, analysing their temporal, spatial, and relational dimensions. We applied topic modelling, a machine learning approach, to analyse 53,600 articles published in the Swedish daily press between 2012 and 2022. We identified 916 topics, of which 94 were of interest for this study. Our results showed ten areas of forest conflicts: hunting and fishing (35% of total coverage), energy (24%), recreation and tourism (11%), nature conservation (8%), forest damages (6%), international issues (5%), forestry (5%), reindeer husbandry (4%), media and politics (2%), and mining (1%). The overall coverage of forest conflicts increased significantly over the study period, potentially reflecting an actual increase in forest conflicts. Some of the conflicts were continuously reported upon over time, while the coverage of others exhibited seasonal or event-related patterns. Four conflicts received most of their coverage in specific regions, while others were covered across the whole of Sweden. A relational analysis of the conflicts revealed three clusters of forest conflicts focused respectively on industrial, cultural, and conservation conflicts. Our results emphasise the value of using topic modelling to understand the overall patterns and trends of the media coverage of current land use conflicts, while also highlighting potential areas of emerging conflicts that may be of special interest for planners and policy-makers to monitor and manage.

This article analyses the interrelationship of patient, citizen, and consumer by considering the history of Tandvårdsskadeförbundet, the Swedish Association of Dental Mercury Patients (TF), which was founded in 1978 as controversy mounted over dental amalgam and mercury poisoning. Concentrating on the 1980s and TF’s quarterly publication TF-bladet, three major themes are identified, which are argued to have structured TF’s position on consumer and healthcare policy: the figure of the consumer; views on knowledge and knowledge production; and freedom of choice and consumer guidance. It is found that for TF the figures of the consumer and the citizen were closely aligned, informed by consumer policies and debate in the 1970s. The consumer was thought to possess rights and obligations vis-à-vis the state, whose job it was to ensure protection from corporate greed and malice. TF’s consumer advice was not overtly political or designed to promote individual choice and healthcare marketisation per se, but rather was seen as a necessary evil in the absence of public protection. This confirms previous research on the history of Swedish patient organisations, which has shown they lean towards the citizen end of the standard citizen–consumer dichotomy. However, TF’s stated mission as a dental consumer organisation, and the way its consumer guidance rhetoric drew on and fed into the contemporary discourse of personal choice and welfare policy, suggest the continuity between post-war patient–citizens and late twentieth-century patient–consumers, previously demonstrated in studies of the US and UK, was also present in Sweden to a degree. The study finds that TF’s views on knowledge, and especially the epistemological centrality of personal experience and testimony, not only resembled other patient organisations’ ideas, but also were key to its standpoint on consumer and healthcare policy. The article thus concludes by calling for further explorations of the role of changing, collectively held epistemological views in the history of welfare marketisation.

I den här uppsatsen används patientföreningen Tandvårdsskadeförbundet som empirisk fallstudie för att studera patientrollens omvandling från medborgar-pa-tient till kund-patient i Sverige under 1980-talet. Analysen visar att patienterna själva – inte minst hur de skapade, samlade och spred kunskap – spelade en vik-tigare roll i ovan nämnda omvandling än vad som tidigare antagits, samt att det finns en tidigare förbisedd kontinuitet i det svenska 1900-talets föreställningar om patienten och konsumenten som sammanlänkade identiteter.

In the 1950s, an extensive drinking water fluoridation study was conducted in secrecy in the Swedish town of Norrköping. A network of prominent scientists coalesced around the study, eventually managing to turn its aims into national political ambitions in the making of the 1962 Water Fluoridation Act – a law which, although it was never put to use, was explicitly created to enable the Norrköping study to continue, after it had been deemed illegal by a national court. Departing from Sheila Jasanoff's concept of co-production, which highlights the simultaneous making of scientific knowledge and social order, this chapter explores the Norrköping study and argues that the combined scientific and public health underpinnings of the fluoridation were crucial throughout the process. The case is presented as an illuminating one for studying the entanglement of science and the state, and it is contextualized in terms of the changing dynamics of the state-citizen contract in Sweden. This uncovers ideas about individual rights and liberties in relation to state power in the field of public health, where a critique of the paternalistic and far-reaching state apparatus in Sweden was formulated earlier than might have been generally assumed.

This dissertation in the history of science and ideas studies the Swedish dental amalgam controversy in the late 20th century. Erupting in the early 1980s, the controversy concerned the issue of whether mercury containing dental amalgams could poison those who had had their teeth filled, or whether the many patients making such claims were in fact suffering from stress, unresolved trauma, or other illnesses. Combining a contextualizing medical history approach with analytical concepts from STS and media studies, the dissertation examines how the controversy challenged and redrew cultural boundaries between science and other forms of knowledge, between science and politics, and between medicine and society more broadly. The notion of co-production of science and social order guides the overall analysis, whereas concepts of boundary-work and biocommunicability help direct the analysis towards contexts where claims of legitimate medical knowledge are made and communicated. One main finding of the dissertation is that the controversy was highly significant in channelling the epistemic practises and the social credos of the new social and environmental movements into organised medicine. The study also indicates that the amalgam controversy functioned as a blueprint for the way that subsequent controversies were handled publicly and discussed in the media. Furthermore, the media did not just function as platforms for actors involved, but were key actors in their own right, as news reports co-produced some of the controversy´s most salient epistemological arguments. Lastly, the dissertation concludes that these processes paved the way for altered understandings of amalgam, dentistry, health, knowledge, and patienthood. The results point toward a need for further research into the rise of the Swedish patient-consumer in the late modern period, particularly with regards to the active role of patients themselves, and to new ways of connecting the historical study of contested illnesses, diffuse symptoms and mediated scientific controversies.