Vid institutionen för socialt arbete på Malmö högskola samlas stora delar av forskningen under en gemensam programförklaring om social utsatthet. Vi beskriver här några teoretiska och normativa utgångspunkter, centrala forskningsområden och den relation vi försöker bygga upp med forskningsfältet. Vi ger även konkreta exempel på vår forskning. Med begreppet social utsatthet riktar vi fokus mot orättvisor och processer som gör att individer och grupper hamnar i sårbara livssituationer som kan innebära att deras framtidsmöjligheter, deras möjligheter att få en någorlunda trygg livssituation, och deras hälsa och upplevelse av värdighet hotas. Social utsatthet betraktas i plattformen som något processuellt och något som skapas och utvecklas beroende på hur man är positionerad i den lokala, nationella, välfärdsstatliga och globala kontexten. I analyser av social utsatthet är det viktigt att synliggöra människors aktörskap. Men det är också av stor vikt att inte se aktörskapet frikopplat från kontextuella faktorer.

The chapter deals with different challenges in Swedish social work. What may be needed in order to create a solidaric social work?

Fattigdom, missbruk, kriminalitet, hemlöshet – allt tycks i dag göras till individuella problem, som om individer levde sina liv isolerade från samhälleliga och politiska strukturer. Det ses numera som närmast naturligt att människor sover på gatan och i trappuppgångar, ber om pengar utanför affären och att medellivslängden skiljer sig markant mellan olika bostadsområden och delar av landet. Men i själva verket har dessa ojämlikheter skapats genom politiska beslut eller avsaknaden av sådana. Det som mer eller mindre utelämnas i dagens socialpolitiska debatt är vad det är som orsakar dessa ojämlikheter och vad ojämlikheterna har för konsekvenser. Människor som möter det sociala arbetet upplever sig allt för ofta bli objektifierade, omgjorda till akter eller ärenden. Och allt för lite uppmärksamhet ägnas åt frågan om hur ett långsiktigt förebyggande socialt arbete kan utvecklas, med fokus på dialog, tillit och lyssnande mellan socialarbetare och klient. Förändring krävs för att de ambitioner om demokrati, solidaritet och jämlikhet som anges i socialtjänstlagens portalparagraf 1§ ska bli något mer än just ambitioner. Det som krävs är ett socialt arbete i tiden, av människor, med människor och för människor. Boken riktar sig främst till studerande på socionomprogrammet såväl som socialsekreterare och andra verksamma inom det sociala arbetets verksamhetsområden, men även till en bredare allmänhet med intresse för sociala frågor och samtida socialpolitik, dess utmaningar och möjligheter.

In this article we address the construction of familiarity and distance in Swedish district court cases, involving young men with both immigrant and Swedish backgrounds. Through ethnographic observations of 40 trials related to street crimes, we have found different qualities of social interaction that distinguish immigrant background and Swedish background cases from each other. These distinctions, disfavouring young men with immigrant background, are built up through a series of practices and events that follow taken-for-granted behaviour and details in interaction, such as speech, laughter, choice of words to describe the accused and trust in Swedish witnesses. In conclusion, we argue for the necessity of detailed, close-up studies of courtroom action and interaction to understand statistical findings of discrimination and disfavouring of certain groups of immigrants in court and elsewhere in the judicial process.

This paper addresses the risk of research exposing people with an immigrant background in criminal court cases to Internet-based racist persecution, due to mismanagement of general ethical guidelines. The principle of informed consent, ideally serving to protect people under study from harm may, in fact, cause them more harm due to the interest among certain Internet-based networks of spreading identifiable, degrading information. Arguments are based on ethically challenging experiences from two ethnographic research projects carried out in Swedish district court environments, focused on immigrant court cases. Ethical advice provided by ethical review boards and established research guidelines, were based on an unawareness of the potentially destructive rendezvous in media attractive immigrant court cases between ‘ethically informed’ research, crime journalism, freedom of information legislation and ‘Internet vigilantes’ on a quest to persecute court participants and their families in the global digital arena.

This article argues that court-ritual unawareness, linguistic shortcomings and stereotypical images about non-Swedish otherness impair the position and acting space for immigrants in a Swedish district court context. Drawing on two ethnographically informed research projects focused on courtroom interaction during more than 20 trials dealing with ‘domestic violence’ and ‘street-related crime’, we claim that immigrant voices are often silenced due to taken-for-granted practices in court. Through analyses of interviews, performances, interpreted hearings and references to a desirable Swedishness, it is argued that situations are created where immigrant participants may experience their possibility of being understood as limited and their voices as being unheard. Such conditions are emotionally draining and may result in participants choosing silence over stating their case. This is a problem, not only within the individual court case, but also for the overall legitimacy of the court system and for issues of institutional trust among citizens.

AIM: This article describes life in an open illicit drug milieu in a Norwegian city. This site, called “the Bench”, is a stigmatised place, and if one sits there, one is marked with the stigma of the place. Our aim is to gain insights into what stigmatised people gain from frequently visiting and staying in a public place that in itself is stigmatised. METHOD – One of the authors spent a year of participant observation, studying what went on at the Bench. He managed to build rapport in a gradual process of inclusion. The theoretical perspective rests on classic ethnography, symbolic interactionism and sociology on labelling and purity and dirt. RESULTS – “The Bench” is not only a local drug market, but also a social meeting place in which one can feel dignity, and where a certain humanisation process takes place through the rituals of everyday life. On “the Bench” it is possible to tell stories of decay, failures and shortcomings in life, stories that in other social arenas would be interpreted as symbols of stigma and degradation. “The Bench” is also a place in which different established power relations may be turned around through storytelling and jokes. This provides the bench-sitters with a sense of mutual control and agency. CONCLUSION – Socialising at “the Bench” is an expression of the need among social human beings to have their existences confirmed, in a society where they have been marginalised and looked upon as second-class citizens, as urban outcasts.

Aims: Open drug scenes can be found in most major cities in Europe. Despite often being closed down by the police, the drug community continues to exist, and the drug scenes reappear elsewhere. There seem to be forces that hold these communities together, regardless of the substances used. In this study we explore whether interaction rituals have an impact on the decision by people to stay in the drug scene or to return after quitting their drug use. Method: In this ethnographic study, one of the researchers spent time in an open drug scene in a Norwegian city over a one-year span and gathered data on the human interactions hosted by this scene. In addition, the researcher interviewed eight people from the scene to obtain greater insight into their lives and perceptions of the scene, drawing on Goffman's and Collins's theories about rituals. Findings: Three themes emerged. First, drug users bonded as a group and resisted what they called "normal people" passing by. Second, users demonstrated the importance of sharing drugs and services and adhering to the scene's rules of conduct. The third and final theme is the focus of attention and the production of emotional energy. Conclusion: The experience of being outsiders and the need to hide some of their activities seemed to make it necessary for persons in the drug scene to have their own rules and rituals. These rules and rituals can be regarded as "interaction rituals". They provide participants with the symbols of group membership, emotional energy, and group solidarity. This makes it hard to leave the scene and might explain why those who do often return.

Kapitlet avslutar boken Kritiskt socialt arbete med en diskussion om vad detta slags arbete kan innebära och hur det handlar om social interaktion, reflexivitet och sociala konstruktioner.

This article investigates how ‘unaccompanied children’ in Sweden experience one part of the reception system – the social workers – in the context of their everyday life. The aim is to describe and analyse how these young people view and experience social workers and their relation to them, as well as their perceptions regarding the social worker’s nature. The article is drawn from a research project where 20 ‘unaccompanied children’ participated for over two years. During this period, the researchers have met with the young people continuously doing interviews, observations and informal conversations once a month. The results indicate that the social worker tends to become something of a bystander, a representative of the authorities who has played no active role in the young people’s everyday life, except for when they ‘pop up’ to make a decision affecting their everyday life. The social worker becomes a bystander with power. This is discussed in relation to situational ethics and the importance of building relationships and trust to service users in general and to ‘unaccompanied children’ in particular.

Research has largely focused on ‘unaccompanied minors’ as a vulnerable group at risk of developing psychological problems that affect their health. Separation from primary caregivers is considered one of the foremost reasons for these young people’s proposed loneliness. Thus, the official and ascribed identity is that they are lonely and that loneliness is their major problem. But research has seldom given the young people themselves an opportunity to express their views in an attempt to trace the often situational, dynamic and complex nature of social and emotional life. The present article analyses how ‘unaccompanied minors’ talk about everyday life and themes related to loneliness. The authors followed 23 ‘unaccompanied minors’ during a period of a year through ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews. Results: Loneliness may occur when these young people experience lack of control in managing life and when they feel no one grieves for them; loneliness may be dealt with by creating new social contacts and friends; loneliness may be reinforced or reduced in encounters with representatives from ‘the system’; the young people may experience frustration about being repeatedly labeled ‘unaccompanied’ and they may create a resistance to and critical reflexivity towards this labeling.

The neo-liberal shift in the Swedish welfare system has entailed different types of power regimes operating through human bodies – through constant processes of surveillance and discipline, including measurement and documentation. In this chapter, we discuss two such areas of social work in a Swedish context. First, a general discussion of institutional changes and their implications for social work through the implementation of New Public Management and Evidence-Based Practice. Second, through a particular practice, namely the shift in treatment of people who are addicted to opiates, from being a social treatment to becoming medicalized and biochemical treatment.

Året var 2013 när Andy, som 13-åring, för första gången satte sina fötter på svensk mark. Platsen var den då ganska nybyggda Citytunneln, i Malmös underjord. Via rulltrappor rörde han sig upp mot stadens ytskikt, Malmö Centralstation och Malmö centrum. Unga migranter har de senaste åren stått i fokus för den mediala och politiska debatten i Sverige och Europa. Det gäller särskilt de unga som anländer utan vårdnadshavare, den grupp som kommit att kallas för ensamkommande. Rörelser, gränser och liv handlar om just dem, om 20 unga människor som vid ett stort antal intervjuer berättar om sina vardagsliv. Från resan genom gränsernas Europa till den situation de befinner sig i idag. I berättelserna inryms både känslor av maktlöshet och frustration, av att misstänkliggöras, och av att betraktas som ensamkommande och att fastna i kategorin. Men också, genom möten med andra, känslor av hopp i att uppfattas som fullvärdiga och komplexa människor, att kunna navigera mot framtiden.

This book is about 20 young unaccompanied refugees who have sought refuge in Europe and how they experience and try to navigate their new situations, including their contacts with social workers, friends and family members left behind.

The book contains stories of powerlessness and frustration from being held under suspicion, from meeting authorities and abstract people of power from "the system," or from constantly being categorized in a static category of "the unaccompanied child." It contains stories of human meetings characterized by thoughtfulness, reciprocity and listening. This book also explores the experiences of meeting social workers as a young migrant in Sweden. The narratives depict how social workers can often reproduce powerlessness and frustration among the young people, but also how there are those social workers who provide something else through the act of listening. By extension, this is a book about society, about how important it can be to reframe people and to listen to their stories, needs and wills.

Demonstrating the importance of listening to the stories of young refuges, this title will appeal to students, researchers, community workers and social workers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, youth studies, social work, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy and health. 

In this article, we listen to young people having arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors, in relation to how they talk about and relate to religion, belief and practice. There is still a lack of research focusing on these young people's own narratives and experiences in their everyday life. This is particularly noteworthy since this category of young people, and especially those with a 'Muslim heritage', have received increased attention both in research and in public discourse. For two years, we have ethnographically followed 20 young people with asylum status in Sweden, who all arrived as unaccompanied minors and all came from areas of the world where Islam is the dominant religion. The conclusions are that these young people both need to navigate and are affected by the current political and social context questioning Muslim people, and that this is the case regardless of their own personal relationship to Islam. Further, religious faith needs to be related to its social and emotional embodiments, since it is here religious belief, shifts, changes and resistance, take place. Finally, we discuss how physical, temporal and social distance makes it possible to create other identities, and other ways of being religious or not.

I denna antologi analyserar och diskuterar ett flertal forskare vad det innebär att i socialt utsatta situationer och positioner förhålla sig till och navigera i relation till de etablerade välfärdssystemen. Ofta handlar det om att tillsammans med andra "outsiders" skapa system för upprätthållande av värdighet.

The purpose of this article is to investigate and analyze changing conceptions of resistance within youth research. Through a careful selection of influential and paradigmatic texts, we follow the development of the concept from the 1970s until today. In particular, we have focused on how the relation between power and resistance is described and portrayed in different theories and empirical studies. This article also takes up questions of social and cultural change, the limitations of social reproduction theories, and the conceptual possibilities of theorizing resistance in contemporary studies on youth, power, and resistance.

I den här boken används socialpsykologiska teorier för att kommentera olika vardagliga exempel, och för att förklara det som annars döljer sig bakom ett självklarhetens skimmer. Vi får följa med till arbetsplatsen, till middagsbjudningen och till dagdrömmandet. Till domäner i vardagslivet som vi håller hemliga, kanske till och med för oss själva. Boken ger en fördjupad förståelse för hur människor agerar tillsammans, hur avvikande beteende skapas, hur makt utövas i vardagslivet och hur det är att leva i 2000-talets mediesamhälle.

The book uses social psychological theories in commenting and discussing different aspects of everyday life. This second edition provides two new chapters, one about intimacy and friendship and the other disability.

I denna tredje upplaga har det tillkommit två kapitel. "Sexualitet, kroppsfixering och identitet" och "På tåget utan papper", om nya migrationsmönster och flyktingskap.

Sedan tidigt nittiotal har Bengt Svensson varit en högaktiv forskare i socialt arbete. Hans avhandling Pundare, jonkare och andra: Med narkotikan som följeslagare är en modern klassiker inom den etnografiska missbruksforskningen. Respektfullt och med stor noggrannhet förmedlar han en förståelse för en grupp människor som av många bara ses som ”knarkare” eller samhällsproblem. Bengt Svenssons forskning handlar om människor som lever sina liv dag för dag. Myndigheterna möter de som klienter eller patienter, då de behöver hjälp eller blir föremål för tvångsingripanden. Av majoritetssamhället betraktas de ofta som avvikare, irrationella eller kriminella. Men Bengt Svensson ger dem röst, och det de berättar är väl värt att lyssna på. Här finns kärnan i Bengt Svenssons budskap: Lyssna mer på dem det gäller! I denna festskrift till Bengt Svenssons ära medverkar sjutton författare med sammanlagt femton kapitel. Texterna skiljer sig åt vad gäller ämne och anslag, men de är alla skrivna i Bengts anda.

This presentation uses an interactionist perspective influenced by scholars such as Howard Becker, Erwing Goffman, Randal Collins, and Pierre Bourdieu in analyzing the everyday life of the heroin users in order to reveal the importance of social dimensions in trying to understand heroin use. It is particularly important to highlight the social dimension since we live in an individualized society in which social problems and deviant behaviour is often interpreted as individual problems of self-control, character, and/or medical/biological shortcomings. This approach is applied to ethnographic studies concerning the city of Norrköping (approx. 130,000 inhabitants), which had little experience of heroin before the end of the 1990s but suddenly harbored a local heroin market. Spending time with 25 young users (average age 22) facilitated a better understand of their motives for using heroin. This also made it possible to understand how important social life was for them, both in relation to getting into heroin and in trying to leave the often stressful life it causes. Social interaction and situations of the past are incorporated in the actors, in their habitus, and in their emotional interpretation of the world. Also incorporated is a certain social rhythm experienced while being with other drug users and by participating in drug using rituals. This rhythm is not coordinated with the social rhythm of mainstream society, whereby it acquires a value of its own.

In this chapter Lalander discusses how use of drugs can be seen as highly social activities if social is related to aspects of being together, forming social bonds and a sense of dynamic interaction. Through examples from ethnographic studies he shows how these social aspects are more or less incorporated in the habitus of the individuals providing them with a knowhow and a feel for the game. The theoretical perspective is taken from Pierre Bourdieu, Randal Collins and Erwing Goffman, thus highlighting the social and very human aspects of life in a time of individualization.

Kapitlet är förord i en fotobok om skinheads. Skinheadstilen beskrivs och analyseras också med bakgrund av det samhälle i vilket det växer fram.

Artikeln handlar om hur en grupp unga i marginalen utvecklar sina egna lärosystem och hur detta är intimt förknippat med ett sökande efter sammanhang och respektabilitet.

The article analyzes the enter into and the agency within local drug economies drawing on classical ethnographic studies. It also links the a symbolic interactionist perspective to structural influences and social inequality using perspectives on gender, class and ethnicity/race. In order to understand illegal street economies it is of major importance not to see them solely as comprising of individual actors and networks that commit crimes and organize themselves on the street. A more comprehensive understanding requires a perspective on how agency on the street is created and limited by structural factors and dimensions. It further requires an awareness of the restrictions and oppurtunities provided by overarching economical structures that operate on global, national och local levels.

Life style house is organized by the user organization Criminals Return in Society (KRIS) and aims at helping young people with a back ground in criminal gangs to live a more "normal" and integrated life. The evaluation includes 50 interviews with young people living in the two houses and the ex-criminals who works there to motivate the youngsters. The analysis shows how important it is with user knowledge and also how fragile these kinds of organizations can be. The importance of strong and motivated leaders can't be underestimated.

Kapitlet erbjuder en ingående analys av ungas väg från kriminalitet, droger och att befinna sig i marginalen i förhållande till det etablerade samhället. I samtal med personer som ingår i stödgruppsverksamheten Unga KRIS, ges gripande berättelser som visar på ett starkt engagemang för att integrera sig i samhället och upprätta värdighet och erkännande. Budskapet om att det rör sig om långsamma och spröda processer fordrar eftertanke och förståelse från det omgivande samhället, inte minst den lokala välfärdsstatens bemötanden och stöd.

The chapter discusses two cases in which power and resistance are central aspects. The first case is about a research and project organization in Norway with the aim of treating researchers, practitioners in the social service, university students and users of public service as equal partners in the production of knowledge to be used in social service. Lalander worked there for a year which involved participant observation and interviews with colleagues. There are many positive aspects creating feelings of equality within this type of organization, but also elements of power which are embedded in daily routines and mundane talk. The users are often expected to be overt with private issues, such as earlier drug abuse or psychiatric problems. The users, however, exert resistance towards this, through irony or through not presenting oneself as a user. The other case is about the modern institution LARO, a public medially assisted treatment facility for opiate users. The control system is described as more or less total and with the aid of urine tests and a sense of trusting more on medical and scientific knowledge, embedded in different taken for granted rituals and in mundane talk, power is distributed. This control system can be seen as a consequence and a reinforcement of a stigmatization process in which heroin users are seen as inferior, as not quite human, even though this is hidden with a rhetoric about the organization as human and in the best interest of the patients.

Då man har slutat med droger kan vandringar genom staden bli riskabla. Philip Lalander skriver om sina etnografiska studier i Norrköping, om minnen som lever kvar i den drogfria kroppen och som kan styra fötterna bort från forna sociala sammanhang.

I det här kapitlet diskuteras först hur motståndsbegreppet växt fram och använts inom ungdomskulturforskningen samt hur det knutits till olika perspektiv på makt och frågor om klass, genus och etnicitet. Därefter diskuteras hur motstånd kan bedrivas och hur det kan handla om både ”dolt” och ”öppet motstånd” samt hur lokala motståndshandlingar ofta finner sina uttrycksmedel i global populärkultur. Sedan följer exempel på hur motstånd uppstår ur känslan av underordning och stigmatisering och hur det kan knytas till segregation och social ojämlikhet. Till sist skriver jag om hur motstånd kan bedrivas med hjälp av ironi, parodi och med hjälp av att ersätta eller omtolka olika ord som används av företrädare för makten. Att unga gör motstånd kan kopplas till kreativitet, aktörskap och informella läroprocesser, vilka utgör viktiga element i det barn- och ungdomsvetenskapliga fältet.

This ethnographc study follows the lives of people who used heroin in year 2000. The author use interviews and participant observation in order to capture different social aspects that are of importance in changing and managing Life.

Kapitlet analyserar etnografiskt en grupp unga människor med migrantbakgrund i ett marginaliserat bostadsområde som tillsammans och med hjälp av både populärkulturella, lokala och translokala influenser skapar en gatukultur. Dessa influenser utgör svar på frågor om vilka de är och var de kommer från, och av det skälet iscensätter de olika symboler och ritualer för att stärka en känsla av tillhörighet. I analysen vävs genus, klass och etnicitet samman.

Kapitlet handlar om etnografiska metoder i samhällsvetenskaplig forskning.

”Pundare, jonkare och Bengt: med känslan som följeslagare” är rubriken på Philip Lalanders kapitel. Philip skriver om sitt första möte med Bengt och diskuterar betydelsen av nyckelinformanter i etnografisk forskning. Genom en närläsning av Pundare, jonkare och andra, Bengt klassiska avhandling, reflekterar han över relationen mellan Bengt och hans nyckelinformant, Harry. Vilken betydelse har känslor i deras relation, undrar Philip. Är Bengt och Harry vänner?

Through a seven year long ethnographic study the author examine and analyze the emergence of a glocal street culture in a residential area in the Swedish city Norrköping. In this hybrid culture there is a mix of influences from different parts of the world creating a feeling of respectability for young urban outcasts. The author tries to understand how criminality and use of illegal substances can be related to the socio economic structures and habitus of young persons living in a highly individualized capitalist consumer society. Through thick descriptions the reader is invited into the world of Lorenzo, David and other members of the street culture.

Utgångspunkten i kapitlet är mina långvariga etnografiska studier om heroinerfarna i Norrköping. Jag tar avstamp i betraktelser av möten mellan forskaren och de heroinerfarna, där just möten, om de präglas av ömsesidiga erkännande, gör något med båda parter. ”Forskare som möter heroinist” blir här till ”människa som möter människa”. Styrande kategoribestämningar, såsom ”soss”, ”missbrukare” och ”klient”, eroderar då relationen utvecklas. En del socialarbetare bidrar till att skapa en känsla av mänskligt värde, att människor de möter känner sig respekterade och sörjda för. De arbetar utifrån en situerad etik, där viljan att förstå och respektera är grundläggande. Men detta sätt att arbeta undermineras av ett system där det sociala arbetet ska effektiviseras och ekonomiseras, där människor ramas om och görs till siffror och budgetposter, eller till urin i provrör som testas och berättar ”sanningen”.

Aim: Following a group of young men with Chilean background living in a Swedish territorially stigmatised area, the author analyses how the actors create, recreate and use ethnicity and on what structural grounds such creation is carried out. This analysis is done to provide a complex and socially constructed view of ethnicity. Method: Between 2003 and 2015, the author followed a group of 16 young men, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The fieldwork included interviews and participant observations in places that were important to the young men; the residential area where they lived in Sweden and the area in Chile that some of them visited during the time of the research and where they have their roots. Findings and conclusion: During childhood and adolescence, ethnic identification became a means to group identification. However, ethnic identity practiced in the street culture and the illegal economy cannot be seen as essential, but rather as something that is performed and staged in different situations, creating a sense of ‘‘Chileanness’’. Producing Chileanness helps combating emotions related to sorrow, to being poor and not feeling welcomed in the Swedish society. This ethnicity is fragile and intertwined with social class and gender.

The chapter is about how deviancy can be understood from a sociological perspective. By mixing empirical examples from everyday life with different theories by influential academics of the field a perspective of deviancy, about how deviancy is something created rather than something essential, is developed. Well known academics such as Foucault, Becker, Goffman and Douglas are discussed and also how science itself contributes in creating deviancy and normality.

The article discusses how the control system involved in medically assisted treatment for opiate users may involve different power issues.

In our presentation we talk about central ethical dilemmas which may occur while studying socially exposed groups, who are used to being documented and suspicious by welfare society agents, but also how researcher may overcome such dilemmas by building trust. We will mainly use data material from our present study “Agency and networks: Unaccompanied minors in a hyper interconnected world”, a qualitative and partly ethnographic study about how ”unaccompanied” young people experience everyday life. Some themes will receive extra attention in our presentation. These are; 1. Providing access to their homes. Who provides access? The young people themselves? The manager or staff working at residential care units? 2. How can we maintain a solid trust building relation to the youth to keep them interested to talk to us more than once and provide us with “thick narratives”? 3. What do they think they may gain from contributing to the project? How do/can we match their expectations? 4. How can we in a time of increasing racialization and homogenization of this group of young people write about them in order not to reconstruct established stereotypes of them? And finally, 5. How can we contribute to reframing these young people as grieveable.

The term ‘anchor child’ implicates that, to create future homes in another country, parents supposedly use their children by sending them on a mission as ‘unaccompanied minors’. Since the term is sometimes used in public debate, our aim is to use elements of this stereotype to analyse and contrast it to the young people’s own narratives. Through repeated interviews and observations with 23 unaccompanied children living in Sweden over the course of one year, this article provides complex narratives of the decision to escape, the rationality of the escape plan and the ways in which the young people reflect on possible future reunion with their families. Results show that their flight and its outcome is related to the young people’s agency during a struggle for survival affected by current political and social contexts, making the tendency to interpret the children’s situation through a ‘Western’ nuclear family rationality highly problematic.

The article examines how unaccompanied young refugees in Sweden relate to and talk about their everyday lives and life plans during a time of transition from childhood to adulthood. We regard them as navigators and emotional beings embodying social situations, relationships and sentiments in their habitus throughout their lives affecting their life plans and acting to build capital in social fields. Their narratives show that they all have a life plan. However, disruptions and adjustments of life plans occur, often related to their birth families, deeply embodied in their habitus, to their everyday life, but also to socio-economic and political contexts both globally and locally. Their position as young 'unaccompanied minors' is fragile when it comes to realizing future goals. A stable social and economic structure, stability capital, appears to contribute to possibilities of adapting to or maintaining sustainable life plans.

Boken ger kunskaper om ungdomars livsvillkor i en dynamisk samtidskultur, i vilken sociala förändringar och ny medieteknik kontinuerligt förändrar förutsättningar och villkor för identitetsskapande och ungdomskultur. I boken riktas stark fokus mot gruppen och dess betydelse för ungdomars vardagsliv. I denna fjärde upplaga har boken uppdaterats vad gäller ungdomsforskning inom olika områden. Den nya upplagan tar på ett tydligare sätt upp hur frågor om klass åter har blivit högaktuella i ett Sverige där vissa grupper marginaliseras och uppfinner kulturellt kreativa strategier för att skapa mening, sammanhang och respekterade identiteter.

Boken handlar om den levande punkkultur som uppstod i Norrköping åren 1977-83. Genom intervjuer, fotografi- och dokumentstudier försöker författarna förstå vilka punkarna var och vad som drev dem att anamma den subversiva stilen.

When punk culture travelled from The US and England to Sweden in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the result was a mix of symbols, emotions and attitudes from all three national contexts. One Swedish town where punk made an impact was Norrköping, a middle-sized working class town south of Stockholm. The foucus of this article is the transformation of punk as it entered a new national and local context. We are interested in what happened to punk as it travelled from centre – London, Detroit and New York – to periphery – Sweden and Norrköping and what kind of meaningmaing practices that became possible in the new context. The empirical material consists of interviews with 24 informants who were part of the punk scene in Norrköping during the period. Besides the interviews we have made use of photographs, song lyrics and newspaper material. Our methodological approach is interactive memory work in which we together with the informants reflect on the performance and meaning of punk in Norrköping.

”We know what you need”: Construction and resistance of ”unaccompanied minors” at residential care units

The aim of the article is to highlight and analyse how ”unaccompanied minors” view the staff at the residential care units (called HVB) where they live. Through repeated qualitative interviews with twenty young individuals over more than a year, the researchers have captured central themes. One such theme is the experience of being defined as a child by the staff. This can be provocative for the young people who feel they are not being acknowledged as competent actors. Another central theme is being described as homogeneous and primitive, as a person that needs to be processed to live up to a desired Swedishness. The informants experience their treatment as children and undeveloped immigrants as a solid structure, a power system that is hard to question since it is so well institutionalized. The article also describes sanctions used by the staff to discipline the residents. Such sanctions are often directed at limiting the possibilities for the young people to participate in social activities, but also at increasing surveillance and documentation. It is difficult for these young people to openly resist since they do not want to be punished. Resistance, thus, becomes hidden. The informants’ experiences show how difficult it is to develop a social environment in which they can feel truly recognized by the staff as complete human beings with valuable competences.