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Today's flexible Western labour markets place new demands on the workforce. Whereas industrial society fostered individuals who found dignity in performing long-term, manual labour, few people can now expect to go through working life without engaging in continuous updating of knowledges and skills. However, there are environments on both sides of the Atlantic where the workforce is still adapted to an economy of production. Industrial restructuring has led to islands of unemployment, whereby the labour force has been unable to reorganise into other sectors. In light of automation and a globalised economy, Jon Sunnerfjell presents a study that explores how a once-flourishing industrial community seeks to manage the challenges of post-industrial society and flexible capitalism. What is at hand is the adaptation to what scholars have labelled the 'active society', reconceptualising structural inequality in terms of individual exclusion. This is a society that seeks to mitigate public expenditures on social welfare by fostering active and employable individuals able and willing to navigate life responsibly. Drawing on ethnographic data, Sunnerfjell analyses what becomes of policy concepts such as lifelong learning, employability and entrepreneurship when they are put to work in an environment imbued with industrial history and working-class culture. Ultimately, he shows the tensions that pervade the active society and what forms of resistance it produces.

Why is menstruation so often considered a dirty phenomenon, in both material and symbolic terms? How do ideas and realities of menstrual pollution affect the lived experience of menstruation and everyday hygiene practices? Josefin Persdotter's study Menstrual Dirt explores how notions and materializations of pollution are enacted in different menstrual practices: in what products to use, in how to get rid of menstrual waste, how to clean reusables, wash the body and stained underwear, scrub toilets and avoid unwanted smells. It unpacks taken for granted aspects of menstrual life and reveals persistent gendered inequalities in relation to menstruation. In focus are two specific menstrual technologies: the disposable pad and the reusable cup. The author shows how the promotion and use of these everyday technologies (re)produce menstruation as something dirty, symbolically and as a lived experience. Theoretical tools from the sociology of dirt, science and technology studies and anthropology are used to make sense of a wealth of fascinating interview and documentary material. The study makes visible how menstrual pollution beliefs are (re)shaped in Sweden, a country with a comparatively high level of gender equality and menstrual activism. The results have implications in a wider context and for policies and technological changes to make menstruating into a less laborious and less negatively felt experience. Josefin Persdotter is a sociologist and an internationally known scholar within Critical Menstrual Studies. She is also an acclaimed menstrual artist and activist.

Society today seems obsessed with the human brain. It has become a crucial component in our culture, for people's attitudes to themselves and others, and for how they should plan their lives. Modern neuroscience has a great impact on society, not only on medical treatments but also on existential questions such as how human consciousness can be defined, where feelings arise, when life ends and death occurs.Such cultural and existential questions are addressed in this anthology. Its authors suggest perspectives and concepts to understand neuroscience, and critically scrutinize its various manifestations in society. Interpreting the brain in society. Cultural reflections on neuroscientific practices is written by scholars from art history, visual studies, and ethnology involved in a research collaboration with medical and natural scientists doing basic research on Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease. There is also an afterword by one of these neuroscientists.Kristofer Hansson is Associate professor of ethnology and Researcher at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden.Markus Idvall is Associate professor of ethnology and Senior lecturer at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden.

Soon, Cities of Power: The Urban, the National, the Popular, and the Global by Göran Therborn will be on the market. In between Science, Class and Society (1976) and The Killing Fields of Inequality (2013) Göran has consistently challenged received wisdom in politics and the social sciences. His Between Sex and Power (2004) is the current global map of family relations and gender equality. With the 1968 article 'From Petrograd to Saigon' he laid the foundation for his worldwide reputation as an innovative public intellectual. His critique of the Frankfurt School had repercussions around Europe. Today his work is spread across six continents, Latin America in particular, and has been translated into more than twenty languages.This book is a critical appraisal of the themes Göran Therborn has pursued up till now, and is introduced by Robin Blackburn, for almost twenty years his editor at New Left Review.'Göran's continual alertness to different paths to or through modernity, and to varieties of capitalism, will very soon be tested in a dramatic way.' - Ian Gough, London School of Economics'This is a very important project and Göran richly deserves it.' - Michael Burawoy, UC BerkeleyCONTENTS:INTRODUCTIONSRobin Blackburn, 'Göran Therborn and the Old Mole'Sven Hort & Gunnar Olofsson, 'A Portrait of the Sociologist as a Young Rebel'SECTION I. Class, Politics and RevolutionsAnders Stephanson, 'On Geopolitics in Therbornism, Early and Late'Risto Alapuro, 'Finnish Demonstrations as Confrontations'Per H. Jensen, 'Origins of Danish Flexicurity'Robin Blackburn, 'From Miliband to Corbyn'Aliaksei Lastouski, Nikolay Zakharov & Sven Hort, 'Belarus - Another "Iceberg Society"?'Elisabeth Özdalga, 'Islam-Oriented Trajectories and Turkey's Fluctuating Encounters with European Modernity'Åsa Cristina Laurell, 'Structural Adjustment, Social Exclusion and Violence'Lena Lavinas, 'The Untold Battlefields Against Inequality in Latin America'Chang Kyung-sup, 'Post-Socialist Class Politics with Chinese Characteristics'SECTION II. Sex, Gender and PowerAnita Göransson & Karin Widerberg, 'Göran between Sex and Power'Eric Hobsbawm, 'Retreat of the Male'Perry Anderson, 'Atlas of the Family'SECTION III. Global ModernitiesImmanuel Wallerstein, 'Empire: Dangerous Slippage of a Concept'Habibul Haque Khondker, 'Entangled Globality'Gabriella Elgenius, 'The Principles and Products of the Identity Market'Zhanna Kravchenko, Lisa Kings & Sven Hort, 'Power Ideology and Transformations of Space'Bo Rothstein, 'Manufacturing Social Solidarity'Erik Olin Wright, 'The Capitalist State and the Possibility of Socialism'

On 28 May 2009, at a closed meeting in Brussels, ministers and state secretaries of education and science from several EU countries decided to build the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden. Or did they?It is common for big European science projects to be surrounded by secrecy and political deceit, but the ESS is extraordinary in its elusiveness. There is a remarkable lack of concrete economic, political, technical and scientific underpinnings to the project - but a boasting certainty in the promises of future paybacks.The ESS is an accelerator-based neutron spallation facility that will cost billions of Euros to build and run. It is expected to bring new knowledge in several fields including materials science, energy research, and the life sciences. But its financing is not yet certain, and future returns hard to predict. How then could the decision to build ESS occur? Why was there so little organized resistance?This book places the ESS project in its political and scientific context. It links the decisions taken to the history of Big Science in Europe and in Sweden. It looks at the dynamic political processes of establishing this megaproject in a small town in the south of Sweden. The eight chapters start from a paradoxical state of affairs: The ESS is not funded, and not formally decided in any binding agreements - yet it is treated as a future reality, locally and nationally, loaded with promises of scientific, economic and social returns.The book makes a much-needed first contribution to the analysis of the ESS project and its political, environmental, and social ramifications. It should be read by scholars of science and technology studies, politicians and the interested general public.

This is a book about gender, labour, and changing relations of power in a Swedish hospital, and presents an ethnographic study of nurses and their work. Paid care work has been a domain of institutional compliance to male dominance, as well as a critical space for women to become economically independent and skilled.In 'Femininity at Work' Rebecca Selberg gives new analytical perspectives and fresh insights into this area. Selberg situates the new conditions for nurses' work firmly in the neoliberal transformation of the ­Swedish welfare state. Nursing has undergone dramatic changes in terms of work intensification and new forms of subordination and class boundaries. At the same time, the nursing profession has embraced nurses' new role as adjunct managers in running the clinics and taking on new responsibilities offered by New Public Management.The key contribution of Selberg's work is her use of the concept of femininity. Through ethnographic explorations of material and ideological conditions of care work, she shows that gendered subjectivities can best be grasped by using the 'plurality of femininities' as a conceptual tool.Rebecca Selberg offers an empirically rich investigation of change and continuity in the relationship between femininity and care work among Swedish nurses. In addition to insights into changing conditions of care work within the public sector, the book makes a significant theoretical contribution through its analysis of how labour processes shape and are in turn shaped by femininities.

Technically advanced machines are not automatically useful teaching tools.Ericka Johnson has studied computer simulators and their integration into medical education. She has analysed videotape of simulator sessions, interviewed instructors and students, and observed students practising medicine, both on the simulators and in hospital wards. Starting from the understanding that learning is situated in practice, she examines simulations and the parallels they have with the existing learning practices that the students encounter in their medical apprenticeship.Johnson shows how instructors reconstitute patient bodies and medical practices in simulations. She looks at how the simulations are situated in the context of the teaching hospital and the identity construction present in both the clinical clerkship and the simulations. Her work suggests ways in which simulations can and should extend beyond the teaching of specific skills, to be made relevant to the medical training.