Browsing by master's degree program "Magisterprogrammet i moderna samhällen"

This thesis is guided by the research question, how is policy to reduce homelessness influenced by the principles of the Housing First approach? The research explores how public policy is informed by the principles of Housing First nationally in the United States and Finland, and particularly in two cities, New York City and Helsinki. Housing First is an approach used both in Finland and the United States to reduce homelessness. The approach requires immediate housing once someone becomes homeless, without any preconditions and with the ability to choose supportive services. As defined in the Housing First Europe Guide, there are eight main principles of Housing First. The principles are housing is a human right, choice and control for service users, separation of housing and treatment, recovery orientation, harm reduction, active engagement without coercion, person-centered planning, and flexible support as long as is required. Research data is collected from national reports published in the United States and Finland during 2022-2023, supplemented by reports from New York City and Helsinki. The interest in examining Housing First in recent reports is to see if and how the principles are present and whether they have any influence on policy recommendations. Reports are supplemented by interviews with actors from different levels of governance and practice. Using Esping-Andresen’s welfare regime types as a theoretical framework, a thematic analysis is used to inquire into how the principles of Housing First are present in the data and what their application means for ending homelessness in each context. The analysis finds that Housing First principles are indeed present and their articulation is embedded within societal values, which align with the country’s welfare regime type. The discussion offers how this research can support the work being done to end homelessness, by presenting a perspective on the importance of societal value systems, and how by aligning these systems to Housing First principles, ending homelessness becomes possible. Conclusions are drawn on the research process and possibilities for future research are presented.

This thesis aims to identify and compare the portrayals of femicide victims between mainstream and feminist sources in Mexican Context. Femicide is viewed in this thesis as linked with structural inequalities between women and men, as well as the patriarchal ideas, which come along with gendered violence, a mechanism that is reproduced in order to oppress women. This is significant to highlight the power struggles that arise from these dynamics. Furthermore, the purpose of this thesis is to point out the social problematic that arises from the first set of discourses (mainstream media) which draws upon hegemonic views of women’s morality. simultaneously I am looking for a comparison with counter portrayals that arise from progressive and challenging discourses within feminist media. Foucauldian discourse analysis is utilized with the attempt of unravelling this power struggle, to approach discourses and identify subject positions of femicide victims and perpetrators, and lastly, in order to determine cultural and historical shifts in the discourses. The research questions are: RQ1) How have the Mexican media constructed the image of femicide victims and femicide perpetrators during 2017-2020? RQ2) How have feminist actors portrayed the image of femicide victims and femicide perpetrators in Mexico during 2017-2020? and RQ3) What are the similarities or differences between the portrayals made by the media and feminist actors during this period (2017-2020)? In total 48 articles, collected from the online portal of the newspaper “Reforma”, and the feminist sources of Latfem.org and vocesfeministas.mx were analyzed. The range of publishing date comprises January 2017 - December 2020. As a result, this thesis identifies four different discourses within the mainstream newspapers coverage: Empty vessels, Noteworthy and salient members of society, Innocent victims of the circumstances, and Self-inflicted violence as a result of her own wrong choices. The identified subject positions for the victims are: one more number, unanimated object or body, the beautiful woman, empowered woman, respected woman, good woman, good mother, pure child, neglected kid, innocent child, the sex-worker, irresponsible woman, blameworthy and immoral. Also, three discourses are identified within the media with feminist scope: Femicides are a preventable and a broader social issue, The failures committed by the State, and Non- binary community, invisible femicides discourse. The identified subject positions available for the victims are: neglected woman, multiply marginalized, neglected by the State and revictimized victim, invisible woman and non-binary. The analysis showed that mainstream media did not take into account structural influences, which in turn were highlighted by feminist portrayals. Derived from the presented results, this study provides future directions to reporters in general, for them to understand their role in this issue. I enlist a series of recommendations, partly my conclusions and finalizing with Marzabal’s ideas (2015). I conclude that it is imperative to break with the hegemonic narratives and also with the competition between the different mainstream sources, who seek exclusivity and news value by exposing and utilizing the femicide victims in different manners, instead of informing objectively the population about femicide and its causes. This thesis contributes to critical social psychology and gender studies. It shows how the feminist discourses disrupt the historically continuous hegemony of mainstream discourses. It also makes a contribution to feminist studies of gendered violence, and portrayals of femicide victims in the feminist media.

This research concerns the well-being of the people associated with a startup company geographically located in and around Finland. It explored the ideal world of startups through ethnography and thematic analysis utilizing anthropological theories of value. Entrepreneurs are often portrayed as exemplary, self-driven citizens who contribute to society through innovations and economic growth. People with such a mindset of freedom and self-dependence formed the startup organization to bring the ideal world to life. However, they simultaneously relied on hierarchical and role-based relations to function as a coherent organization. Living in such contradictions, feelings of euphoria and vague emptiness roomed as the ideal world seemed to be within reach yet impossible to actually attain. In such a place, having anything that could truly be called well-being - if it means being one with the world they envision and attaining what they consider important - was difficult.

Tolerance is the pillar that ensures the safety and stability of a nation, especially for a populous and multicultural one such as Indonesia. Societal characteristics, such as diversity, may play a significant role in shaping people’s attitudes. Diversity may improve intergroup relations by encouraging positive interaction between members of different groups. On the other hand, it may have a negative influence by aggravating social tension. This thesis aims to examine how intergroup contact and diversity associate with religious tolerance in Indonesia. Due to the hierarchical nature of the problem, multilevel regression analysis was utilized for this study. This thesis also aims to investigate if the application of multilevel regression can provide any additional value to the analysis. Classical single-level linear regression was also employed as a comparison for the multilevel model and to complement the analysis. This thesis utilized a combination of national survey data and official data from government bodies. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) calculated from the model revealed that around 23% of the variation in tolerance score was due to the grouping structure in the data, which can be considered to be quite high. Religious diversity was found to be statistically significant and was able to explain a substantial amount of the variation in province level. Intergroup interaction was also found to be positively and significantly associated with tolerance score. The multilevel model was also found to correct the underestimation of standard error in single-level regression due to treating a group-level predictor as an individual-level predictor. Thus, the application of multilevel analysis provided additional value to the analysis by revealing province-level inequalities in the data and minimizing the risk of spurious significant results.

Apotti is an electronic health record system (EHRs) used in the Uusimaa region of Finland. The system is based on structured records which aims to maximize the collection of big data, which is expected to bring long-awaited solutions for our health care system suffering from structural funding and efficiency issues. As such, Apotti reflects the paradigm of datafication, which means quantifying social reality into data to be later used in value-making purposes. However, the endeavors gaining benefits from big data might be problematic from the point of view of nursing, that is hard, if not impossible to quantify due to its multidimensional nature, which also operates beyond visible performance. For this reason, there is a tension between the datafication paradigm and nursing practice in a more data-driven health care system. In this thesis, I explore this tension by examining the experiences of Finnish nurses using the Apotti system. The material of this thesis consists of eight in-depth interviews of nurses using the Apotti system, collected during the year 2023. The analysis was done using theory-guided content analysis. As a theoretical framework, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration is used. According to the theory of social acceleration, the essence of modernity is acceleration, consisting of technical acceleration, acceleration of social change and the acceleration of pace of life. Rosa’s theory suggests that accelerated life leads to an alienated relationship with the world, as modern subjects seek to do more in absolute numbers but end up doing qualitatively worse. Rosa also uses care work as an example of an alienated relationship: caretakers do not encounter the patient on a reciprocal basis anymore, but the patient is fragmented into discrete pieces of parameters on which the health care staff focuses on under constant pressures of being effective. Accelerated life, according to Rosa, roots back to the ethos of controllability which seeks to dominate the surrounding reality by technological and scientific processes. As such, for both datafication and controllability, value creation is linked to how successfully the surrounding reality becomes exploitable for humans. The analysis consists of three parts, starting with handling time scarcity in nursing practice. Datafication is linked to this in two ways: firstly, doing the EHRs is not a minor, but major work task in nursing practice. Secondly, as value and meaning assimilates with data, work that does not show in the data starts lacking crucial evidence of its existence, leading to an accelerating data mill with increased amount of mandatory data work. The second part of the analysis elucidates the “invisible” work of nurses not shown in the data. In this part, challenges related to the nature of structural records against the nursing practice are also scrutinized, as well as more profound problems related to data collection and uncritical use of data. In the third part of the analysis, the medication process in Apotti is examined. Even if the medication process in Apotti is rendered as rock solid as possible, by shifting the focus away from nurses own judgement to technological procedures that are never flawless and often very complex, new hazards to medication safety emerge. This thesis discusses how Apotti, being a technological solution for time scarcity in the health care sector, has not decreased time scarcity, but instead by changing the social reality of nurses has resulted into an opposite outcome with increasing demands raising from datafication. Nevertheless, nurses hold resistance to these demands by actively maintaining more holistic relationship with patients by focusing on the human behind the parameters representing a human and prioritizing patient care over data work. The main contribution of this thesis is showing the limits to quantitative data in representing and guiding nursing practice, which should be acknowledged when health care sector becomes more data-driven. As nursing is being quantified regardless of being a profession that seems hard if not impossible to define in quantitative manners, qualitative research is also needed to elucidate essential work that remains in the shadows of quantification.

In the last several decades, the abortion debate has grown increasingly controversial and polarized worldwide. The citizens’ initiative OwnWill2020, which aimed to update the Finnish Act on Induced Abortion, sparked the discussion in Finland as well. By examining abortion discourse in the Finnish parliament, this thesis aims to get a view of the meanings of abortion in Finland at this time of legislative change. The material consists of the speeches in the minutes of the referral debate on the citizens’ initiative OwnWill2020. These are analyzed by Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis framework. The thesis draws on concepts such as biopower and subject positions from Michel Foucault. These concepts, together with feminist and feminist Foucauldian theory on the politics of the body and reproductive rights, situate the debate on reproductive rights as a site of power and negotiation. The findings revealed three main abortion discourses: the self-determination discourse, the child’s rights discourse and the woman’s well-being discourse. The most significant difference in the discourses was their meanings of the embryo/fetus. Two of the discourses were built on biopower, while the third discourse criticized it. By ascribing subject positions to the pregnant person and the embryo/fetus, the three abortion discourses produce new norms of pregnancy and motherhood. The results of the thesis suggest that Finland’s position as a model country in gender equality is questionable, at least based on the utterances of Finnish Members of Parliament.