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Sweden has a long tradition of providing social care and support to its citizens in their own homes through formal home care, delivered either by home care services or personal assistance. A majority of people given support by formal home care need assistance with personal and intimate care. The focus of this interview study was on exploring care recipients’, care workers’, personal assistants’ and care unit managers’ perceptions and experiences of intimate and personal care in the context of formal home care in Sweden. In total, 57 interviews were conducted with 42 persons. Three themes emerged in the analysis: Personal Hygiene, Personal Sphere, and The Contextual Variability of Intimacy. Interviewees described intimate care as being inseparable from a person’s service needs as a whole. Highlighted was how caring for and washing intimate body parts, intrusion into recipients’ personal spheres, and the need to preserve integrity vary depending on situational, temporal and relational aspects. To safeguard the care recipient’s influence, integrity and dignity in the reception/provision of care work, home care services and personal assistance, it is important to raise awareness of the variation in perceptions of intimate and personal care in education and inhouse training.

As social reality is quite elusive, even regarding seemingly well-recognized everyday concepts and objects, there are always methodological challenges underlying assessments and evaluations of implementation policies. The present article addresses this area of concern by presenting the results of a rereading of an empirical study of elderly home care services. Our results reveal the emergence of a dissolution of common and professional key concepts and objects in these welfare services to a degree that challenges both the implementation policy and the evaluation of policy. We claim that this has methodological implications for evaluation of implementation policies in general.

The provision of intimate and personal care constitutes a challenge for both careworkers and care recipients and is still a neglected area of research. An observational study of the interaction between the careworkers and care recipients in night-time home care services was conducted in a large municipality in Sweden. The results were analysed in light of previous research and theorising on strategies for handling intimacy in intimate care. The study highlights what appears to be a tension between the ways in which the recipient of care is conceptualised as an active consumer of care in present-day guidelines and the strategies chosen on the part of both caregivers and care recipients, when intimacy and integrity is most at stake, and framed as it is by the care recipients' situation of dependency and vulnerability. Home care services night-time was shown to be a case that markedly differs from many other settings of intimate care, but in the interactional routines intimate care came forth as a smooth and minimally obtrusive activity. The careworkers and care recipients engaged in strategies such as disattention, eye-discipline, middle-distance orientation, and objectification, thereby serving the purpose of balancing the transgressions of thresholds of intimacy.

Sweden, as a welfare state, has a long tradition of providing formal home care and support to their citizens in their own homes, either through home care services or personal assistance. A large percentage of frail elderly and persons with disability who receive formal home care require personal and intimate care, such as help with eating, showering, getting dressed and personal hygiene. Managing intimacy and safeguarding the care recipient’s integrity pose particular challenges for staff. The aim of this qualitative interview study is to describe and analyse care workers’ (CWs) and personal assistants’ (PAs) strategies for managing situations and challenges related to provision of personal and intimate care in the context of formal home care. Semi-structured interviews with eleven CWs and nine PAs were conducted. Our analysis reveals a complex repertoire of relational and communicative strategies, within an overall approach - which we labelled 'empathetic attuning'—of relating to the current situation and task at hand whilst safeguarding integrity. These strategies were intertwined with dimensions of time. The possibility to accomplish satisfactory personal and intimate care rests on structural and organisational conditions that promote sustainable working conditions, where relations characterised by continuity, integrity and respect can be realised.

I artikeln diskuteras de pedagogiska utmaningar som följer av att undervisa i tvärvetenskapliga sammanhang. Följande frågor ställs: på vilka sätt kan olika ämnesbakgrunder vara till hinder eller till hjälp i lärandesituationer?; vilka pedagogiska utmaningar ställs man inför som lärare?; vad sker med förståelsen av det egna ämnet efter möten med nya och annorlunda ämnestraditioner?; vilken roll spelar förmågan att kunna läsa texter från olika ämnen och traditioner än det egna, för att kunna uppnå en gynnsam lärandeprocess?

Research collaboration in the form of networks, projects and centers has become one of the dominant modes of engaging in research, especially funded research, across all academic domains. However, there has been little research on the processes of such collaborations, particularly their affective dimensions. These, as this volume demonstrates and as researchers know well, are highly important, yet mostly not directly engaged with when scientists work together, even though they are experienced by everybody involved.This volume is the first to consider questions such as how the naming of projects impacts on their accompanying “affect-scapes,” the policing or disciplining of emotions in research collaborations, their accompanying tensions and how these might be managed, and the challenges to trust between scientists that such collaborations present. Drawing on theories of affect and literature on collaboration, as well as on the contributors experiences of being involved in large-scale research projects, the volume also importantly deals directly with some of the key emotions that occur during research collaborations such as blame, elation, frustration, alienation and belonging, and suggests some ways in which one might engage productively with the affective dimensions of research collaboration.