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Att stora delar av världen – inklusive Sverige – påverkas av klimatförändringar är konstaterat i många sammanhang. Alltmer besvärliga väderförhållanden med ödesdigra översvämningar, torkperioder och stormar kopplas till dessa förändringar. Ett förändrat klimat påverkar även olika yrkesgrupper, inte minst byggnadsarbetare. Den här texten handlar om byggnadsarbetares vittnesmål om hur arbetssituationen påverkas av klimatförändringar i termer av alltmer svårkontrollerade väderförhållanden. Ett speciellt fokus riktas mot hur berättelserna kan förstås i termer av prekarisering, det vill säga hur de förmedlar föreställningar om och erfarenheter av brist, utsatthet och osäkerhet. Utgångspunkter är kritisk realism, intervjuer med 16 byggnadsarbetare och enkätsvar från 250 byggnadsarbetare. Materialet har genomgått en tematisk analys och tre former av prekarisering identifieras i texten, direkt prekarisering, indirekt prekarisering och prekarisering genom anpassning.

Climate change is widely recognized as affecting large parts of the world, including Sweden, and is associated with increasingly severe weather events such as floods, droughts, and storms. These changes also impact various occupational groups, not least construction workers. This paper investigates how construction workers describe the influence of climate change on their working conditions, particularly in relation to increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. The analysis focuses on how these narratives can be understood through the concept of precarization—notions and experiences of scarcity, vulnerability, and uncertainty. Drawing on critical realism, the study is based on interviews with 16 construction workers and survey responses from 250 participants. A thematic analysis identified three forms of precarization: direct, indirect, and adaptation related. 

Vi lever i det som har kallats postsanningens tidevarv - en tid då falska nyheter, faktaresistens och konspirationer präglar samhällsdebatten. Samtidigt krävs att starkare bevis för att kunskap ska erkännas som legitim. I denna spänning formas det som kallas en sanningskris. I Sanningskris - Det postfaktiska samhället och medielandskapets förändringar samlas forskare och skribenter från humaniora och samhällsvetenskap för att undersöka vad som egentligen står på spel. Här diskuteras allt från klimatförnekelse, museers kunskapsroll och abortmotståndets sanningsanspråk till mytavslöjanden på Tiktok och konspirationsteorier om socialtjänstens arbete. Boken erbjuder inga enkla svar - men den öppnar upp för en djupare förståelse av hur kampen om kunskap och sanning formar vår samtid. 

Aim: Climate change poses increasing risks to outdoor occupations, including construction work. This study explores how vulnerability is constructed in narratives of manual labour within the Swedish construction sector, particularly under extreme weather conditions.

Methods: Drawing on 16 qualitative interviews with Swedish construction workers, the study adopts a social constructionist lens to explore how vulnerability is shaped and experienced.

Findings: The findings identify multiple, intersecting forms of vulnerability—bodily, hierarchical, material, social, and market-driven—exacerbated by climate-related challenges such as high temperatures, heavy rainfall, and strong winds. Crucially, the analysis highlights how extreme weather disrupts temporal rhythms, widening the gap between scheduled work plans and the actual time needed to complete tasks.

Conclusion: The paper concludes that vulnerability arises not only from direct exposure to adverse weather, but also through indirect social, material, and temporal dynamics inherent in the construction sector and exacerbated by climate change.

This paper problematises ideological assumptions about journalism’s epistemic authority among Swedish media professionals in relation to notions of post-truth. The study is based on qualitative interviews with journalists who are active in the Swedish news industry. The concept of discursive logics is applied to showcase how journalism is understood and experienced by journalists themselves during an alleged truth crisis. This paper analyses how journalistic practices and ideals are perceived to be disrupted by an ongoing truth crisis and how such practices are envisioned in the future. This paper identifies two major discursive logics in which these disruptions are manifested. The journalists conceived of new techno-political infrastructures in the media as a horrific fantasy threatening their work practices. The second logic is the beatific fantasy of truth-seeking journalism in current times. Post-truth represents a threat against journalism in a double-edged way: first by creating mistrust in established media, and second because, when attempting to counteract fake news through fact checking, the journalist is instead positioned as an activist or a debater.

Background: Swedish labour care is becoming increasingly medicalised, with rising rates of intrapartum interventions such as induction and augmentation of labour, epidural analgesia, and caesarean section. This study aimed to explore the paradox of the increasing medicalisation of childbirth despite the vast evidence of the benefits of low-intervention physiological birth.

Methods: Focused ethnography was used to study woman-midwife interactions during labour and birth and the everyday practices of midwives in two Swedish labour wards. After birth, the women and midwives were interviewed. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data, and the study design and interpretation of results were informed by a social constructionist view of gender.

Results: The analysis resulted in three themes, mirroring the pillars on which labour and birth care rests– the labour care organisation, the midwives, and the women who give birth. The organisation was hierarchical and based on traditional masculine values such as rationality, efficiency, and productivity. The midwives tried to balance the needs of the birthing women and the organisational demands of throughput. As action and technological skills are more noticeable and linked to masculinity, and thus more valued than the invisible feminine-coded emotional care work of supporting a woman in labour, the midwives became task-oriented and more focused on ‘doing’ than on ‘being’. This led to more birth interventions, less support for the birthing women, and to occupational stress and stress of conscience for the midwives. Normative expressions of femininity were observed in the birthing women, such as placing the needs of others before their own and acts of compliance, which sometimes led to unconsented interventions.

Conclusions: We suggest that societal gender norms and gender-based hierarchies in combination with modern society becoming progressively risk-laden and technology-oriented, have contributed to an increasingly medicalised and interventionist labour and birth care organisation, where physiological birth is rare. Awareness of how gender norms inform labour and birth care practice may be one way to make visible and to recognise all aspects of midwifery care, as well as help flatten hospital hierarchies, improve working conditions for midwives, promote physiological birth, and limit unnecessary and unconsented interventions for the birthing women.

Accelerating climate change has been associated with, among other things, rising temperatures, rising sea levels, extensive periods of precipitation, and difficult wind conditions. These are said to affect large segments of society, not least outdoor workers, whose working conditions are negatively affected. Much media attention has been paid to the situation of outdoor workers, and the media presents tips on what to consider when working in conditions such as high temperatures. The aim of this paper is to explore how the Swedish media reports on outdoor workers and their working conditions in relation to climate change and difficult weather conditions, especially high temperatures. The aim is also to describe and analyze how an identified risk discourse is legitimized in media representations of extreme weather and outdoor work. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of 72 articles in the Swedish media, available in the digital archive retriever.com (Mediearkivet). A social constructionist perspective is used to explore how weather, climate, and risks are “constructed” in the material, and a focus on storytelling techniques and legitimization strategies makes it possible to investigate how certain views of weather, climate, and risks are justified. According to the results, climate change and changing weather conditions are related to risks at both a structural level and an everyday level in working life. Two overall categories of risk are identified, on one side physiological and mental risks, and on the other economic and technological risks. Together, these categories underpin a general risk discourse that is legitimized using strategies such as scientification, dramatization, and personification. The conclusion is that the media representations are characterized by a de-politization of climate change and changing weather conditions, and by a focus on individual adaptation to these changes.

The number of media representations of climate activists has increased dramatically in Sweden recently. Some climate actions have attracted particular attention from Swedish media, such as when activists stopped traffic and disrupted public events. In this article, I present an analysis of media representations of both supporters and critics of climate activists in terms of strategies of legitimisation and de-legitimisation. The study is based on an examination of 98 Swedish media texts. The results reveal that risk-taking, self-sacrificing, heroisation, normalisation and personification are legitimisation strategies, while de-legitimisation strategies involve de-politicisation, rigid opposition, undermining the motive and stigmatisation. A conclusion is that the identified (de)legitimisation strategies are an expression of and contribute to increased polarisation between those who support the activists and those who criticise them. This polarisation takes different forms (partisan polarisation, affective polarisation and cultural polarisation) and risks contributing to an antagonistic debate where political opponents are transformed into enemies to be destroyed.