Humanities and Social Sciences

Defector operations are a central part of the strategy to reduce gang-related criminality. It has become ever more common for the police to initiate and lead defector operations through various programmes. Despite this, there are few studies of how the police actually can help gang members to stop comitting crimes.

In our research project, we want to analyse how the police defector programmes are organised and function.

We will be studying how gang defections are defined and perceived, by the police and practicians on the one hand, and on the other hand by gang members who want to defect, or who have defected via the programmes. We will be interviewing the different groups and make observations of the police’s everyday work with gang defections.

Theoretically, the project is based on steering theories, where the police work is seen as a hub within a network of different relationships and alliances, for example betweeen municipal activities, functions within the Police Force, and private actors who offer support to defectors. The other theoretical starting point focuses on what makes people stop committing crimes, and how the police and other societal actors can provide support to criminals in the process that a defection may entail.

The research team is supported by a team of practicians and academics, both within and outside Sweden. By studying experiences of both police officers and gang defectors, the project will create new knowledge that can contribute to developing the police’s defector programmes and show their potential for reducing gang-related criminality.

Project name: Policing Gang Desistance: Challenges and Opportunities

Project leader: Anita Heber, Associate Professor in Criminology Studies, Stockholm University.

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.

Language development is often delayed in children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis. A large part of the research has to date focused on learning the mother tongue, not a second language.

Three student dissertations indicate a surprising hypothesis: High-functioning children with autism (ASD pupils) perhaps prefer speaking a second language, and feel more competent and comfortable with that than with their mother tongue.

In this project, we want to investigate this hypothesis systematically. We do this by comparing how fluent high-functioning upper secondary ASD pupils and upper secondary pupils without autism are in Swedish and in English in two different contexts – image-inspired storytelling, and natural interaction during role play. We supplement the tests with surveys and interviews with the ASD pupils and their parents and teachers, to include more personal experiences and perspectives of the use of the languages in everyday life.

Using these methods, we can evaluate the pupils’ language skills and communicative comfort in each language, and estimate which language they prefer to use, and why. If the hypothesis is confirmed, this can have considerable personal and educational effects on high-functioning ASD pupils and their parents and teachers. It may open the door to new strategies for effective communication, and thereby improve both quality of life and the educational results of children with high-functioning autism.

Project name: Swedish or English? – Language Preference and Linguistic Skills of High-Functioning Students within Autism Spectrum Disorder

Project leader: Andrea Schalley, Professor in the Department of Language, Literature and Interculture, Karlstad University

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.

Globally, women are under-represented in politics, and particularly disadvantaged in relation to political leadership positions. Female political leaders are also often treated worse than their male colleagues. This is often explained by leadership ideals being coded as masculine. They emphasise dominance and individualism, while feminine-coded attributes emphasise care and inclusion.

Research has to date been dominated by studies from countries and contexts where men are over-represented in politics. On the other hand, there is not much knowledge of the preconditions for female political leaders in more gender-balanced contexts.

Our project aims to fill this research gap by investigating the relationship between leadership ideals, practical preconditions for exercising leadership, and gender. We will investigate how leadership ideals and gender are perceived in Swedish contexts, and also how male and female leaders are treated and judged. We will investigate this using a number of studies: interviews with and surveys of Swedish politicians, quantitative text analysis of debates on questions raised in the Swedish Riksdag, and surveys of citizens. This combination of data and methods will provide us with both empirical and theoretical insights.

Under-representation and discrimination of women in leading positions is a challenge, both in politics and in other sectors. This project contributes knowledge about a largely unresearched question of high democratic relevance: are the preconditions for women to exercise leadership in politics improving in line with male dominance declining? The results can guide the work on actually creating preconditions for gender-equal political leadership.

Project leader: Josefina Erikson, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Uppsala University

Project name: What does it take to make leadership gender equal? Studies of political leadership in a gender balanced context

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.

Anti-Semitism is not a historical phenomenon, but a growing problem in both Sweden and the rest of Europe. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories circulate, extremist political groups are spreading hate on social media, and in several countries radical nationalistic groups have increased their presence in the public sphere. Many Jewish young persons are being confronted by anti-Semitism on a daily basis in their everyday lives. At the same time, the Swedish Child Ombudsman (2021) indicates that there is very little knowledge about young Jews’ experiences of anti-Semitism. Teachers and other school personnel bear witness that it is often difficult to identify anti-Semitic ideology, as it can be expressed in many different ways. A newly published report on anti-Semitism is Stockholm schools (2022) confirm this picture.

With this project, we want to use linguistic and ethnographic methods to investigate how anti-Semitic rhetoric is manifested linguistically and visually, and how young persons who are exposed to anti-Semitic messages in Sweden today interpret and are influenced by these. We will be combining discourse analysis with field studies.

One of the project’s sub-studies will focus on anti-Semitic expressions in public political contexts, with particular focus on the Politicians’ Week in Almedalen. Another sub-study will be investigating anti-Semitic propaganda in school environments. To ensure the perspectives of young persons have a prominent role, Jewish young persons will themselves participate in the third sub-study as co-researchers.

Project leader: Gustav Westberg, Associate Professor in Swedish, Örebro University

Project name: Antisemitic manifestations – the semiotics of antisemitism in Sweden and the experiences among Jewish youth

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.

Police interviews shall be conducted in an objective manner. This means, for example, that leading questions shall be avoided, and that the interviewee’s perspective shall be able to be put across. This is fundamental in a state governed by the rule of law, but criticism has still been aimed at the police’s ability to remain impartial in their investigations.

In this project, we will study how language is used in Swedish police interviews, as language is used to ask questions, recreate memories, and retell events. Internationally, there has been an increase in the number of studies investigating language in interview situations, but Swedish police interviews have not been investigated to any great extent. The project will therefore highlight how objectivity is construed and handled in the interaction between the police and the interviewee, with particular focus on how the police word questions, and how the interviewee’s story is reworded by the police.

The project is of high societal relevance, as it investigates the exercise of authority in practice, and how the principles of the rule of law are complied with and recreated in actual conversations. The project is also of practical benefit to the police and police training, in particular in relation to interview technique during police interviews.

Project leader: Lina Nyroos, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Swedish, Södertörn University

Project name: Interactional Patterns in Swedish Police Interviews. ´Doing Objectivity´ when Asking Information Seeking Questions and Producing Reformulation.

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.

Social inequality has played an important part in societal development, but when it comes to research into older societal structures, the focus has primarily been on people who belonged to the elite.

In this cross-disciplinary project, we will be studying the living conditions of marginalised groups in Scandinavia during the Viking period (around 750–1050 BCE). Societies in the Viking period were strictly hierachical, and on the few occasions where marginalised groups have been the focus of research, it has, for example, been about them perhaps not being given a formal grave.

The aim of our project is to provide new perspectives on how social inequality arose, was expressed, and was maintained. We will combine bio-archaeological analyses of skeletons with archaeological context information in order to find new explanation models and obtain increased understanding of how social inequality permeated life in the Viking period. The research also has the potential to illuminate structural and cultural mechanisms relating to the exploitation of different groups today.

Project leader: Ben Raffield, Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University

Project name: Social inequality, structural violence, and marginalisation in Viking-Age Scandinavia

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.

In 1919, the decision was taken that is usually regarded as the introduction of universal suffrage in Sweden. However, it took 70 years before all adult citizens were covered by this right. It was only when the declaration of incompetence was abolished in 1989 that the last ‘bar against voting’ for this group disappeared.

Internationally, Sweden was early to do this. In the majority of the world’s democratic states, persons with certain intellectual disabilities still lack opportunities to vote on the same terms as others. This is despite nearly all countries having signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which came into force in 2008.

There is, however, reason to believe that Swedish democracy is not fully accessible for this group, despite a number of accessibility measures having been taken. This is because participation in voting is considerably lower among persons with intellectual disabilities than among the population as a whole.

We will be monitoring the accessibility initiative Mitt val (“My Election”) ahead of the 2022 election. Mitt val offers a combination of study groups, easily read information, and discussions with politicians aimed at creating equal opportunities for all to participate in democracy. By letting persons with intellectual disabilities have their own say, we want to map the obstacles perceived and evaluate the options for overcoming these.

Project leader: Jonas Hultin Rosenberg, PhD in Political Science, Uppsala University

Project name: Obstacles and opportunities for equal participation of citizens with intellectual disabilities: evidence from a world-leading accessibility initiative

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.

Images constitute a powerful form of political communication that has become every more prominent in line with increasing digitisation. At the same time, we know fairly little abut the actors that spread different types of images to promote political ideas, and how these activities impact on the public discourse and contribute to shaping the political agenda.

To understand the power over the agenda in a digitised era, one must consider the visual dimension of politics. One problem is that political ideas are usually studied in text, while images differ in what they transmit and how they engage. They have their own dynamic.

The study of visual politicals also often relies on manual analysis of selected images – an approach that is not sufficient in today’s complex media landscape.

The project therefore has several purposes. We will firstly investigate how climate issues are communicated, disseminated, and achieve impact on platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Ahead of this we will develop methods for studying large-scale, visual dissemination phenomena through a combination of ‘framing’, machine learning for image analysis, and new advances in network analysis. In addition, we will evaluate the opportunities, challenges, and consequences of using AI-based methods in social sciences research.

Project leader: Alexandra Segerberg, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Uppsala University

Project name: Visual Politics: A Deep Learning Approach to the Spread and Stick of Political Ideas

Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.