According to many sociologist (cf. Baumann 1992, Berger 1969, Davies 1997, 2005), death reveals the precariousness of not only the individual human subject, but of all social worlds. Thus, the point of departure for sociological and cultural studies on death is often the notion of death as obliteration and the end of life as we know it. This notion serves as point of departure for studies on how individuals and collectives develop cultural practices in order to negotiate the irrevocability and finality of life that death implies. In this way, death serves as the target for the development of religion, of funeral practices, of memorials and memorialisation, of a plethora of artefacts, and of formations of societies and nations.

In this presentation I want to turn things around. Instead of seeing death as the object and target for social and cultural practices, my point of departure is the agency and productivity of death. Drawing on post-humanist theory (Deleuze and Guattari (1988, Latour 2005), I want make trouble with the common dichotomous notion of death and life. Moving away from a conception of death and life as each other’s opposites, I want to explore death as an assemblage, produced by multiple elements and phenomena, as well as producing multiple elements and phenomena. Specifically, I want to shed light on the productivity of death. Using examples from my different studies on death, bereavement, and memorialisation (Reimers 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2012), my argument is that assemblages of death produces new relations, new becomings, and therefore should not be seen as neither the end or the opposite of life. Death is becoming.

From a perspective of status and class, this paper delineates changes in Swedish childminder education. The data are policy documents, documents from childminder training, and interviews with educators. The analysis is informed by post-structural theory. The study shows that the status of the childminder program has shifted between high and low status, and led toward differently classed life trajectories at different times. One reason for these variations is that the emphasis in childcare has shifted from care to teaching. This has at times increased the status of the education and the vocation, but also subverted the demand for childminders.

Drawing on post-structural perspectives and analysis of television programs on education, the article investigates the public educational discourse in Sweden. It shows how a dominant neoliberal educational discourse is articulated together with a discourse of equal education, where the two discourses influence and subvert each other so that neither becomes totally hegemonic. Taking point of departure in the neoliberal emphasis on the individual, not the least concerning school choice and in relation to the significance of class for educational success, the analysis focus on the constitution of classed positions. The study reveals constitutions of class in which race, place, gender, economy, and agency are intertwined, such that the schools and the students are attributed both different status and differing subject positions in terms of future economic trajectories. The conclusions drawn are that in the public conversation about the organization and goal of compulsory education it is important to be aware of the discursive and political contexts in which the discussions take place, and that class matter in the educational assemblage in the form of economic subjectivities constituted in a web of intersecting notions about differing preconditions and outcomes of education.

Skola i normer granskar hur normer för hur man ska vara och bete sig upprepas och utmanas av elever och lärare i skolan, på lärarutbildningen och i skolans värdegrundsarbete. Genom föreställningar om normalitet skapas också det Andra, det som inte ryms innanför normens gränser och som därför stängs ute. Samtidigt uppstår alltid motsägelser som ger möjligheter till motstånd.

I denna nya upplaga har perspektiven vidgats och normbegreppet används för att belysa fler aspekter av hur normer verkar. Förutom normer om genus, ålder och sexualitet, diskuterar författarna på ett tydligare sätt också rasifiering och klass. Under senare år har betydelsen av dessa normativa processer blivit allt mer påtaglig, både i skolans värld och i samhället i stort. Ytterligare en skillnad är att förskolan, fritids, grundskolan, gymnasiet och högskolan diskuteras som delar i och konsekvenser av globala och nationella normstrider.

Purposes

The present paper employs public discourses, in the form of policy documents from the OECD, EU and the UN, news and popular media, to explore how economic and political subjectivities simultaneously emerge and are obfuscated in the ubiquitous discourses on education that are dominated by neoliberal ideas (Ball, 2006; Buras & Apple, 2005).

 Perspectives and theoretical framework

One point of departure are the notions of “interdiscursivity” and “medialization of politics,” which point to how discourses are rearticulated in different contexts, drawing on each other, and thereby both affirming and displacing each other, and to how politics is made intelligible in public media (Fairclough, 1995; 2000). Another point of departure is the notions of assemblages and flight lines (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). These concepts enable us to understand the neoliberal education discourse as an open, ambiguous and undecided assemblage, and to explore how this assemblage makes possible differing educational aims and subject positions.

 Methods

The argument is based on discourse analysis of transnational policy documents and news and popular media from different nations. The aim of the analysis is to explore what economic and political subject positions are made possible in these different data sets.

 Results and Arguments

Although the tenants of neoliberalism are dominant, they are not totally hegemonic. In both the policy documents and the public media data, there are simultaneous articulations of a neoliberal educational discourse and a discourse of education as a tool to enhance democracy and create social justice. Furthermore, these discourses inform and are often intertwined with each other. 

 The transnational policy documents predominantly articulate education as possibilities.

There are, however, salient differences between the OECD and EU documents, and the UN documents. Although all emphasize what education can do for the nations, the former stress education as a prerequisite for economic progress, whereas the latter stress eliminating poverty, fostering democracy, and empowering individuals and subordinated groups. In this way, the OECD and EU documents constitute subjectivities in relation to a market focused on how learners can contribute to a growing economy, whereas the UN documents constitute political subjects who can contribute to society through political interventions.

 News and public media are dominated by articulations of an education system in a state of “crisis”. The arguments for these representations and the solutions brought forward are drawn from a neoliberal discourse focused on competition, marketization, free choice, and private initiatives, but there is also a parallel and intersecting discourse of education as a means to give subordinated subjects opportunities for a better life. However, these discourses mainly point to economic rather than to political subjectivities, who hold their future in their own hands by making the right choices and working hard. This is not completely unambiguous, as media representations, especially in the popular media, also depict resistance and constitute subjectivities who subvert the neoliberal hegemony and who insist on the political (Mouffe, 2005). These subversions open the door to notions of education as practices that not only stabilize, but also destabilize and change society.

Death affects all aspects of life, it touches our emotions and influences our identity. Presenting a kaleidoscope of informative views of death, dying and human response, this book reveals how different disciplines contribute to understanding the theme of death. Drawing together new and established scholars, this is the first book among the studies of emotion that focuses on issues surrounding death, and the first among death studies which focuses on the issue of emotion. Themes explored include: themes of grief in the ties that bind the living and the dead, funerals, public memorials and the art of consolation, obituaries and issues of war and death-row, use of the internet in dying and grieving, what people do with cremated remains, new rituals of spiritual care in medical contexts, themes bounded and expressed through music, and more.

This article discusses practices in connection with death and mourning. It argues that kinship is an ambiguous and contingent concept, and that rituals done in connection with death and mourning have consequences for how people are acknowledged as bereaved. The discussion is based on data from a Swedish study of bereavement. Besides evincing the salience in death practices of a notion of kinship based on conjugal relations and blood ties, the results of analysis of participant observations in a grief group and in-depth interviews with gay widowers reveal that the dominant kinship norm both constrain and enables differing positions as primary mourners. Drawing on Judith Butler and discourse theory, the study shows that claiming a position as bereaved can entail struggles concerning acknowledgement of kinship, and that examples of denunciation simultaneously stand out as resistance and subversion. To avoid marginalizing prospective mourners, it is important to be aware of how these practices of kinship and grief work together.

'Norm Struggles' explores and challenges normativity in general and heteronormativity in particular. A common trait in all chapters is the focus on contradictions, changes, disruptions and uncertainties that follow with different norms and structuring forces. The authors discuss and explore how norms are produced, and reproduced but also disrupted, subverted and changed. The chapters are based on observations from different settings such as preschools, schools, universities, factories, social welfare, popular culture, passenger ships, and the fire service. They are also based on observations from different countries - Lithuania, Canada, USA, Sweden, Finland, and Great Britain. The book presents studies of media, policies, machines, organisations, academic sexual theory, and the ongoing constructions of nations and nationalities