A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• The public as infrastructure in policy processes: The case of the abolition of the Swedish alcohol rationing system

  2023. Katarina Winter, Johan Edman. International journal of drug policy 120

  Article

  Background: The Swedish political system is based on a strong tradition of commissions of inquiry, which work over the long-term to develop knowledge-based policy. This study explores knowledge processes associated with the work of such commissions, focusing on the case of the abolition of the Swedish alcohol rationing system. The point of departure is the 1944 Temperance Committee and its internal committee work, the committee's reports, and also the resulting governmental bill that led to the abolition of the rationing system in 1955. The focus is directed at how the public was used in arguments for and against the abolition of the system.

  Methods: The article adds to studies of knowledge production in policy by presenting a case study of the various ways in which the arguments used in political processes rely on the public as a carrying infrastructure over the course of a political process. We use the concept of the infrastructure (Star, 1999) as a metaphor to engage with the way the public is taken for granted in policy processes, and with the discursive resources needed to move arguments forward within a political process.

  Results: Political processes involve many activities related to the movement of knowledge, of which we have explored the use of the public as an activity required for the movement of arguments. The public is understood as providing both conversational and legalistic resources for moving arguments from one context to another. While the internal committee documents and the final bill allowed for an everyday use of the public in relation to arguments on hassle, annoyance and freedom, the committee reports combined the use of the public with formal arguments on legal processes and the public's sense of justice.

  Conclusion: Explanations of the movement of knowledge often miss the articulation work (Star, 1991) that takes place within policy processes. The public is indirectly present, as well-behaving witnesses used to emphasize arguments, and as such, they do plenty of work. At the same time, it is the committee documents that facilitate the presence of this public, which often lie far from the publics’ actual potential to make their voices heard. Although a perception of the rationing system's lack of support in popular opinion constituted a backdrop to the work of the committee, there was little knowledge of the publics’ actual views on the rationing system. We show that the public constitute a spoken rather than a material resource that proves quite effective: the public is rarely questioned as long as it is a restricted singular public that behaves well. To date, little attention has been focused on understanding the role of the everyday actors in relation to alcohol policy and other forms of drug policy. We argue that research needs to engage more with the way publics are allowed to indirectly or directly participate in policy processes and what knowledge and policy consequences this participation produces.

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• Förnuft och känsla. Kunskapsbruk hos gårdagens förbudskritiker och dagens alkoholliberaler

  2022. Katarina Winter, Johan Edman. Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

  Article

  Aim: The aim is to study non-governmental actors’ production and use of alcohol policy knowledge in the early 20th and the 21st century respectively, by analyzing their main arguments, knowledge substantiation and their overarching discursive legitimacy. Design: The first impact focuses on prohibitionist-critical actors’ engagement against the alcohol ban in the years 1916–1922. The second impact focuses on the Swedish think tank Timbro’s engagement in alcohol policy in the years 2012–2020. The analysis of the two empirical cases was based on an open coding strategy with a focus on what type of knowledge claims that were made and how which reasoning was put forward in relation to these. Results: Great similarities are distinguished between the two timeperiods. Alcohol is an issue of freedom and at the same time a threat of crucial importance for the future society. The arguments are supported by historical, international, media and scientific evidence. The biggest difference lies in the legitimization of the argumentation. In the early 20th century this is rooted in democracy and the will of the people while the arguments of the 21st century are rooted in public health and governmentally sanctioned knowledge. Conclusion:The knowledge processes are explored as matters of political appropriation that takes place through processes of directing and stealing the spotlight. These processes show how the aspiring democracy and the existing public health policy respectively are productive preconditions for what kind of knowledge that can be brought forward. This enables a renegotiation regarding what democracy and public health policy can involve.

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• Collective, unruly, and becoming: Bodies in and through TTC communication

  2021. Kristina Stenström, Katarina Winter. MedieKultur 37 (71), 31-53

  Article

  Online contexts offer an important source of information and emotional support for those facing involuntary childlessness. This article reports the results from an ethnographic exploration of TTC (trying-to-conceive) communication on Instagram. Through a new materialist approach that pays attention to the web of intra-acting agencies in online communication, this article explores the question of what material-discursive bodies (constructs of embodiment and medical information) emerge in TTC communication as the result of shared images and narratives of bodies, symptoms, fertility treatments, and reproductive technologies. Drawing on a lengthy ethnographic immersion, observations of 394 Instagram accounts, and the close analysis of 100 posts, the study found that TTC communication produces collective, unruly, and becoming bodies. Collective bodies reflect collectively acquired, solidified, and contested medical knowledge and bodies produced in TTC communication. Unruly bodies are bodies that do not conform to standard medical narratives. Becoming bodies are marked by their shifting agency, such as pregnant or fetal bodies.

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• The social perspective and the BDMA's entry into the non-medical stronghold in Sweden and other Nordic countries

  2022. Jessica Storbjörk, Lena Eriksson, Katarina Winter. Evaluating the Brain Disease Model of Addiction, xxx-xxx

  Chapter

  Sweden and the other Nordic countries have held an alternative way to many other countries of understanding and responding to substance use and addiction. The non-medical approach grew particularly strong in the 1960s, but this social perspective has, since the 1990s, become increasingly challenged. This chapter outlines the social understanding and the developments within substance use treatment (SUT), policy, and everyday society in Sweden. A renewed medicalization began at the turn of the millennium, and has accelerated in more recent years, increasingly so due to an underlying brain disease model of addiction (BDMA) and sometimes also by outspoken BDMA arguments. Some explanations for the BDMA’s entry into the Nordic non-medical stronghold are: the medical perspective embedded in both evidence-based practices (EBP) and New Public Management (NPM), and the related fragmentation of the treatment system and demands for cost-effectiveness, communication and public outreach. Explanations are also found in worldwide trends, e.g., a mainstreaming of diagnoses; the public health movement; drug-related deaths and a push towards medical harm reduction measures; and, most recently, by a BDMA rhetoric emerging in public and policy debate and SUT. Understood from processes of ‘copresence’ and ‘vaguification’, the BDMA is in line with these forces driving towards a biomedical understanding of substance use problems.

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• Berusningens politiska aritmetik

  2021. Johan Edman (et al.). Samhällets långsiktiga kunskapsförsörjning 1-8

  Chapter

  Vetenskap syftar till att säkra kunskap, men är samtidigt en osäker process. Det märks exempelvis om man skärskådar relationen mellan vetenskap och politik i den svenska välfärdsstaten. I detta häfte undersöks och diskuteras utifrån ett vetenskapshistoriskt perspektiv hur berusningspolitiken utformades och begripliggjordes under 1960- och 1970-talen. Särskild vikt läggs vid den betydelse som statistiska kvantifieringar kom att få för att etablera kunskap.

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• “I’ll Look Into it!” Lubricants in Conversational Coproduction

  2020. Katarina Winter. Minerva

  Article

  This study investigates the interaction between civil servants and politicians in a planning committee in a Swedish county council. As the committees are venues for preparation of future decision-making, civil servants and others are invited to inform and report to the politicians on different topics. The aim is to explore this local interaction process based on an analysis of requests and responses. It is shown that the communication between civil servants and politicians is pervaded by sociability in the form of conversational routines. The article aims to recognize this sociability as an intrinsic part of knowledge coproduction processes. Civil servants and politicians negotiate different types of professional and common knowledge through routines that dislocate time, responsibility, roles, and protocol order. These lubricants – important but often circumvented in studies of policy-making – are explored as instances of conversational coproduction.

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• Everybody knows?

  2019. Katarina Winter (et al.).

  Thesis (Doc)

  The coproduction idiom within Science and Technology Studies (STS) centers on how science and society produce knowledge together. The current thesis explores expert communication – which is immersed in the relationship between science and society – as a case for understanding such coproducing processes. Expert communication is often characterized as a democratic initiative of knowledge enlightenment. But we know less about the consequences that communication initiatives bring. For instance, while groups of publics and experts are large and heterogeneous, expert communication often involves simplified and dichotomized relationships between these groups. The aim of this thesis is to understand the practice of expert communication in terms of how expertise is communicated and received. Who gets to represent experts and publics, in what ways and in which situations, and how do they engage with expertise?

  Expert communication takes place in all kinds of fields. The focus of this thesis is communication of addiction expertise. The addiction field makes a suitable case for studying co-constitutive practices of communication, as it is broad and disparate, and filled with different contradictory perspectives, actors and relations. The current study explores communication of addiction expertise through three cases that involve different types of experts and publics, as well as different dimensions of the expert/public relationships and of communication as a process of coproduction: Newspaper readers’ interpretations of media representations of biomedical addiction expertise, conference participants’ collaboration within a conference on codependency, and civil servants’ and politicians’ interaction within county council committee meetings. Drawing on STS approaches of coproduction of knowledge and classical sociological conversation analysis, the thesis explores questions of how, what, and whose knowledge is communicated and received, and what activities and actors are involved in these processes. A specific focus is put on how sociability in the form of conversational routines is productive, as sociability carries expertise and establishes relations between actors involved in coproducing processes of communication.

  Publics are not only recipients of expertise but also active enablers of how expertise comes into being in the everyday society, as publics engage with expertise through filtering and intertwining expertise through and with their personal experiences. Expertise, at least regarding human and social activities such as addiction, is thus bound to everyday experiences and lives. It is also shown how certain expertise, certain experiences, and certain actors and victims of addiction related problems are included while others are excluded. For example, biomedical explanations such as the reward system and the brain disease model seem to co-exist well with peoples’ personal experiences in contrast to social scientific explanations. Moreover, certain actors manage to draw on personal experiences in multiple roles as both experts and publics. Introducing the concept of conversational coproduction, the studies also highlight the sociability and conversational routines involved in expert communication as crucial for (de)establishing relations and making expertise flow or freeze in local coproducing processes as well as for understanding consequences of expert communication and its relation to public participation and democracy.

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• Forskningsformidling: oplysning, magtmiddel eller begge dele?

  2019. Katarina Winter.

  Other

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• Experiences and expertise of codependency

  2018. Katarina Winter. Public Understanding of Science

  Article

  Arenas where experts interact with publics are useful platforms for communication and interaction between actors in the field of public health: researchers, practitioners, clinicians, patients, and laypersons. Such coalitions are central to the analysis of knowledge coproduction. This study investigates an initiative for assembling expert and other significant knowledge which seeks to create better interventions and solutions to addiction-related problems, in this case codependency. But what and whose knowledge is communicated, and how? The study explores how processes of repetition, claim-coupling, and enthusiasm produce a community based on three boundary beliefs: (1) victimized codependent children failed by an impaired society; (2) the power of daring and sharing; and (3) the (brain) disease model as the scientific representative and explanation for (co)dependence. These processes have legitimized future hopes in certain suffering actors, certain lived and professional expertise and also excluded social scientific critique, existing interventions, and alternative accounts.

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• Coproduction of Scientific Addiction Knowledge in Everyday Discourse

  2016. Katarina Winter. Contemporary Drug Problems 43 (1), 25-46

  Article

  The phenomenon of addiction enables studies of how society governs citizens and produces (healthy) bodies through classifications and definitions within treatment, science, and politics. Definitions and explanations of addiction change over time, and collective narratives of addiction in society are shared between scientific, official, and colloquial discourses. It is thus reasonable to argue that scientists, clinicians, and practitioners, as well as politicians, journalists, and laypersons, co-create addiction as a (bio)medical, social, and cultural phenomenon defined by varying actions, experiences, contexts, and meanings. The mass media is a key link between science and citizens. Explanations and definitions of the nature and causes of, and solutions for, addiction are provided by science and communicated to the rest of the society in popular scientific representations. While the language of scientific discourse is actively used, reproduced, and redefined in everyday language, laypersons are seldom acknowledged as active participants in studies of knowledge coproduction. This study examines how 25 newspaper readers interpret and explain dimensions of addiction phenomena through their own knowledge and interpretation of scientific representations in the media. The analysis shows how (popular) scientific biomedical addiction discourse interacts with newspaper readers’ interpretations, focusing on lay discussion of the causes of and solutions for addiction, how lay coproduction of scientific explanations is made, and how we can understand it. The study contributes to our understanding of the complex network of interacting and competing actors coproducing knowledge of addiction, emphasizing laypersons’ involvement in this process.

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• Knowledge production, communication and utilization

  2013. Alexandra Bogren, Katarina Winter. Drugs and Alcohol Today 13 (1), 28-35

  Article

  Purpose - A growing body of social research analyzes how the biomedical interest in detailed molecular aspects of our bodies (genes, biomarkers, DNA) affect everyday notions of health, risk, and responsibility for health problems. However, this research focus has been largely neglected in social alcohol research. The purpose of this paper is to report on some early findings from a study of media portrayals of biomedical alcohol research and to present a rationale for studying biomedical alcohol research more broadly.

  Design/methodology/approach - The empirical discussion is based on textual analysis of 90 newspaper articles published in Swedish newspapers between 1995 and 2010 and one-on-one semi-structured interviews with 24 newspaper readers about their interpretation of the newspaper portrayals. The motives for studying biomedical alcohol research more broadly are discussed in relation to existing research and theories of biomedicalization.

  Findings - Firstly, we find that a large majority of the newspapers cite biomedical researchers to explain the mechanisms of addiction, and that biomedical research is often presented as revolutionary in scope. However, journalists also act as storytellers who explain the biomedical research results to readers. The reward system proved to be a central notion among the interviewees, who had their own, different and varying definitions of the concept. Secondly, we suggest a framework for analyzing how biomedical knowledge is produced, communicated and utilized by three types of key actors.

  Originality/value - The study presents a novel framework for studying biomedical alcohol research.

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• The realization of sexed bodies

  2013. Katarina Winter, Alexandra Bogren. Women's Studies 37, 53-63

  Article

  During recent decades, biomedical research has increasingly entered the press scene, particularly in media stories of healthy bodies and lifestyles. One of the fields where this is visible is in the discussion of alcohol consumption and problems, a field where references to biological sex differences are common. This paper analyzes how facts about sexed bodily difference are made real in Swedish newspaper stories of biomedical alcohol research. Our findings indicate that newspapers represent the body at different levels of abstraction; from detailed descriptions at the molecular level (hormones and genes), through discussion at the molar level (body parts, organs and disease), to more general discussion at the social level (inner nature, sensitivity, and responsibility). We also find a double metaphorical meaning of the word alcohol: alcohol is a solution (a soluble liquid) that also dissolves the dimorphism of bodily sex difference.

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Show all publications by Katarina Winter at Stockholm University