Malin Gunnarsson SylvinPhD Student
About me
I am a PhD candidate in Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University. My research explores the social and cultural dimensions of substance use problems, with a particular focus on how people narrate, negotiate, and make sense of their experiences in everyday life.
In my dissertation Many Facets of Substance Use Problems: Narratives of Normality, Stigma, and Everyday Life in Sweden, I examine how substance use is embedded in routines of work, family, youth, and urban space. Through narrative and walking interviews, I analyze how individuals both maintain and retrospectively reconstruct a sense of normality in the face of stigma and disruption.
My research consists of four studies:
- Performing normality in working life among heavy substance users (2022, Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs), which shows how individuals manage substance use while sustaining employment through strategies of concealment and impression management. DOI: 10.1177/14550725221108796
- Parenting and substance use problems in Sweden: Hiding, disappearing and compensating (2025, Addiction Research and Theory) - which examines how parents negotiate ideals of responsible parenthood while managing substance use. DOI: 10.1080/16066359.2025.2459658
- Doing normality: Retrospective narratives of early substance use (manuscript), which explores how adults make sense of their early initiation into alcohol and drugs as part of ordinary family and peer life.
- Walking through stigma: Everyday life, normality, and substance use in urban spaces (manuscript), which uses walking interviews to show how people re-narrate and reframe their past substance use through meaningful places and spatial memories.
Together, these studies highlight how substance use problems are socially situated, and by centering people’s own stories, my work contributes to more nuanced and humane understandings of substance use, stigma, and recovery.
Additional relevant studies not included in the dissertation:
- Törrönen, J., Winerdal, U., & Gunnarsson Sylvin, M. (2025). Parenting and heavy substance use: From neutralization theory to actor-network theory to avoid stigmatizing participants. Journal of Drug Policy. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2025.104983
- Törrönen, J., Winerdal, U., & Gunnarsson Sylvin, M. (2025). Using drugs to enhance capacities for action in everyday life practices: Analysing addiction stories’ descriptions of the escalation of substance use as counter-narratives. Social Science & Medicine. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118245
- Törrönen, J., Samuelsson, E., & Gunnarsson, M. (2020). Online Gambling Venues as Rational Actors in Addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gambling. International Journal of Drug Policy. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102928
Research projects
Publications
A selection from Stockholm University publication database
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Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblers
2020. Jukka Törrönen, Eva Samuelsson, Malin Gunnarsson. International journal of drug policy
ArticleRead more about Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblersBackground
With the emerging technologies of the Internet and smartphones during the last decades, the gambling environment has undergone a massive transformation. In Sweden, and Europe in general, online gambling has more than doubled since 2007.
Method
The paper studies online gambling venues (OGVs) as relational actors of addiction. By drawing on the actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage thinking, we examine how OGVs, as actors in specific networks of attachment, enable the development of gambling addiction and facilitate its continuation. The data consists of life story interviews with 34 online gamblers.
Results
Online gambling venues extend the scope of gambling opportunities through space, providing an easy portable 24-hours-a-day access to gambling online and on smartphones. This increases the spatial mobility of gambling to diverse contexts. By linking gambling to more unpredictably evolving patterns of relations, online gambling venues also increase gambling's temporal mobility to intrude in the habitual trajectories of everyday life. By enhancing the gambling mobility through space and time, OGVs simultaneously extend the scope of situations in which gambling may transform from a controlled activity into an addiction. It is then that the actor-networks of gambling infiltrate in the actor-networks of work, domestic life and leisure, and start to feed processes where they are translated to serve the interests of gambling.
Conclusion
By giving us tools to challenge simplistic and taken-for-granted explanations of gambling addiction and by allowing us to grasp the flux and changing nature of addiction as a relational pattern of heterogeneous contextual attachments, the actor-network theory can help us to understand the complexity and multiplicity of gambling problems. The knowledge on what kinds of contextual attachments in diverse actor-networks enable harmful gambling and sustain unhealthy relations helps practitioners to focus treatment interventions especially on these contextual linkages and their configurations.
Show all publications by Malin Gunnarsson Sylvin at Stockholm University
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