Malin Gunnarsson SylvinDoktorand
Om mig
Jag är doktorand i folkhälsovetenskap vid Stockholms universitet. Min forskning undersöker de sociala och kulturella dimensionerna av substansbruk och substansbruksproblem, med särskilt fokus på hur människor berättar, förhandlar och skapar mening kring sina erfarenheter i vardagslivet.
I min avhandling Many Facets of Substance Use Problems: Narratives of Normality, Stigma, and Everyday Life in Sweden analyserar jag hur substansbruk vävs in i arbetsliv, familjeliv, ungdomstid och urbana miljöer. Genom narrativa livsberättelser och promenadintervjuer studerar jag hur individer både upprätthåller och i efterhand omformar en känsla av normalitet i relation till stigma och sociala förväntningar.
Avhandlingen består av fyra delstudier:
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Performing normality in working life among heavy substance users (2022, Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs) – visar hur personer med substansbruksproblem hanterar sitt bruk i arbetslivet genom strategier för att dölja och normalisera. DOI: 10.1177/14550725221108796
- Parenting and substance use problems in Sweden: Hiding, disappearing and compensating (2025, Addiction Research and Theory ) – analyserar hur föräldrar förhandlar ideal om ansvarsfullt föräldraskap samtidigt som de hanterar substansbruk. DOI: 10.1080/16066359.2025.2459658
- Doing normality: Retrospective narratives of early substance use (manuskript) – undersöker hur vuxna i efterhand gör mening av sina tidiga erfarenheter av alkohol och droger som en del av vardagliga familje- och kamratmiljöer.
- Walking through stigma: Everyday life, normality, and substance use in urban spaces (manuskript) – använder promenadintervjuer för att visa hur människor återberättar och omtolkar sitt tidigare bruk genom betydelsebärande platser och minnen.
Tillsammans visar dessa studier att substansbruksproblem är socialt situerade, och genom att sätta individers egna berättelser i centrum bidrar min forskning till mer nyanserade och mänskliga förståelser av substansbruk, stigma och återhämtning.
Ytterligare relevanta studier utanför avhandlingen:
- 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
Forskning
Forskningsprojekt
Publikationer
I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas
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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
ArtikelLäs mer om 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.
Visa alla publikationer av Malin Gunnarsson Sylvin vid Stockholms universitet