To Örebro University

Purpose: The aim of this study is to analyze mothers’ narratives about their children’s life situation while living at domestic violence shelters in Sweden. More precisely, the analysis focuses on determining what aspects are highlighted as being most important for the children’s living situation during their stay.

Method: This study is based on interviews with mothers who have experience of living at a domestic violence shelter together with their young child/ren. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the narratives.

Results: The analysis resulted in seven themes important for the children’s lives during their shelter stay. These are: safety, isolation, a child-friendly environment, shared living space, social relations at the shelter, children’s health during their stay, and support at the shelter.

Conclusion: In the narratives, safety was highlighted as the most important issue, and as something that also affects other aspects of the children’s lives during their time at the shelter. A child-friendly environment, access to activities and support, and positive social relations at the shelter are also important. In addition, positive experiences regarding these aspects can be understood to counteract the feeling of isolation and improve children’s ability to process their experiences.

Promotional videos produced by higher education institutions (HEIs) are an important medium for introducing new generations of students to HEIs and communicating their roles and purposes to the outside world. Despite the widespread use of such videos, research on their contents and implications is relatively sparse. This study addresses this gap by analysing videos from 12 Scandinavian HEIs. The study found that the videos aligned with the concept of the ‘Promotional University 2.0’, emphasizing an intention to ‘aspire to more’ and ‘add to the real world’, and portraying the university as an arena for play and joy. Three main categories of videos emerged: student-centred, market-centred, and organization-centred. The study also highlights the ideological implications of the representations, as they reflect the tension between traditional and commercialized views of the university. The results contribute to an understanding of how promotional videos shape the expectations of students and other stakeholders. This research is important as it helps us understand how HEIs communicate and represent themselves in the highly competitive marketplace of higher education. It also illustrates the incommensurability between higher education policies aiming to promote democratization and serve the public interest on the one hand, and the images of HEIs created by promotional multimodal content on the other.

In this paper, we analyze the front pages of mainstream Greek newspapers with the highest circulation reporting the official result of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Our analysis seeks to extract the standpoints and arguments that circulated in the Greek mainstream press on that day by studying the headlines and visuals on the front page. We study the front page not merely as an informative genre but crucially as an argumentative one, where the arguments can be reconstructed with the help of tools from argumentation theory combined with principles from multimodal critical discourse analysis. The proposed approach makes it possible to compare how the different ideological orientations in the Greek public sphere were steered by the representation of this piece of news. We show that, despite their ideological background, the newspapers under study converge to the construction of Brexit as a menacing phenomenon that puts the EU integration to the test and, as such, as an event that should have been avoided.

Greening public organizations demands the acknowledgment and reconciliation of tensions and conflicts between core values. This is a challenge that public pension funds have come to face as the call for sustainability has reached the finance sector. Building on the value pluralism debate and institutional theory this article provides a theoretical elaboration of strategies for managing value conflict in public organizations, discussing how value conflict management may promote or inhibit institutional change. The empirical analysis explores how sustainability-related value conflicts are managed within Swedish public pension funds. Political goals and ideals of sustainable finance are pushing funds to promote sustainability through their investments, thus, to consider and promote further values than financial return. Previous research has mainly focused on the financial profitability of sustainability concerns. This study shows that economic value calculation remains the dominant approach within funds, downplaying any conflict between environmental and financial goals. However, to maintain institutional legitimacy under increasing external pressure, the funds have implemented complementary strategies, such as organizational separation of value-related tasks, and different principles for prioritizing value-based actions. The funds thereby avoid ethical reasoning which they fear would lead to subjectivity. In conclusion, the implications for organizational change are discussed.

The scope of protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict has continued to expand since the issue was first introduced on the international agenda in the 1970s. Today, it is recognized that the environment is a prima facie civilian object and as such it is entitled to the same layers of protection during an armed conflict as any civilian person or object. Thus, there is a legal obligation to prevent environmental harm in armed conflict, before the event. Given the magnitude of environmental damage that can be anticipated in relation to armed conflict, the obligation to prevent such damage in the first place is critical. In this regard, it is important to note that the legal obligation to prevent environmental harm originates from international environmental law. Furthermore, the obligation to prevent harm is an ongoing obligation. This article illustrates that the general preventive obligations found in international environmental law can shed much-needed light on the general preventive obligations already established under the law of armed conflict, in furtherance of environmental protection.

Encoding and (re-)using data about or created by citizens to generate new value is a process referred to as datafication. Extracting data from and about citizens raises numerous human rights questions, particularly in the area of the right to private life. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has over the years developed and shaped the right to digital private life by outlining what type of collection, processing and retention of data about individuals is considered permissive – and what is not. Although the datafication process entails elements that currently lie outside the core ambit of the ECtHR, it has a longstanding and indeed heightened interest in defining and protecting what constitutes genuine human private life. In this regard, digital private life falls into a domain of matters which the ECtHR finds worthy of protection. By pointing out specific requirements in order to prevent the abuse of State power, the ECtHR is a mechanism that can be reckoned with when it comes to shielding European citizens from datafication.

In this paper, I explore the socio-legal status of trans women in contemporary Iran especially as it relates to Gender Affirmation Surgery. More specifically, I try to understand how trans women embody gender by investigating gender practices and relations in family, law, and medicine. Based on my fieldwork in Iran, the findings suggest that aberu – a phenomenon specific to Iranian culture – plays a big role in shaping trans women’s lives. By bringing together feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser’s work on the politics of recognition and sociologist Raewyn Connell’s understanding of social embodiment, I discuss how the status of trans women is pervasively misrecognised and how they are denied economic participation and democratic representation in Iranian society. Adopting the method of thematic analysis, I argue that the social pressure associated with aberu, and the lack of legal protection have made trans women simultaneously invisible and yet also subject to violence. Finally, I discuss how trans women go through the process of gender embodiment by problematising misrecognition, redefining femininity, and reclaiming womanhood through everyday life challenges.

Urinary tract infection is one of the most common infections and is mostlycaused by uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC). The inflammasomeassociatedproteins caspase-1, caspase-4 and NLRP3 are essential in the hostcell response during urinary tract infection by regulating IL-1β release. Thepro-inflammatory effects of IL-1β can be inhibited by binding of the IL-1receptor antagonist (IL-1RA) to the IL-1 receptor. The aim of this thesis is toinvestigate what role caspase-1, caspase-4, NLRP3 and IL-1RA have on the proinflammatoryhost response evoked by UPEC and their role in recurrent UTI.

The results showed that the inflammasome-associated proteinscaspase-1, caspase-4 and NLRP3 are involved in cytokine and chemokinerelease and in antimicrobial activities of neutrophils during UTI. Weconclude that IL-1RA influences the release of various inflammatoryproteins during a UPEC infection from bladder epithelial cells. In addition,deficiency in IL-1RA led to decreased UPEC colonization and invasion ofbladder epithelial cells. Our results also show that NLRP3 has a regulativefunction on estrogen signalling and the expression of antimicrobialpeptides. Additionally, we found that capsase-1 and caspase-4 can regulatethe gene expression of important immune regulators, including TLR4,antimicrobial peptides, cytokines and chemokines.

Together, our results show that that the inflammasome-associatedproteins caspase-1, caspase-4, NLRP3 and IL-IRA are important immuneregulatorsduring UPEC infection in bladder epithelial cells. They regulateUPEC colonization, cytokines and chemokines release, antimicrobialactivities of neutrophils and estrogen signalling.

Advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence have paved the way for autonomous agents to perform complex tasks in various domains. A critical challenge in the field of robotics is enabling robots to acquire and refine skills efficiently, allowing them to adapt and excel in diverse environments. This thesis investigates the questions of how to acquire robot skills through priorconstrained machine learning and adapt these learned skills to novel environments safely and efficiently.

The thesis leverages the synergy between Reinforcement Learning (RL) and prior knowledge to facilitate skill acquisition in robots. It integrates existing task constraints, domain knowledge and contextual information into the learning process, enabling the robot to acquire new skills efficiently. The core idea behind our method is to exploit structured priors derived from both expert demonstrations and domain-specific information which guide the RL process to effectively explore and exploit the state-action space.

The first contribution lies in guaranteeing the execution of safe actions and preventing constraint violations during the exploration phase of RL. By incorporating task-specific constraints, the robot avoids entering into regions of the environment where potential risks or failures may occur. It allows for efficient exploration of the action space while maintaining safety, making it well-suited for scenarios where continuous actions need to adhere to specific constraints. The second contribution addresses the challenge of learning a policy on a real robot to accomplish contact-rich tasks by exploiting a set of pre-collected demonstrations. Specifically, a variable impedance action space is leveraged to enable the system to effectively adapt its interactions during contact-rich manipulation tasks. In the third contribution, the thesis explores the transferability of skills acquired across different tasks and domains, highlighting the framework’s potential for building a repository of reusable skills. By comparing the similarity between the target task and the prior tasks, prior knowledge is combined to guide the policy learning process for new tasks. In the fourth contribution of this thesis, we introduce a cycle generative model to transfer acquired skills across different robot platforms by learning from unstructured prior demonstrations. In summary, the thesis introduces a novel paradigm for advancing the field of robotic skill acquisition by synergizing prior knowledge with RL.

This dissertation presents advances in social human-robot interaction (HRI) and human social cognition through a series of experiments in which humans face a robot. A predominant approach to studying the human factor in HRI consists of placing the human in the role of a user to explore potential factors affecting the acceptance or usability of a robot. This work takes a broader perspective and investigates if social robots are perceived as social agents, irrespective of their final role or usefulness in a particular interaction. To do so, it adopts methodologies and theories from cognitive and experimental psychology, such as the use of behavioral paradigms involving gaze following and a framework of more than twenty years of research employing gaze to explore social cognition. The communicative role of gaze in robots is used to explore their essential effectiveness and as a tool to learn how humans perceive them. Studying how certain social robots are perceived through the lens of research in social cognition is the central contribution of this dissertation.

This thesis presents empirical research and the multidisciplinary literature on (robotic) gaze following, aging, and their relation with social cognition. Papers I and II investigate the decline in gaze following associated with aging, linked with a broader decline in social cognition, in scenarios with robots as gazing agents. In addition to the participants' self-reported perception of the robots, their reaction times were also measured to reflect their internal cognitive processes. Overall, this decline seems to persist when the gazing Overall, this decline seems to persist when the gazing agent is a robot, highlighting our depiction of robots as social agents. Paper IV explores the theories behind this decline using a robot, emphasizing how these theories extend to non-human agents. This work also investigates motion as a competing cue to gaze in social robots (Paper III), and mentalizing in robotic gaze following (Paper V).

Through experiments with participants and within the scope of HRI and social cognition studies, this thesis presents a joint framework highlighting that robots are depicted as social agents. This finding emphasizes the importance of fundamental insights from social cognition when designing robot behaviors. Additionally, it promotes and supports the use of robots as valuable tools to explore the robustness of current theories in cognitive psychology to expand the field in parallel.

Background: The interaction of organisms with their surrounding microbial communities influences many biological processes, a notable example of which is the shaping of the immune system in early life. In the Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, the role of the environmental microbial community on immune system maturation — and, importantly, protection from infectious disease — is still an open question.

Results: Here, we demonstrate that early life microbial exposure durably improves oyster survival when challenged with the pathogen causing Pacific oyster mortality syndrome (POMS), both in the exposed generation and in the subsequent one. Combining microbiota, transcriptomic, genetic, and epigenetic analyses, we show that the microbial exposure induced changes in epigenetic marks and a reprogramming of immune gene expression leading to long-term and intergenerational immune protection against POMS.

Conclusions: We anticipate that this protection likely extends to additional pathogens and may prove to be an important new strategy for safeguarding oyster aquaculture efforts from infectious disease

Recent insights in evolutionary biology have shed light on epigenetic variation that interacts with genetic variation to convey heritable information. An important characteristic of epigenetic changes is that they can be produced in response to environmental cues and passed on to later generations, potentially facilitating later genetic adaptation. While our understanding of epigenetic mechanisms in vertebrates is rapidly growing, our knowledge about invertebrates remains lower, or is restricted to model organisms. Mollusks in particular, are a large group of invertebrates, with several species important for ecosystem function, human economy and health. In this review, we attempt to summarize the literature on epigenetic and intergenerational studies in mollusk species, with potential importance for adaptive evolution. Our review highlights that two molecular bearers of epigenetic information, DNA methylation and histone modifications, are key features for development in mollusk species, and both are sensitive to environmental conditions to which developing individuals are exposed. Further, although studies are still scarce, various environmental factors (e.g. predator cues, chemicals, parasites) can induce intergenerational effects on the phenotype (life-history traits, morphology, behaviour) of several mollusk taxa. More work is needed to better understand whether environmentally-induced changes in DNA methylation and histone modifications have phenotypic impacts, whether they can be inherited through generations and their role in intergenerational effects on phenotype. Such work may bring insights into the potential role of epigenetic in adaptation and evolution in mollusks.

Environmental epigenetic is an emerging field that studies the cause–effect relationship between environmental factors and heritable trait via an alteration in epigenetic marks. This field has received much attentions since the impact of environmental factors on different epigenetic marks have been shown to be associated with a broad range of phenotypic disorders in natural ecosystems. Chemical pollutants have been shown to affect immediate epigenetic information carriers of several aquatic species but the heritability of the chromatin marks and the consequences for long term adaptation remain open questions. In this work, we investigated the impact of the diuron herbicide on the DNA methylation pattern of spat from exposed Crassotrea gigas genitors. This oyster is one of the most important mollusk species produced worldwide and a key coastal economic resource in France. The whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS, BS-Seq) was applied to obtain a methylome at single nucleotide resolution on DNA extracted from spat issued from diuron exposed genitors comparatively to control spat. We showed that the parental diuron exposure has an impact on the DNA methylation pattern of its progeny. Most of the differentially methylated regions occurred within coding sequences and we showed that this change in methylation level correlates with RNA level only in a very small group of genes. Although the DNA methylation profile is variable between individuals, we showed conserved DNA methylation patterns in response to parental diuron exposure. This relevant result opens perspectives for the setting of new markers based on epimutations as early indicators of marine pollutions.

Robots can direct human attention using their eyes. However, it remains unclear whether it is the gaze or the low-level motion of the head rotation that drives attention. We isolated these components in a non-predictive gaze cueing task with a robot to explore how limited robotic signals orient attention. In each trial, the head of a NAO robot turned towards the left or right. To isolate the direction of rotation from its gaze, NAO was presented frontally and backward along blocks. Participants responded faster to targets on the gazed-at site, even when the eyes of the robot were not visible and the direction of rotation was opposed to that of the frontal condition. Our results showed that low-level motion did not orient attention, but the gaze direction of the robot did. These findings suggest that the robotic gaze is perceived as a social signal, similar to human gaze.

AR is progressively being implemented in the automotive domain as an ADAS system. This increasingly popular technology has the potential to reduce the fatalities on the road which involve HF, however the cognitive components of AR are still being studied. This review provides a quick overview of the studies related with the cognitive mechanisms involved in AR while driving to date. Related research is varied, a taxonomy of the outcomes is provided. AR systems should follow certain criteria to avoid undesirable outcomes such as cognitive capture. Only information related with the main driving task should be shown to the driver in order to avoid occlusion of the real road by non-driving related tasks and high mental workload. However, information should not be shown at all times so it does not affect the driving skills of the users and they do not develop overreliance in the system, which may lead to risky behaviours. Some popular uses of AR in the car are navigation and as safety system (i.e. BSD or FCWS). AR cognitive outcomes should be studied in these particular contexts in the future. This article is intended as a mini-guide for manufacturers and designers in order to improve the quality and the efficiency of the systems that are currently being developed.

The ability to follow the gaze of others deteriorates with age. This decline is typically tested with gaze cueing tasks, in which the time it takes to respond to targets on a screen is faster when they are preceded by a facial cue looking in the direction of the target (i.e., gaze cueing effect). It is unclear whether age-related differences in this effect occur with gaze cues other than the eyes, such as head orientation, and how these vary in function of the cue-target timing. Based on the perceived usefulness of social robots to assist older adults, we asked older and young adults to perform a gaze cueing task with the head of a NAO robot as the central cue. Crucially, the head was viewed from the back, and so its eye gaze was conveyed. In a control condition, the head was static and faced away from the participant. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between cue and target was 340 ms or 1000 ms. Both age groups showed a gaze cueing effect at both SOAs. Older participants showed a reduced facilitation effect (i.e., faster on congruent gazing trials than on neutral trials) at the 340-ms SOA compared to the 1000-ms SOA, and no differences between incongruent trials and neutral trials at the 340-ms SOA. Our results show that a robot with non-visible eyes can elicit gaze cueing effects. Age-related differences in the other effects are discussed regarding differences in processing time.

Students around the world are expected to read, comprehend and learn from growing numbers of English texts in higher educational contexts where the official medium of instruction is the local language. Despite this language shift, relatively little attention has been paid to the challenges academic texts in English present for students. The present paper provides insights into first-year university students’ perceptions of and attitudes towards academic reading in English in Sweden through a sequential explanatory design with questionnaires and follow-up interviews. Sweden is often seen as a model country in terms of second-language proficiency in English, but as this study shows, a majority of first-year university students expressed negative attitudes towards academic reading in English. Student responses suggested more than one third of first-year Swedish university students in social science subjects struggled to comprehend and keep up with their assigned reading, with vocabulary and reading speed cited as their biggest challenges. This paper further shows that a considerable number of students entered higher education unaware that they were going to be required to read academic texts in English, with some questioning this common practice. Finally, implications for teachers are discussed.

Peer assessment has been proven to improve learning for both the observer and the observed. One dimension of peer assessment that has been given little attention in the context of physical education teacher education (PETE) is the tension that exists when peers give feedback on each other’s work. In this paper, we report on Swedish preservice teachers’ (PST) views on peer assessment used in PETE school placements. Our findings reveal four mechanisms of peer assessment assigned value in PETE: (i) building social relations, (ii)making ‘what to learn’ visible, (iii) giving correct feedback, and(iv) handling sensitive and gendered comments. Inspired by Bourdieu, we discuss learning potentials and complex challenges with peer assessment, where the combination of social capital and physical capital decides what is possible to say and to whom when peer assessment is used in the PETE school placement and in school physical education (PE).

This study concerns a group of people often called CODA (Children of Deaf Adults). CODAs are of significant interest to researchers since they grow up in families with one visual-signed language and another auditive-spoken language. They use two languages in the family in two different modalities. Despite this, the research field is limited.

The study was an interview study of twelve hearing adults (age 18–50) who had grown up in deaf signing families. The overarching purpose of the study was, from a translanguaging theoretical perspective, to analyze effects associated with experiences of Swedish and Swedish Sign Language during childhood. In this particular article, positive multilingual effects and experiences are focused upon, as well as how they describe bimodal language effects. The main findings from this study show benefits from CODAs growing up in a signing family on development of Swedish and of general linguistic competence. 

This thesis explores Turkish-born women’s experiences of ageing in a translocal setting by looking into the narratives of women who lived in Sweden for 40 years on average. It is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 Turkish-born women who are between the ages 60 and 78. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to new knowledge about the diversified later life experiences of ageing migrant women from an intersectional life course perspective. The following research questions have guided the analysis: How do Turkish-born women con-struct their sense of belonging after almost 40 years in Sweden? How did the migration to Sweden influence the women’s understandings of gender norms? How do they make sense of ageing and care in a migration context? And how can we explore the complex power dynamics that have been produced over the life course of ageing migrant women? The study incorporates a cross-fertilisation of intersectional and life course perspectives to emphasise the simultaneous influence of agency and structural forces to reveal the racialised and gendered experiences of migrant women. The analysis shows that sense of belonging is constructed at a translocal scale that extends national borders and has a temporal nature. The women construct their sense of belonging through family and kin ties and become rooted in certain localities through negotiations and re-negotiations over the years. Care and work come to the fore as important sites of such negotiations as the women age in Sweden. Both care and work arrangements carry gendered patterns as they do and undo gender by performing household work, paid work and care for family and kin. The analysis shows that the women often have one foot in traditional gender norms while having another foot in gender equal norms. Moreover, the ‘doing’ of gender extends to old age. The women do age through negotiating intergenerational and gendered care with other actors in their lives. The study suggests an intersectional life course perspective to expand our gerontological imagination.

In everyday activities where continuous visual awareness is critical such as driving, several cognitive processes pertaining to visual attention are of the essence, for instance, change detection, anticipation, monitoring, etc. Research suggests that environmental load and task difficulty contribute to failures in visual perception that can be essential for detecting and reacting to safety-critical incidents. However, it is unclear how gaze patterns and attentional strategies are compromised because of environmental complexity in naturalistic driving. In a change detection task during everyday simulated driving, we investigate inattention blindness in relation to environmental complexity and the kind of interaction incidents drivers address. We systematically analyse and evaluate safety-critical situations from real-world driving videos and replicate a number of them in a virtual driving experience. Participants (N= 80) aged 23-45 years old, drove along three levels of environmental complexity (low-medium-high) and various incidents of interaction with roadside users (e.g., pedestrians, cyclists, pedestrians in a wheelchair), categorized as safety critical or not. Participants detected changes in the behaviour of road users and in object properties. We collect multimodal data including eye-tracking, egocentric view videos, movement trace, head movements, driving behaviour, and detection button presses. Results suggest that gaze behaviour (number and duration of fixations, 1st fixation on AOI) is affected negatively by an increase in environmental complexity, but the effect is moderate for safety-critical incidents. Moreover, anticipatory and monitoring attention was crucial for detecting critical changes in behaviour and reacting on time. However, in highly complex environments participants effectively limit attentional monitoring and lingering for non-critical changes and they also controlled “look-but-fail-to-see errors", especially while addressing a safety-related event. We conclude that drivers change attentional strategies, avoiding non-productive forms of attentional elaboration (anticipatory and monitoring) and efficiently disengaging from targets when the task difficulty is high. We discuss the implications for driving education and research driven development of autonomous driving. 

To enable progress towards egocentric agents capable of understanding everyday tasks specified in natural language, we propose a benchmark and a synthetic dataset called Egocentric Task Verification (EgoTV). The goal in EgoTV is to verify the execution of tasks from egocentric videos based on the natural language description of these tasks. EgoTV contains pairs of videos and their task descriptions for multi-step tasks -- these tasks contain multiple sub-task decompositions, state changes, object interactions, and sub-task ordering constraints. In addition, EgoTV also provides abstracted task descriptions that contain only partial details about ways to accomplish a task. Consequently, EgoTV requires causal, temporal, and compositional reasoning of video and language modalities, which is missing in existing datasets. We also find that existing vision-language models struggle at such all-round reasoning needed for task verification in EgoTV Inspired by the needs of EgoTV, we propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Grounding (NSG) approach that leverages symbolic representations to capture the compositional and temporal structure of tasks. We demonstrate NSG's capability towards task tracking and verification on our EgoTV dataset and a real-world dataset derived from CrossTask (CTV). We open-source the EgoTV and CTV datasets and the NSG model for future research on egocentric assistive agents. 

Despite its successes, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) yields non-interpretable policies. Moreover, since DRL does not exploit symbolic relational representations, it has difficulties in coping with structural changes in its environment (such as increasing the number of objects).  Meanwhile, Relational Reinforcement Learning inherits the relational representations from symbolic planning to learn reusable policies. However, it has so far been unable to scale up and exploit the power of deep neural networks. We propose Deep Explainable Relational Reinforcement Learning (DERRL), a framework that exploits the best of both -- neural and symbolic worlds. By resorting to a neuro-symbolic approach, DERRL combines relational representations and constraints from symbolic planning with deep learning to extract interpretable policies. These policies are in the form of logical rules that explain why each decision (or action) is arrived at. Through several experiments, in setups like the Countdown Game, Blocks World, Gridworld, Traffic, and Mingrid, we show that the policies learned by DERRL are adaptable to varying configurations and environmental changes.

Bringing more girls and women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM, is often highlighted as an aim in education and industry. A constantly growing body of research on engagement is driven by equity concerns caused by the unbalanced gender distribution in STEM. In this study, Swedish teenage girls on a three-day technology camp are in focus. The camp was an initiative with three goals: “Get girls interested, keep girls interested and provide knowledge about futures within technology professions”. We explored the participating girls’ technological activities and conceptions of technology at the camp. Data collection was conducted through participant observations and a focus group interview. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and a gender theoretical framework. Results show the camp presented uncertain notions of what technology can be, and traditionally male-oriented domains were “girlified”. However, girlified activities might not have been constructive in this context since the girls expressed interest in technology before the camp and showed few signs of gendering technology – they liked all kinds of technology. Girlified technology can, at its worst, give a false image of the future industrial work life that the camp organiser aimed to inspire. Despite this, the camp activities were still meaningful and relevant to the girls. The camp created opportunities for the girls to develop their sense of being technical and a feeling of belonging. Implications for technology classroom settings and future camps are to value practical work and improvisational design without leaving the teaching unreflected. This could be a way of engaging and familiarising girls with the multifaceted world of technology without girlifying it. In addition, a broad conception of technology could make gender codes less relevant and open new opportunities.

This chapter introduces a governmentality approach to issues of risk and safety, and carves out an analytical framework that combines it with appraisal analysis. From the perspective of governmentality, responsibilisation is the social process whereby actors assign/assume various moral duties that benefit governing purposes. Institutions and organisations are also increasingly trying to involve and motivate people to manage risk themselves and thus ‘partner’ with them in large-scale tasks of improving health and safety. Appraisal analysis can help demonstrate how actors evaluate risks and safety measures and how they assume or resist positions of responsibility. The analytical model proposed more specifically aids an examination of how actors appraise (a) what are risks and what should be protected; (b) safety measures spanning collective and individual protection (or lack thereof ); and (c) safety measures spanning behavioural prompts and risk elimination. Choices along these dimensions stand in a dialectical relationship to certain pervasive, global discourses of risk governance. Focus group discussions on a nuclear power plant (NPP) accident scenario are analysed, for which state agencies plan to recover contaminated neighbourhoods. The analysis shows that an enduring inconsistency in the policy of governing risk through the logic of recovery and individualised responsibility is a risk mitigation strategy that requires that the risk be considered tolerable by those who are to face it – a condition that is met only partially. It is therefore likely that such a policy will be met with resistance in the event of a nuclear accident, as it was after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

Microsatellite instability is characterised by gains or losses of nucleotides in short tandem repeat sequences, microsatellites, dispersed throughout the human genome. Microsatellite instability status is a molecular fingerprint for DNA mismatch repair deficiency. Clinical detection of microsatellite instability status is important for identifying inherited disease in patients with colorectal and endometrial cancer but has also a prognostic value for survival and prediction of treatment response. Lately, microsatellite instability has been used as a tumor agnostic biomarker that predicts response to immune checkpoint inhibitors. To identify microsatellite instability status clinically, PCR and immunohistochemistry have been the gold standard. On the contrary, next generation sequencing provide simultaneous accession of large number of microsatellite loci and can be combined with detection of several other biomarkers. 

The national collaboration Genome Medicine Sweden have developed a solid tumour gene panel composed of 560 cancer associated genes with integrated microsatellite instability score. Our aim was to validate the microsatellite instability status based on microsatellite instability score from GMS560 DNA panel against the clinically used methods. Extracted DNA (100 ng) from formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue sections with various tumour cell content >10% were analysed. During target enrichment sequencing analysis, allelic distribution from 5000 microsatellite markers were calculated by MSIsensor Pro to generate an instability score. 

The cohort consisted of microsatellite instable verified colorectal cancer samples (n=20), microsatellite stable solid tumour material (n=60). Preliminary results generated a microsatellite instability score for the colorectal cancer samples with a mean of 26.5 % (CI: 23.4-29.6, range: 16.9-32.3). Microsatellite stable tumour samples had a mean microsatellite instability score of 1.5 % (CI: 0.93-2.07, range: 1-4.45). 

In conclusion, we found the microsatellite instability score from GMS560 DNA panel to be both diagnostically sensitive and specific for determining MSI status due to obvious separation in instability. 

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) worldwide pandemic has led to extensive virological monitoring by whole genome sequencing (WGS). Investigating the advantages and limitations of different protocols is key when conducting population-level WGS. SARS-CoV-2 positive samples with Ct values of 14–30 were run using three different protocols: the Twist Bioscience SARS‑CoV‑2 protocol with bait hybridization enrichment sequenced with Illumina, and two tiled amplicon enrichment protocols, ARTIC V3 and Midnight, sequenced with Illumina and Oxford Nanopore Technologies, respectively. Twist resulted in better coverage uniformity and coverage of the entire genome, but has several drawbacks: high human contamination, laborious workflow, high cost, and variation between batches. The ARTIC and Midnight protocol produced an even coverage across samples, and almost all reads were mapped to the SARS-CoV-2 reference. ARTIC and Midnight represent robust, cost-effective, and highly scalable methods that are appropriate in a clinical environment. Lineage designations were uniform across methods, representing the dominant lineages in Sweden during the period of collection. This study provides insights into methodological differences in SARS‑CoV‑2 sequencing and guidance in selecting suitable methods for various purposes.

This anthology is a collection of scholarly articles drawn from contributions to the inaugural international and interdisciplinary conference of the Financial Information Retrieval Ecosystem (FIRE) research project. This conference took place from November 10th to 11th in 2022 at Örebro University, Sweden, and was generously financed by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

The FIRE consortium is an international and interdisciplinary research collective unified by a core inquiry: how is society, particularly from a legal viewpoint, being fundamentally reshaped by the swift digitalisation of business-related information? This inquiry deeply resonates at both national and international echelons, given the extensive influence digitalisation holds over the social, economic, and legal dimensions of our global society.

Furthermore, the commitment of Örebro University extends beyond hosting the conference. They have generously funded the open access publication of this anthology. 

We use survival analysis to analyse the impact of export credit guarantees on firms’ export duration using granular Swedish panel data at the firm-country and firm-country-product levels. The estimation results show that firms’ export survival substantially increases with guarantees, at both levels. The associations are particu- larly strong for smaller firms and contracts as well as in trade with riskier markets. The findings have implications for policies to promote long-run export growth.

Purpose – This literature review aims to synthesise the research on various sustainable product branding activities and their impact on consumer responses to sustainable products and brands.

Design/methodology/approach – This literature review is semi-systematic and can be classified as a domain-based review. The search strategy was systematic and well-defined.

Findings – The authors identified four themes: building brand equity, brand communication, product development and third-party labels and ratings, within the sustainable product branding activities that influence consumers’responses to sustainable products and brands. The study’s findings revealed diverse, and not always favourable, types of behavioural and attitudinal responses from consumers. As for the positive consumer responses, the authors found positive attitudes towards brands, willingness to pay a premium price and positive word-of-mouth intentions. As for the negative consumer responses, the authors found perceived greenwashing, negative brand evaluations and resistance to sustainable products with unfamiliar third-party labels. Several future research propositions and implications for research and practice are discussed.

Originality/value –Despite the large number of studies that look at sustainable branding strategies, there is a gap in terms of synthesising the knowledge on consumer responses to sustainable product branding strategies. This paper intends to fill this gap.

The aim of this presentation is to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how to make secondary science education more inclusive, drawing on examples from a pilot study. The project was based on formative interventions where lower secondary science teachers and pedagogues from a local nature school together developed and tested science units based on language scaffolding and experience-based learning in introductory and regular classes. Data was collected through individual interviews of teachers and students, and questionnaires distributed after the science unit was completed. The results indicate that the collective activity where teachers and trained nature pedagogues together developed new forms of science teaching resulted in both the development of new innovative ways of inclusive teaching and a transformation of the teacher’s views of collaborative learning. The results also indicate that science teaching based on language scaffolding and experience based-learning may have a positive effect on outcomes for newly-arrived students as well as for student with the language of instruction as mother tongue. The results give implications for the possibilities for inclusive science teaching for newly-arrived students as well as contributing to the discussion about a more inclusive science education in general.

Filosofer såväl som forskare har länge hävdat att förundran är en nyckel till elevers intresse och engagemang i skolans NO-undervisning. Trots detta finns det i nuläget mycket få empiriska studier som beskriver lärares arbete med att ge plats för förundran i skolans NO-undervisning.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur elevers förundran kan studeras i klassrumssituationer samt om, och hur, elevers uttryck för förundran kan kopplas till deras meningsskapande om ett planerat lärandemål.

I studien har forskare och en NO-lärare (årskurs 7) samarbetat för att utforma evolutionsundervisning med plats för elevers förundran. Följande forskningsfrågor fokuseras:

1. På vilka sätt kan lärare ge plats för förundran i samband med evolutionsundervisning?
2. Hur påverkar undervisning, med plats för förundran, elevers möjligheter för meningsskapande om evolutionära processer och begrepp kopplade till dessa?

Empirin består av 45 individuella skriftliga elevreflektioner och transkriberade ljudinspelningar från 6 parvisa elevintervjuer. Elevernas reflektioner analyserades i två steg. Steg ett fokuserade på hur eleverna uttryckte förundran i relation till frågan Vad brukar du förundras över? Steg två på vad de förundrats över i evolutionsundervisningen. Elevintervjuerna analyserades med fokus på elevernas meningsskapande om evolutionära processer.

Resultaten visar att eleverna ger uttryck för förundran kopplat till variation, mångfald, evolutionära tidsaspekter och samspel mellan organismer och livsmiljö. Elevernas förundran skiljer sig kvalitativt inom ett spänningsfält mellan nyfikenhetsbaserad förundran och kontemplativ förundran. Samtidigt visar elevintervjuerna att eleverna fortfarande, efter sex veckor av undervisning, kämpar med att integrera vetenskapliga begrepp från evolutionsteorin med sitt eget meningsskapande om processerna.

This position paper argues for an interdisciplinary agenda relating crises to on-going processes of normalization of anti- and post-democratic action. We call for exploring theoretically and empirically the ‘new normal’ logic introduced into public imagination on the back of various crises, including the recent ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe, COVID-19 pandemic, or the still ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Gathering researchers of populism, extremism, discrimination, and other formats of anti- and post-democratic action, we propose investigating how, why, and under which conditions, discourses and practices underlying normalization processes re-emerge to challenge the liberal democratic order. We argue exploring the multiple variants of ‘the new normal’ related to crises, historically and more recently. We are interested in how and why these open pathways for politics of exclusion, inequality, xenophobia and other patterns of anti- and post-democratic action while deepening polarization and radicalization of society as well as propelling far-right politics and ideologies.

Effective risk management strategies for victims of domestic violence require an adequate risk assessment. While risk assessments for domestic violence typically focus on the adult victim, the risk of children who are exposed to such violence is often overlooked. This study aims to explore what risk, vulnerability and protective factors can be identified through forensic interviews with children exposed to domestic violence. A qualitative latent content analysis was conducted on documented forensic interviews with 41 children. The results show that children reported factors that should be taken into consideration when managing the risk of violence for their mother. In addition, the children's responses suggest the need for a separate risk management plan to address their needs and to protect them from re-victimization. Direct communication with children is crucial to identify factors that are unique to them. These results emphasize the significance of including their perspective in risk assessments for domestic violence to influence the risk management that includes both mothers and their children.

This article considers Mulvey's male gaze in today's postfeminist media culture in the latest remake of Charlie's Angels. Male gaze is analyzed as form, as production ecology, and as narrative. Since the inception of Charlie's Angels in the 1970s, the TV and feature film franchise has tried to balance feminist concerns with notions of femininity, in more and less successful ways. Although the 2000 remake of Charlie's Angels could be considered as an exemplar of objectifying and sexualizing women, the 2019 film barely presents such instances. Instead, it offers a male gaze directed at a female audience and internalized as a measure of success for its female protagonists and the implied female audience. Through practices of othering, and by placing male characters in morally inferior positions, the female audience is presented with hegemonic conceptions of white, middle-class femininity as an ideal that female viewers can and should aspire to be.

This is a case study that aims to explain how the company Bofors in Karlskoga, Sweden, struggled through three periods of crisis or uncertainty, while remaining innovative. It begins in the late 19th century and ends in the early 21st century after Bofors had been divested. The investigation takes a constructivist approach and focuses on the experiences of individuals. The data consists of archived letters, interviews and secondary sources. The concept of diversification is applied to explain how Bofors, originally an ironworks acquired new technologies and skills over the years, which were combined in a number of ways, resulting in an innovative local knowledge infrastructure. This development took place while the company sought to adapt to a changing institutional environment – societal norms, rules and practices – following two world wars, disarmament and deindustrialisation. The results also show that, during each of the three periods, Bofors was dependent on long-distance partnerships with external actors to gain new knowledge or financial resources, or both. Different dimensions of proximity are applied, revealing that cognitive proximity was most important for the success of the partnerships. Partners collaborating on innovations had to share a knowledge base. And, preferably, partners’ knowledge should be complementary. But if no proximities were high during the early phase of a partnership, if partners were too far apart from cognitive, geographical, social, institutional and organisational perspectives, then geographical proximity was crucial for increasing the other proximities. To meet face-to-face was necessary in order to learn from each other and to bridge gaps in the relationship caused by partners not knowing each other and belonging to different organisations and cultures with different languages and traditions.

Humans’ perceived relationship to nature and non-human lifeforms is fundamental for sustainable development; different framings of nature – as commodity, as threat, as sacred etc. – imply different responses to future challenges. The body of research on nature repre-sentations in various symbolic contexts is growing, but the ways in which nature is framed by people in the everyday has received scant attention. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the framing of nature by studying how wild-boar hunting is depicted on YouTube. The qualitative frame analysis identified three interrelated frames depicting hunting as battle, as consumption, and as privilege, all of which constitute and are constituted by the underlying notion of human as superior to nature. It is suggested that these hegemonic nature frames suppress more constructive ways of framing the human-nature relationship, but also that the identification of such potential counter-hegemonic frames enables their discursive manifestation.

In 2016, Swedish climate reporting declined in quantity and shifted focus somewhat from climate change as such to the harmful climate impacts of meat consumption. The latter prompted discussions in social media – an increasingly important forum for public debate but infrequently studied in environmental communication research. Despite strong evidence that a meat and dairy based diet is devastating for the environment, meat consumption is increasing, and this qualitative study aims to – through the lens of social representation theory – contribute knowledge about how livestock production is legitimized in everyday discourse on Facebook. The article identifies representations that legitimize livestock production through polarization between (1) livestock production and other (environmental) issues, (2) environmentally “good” and “bad” countries, and (3) “reliable” and “unreliable” information. It concludes by discussing the influence of national ideology on the legitimization of livestock production and the potential of social media to counter the post-politicization of environmental issues.

Ongoing transformations of the media ecology in the direction of greater digitization have increasingly blurred the boundaries between professional journalists and other information brokers; the former now must work hard to distinguish themselves from the latter. Notable among these developments is a shift towards the individualization of journalism, with journalists seeming to spend more time building personal brands, for instance on Twitter, than on building organizational ones. Within journalism research there is a growing interest in the use of Twitter for journalistic self-promotion and branding, but studies are still scarce, and the ways in which journalistic self-promotion is discursively constituted need further empirical and theoretical attention. By means of a critical discourse analysis of the tweets of a widely followed journalist in Sweden, and through the theoretical lens of celebrity, this study aims to contribute knowledge about how journalistic self-promotion discourses evolving in the digitized media setting are constituted. The article identifies discourses that construct celebrity through (1) “fame by association,” (2) asymmetrical communication, and (3) “lifestreaming.” It concludes by discussing “celebrification” as a vital component of journalistic self-promotion discourses as well as the power aspects of ubiquitous self-promotional discourses, which are deeply embedded in the general structures of society.

In recent times we have allegedly witnessed a “post-truth” turn in society. Nonetheless, surveys show that science holds a relatively strong position among lay publics, and case studies suggest that science is part of their online discussions about environmental issues on social media — an important, yet strikingly under-researched, debate forum. Guided by social representation theory, this study aims to contribute knowledge about the role of science in everyday representations of livestock production on social media. The analysis identifies two central themata, namely lay publics' contestations of (1) facts and non-facts, and (2) factual and non-factual sources.

Today, there is much academic discussion about how journalism and journalists are affected by rapid change and convergence in the work context. Considering the fundamental transformations of the media ecology brought about by digitization and the advent of social media, it has been assumed that journalists are more or less compelled to reinvent their professional role and identity. We know a good deal about how social media is adopted by journalists, mostly through survey and interview studies investigating self-perceptions of identity in terms of norms and values. There are also some case studies, predominantly in the form of (quantitative) content analyses, exploring the (innovative) uses of Twitter. However, we still have little knowledge about how the professional identity of journalists is discursively constructed – how, in specific detail, traditional norms and ideals are discursively reinforced or challenged – in the Twitter flow. With a discourse theoretical and methodological approach, this article aims to contribute to our understanding of the discursive construction of professional identity on Twitter by qualitatively analyzing tweets from the most widely followed journalist in Sweden. The analysis of the most active j-tweeter can yield important clues as to what journalism may be in the process of becoming. The article identifies discourses that (1) reinforce the watchdog identity, (2) challenge the watchdog identity, (3) reinforce the disseminator/explicator identity, and (4) reinforce transparency but challenge professional identity. It concludes that the reinvented journalistic identity includes discursive processes that both shape and are shaped by Twitter in a dialectical relationship. 

The successful application, usability, and social emancipation of AI technologies necessitates that the design and implementation of technical systems be founded on human-centred principles, be it cognitive or behavioural, social, ethical etc. Towards this objective, this thesis develops an interdisciplinary methodology for embedding cognitive behavioural principles in the design and development of next-generation human-centred AI technologies that aim to assist and empower humans in everyday life.

The interdisciplinary methodology developed in this research categorically focusses on two key aspects pertaining to human-centred technology design and engineering: (1) human behavioural precedents; and (2) cognitively founded representational and computational modalities:

• Human behavioural precedents are established by systematically analysing human visuo-locomotive experience during everyday activities involving (embodied) multimodal interactions. We conduct naturalistic behavioural experiments focusing on aspects of visual perception (e.g., inattention blindness) and spatial cognition (e.g., orientation, navigation) in diverse settings of everyday mobility. As specific -in-the-wild- experimental contexts, we focus on behavioural aspects involved in everyday (human) navigation and driving.
• Representational and computational modalities are developed based on cognitively-driven articulation of behavioural precedents. Particularly, a cognitive model of visuospatial complexity for grounding embodied multimodal interactions is developed by incorporating behavioural precedents pertaining to representations of space, motion, and interaction. Furthermore, precedents concerning human preferences are used as a basis for semantically-driven computational synthesis (e.g. in the generation and manipulation of spatial morphologies), and in the articulation of human-centred evaluation and standardisation of AI systems.

As case studies we demonstrate the developed methodology in the backdrop of two application domains: (a) design assistance technologies, and (b) autonomous driving. More broadly, this thesis emphasises the need for embedding ecologically valid behavioural knowledge within the development of "human-centred" technologies.  Furthermore, this research paves the way for the development of systems that understand, interpret and anticipate human behaviour under ecologically valid naturalistic circumstances.

Software development (SD) projects are complex endeavors, and organizations employ software development methods (SDMs) both to add structure and to propel their projects. Nowadays, agile SDMs are the most used methods. Still, inefficient and ineffective use of SDMs is a challenge, and existing research shows cases of SD teams failing in their use of SDMs due to deviations made. Of course, methods should not be used in rigorous and textbook-like ways. Among practitioners, some of these deviations are referred to as cargo cult behavior; without, however, providing much of theoretical depth or any analytical tools to identify and characterize such behaviors. Although existing research has investigated SDM deviations, they have not been investigated as cargo cult behavior.

Against this backdrop, the aim of this thesis is to understand the challenges in succeeding with SDM use by developing a theory called SDM cargo cult theory (SDMCCT), to identify, analyze, and describe the cargo cult phenomenon in agile SDM use. The journey of this thesis takes its starting point in practitioners’ use of the buzzwords “cargo cult” when referring to flawed SDM use. By returning to the field of social anthropology and its studies of cargo cult, a definition of SDM cargo cult and an analytical framework are iteratively crafted through a longitudinal ethnographic study to constitute the SDMCCT. The research approach has been abductive and the SDMCCT builds on social action theory and work motivation theory.

The ethnographical study took place at an international industrial manufacturing company in Sweden that is using agile SDMs. This study includes three years of data collection, which includes observations, interviews, and gathering of business documents. The ethnographic study focused on three SD teams and their daily work using agile SDMs. The analysis using the analytical framework includes four agile SDM practices: daily scrum meeting, sprint demo, continuous integration, and visualization. In total, the analysis uncovered 36 deviations in the SD teams’ use of these practices, structured into 30 SDM cargo cult categories. In addition, this study shows that the framework is applicable to analyze and characterize effective SDM use as well, although it is not its main focus. The framework can be used by researchers to make similar analysis of cargo cult situations in other organizations, and the catalogue of cargo cult situations can serve as background knowledge for other organizations to study and improve their SD teams’ use of agile SDM practices.