Susanne Severinsson

Ambiguous spaces for troubled youth: home, therapeutic institution or school?

In Sweden and elsewhere, students permanently excluded from school are removed from their local environment, and sometimes their parental home, and moved to a rural residential care home. Thus ‘home’ and ‘school’ are clearly considered places where problems exist, but it is the young people themselves who are scrutinised and subjected to change. This study examined how the change of place and the performance of the alternative ‘home’ and alternative ‘school’ affected student adjustment. It also explored the significance of place in these measures and questioned how possibilities for agency and subjectivities are produced. The work comprised an ethnographic study of two residential care homes for troubled youth (aged 12–15). The results show how complex assemblages produce opportunities and limitations for care and education and how location and buildings partake in the constitution of possible subjectivities and agency. The analysis, inspired by actor-network theory, captured mobility and flow, an important aspect when studying complexity. The analytical approach used enabled the complex arrangements for disadvantaged teenagers to be studied in terms of social interactions, but also of materiality.

Documentation for students in residential care: network of relations of human and non-human actants

ABSTRACT Swedish and international research points to serious problems for the education of students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) in the care of social welfare, for example, in residential care. The aim of this article is to elucidate how documentation, care plans (CPs) and individual educational plans (IEPs) outline the educational prospects for SEBD students in residential care. A more specific aim is to study how the form or template partakes in the production of educational trajectories. Using post-structural theory and the concepts of actor-network theory, this paper highlights the forms or templates as agentive forces in a network with students, parents, teachers and social workers. Documentation reveals few expectations that these teenagers can become capable learners and almost all of the subjects have been given a reduced curriculum. The lack of headings such as ‘Students or parents’ opinion’ or ‘School subjects’ can be understood as indications that these topics are considered to be of less importance. Individual differences between students disappear when the electronic document enables the use of the exact same phrases and words to describe different students. These results, along with previous research, point to an immediate need to discuss both the form and content of documentation in educational practice and to consider what, for what reason and for whom to document.

Documentation of education for teenagers in residential care: a network of blame and critique

Abstract This article presents analyses of documents from special schools in Sweden for students in the care of social welfare who have been assessed with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. The aim is to use actor-network theory to analyse how blame and critique are handled in individual educational plans, and how responsibilities are produced in interactions between human and non-human actors. The documentation can be read as a materialised network that produces a distributed responsibility; the network is stabilised by accepting and recognising differences between actors. The template headings for each actor enable different translations of the network and make it possible for responsibilities to be distributed between students, parents, social service officers and teachers, thereby reducing the risk of conflicts. While the network provides opportunities for students to become learners, it is silent on the topic of adults’ responsibilities.

Emergent Subjectivity in Caring Institutions for Teenagers.

We investigate how different mealtime situations help shape teenager and staff subjectivities in two Swedish residential care homes and a special school for girls and boys, 12–15 years old, with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Three mealtime networks are analysed using concepts from actor–network theory, treating architectural space and artefacts, as well as teenagers and staff, as actors. The architectural spaces in the kitchen and dining room were first created for other purposes than residential care for troubled youth (i.e. a former farm, hospital and preschool) and have been adapted to be more homelike while coping with housing and feeding 20 or more people. The original architectural spaces as well as activities before mealtimes were powerful actors in the mealtime network, causing different subjectivities to emerge in the translations. The subjectivities emerge in the first network as offenders/guards, in the second network as small children/nannies and in the third network as guests/service staff. The different translations in the three meal networks create different mobilization opportunities for the teenagers concerning responsibility and normality.