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Analyses of care work typically speak of three necessary roles of care: the care worker, the care recipient, and an economic provider who makes care materially possible. This model provides no place for addressing the difficult political questions care poses for liberal representative democracy. I propose to fill this space with a new caring role to connect the care unit to the political sphere, as the economic provider connects the care unit to the economic sphere. I call this role that of the "care claimant." The labor of claiming care consists in the development, expression, and advancement of the interests of the care unit. The argument for employing this fourth care role begins by comparing Nel Noddings's phenomenological care unit to Sara Ruddick's family‐based analysis. It then moves to discuss the way Eva Kittay emphasizes the dependency of the charge and its political ramifications to illustrate the need for a care claimant. After distinguishing the care claimant from the other roles of care, I examine the power relationships in the care unit and the position of the care claimant in the public sphere.

Literature on the aetiology of anorexia nervosa is largely dominated by the discipline of psychology. This has meant that current research on the topic approaches the disorder as stemming from the psychologically `maladapted' individual diagnosed with anorexia. Thus, the `pathological' self-conduct of the anorexic is viewed as a result of his, or her, psychological `deficits and dysfunctions' (Malson and Swann, 1999: 397). As a result, the experiences and practices of the anorexic are regarded as being separate from the social and cultural context from which they emerge. This article argues that denying the contextual aspects that the disorder is entrenched in is theoretically insufficient as it neglects the complexity of anorexic practice. Moreover, it is acknowledged that there exists a multiplicity of discourses that have amalgamated to spectacularize the anorexic subject position. Employing a poststructuralist approach, the discursive constructions produced by the media, the discipline of psychology itself and the new public health agenda are examined to reveal the foundations of anorexia's current appeal.

Foucault's work has inspired studies examining how subject positions are constructed for citizens of the welfare state that encourage them to adopt the subject position of active and responsible people or consumers. Yet these studies are often criticised for analysing these subject positions as coherent constructions without considering how their construction varies from one situation to another. This paper develops the concept of subject position in relation to the theory of justification and the concept of modality in order to achieve a more sensitive and nuanced analysis of the politics of welfare in public debates. The theory of justification places greater weight on actors' competence in social situations. It helps to reveal how justifications and critiques of welfare policies are based on the skilful contextual combination of diverse normative bases. The concept of modality, in turn, makes it possible to elaborate how subject positions in justifications and critiques of welfare policies become associated with specific kinds of values. We demonstrate the approach by using public debates on children's day care in Finland. The analysis illustrates how subject positions are justified in relation to different kinds of worlds and made persuasive by connecting them to commonly desirable rights, responsibilities, competences or abilities.

Public dialogue about science, technology and medicine is an established part of the activities of a range of charities, private corporations, governmental departments and scientific institutions. However, the extent to which these activities challenge or bridge the lay—expert divide is questionable. Expertise is contested, by the public and the community of scholars who study and/or facilitate public engagement. In this paper, we explore the dynamics of expertise and their implications for the lay—expert divide at a series of public events about the new genetics. We examine participants' claims to expertise and consider how this relates to their claims to credibility and legitimacy and the way in which these events unfolded. Using a combination of ethnographic and discursive analysis, we found that participants supplemented technical expertise with other expert and lay perspectives. We can also link participants' claims to expertise to their generally positive appraisal of genetic research and services. The colonization of lay positions by expert speakers and the hybrid positioning of lay—experts was characteristic of the consensus and conservatism that emerged. This leads us to conclude that public engagement activities will not challenge the dominance of technical expertise in decision-making about science, technology and medicine without more explicit and reflexive problematization of the dynamics of expertise therein.

This article takes two examples of trying to collect fieldwork data in dangerous or difficult circumstances in Bali and uses them to explore some issues central to qualitative research. These issues include shifting researcher subject positions in qualitative sociology approaches, and the coherence and usefulness of data collected in chaotic or risky circumstances. Methodological practices such as reflexivity are considered, as well as the task of writing research accounts up from messy and chaotic data sets. It is concluded that data collected at moments of fieldwork crisis may not be particularly useful, except as a cultural reminder of the insider/outsider status of the researcher, and to inform more productive factual data collected after the event.

Utilizing published autobiographies, we explore how individuals who self-injure discursively construct their experiences of the self and self-injury. The authors construct their selves into two seemingly opposite subject positions, here named the "bad girl" and the "good girl." For the most part, the authors identify themselves with the "bad girl" position. Although there is a struggle to uphold normalcy in front of others, they regard evidence of the "good girl" position as fake. We demonstrate how they, to a large extent, accept the dominant discourse of self-injury as an individual and pathological problem for which they tend to blame themselves. However, they also challenge the negative subject position by separating themselves discursively from the bad "side of the self." Acts of self-injury are described as a way to cope with the negative perception of themselves and at the same time being what causes feelings of self-loathing. Thus, understanding how the psychomedical discourse affects individuals who self-injure as well as the consequences of the medicalization of self-injury are of importance. Furthermore, social workers may be in a legitime position to work with the self-representations and the social factors that may underlie an individual's need to cut or in other ways physically hurt oneself.

Completing course of education, any student is expected to have not only bundle
of professional knowledge and put them into practice, but also have ability to solve
nonstandard professional tasks independently and with imaginative approach. A
professional shall be able to accept responsibility for his/her decision that comports
with understanding of subject of activity. From our point of view, it is the prerogative of universities to form future specialists' capabilities to solve problems of that kind.
Learning of a subject of professional activity at university level should take place
proceeding from its structural and level organization and be considered with regard to
content of professional education.

This article analyses how youth subject positions of the 'racialized other' are produced, and how these positions interconnect with the concept of belonging to the rural community. We do this by analysing 15 group discussions with 63 young people living in rural areas in northern Sweden taking a discursive psychology approach, and focusing on how discourses produce certain subject positions of 'the racialized other'. Drawing on the concepts of the politics of belonging and the 'stranger', we argue that discourses on belonging to the (rural) community create boundaries that exclude 'other' youth, as well as resistance and contestation. The subject positions that such discourses produce represent racialized youth in stereotypical ways and imply a promise of belonging for certain 'others' based on their fulfilment of particular norms. However, such a depoliticized promise of belonging that places the responsibility for becoming integrated on the 'others' was also challenged. Firstly, in relation to criticisms of the welfare system, and secondly, in relation to racism as an unwelcome threat in rural communities.

Reading autobiography as a performative act enables for the analysis of processes involved in constructing the self. It provides a space for analysing the ways in which gender, nationality, and other social locations of the subject are negotiated. In this article, I read the famous Finnish nineteenth-century playwright and author Minna Canth's concise autobiography, focusing on various locations of the autobiographical subject in this rather laconic matter-of-fact text. My reading follows current trends in feminist autobiographical theorising as well as feminist politics of reading. I strive to deconstruct the interpretation of autobiographies as dichotomously fixed texts. I suggest a more flexible reading that would take the ambiguities of the genre seriously, such as describing both the public and the private life of the author, constructing the subject of the narrative, both relational and autonomous, in addition to varying stylistically between mere factuality and decorative description. Such a reading takes into account the shifts of the subject positions as well as the styles of narration moving between feminine and masculine, rational and emotional, chronologically organised progress of the plot and a more vague way of organising the narrative according to the inner logic or the unconscious. In analysing the variations of narration, inspired by the theoretical and methodological discussion on intersectionality, I conceptualize autobiography as a site for negotiating and performing various subject positions, thus striving for a non-essential reading of autobiographies. ; peerReviewed