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Humans have an ambivalent relationship to rabbits: they are popular pets but are also widely used in the fur industry and as laboratory animals. As urban wildlife they are commonly considered to be pests. In any case, humans are preoccupied with their proliferation: they either breed them or inhibit their thriving through culling or other kinds of interventions. This essay draws on news articles, scholarly work, and examples from the authors’ study of municipal hunting and wildlife management, to discuss the biopolitics of killing, culling, and caring for rabbits. By thinking with rabbits, the essay interrogates the blind spots of Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualizations of biopolitics and furthers a theoretical understanding of the management of non-human life. Biopolitics aims to optimise human lives—a governing where violence is the exception. For non-human animals, in contrast, violence is the rule and an elevated political status is the exception, attributed selectively to some animals in ‘zones of distinction’ like homes, animal shelters, and sanctuaries. By bringing focus to such zones, the essay sheds light on the wider workings of the biopolitical and anthropological machines and points towards a way out of the biopolitical rabbit hole.

Robotic animals are designed to resemble real, living animals, but at the same time, dementia care guidelines and policies often emphasize the value of transparency in relation to robots—people should not be led to believe that robots have capacities that they in fact lack. However, it is not obvious how to separate truth from lies in everyday care practice. Based on participant observations and interviews with certified assistant nurses and nursing assistants in Swedish nursing homes for people with dementia, this article studies how robotic animals become “real” in care practice. The article takes a posthumanist approach to the co-constitution of aging, care, and technology—a perspective that recognizes that not only care staff and nursing home residents, but also robots and other material things, can take an active part in shaping care practice. The analysis results in four typical situations out of which robotic animals emerge as real, living animals: the cuddle, with its simple but dynamic embodied actions; the comfort, where the robot is used as a resource for distraction and emotional support; the conversation, by which robotic animals' agency is both established and challenged; and the adoption, through which narratives and props are used to establish the robot as a pet. Robots cannot lie, at least not by themselves; instead, robots' deceptive potential is enabled by a network of actors, which is why it is often difficult to draw a clear line between lying and care workers' empathic following. 

Welfare technology usually works best when users ignore it, or when they accept the technology’s presence without questioning it. However, this means that users’ integrity and their chance to make an informed consent is put at risk. Based on previous research and original empirical material, this presentation focuses on three examples to specify how this dilemma is materialized in dementia care. First, guidelines emphasize the need for informed consent when it comes to video surveillance, but video surveillance works best when the cameras are ignored. Second, nursing homes often use internet platforms for entertainment purposes and users’ profiles can be highly personalized. However, the algorithms that identify the users’ preferences are usually obscure—to residents as well as to care staff. Third, while robotic animals are increasingly used in dementia nursing homes, guidelines dissuade care staff from leading residents to believe that the robots are real. However, in practice both residents and care staff usually approach the robots as if they were real animals. These challenges concerning deception, transparency and integrity cannot simply be solved through additional information, as people with dementia may already be struggling to understand, and remember, abstract instructions. Deceptive practices in relation to technology is therefore here considered as a form of digital emotional labor through which care staff attempt to bridge the gap between policy and practice. They do so partly in their communication with nursing home residents, and partly through their own reflective practices around these technologies. In conclusion, it is argued that dilemmas connected to welfare technology, and the deceptive practices related to its use, are not built into the technological devices. Instead, deception is a relational phenomenon that emerges from interactions between care staff, residents, and technological artifacts and systems.

Caregivers are dissuaded from using deception in dementia care in Swedish policies. However, guidelines in other countries have a more positive approach to deceptive practices when these are used in the best interest of patients. Research also shows that lies and deception are widely used in dementia care. Based on interviews with caregivers and ethnographic visits to nursing homes in Sweden, this paper examines the use of technology in deceptive practices in the care of people with dementia. Three technological devices are in focus: the online patient journal, the security camera, and the robotic animal. The journal allows for a smooth transition of knowledge between caregivers, enabling a person-centered care. However, the patient is often unaware of this circulation of knowledge by which the patient becomes known to everyone without necessarily knowing anyone. The camera makes it possible for caregivers to watch over patients without having to enter their rooms, which means that they do not have to disturb them with unnecessary and inconvenient visits. Paradoxically, the technology thus breaches the patients’ integrity in order to secure it. Last, the robotic animal works particularly well when it is perceived to be a real animal; yet, both policies and previous research caution against using a robot to create an illusion of a living being. The paper argues that to handle these dilemmas, the devices need to be understood in context: deception is not built into healthcare technology but is instead generated in the relationship between caregiver, patient, and technological device.

Sedan Rysslands invasion av Ukraina har opinionen i Sverige svängt snabbt – från enträgen alliansfrihet till ohämmad NATO-längtan. Och även om antalet ansökningar om medlemskap till Svenska Freds ökat har dess (nu före detta) ordförande Agnes Hellström mottagit hot och hat för att ha tagit tydlig ställning emot Sveriges Nato-ansökan, mitt under brinnande krig i Europa.

Svenska freds arbetar förebyggande mot krig och vill att konflikter ska lösas utan våld. Den vanliga kritiken mot ickevåldsmetoder är att de är ineffektiva, och att de som tror på dem är naiva. Men så behöver det inte vara: den här typen av kritik bottnar i en bristande socialpsykologisk förståelse för hur grupper fungerar. Med kunskap om styrkan i sociala band kan ickevåld vara ytterst effektivt, och därför har också sociala påtryckningar använts av många aktörer, alltifrån Gandhis ahimsa-rörelse till CIA.

Med den senaste tidens hänsynslösa skjutningar och sprängningar, där oskyldiga fallit offer för våldet och angrepp riktats mot anhöriga till gängmedlemmar, verkar det som om vi har nått en ny bottennivå där ingenting är heligt för organiserade kriminella. Därför efterlyser Carin Götblad, polismästare vid Nationella operativa avdelningen, ”en kultur där vi skämdes” i en intervju i DN. Götblad talar om skamlösheten hos ”ett narkotikapåverkat ungdomsgäng” och om vikten att tillrättavisa ”en åttaåring som skriker på biblioteket” – två skilda företeelser som här ses som symtom på ett samhälle på väg åt fel håll. Är det så att vi kollektivt håller på att förlora förmågan att känna skam?

Riding became a widespread leisure activity for children in Sweden and Finland during the post-war decades through the emergence of riding schools. Drawing on books and comics published in Sweden and Finland from the 1960s to the present, together with interviews and observations at contemporary Swedish riding schools, we approach this development with a geographical, historical and sociological focus. We ask how children’s equestrian cultures were formed within the spaces of horse yards, especially riding schools, and how caring well was understood and negotiated through different types of knowledge and the idea and practice of horse ownership. As we show in the analysis, despite the increase of written knowledge about horses and their care, situated and relational knowledges based on interspecies interaction prevailed in children’s equestrian cultural spheres in which children had a chance to interact with animals and care for them outside the everyday spaces of family and school. In these cultures of interspecies care, ideas of horse ownership carried expectations of continuity where the child–horse relationship was secured and could develop. The entry to these spatial cultures was through rites of passage characterised by embodied interaction and hands-on care, where children learned to care for animals well.

While previous research studies have focused on either caregivers' or residents' perception and use of social robots, this article offers an empirical and theoretical examination of joint activities in triadic human-robot interaction. The symptomatology of dementia creates an asymmetrical relation wherein the impetus to employ a robot often originates from the caregiver. Drawing on field work and video recorded interactions in dementia care homes, the article investigates how caregivers draw on embodied resources to involve residents and robot animals in interaction. The analysis demonstrates how caregivers promote commitment and encounter resistance with residents. We draw on the theory of sociomaterial interactionism to study situated interaction between bodies in a meaning-generating process. By re-conceptualising the theoretical notions of manipulation and recruitment, the article offers an approach for studying orientations that distinguish between reciprocity of agential objects. We show that caregivers usually distinguish between interactions with people and machines by anticipating a specific response from the robots (manipulation), while they invite participation in a broader sense from residents (recruitment). Social friction arises, however, if caregivers act upon the residents as embodied objects in manipulative ways.

Pixar-filmen Insidan ut 2 har slagit rekord den här sommaren och är nu den mest inkomstbringande animerade filmen genom tiderna. Filmen är den andra om Jenny och hennes känsloliv i vilken vi får följa både yttre händelser i Jennys liv och inre händelser på hennes ”huvudkontor” där Glädje, Vemod, Ilska och Avsky konkurrerar om att få bestämma hur Jenny ska agera i olika situationer. Det är lätt att förstå filmens popularitet – att våra känslor drar i väg med oss, nästan som en magisk kraft, är något de flesta varit med om.