Desirée Enlund - ‘We will occupy until the next election!’ Understanding public healthcare restructuring through the lens of collective action
Healthcare restructuring marked by concentration of services in cities and withdrawal from rural areas has given rise to several drawn-out and spectacular collective actions in contemporary Sweden.
This presentation details contention around healthcare restructuring in two cases in rural and peripheral northern Sweden from 1990 until today. Through interviews with workers and activists Enlund explore people’s experiences of public healthcare restructuring, their motivations for engaging in contention around it and their experiences of self-organizing cooperative healthcare. Her analysis finds that healthcare authorities’ attitude towards such collective action has shifted from being supportive in the 1990s to nowadays emphasizing their role in safeguarding fair market conditions in the healthcare market. As this restructuring leads to a reduction in public healthcare services for rural populations, it transfers responsibility to private or cooperative providers, exemplifying a process of "rural neoliberalism" that is deepening spatial inequalities as welfare services withdraw from rural areas and new private-for-profit providers establish in urban areas. Despite these challenges, those involved in collective action envision and advocate for a more holistic and equitable healthcare system.
Practical
Date 13 May
Time 16:00
Place IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam
Entrance Free entrance, but please register at event@iisg.nl
Desirée Enlund is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden, with a PhD in Social and Economic Geography from Umeå University. Her doctoral thesis on local resistance to public healthcare restructuring in rural Sweden was awarded the 2020 Rudolf Meidner Award for research on the history of the trade union movement by the Research Council at the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library. Enlund’s postdoctoral research in an interdisciplinary team focused on developing smart city technology based on citizens’ needs to achieve more sustainable cities. She is currently studying the individual motivations & collective responses to platform work among medical doctors, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oslo (2024) and Norwegian Business School (2024-25). Her work has been published in Urban Studies, Big Data & Society, Journal of Youth Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, IEEE Technology & Society Magazine, as well as various popular scientific fora.
