We are increasingly abdicating personal responsibility and relying instead on public interventions. This signals a disastrous shift towards learned helplessness, leaving us unable to act when no helpers are nearby. This trend threatens not only to erode our individual capacity to handle crises, but also to weaken society’s structural self-confidence and diminish our collective moral courage, writes Hanna-Karin Grensman. “The safety chat is proving a success on public transport.” That is how the impact of the chat service, which since 2020 has enabled passengers to communicate directly with SL’s safety control centre, has been described. In concrete terms, it has…
Posts published in “Agency, Subjectivity and Resistance”
Agency, Subjectivity and Resistance
In complex systems, individual agency is often constrained, fragmented or obscured. At the same time, people are held responsible for outcomes they do not control. This theme explores the tension between structure and subjectivity: what it means to act, assume responsibility or resist within contexts shaped by institutional and technological power.
Here you will find articles reflecting on agency—the capacity to act meaningfully—under conditions of bureaucracy, social norms, illness, technological governance and social expectation. The texts explore questions of adaptation, exhaustion, resistance and strategies for survival within systems that are not designed for human complexity.
The focus is on how people navigate structures, often through subtle shifts rather than grand gestures. Resistance is understood not only as open rebellion, but also as everyday actions, linguistic shifts and the refusal to internalise the narratives imposed by systems.
This theme places the human being at the centre: not as a wholly free actor, but as a thinking, feeling and acting subject.
Bodily autonomy—the right to decide what happens to one’s own body—is affirmed in the United Nations’ human rights framework and ought to be regarded as inviolable. In reality, however, it proves to be largely theoretical. The Swedish state routinely grants itself extensive powers at the expense of its citizens. Do you believe that you own your body? That it is yours to do with as you wish? That you have a right to bodily autonomy? It is a popular belief. Yet upon closer examination, one is forced to conclude that it is largely untrue. Although human rights principles emphasise bodily…
Legal abortion is often portrayed as a way for parents—usually fathers—to evade responsibility. In reality, such legislation could instead provide children with protection from disengaged and unsuitable parents. Parents can already abandon their children today; legal abortion would simply mean losing the right to resume parenthood whenever it suits them. A ridiculously low maintenance payment. That is often the only legal consequence when a parent relinquishes responsibility and disappears from a child’s life. Despite the fact that children’s rights frameworks emphasise a child’s right to a relationship with both parents, there is virtually nothing that regulates a parent’s obligation to…
Greater regulation of parental leave does not lead to greater gender equality, despite what the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees’ (TCO) Equality Index implies. On the contrary, it risks pushing people into situations that are every bit as restrictive and damaging as those that existed when parental leave was effectively regarded as a women’s responsibility. Kristina takes all the parental leave with little Anna because her husband Karl-Oskar’s farm would otherwise go bankrupt. When Karl-Oskar comes in from the cowshed, he takes over responsibility for Anna and also carries out virtually all household work during the remaining sixteen hours of…