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…
Posts published in “Healthcare on the System’s Terms — Knowledge, Judgement and Responsibility in Modern Healthcare”
Healthcare on the System’s Terms — Knowledge, Judgement and Responsibility in Modern Healthcare
An ongoing analytical project on decision-making, institutional rationality and conceptions of the human being within Swedish healthcare.
Swedish healthcare is often described in terms of resource shortages, staff attrition or organisational details. This project begins from a different premise: that the problems facing healthcare are not primarily temporary or administrative, but structural. They concern how responsibility is allocated, how governance is designed, and how human beings are understood within institutional systems.
Healthcare on the System’s Terms is a long-term analytical project examining healthcare as a socio-technical system. The focus is on how political decisions, management models, professional hierarchies and administrative logics interact, and on the consequences this has for both patients and healthcare professionals. The project moves between the systemic and the experiential: from governance models and reforms to the concrete encounter between the body, suffering and organisation.
The analyses explore how responsibility becomes fragmented and displaced, how the patient’s narrative loses legitimacy when confronted by standardised processes, and how healthcare is gradually adapted to the needs of the system rather than those of the individual. Healthcare is not treated as an isolated domain, but as a reflection of broader social logics centred on efficiency, control and risk minimisation.
The project does not seek quick fixes or convenient scapegoats. It is an investigation into what happens when responsibility dissolves within complex structures.