Seminar (TURBA Lab): "Exploring the uneven geographies of public healthcare restructuring"

In this presentation, I outline different approaches I have used to explore the uneven geographies of public healthcare restructuring in Sweden. The first approach to healthcare restructuring departs from a bottom-up perspective. Here I have looked at citizen protests and self-organizing in cooperatives, and healthcare professionals’ motivations to work for digital labour platforms and their trade unions’ views on this. The second approach to healthcare restructuring is from a top-down perspective. This includes the launch of the European Health Data Space and the imaginaries embedded in this supranational regulation of health data use, and I am currently looking at how public procurements of large IT systems, such as electronic health records, imagines and (re)shapes (health)care. I discuss how these different approaches have helped me to understand and shed light on how marketization, privatization and digitalization transforming the Swedish public healthcare system. Finally, I will discuss how these approaches can contribute to our understanding of the processes reshaping (spatial) inequalities, creating (digital) vulnerabilities and opening the door for financialization of public healthcare systems.

 

Bio

 

Desirée Enlund is assistant professor at the Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, with a PhD in Social and Economic Geography. Her research interests include rural-urban inequalities, social movements and labour organizing, digitalization and technological change and welfare state retrenchment. Desirée is currently working on two projects about individual motivations and collective responses to platform work among healthcare personnel and digital vulnerabilities in the automated welfare state, both funded by the Swedish Research Council. She is the recipient of the 2020 Rudolf Meidner Award for her doctoral thesis on cooperatives and social movements organizing against healthcare closures in rural Sweden. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oslo, Norway and the Norwegian Business School in Oslo, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.