Today, the terms ‘young people’ and ‘rural Sweden’ are automatically associated with problems. Young people are associated with various worrying issues, such as mental illness, stress, pressure at school, or internet risk. Being young and living in a rural community is often regarded as especially problematic. Rural life is thought dull, and bracketed with isolation, lack of meaningful activities, and being inferior to urban spaces. In this thesis, these well-known problematics are set aside in favour of studying young people’s everyday lives in a broader sense.

This thesis investigates how young people in rural areas do everyday life in interaction with their wider surroundings. Young people’s doings are interpreted against those of adult ‘interveners’, the professionals and volunteers who work with the young and intervene in their activities and places. Applying a symbolic interactionist approach, youngsters’ everyday activities and their doing of everyday life were investigated by ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish village. The thesis is based on data from observations and interviews with young people and interveners in the village. The thesis introduces an analytical framework for interpreting everyday life. A ternary framework, it comprises three dimensions of everyday life: heightened everydayness, unnoticed everydayness, and dull everydayness. The framework has been created in response to the study’s empirical material, and serves as an analytical lens throughout the study.

The results show that young people and interveners portray everyday life in the village differently. Interveners focus primary on the problematic aspects of rural life. Youngsters instead highlight heightened everydayness. In accordance with young people’s representations of everyday life, the thesis thus focuses on heightened everydayness. The analysis shows how youngsters accomplish heightened everydayness by being on the move, physically and virtually; engaging in indeterminate or problematic situations; and being with cared-for people, animals and things. Based on the study’s results, it is found that everyday knowledge emerges as crucial for heightened everydayness. The thesis concludes that everyday life is valuable. Contrary to general understandings of everyday life as grey and dull, the study shows everyday life as rich in content, meaningful, and fun.

In contemporary Ghana, the traditional system and professional social work operate as two parallel systems within the field of social work. The aim of this study was to investigate if and how the teaching of contemporary professional social work in Ghana takes into account traditional actors and practices. The traditional system includes extended family members and traditional authorities such as chiefs or family heads. It formed the social institution that protected and cared for the vulnerable before (Western) social work was introduced as a formal profession in Ghana. A 10-week ethnographic field study was conducted at the Department of Social Work at the University of Ghana. The study employed a qualitative, social constructionist approach, interpreting the results within a theoretical framework of social world theory. The empirical material consisted of interviews with students and teachers, participant observation at lectures, and various documents. The main findings of the study were that professional social workers and traditional actors can be seen as members of two subworlds – the subworld of professional social workers and the subworld of traditional actors. Students and teachers discuss interventions from the perspective of social workers and traditional actors. Their ability to take different perspectives seems to be crucial for localisation – the process by which social work is made relevant to local culture and traditions. The interviewees’ accounts reveal how localisation is not only about culture, but also about social structures and practical considerations. The poor state of the social work profession in Ghana affects interventions in a profound way.

In 2015, the Swedish government made a shift in migration policy: In order to reduce the amount of refugees arriving in Sweden, the government changed asylum and refugee protection laws, and introduced permanent border controls. In this article, we discuss these changes from the perspective of social work students. Our study is based on qualitative material compiled within the framework of an international project, with the aim of developing good practices in the reception of refugees recently arrived in Europe. The students discussed the responses of the Swedish authorities, expressed their anxieties and concerns about the impact of the policy shift on asylum seekers, society in general and their own environment. Their reflections express uncertainty and impotence, as well as fear, as they meet growing racism, both in public space and their immediate surroundings. We identify the processes described by the students as an increasing loss of community identity. Students suffer from this loss, which reduces their social interactions, contributing to the weakening of social ties and the reinforcement of the processes they criticize. Thus, despite being positioned against refrugee resusal policies, when they discuss Social Work education in relation to migration they maintain the distance between nationals and migrants and reinforce the division between "us" and "them".