The funds have been allocated, inter alia, for studies of marine acidification from the perspective of crustaceans, for research of how water could be purified without chemical treatment, and for calculations of how the costs associated with the emission of greenhouse gases all over the world can be fairly apportioned.
Poverty in Sri Lanka
A project about the south of Sri Lanka, run by Jonas Lindberg, lecturer and researcher at the Department of Human and Economic Geography, Göteborg University, is about equity. In 1997 he arrived in Sri Lanka under a youth exchange scheme and lived with a Sri Lankan "partner" in a Buddhist temple up in the hills for three months in order to understand a village in depth. His thesis later on dealt with the spatial distribution of educational opportunities in the rural areas of Sri Lanka. The new project is called "Ways out of poverty or the new face of poverty? A study of how diversification processes in rural areas affect peoples' wellbeing." Jonas Lindberg explains:
- Diversification is used as a term in studying poor parts of the world. More and more households leave farming and get themselves several incomes. Some perhaps move to other places to work on building sites or in factories so that they can send money home. Jonas Lindberg is primarily interested in the consequences of diversification processes, and why they appear to have different consequences in different political and spatial contexts.
- The hypotheses are contradictory. It may be a positive development for the poor. Or it is a sign that poverty has become deeper.
Who is normal?
Ebba Högström, Architect SAR/MSA, who will present her doctoral thesis in the spring of 2011 at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH, Stockholm, and her supervisor Lars Orrskog, have been granted funds for The integrated space – room and place in Swedish psychiatric care after 1967.
- An ideology concerning integration had developed, says Ebba Högström. It was expected that, through social and physical integration in society, pychiatric patients would be able to live a normal life. One case study deals with the Nacka Project, 1974-1980, where one of the first experiments with sectorised psychiatry was performed. The second case study relates to the Södertälje Model, and makes a special examination of the "rehabilitation units" where there was shared leadership – one from the municipality and one from the county council.
- The place and the building is about formulating and maintaining categories regarding normality, but in the Södertälje case it is the shared building which provides the basis for cooperation, says Ebba Högström.
Facts:
33 assistant professor posts. Of the 154 applications for posts as assistant professor, 33 received a favourable response. Grants were also given for 32 transdisciplinary projects, and 28 postdoc scholarships. Fifteen information projects were allocated funds, one of which will result in a book on molecular gastronomy in one's own kitchen. More on Formas website, www.formas.se .