Coming dissertations at Uppsala university
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Den ideal(istisk)a byråkraten : En etnografisk studie om professionell socialiseringunder socionomutbildning
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-538725
This dissertation investigates the professional socialization of social work students. Through ethnographic, yo-yo fieldwork with a group of students in one class, it seeks to offer a window into students’ experiences of becoming social workers. The empirical material consists of field observations on campus and digitally on Zoom, as well as interviews. The field work targeted the first, beginning of the third, end of the fourth, and the fifth semester, out of seven semesters in total. A total of 25 interviews were conducted with a sub-sample of students on three occasions during their education. The research design facilitated an understanding of the socialization process as it unfolded over time.
Grounded in symbolic interactionism, the dissertation develops a theoretical framework which sees socialization as the construction of frames and laminations through identity resources. Frames and their laminations, i.e. extra layers of interpretation, provide norms, channel attention and guide boundary work.
The dissertation describes four analytical phases of the socialization process: start, orientation, ambivalence, and practice. In the start phase, students constructed a helping frame to make-sense of social work. It had an individual lamination, meaning they were interested in helping people through meaningful relations. Over time, they developed a bureaucratic frame with which they saw social work as a bureaucratic practice. These frames were laminated with extra layers of interpretation that contributed to students’ ability to act as social workers. They formed a social scientific, a behavioral scientific, an emotional, and a connective lamination.
The analysis illustrates that social work students formed a professional identity characterized by three aspects. Double ambivalence refers to a need to navigate contradicting norms that stem from the helping and bureaucratic frames, as well as having to handle complex situations. Second, students seem to develop an epistemological humbleness. They could emphasize a need to consider the complexity of problems, as well as the value of taking others' perspective, both that of the person they wanted to help and that of other professionals. Third, students formed an identity which can be characterized as a professional underdog. They seemed to become increasingly aware of professional hierarchies, and could perceive the social worker’s position to be that of a challenger to dominating knowledge claims. The concept of professional underdog also denotes how students gained knowledge of organizational contexts that could make helping difficult. Lastly, this concept aims to capture how students wanted to help vulnerable individuals and groups.
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LIMARIKET : Utvecklingen av det spanska imperiets fiskala system i La Caja Matriz i Lima 1790–1820
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-538751
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, wars and political crises placed significant financial strain on the Spanish Crown’s treasuries in the Americas. This dissertation aims to create a better understanding of how the fiscal system of the Spanish Crown developed in the main state treasury, La Caja Matriz in Lima, between 1790 and 1820. It emphasizes the vital role played by royal treasuries and their accounting methods in facilitating the transfer of funds and knowledge from distant regions to the central government in Lima. This system was crucial for governing the empire’s vast and remote territories from both Madrid and Lima.
By analyzing the accounts of La Caja Matriz and reconstructing the new accounting method introduced in 1790, this dissertation offers a nuanced and comprehensive view of the Spanish tax system in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Additionally, the study introduces a new analytical framework that provides a more dynamic understanding of the development of government finances over time. It moves beyond the traditional focus on revenues and expenditures, incorporating analysis of deficits, surpluses, residuals (restantier), and debt.
The analysis highlights how La Caja Matriz strengthened its coordinator role during wartime, becoming the central financial hub not only for other royal treasuries but also for various state and private economic entities. This coordination enabled the government in Lima to mobilize resources and centralize the political and military power, sustaining Spanish institutions during the empire’s decline in the early nineteenth century.
Furthermore, this study challenges the assumption that deficits and low revenues in La Caja Matriz necessarily reflected weak financial capacity. Instead, these factors should be assessed in terms of the government’s ability to manage and mobilize cash flows to sustain the monarchy’s institutions across regions far from Lima. This crucial aspect has been overlooked in previous studies, which have tended to analyze La Caja Matriz as a local affair, rather than recognizing its broader imperial function beyond the Peruvian Viceroyalty.
The state’s ability to distribute fiscal responsibilities among various royal treasuries and financial entities explains why the system continued to function, even when La Caja Matriz showed signs of deficit. In the short term, the financial balance was maintained through rationalized allocations and increased borrowing. As a result, the system endured, operating daily across a continent marked by war and institutional chaos until the middle of 1821.
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Designing and Evaluating Electrocatalysts Based on Pt and Pd Alloys for Glycerol Electrooxidation Reaction : A Study of Mesoporosity, Alloying Strategies, and Operando Structural Analysis for Enhanced Performance and Durability
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-538938
As a consequence of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable biofuels and in particular biodiesel, glycerol has shifted from being a commodity chemical to a by-product. Currently, glycerol is often either discarded or further oxidised into value-added 3-carbon products. Electrochemical oxidation also offers the potential to produce clean hydrogen gas. The main challenge from both the industrial and scientific viewpoints is in understanding the reaction mechanisms in order to develop effective and selective catalysts.
This thesis focuses on the development, characterization, and optimization of Pt- (and Pd-) based catalysts for the glycerol electrooxidation reaction (GEOR), with a particular emphasis on the effectiveness, the reaction mechanism, and the selectivity of the reaction. In the first part, the enhancement of the catalytic surface area of Pt is achieved through the use of different porogens where Pt is electrodeposited to fabricate mesoporous catalysts with linear, hierarchical or cubic pore structures. The mass diffusion of the reactant and products in the pores was the critical step where hierarchical pores allowed for an increased electrochemically available surface area without hindering out the diffusion of oxidation products. To tackle some of the drawbacks of pure platinum and to increase the catalytic activity, a Cu-Pt alloy with varying relative compositions was studied. Incorporating Cu into Pt improves the catalytic performance by straining and introduction of vacancies into the valence band of Pt atoms. An enhanced current density, catalytic activity, and stability enhanced activity was found close to the composition Cu3Pt, which was also theoretically predicted. The composition of these alloys also had an influence on the product selectivity where the composition and potential-dependent mechanism was matched with DFT calculations. The performance and stability of the Cu-Pt catalysts was studied under operando conditions using grazing incidence diffraction with synchrotron radiation, for which a dual-chamber flow cell was specifically designed to mimic normal laboratory conditions. Analysis of the angle- and time-dependent data provided insights into the real-time structural dynamics as function of probing depth as well as the degradation of the electrocatalysts particularly under the first few “activation” cycles but also upon prolonged cycling. The results show that the activation of catalysts with an excess copper resulted unequivocally on the surface leaching of copper species and consequent surface dealloying towards Pt rich surface compositions. The last part of the thesis focused on the characterization of Pd0.9Ni0.1 and Pd electrocatalyst electrodeposited on a Ni rotating disk electrode for the GEOR to understand the structural and morphological changes of PdNi catalysts after electrolysis.
Experimental and theoretical results show that Pt- (and Pd-) based alloys are promising catalysts for the industrial GEOR although there is still work to do.