Jag heter Niklas Altermark och är doktorand på statsvetenskapliga institutionen. Jag har sedan tidigare en master- och en kandidatiexamen i statsvetenskap, som också innefattar tre terminer praktisk filosofi. Efter examen blev jag anställd på stadskontoret i Malmö stad där jag arbetade med kvalitets- och utvecklingsfrågor inom vård- och omsorgsområdet.

Mina forskningsintressen rör sig i överlappningarna mellan fälten politisk teori, välfärdspolitik och förvaltning. Det är också inom dessa områden som jag undervisar. Avhandlingsprojektet som jag arbetar med handlar om utvecklingsstörning som politiskt fenomen. 

In English  

I was admitted to the PhD-program in August 2010. I have a master in Political Science from Lund University and have previously worked at the Municipality office at Malmö Stad. My research interests mainly concern political theory, social policy and public administration, which are also my teaching areas. The dissertation project I work on deals with intellectual disabilities as political phenomena. 

The main purpose of the project is to produce an understanding of intellectual disabilities as political phenomena, focusing on how the notion of citizenship operates. What citizenship is and how it should be understood are contested issues, involving questions about what it means to be human and normative assumptions regarding how society should be organized. Most accounts of this concept, however, seem to share the potential to convey hopes about a better future. Throughout history “citizenship” has repeatedly carried the dreams of another possible world, so also for people with disabilities. This dissertation project deals with how citizenship has been formulated, implemented and contested regarding individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Making citizens out of disabled people has been one of the overriding goals of disability policies in western welfare states since the mid-eighties, aiming at individual autonomy and stripping public officials from authority to interfere in the decision-making of service recipients. The ideal has been that individuals with learning disabilities should have the same right to choose how to live and the same independence as others. Despite these highflying ambitions are disability services repeatedly reported not to live up to policy goals. Many would suggest that this is due to individuals with learning disabilities not being able to function as citizens because of their presumed lacking cognitive capacities. Hence, it seems as more paternalism is called for than policies permit. In this way, support and services for the cognitively impaired can be considered a microcosm where tensions between state authority and individual freedom are continuously played out, where the conceptions of citizenship are confronted with the realities of a group that sometimes are described as escaping available definitions.  The perspective in my dissertation is that this microcosm is embedded in power relations and discourses about what intellectual disability is and means. Thus, my interest is in creation of intellectual disabilities, how expressions of power take form and are legitimized by those working in the everyday lives of disabled individuals. But also how such expressions of power can be challenged and contested.