Under det senaste decenniet har mycket negativ medieuppmärksamhet riktats mot Malmö. Staden har sett återkommande oroligheter i vissa utsatta områden, vilket vittnar om en låg samhällstillit hos vissa befolkningsgrupper. Det har rapporterats om gängkriminalitet och antisemitism, och under senare tid även om ett utbrett hat i ord och handling riktat mot muslimer. Samtidigt finns en livfull anda inom såväl stadsförvaltningen som det lokala föreningslivet av att vilja stärka integrationen, minska etniska och religiösa motsättningar och kriminalitet samt förbättra livsmiljön i staden. Företrädare för både staden och civilsamhället anser att trossamfunden kan och bör spela en nyckelroll i detta, en roll som tidigare ofa varit förbisedd. Syfet med denna rapport är att skapa underlag för beslutsfattare inom kommuner och myndigheter genom att utvärdera samverkan mellan Malmö stad och olika civilsamhällesaktörer för tryghet och tillit i utsatta områden. Särskilt fokus har lagts på trossamfundens roll i denna samverkan.

Rapporten har tagits fram av på uppdrag av Myndigheten för stöd till trossamfund (SST).

This chapter engages with the burgeoning international phenomenon of therapeutic nature practices, such as ecotherapy, forest bathing, and forest therapy. This is informed by the author’s ethnographic research in European geographical and cultural contexts with much in common but also notable differences: Wales, Sweden, and Finland. In all of these fieldwork contexts the idea that ‘natural’ spaces were somewhere one could ‘get away’ to as an ‘escape’, as something ‘set apart’ or seen as ‘other’, was key to the therapeutic framing of the activities. This was both an escape from perceived pathological effects of society and an escape to a complex community of life represented by nature. Therefore in these fields nature is a community, but one without social roles and stratification, a communitas, as described by Victor Turner. In Turner’s understanding, communitas arises in a liminal state, an in-between state where the social system is dissolved within a ritual framework, enabling participants to transform, reconstitute themselves, and re-enter society in a new role. A lack of social roles and demands is still an absence, of course. However, in many practitioners’ accounts it is also clear that positive characteristics are attributed to earth beings. The presence of life and living beings is experienced as revitalising. A transformation can be argued to take place, but this is primarily within the individual, rather than outer cultural or societal change. Also of note was a mostly positive view of nature, with little consideration of the potential for threat or danger. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how therapeutic nature practices both reflect and resist contemporary Western culture.

Through field research in Sweden and Finland between 2017 and 2022, the thesis follows a burgeoning social movement in which connection with nature is seen as a means of both personal wellbeing and ecological sustainability at the societal level. The thesis describes and analyses ideas, practices, organisations, and literature in a contemporary cultural context in the borderland between health practice, environmental activism, and spirituality. It also examines participants' personal experiences and understands both the practice and its social milieu as a cultivation of experience, whereby experiences of nature as alive and communicative are maintained and enhanced. This leads into a discussion of animism in a contemporary Western context, where the thesis aims to develop a multidimensional understanding which takes into account not only ontology and cognitive-perceptual patterns, but also lays emphasis on emotional and ethical dimensions.

The thesis employs the concept face, which, in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, signifies the encounter with subjectivity outside of oneself. In contrast to objects, which can be grasped intellectually and thus controlled and incorporated, the face reveals a reality beyond conceptualisation to which one must relate ethically. The thesis arrives at an understanding of both health and spirituality as states of (relative) openness toward the world and its human and non-human inhabitants. 

Activities for a deepened nature connection are promoted as ways to increase personal wellbeing and as a solution to the ecological crisis. This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of practices at the junction between spirituality, wellbeing practice, and social activism, practices which will here be referred to collectively as the nature connection movement. The practices include exercises of sensory attention and ritual activities, all of which seem to affect the way practitioners experience nature, leading to a proneness to experience communication with non-human entities, i.e., what can be classified as a form of animism. The chapter is divided into three main parts. The first seeks to place the movement in a contemporary cultural context and introduces the chapter’s central concept: subjective activism, which here refers to activism with an inward direction but with social ambitions. The second part describes the nature connection movement and its practices, which here serves as a case study of subjective activism. The third part discusses the potential social impacts of these practices in the light of Stephen Vaisey’s dual-process model for motivation and justification, and Philippe Descola’s modes of identification and modes of relation, which puts cognitive patterns and practical relations on equal footing as simultaneously cause and effect of each other. I conclude that the potential impacts range from temporary relief from the negative impacts of the current social order – in which case it may help to conserve that order – to a fundamental disruption.

Denmark, Estonia, and Sweden are, if measured by certain sociological criteria, considered to be three of the world's most secular countries. Nature-forests, pristine beaches, and the countryside-plays a specific role in the allegedly secular discourse of the mainstream populations of these nations. Not only is it almost without exception deemed as a positive asset worthy of protection, it is also thought of as holding certain existential qualities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article suggests that Alfred Schutz's conceptualization of transcendence-further developed by Thomas Luckmann-can be used to describe the existential experiences in nature of contemporary secular people. The article results in a suggestion for an operational definition of transcendence.