This paper explores young autistic adults' energy management in relation to work, leisure activities and social relationships. Energy management strategies serve as different ways for the young autistic adults to sustain their energy balance by trying to understand what increases or reduces their energy levels. In this way, energy can be understood as modes of autistic functionality where the informants' individual energy levels, the contexts in which they find themselves and the strategies they use to influence and form central parts of their everyday lives.

Autistic people have historically been described as incapable of developing a deeper sense of self-awareness, and autistic understandings of self-awareness have been largely disregarded. The aim of this study is to explore the way young autistic adults try to understand their functionality and who they are, or to develop their sense of self-awareness, in work and in private life contexts. In 12 qualitative interviews conducted with four autistic adults without learning difficulties, we identified a rich set of reflections on knowing and accepting oneself. The overarching theme of self-knowledge has three subthemes: learning from previous experiences, learning about oneself by securing the support of others, and understanding and accepting autistic functionality. The strategy of self-knowledge was used by these young adults to help them achieve functional lives in the work and private domains. Our results show that young autistic adults both actively explore and develop their self-awareness. We suggest that it is important for practitioners and employers working with autistic individuals to engage with their journeys of self-awareness as a vital part of understanding and supporting them.

In this article, we explore experiences of support and self-management amongst young autistic adults in the context of vocational support interventions in Sweden. We analyse how young autistic men use different strategies to manage their vocational work and the support they need to maintain, achieve and sustain their work performance. Data consist of eleven interviews with 4 autistic young adult men in different work environments where vocational support interventions are implemented to different degrees. One finding concludes that the interviewees are affected by and try to adapt to neurotypical norms and expectations about working life and adulthood. Although individualised coping strategies can be helpful, it is important for employers and formal support persons to understand and acknowledge that individual emotional and problem-solving coping strategies are demanding and need to be combined with adaptations in the working environment. Another finding concludes how work managers act as gatekeeper in the vocational support system the young autistic men aspire to access and in which they need to manage their work performance. Thus, social workers must provide structured and well-coordinated formal work support by both involving the autistic clients’ employers, work managers and informal networks.

This thesis relates to a classic question within cultural sciences: what does it mean to be human? In a time characterised by the increasing presence of human-like technology in people's everyday lives and working lives, where technology is programmed with human-like traits or is attributed human-like traits, studying the relationship between humans and human-like objects can contribute to an understanding of how notions of what it means to be human are negotiated and renegotiated.  

The overall aim of this thesis is to explore the notions of what it means to be human in relationships between humans and human-like technology. What are these notions of being human, what characterises them, and how are they expressed? How are borders between humans and human-like technology negotiated and renegotiated? The aim is also to explore how notions of being human, in relation to human-like technology, are both affected by and influence notions of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, social stratification, and subjectivity as well as health care and professionalism. These different perspectives are studied in the five papers making up this thesis. 

The empirical material, based on two sub-studies, was collected from both fictional and non-fictional Swedish contexts where human-like technology is developed and used by people. In the first sub-study (papers 1–2), the development of digital health technologies for health care is explored through two interdisciplinary research projects – Like-a-peer and Walk Safely. In the second sub-study (papers 3–5), relationships between humans and human-like technology in the world of fiction, in the Swedish science fiction TV series Real Humans (Äkta människor), are explored.  

Based on the results of this thesis’ papers, two overarching themes were discerned. The first theme concerns how human-likeness as a means, an imagination, and a practice both maintains and exceeds borders between humans and human-like technology. In Like-a-peer, Walk Safely, and Real Humans, technology was made human-like in different ways, in different degrees and for different purposes. This humanisation was expressed in various ways in the thesis' sub-studies, but mainly through “biological” embodiments, personalisation, and subjectification. The second theme concerns how human-likeness gives rise to (possible) conflicts and challenges, and two potential conflicts were identified. The first conflict involved the relationship between the patient and the digital health technology in whether, and when, the digital caregiver should follow or go against the patient's own health-related preferences. The second conflict revolved around the issue of the patient's freedom of choice and the patient’s opportunity to independently choose avatars for their digital caregiver to increase their willingness to use and follow the digital caregiver's advice. The interviewees expressed risks such as the patient choosing their avatars based on prejudices regarding, for example, gender, ethnicity, and age. The patients' choice of avatar, how the digital health technology should be embodied, led to a potential conflict between the patient’s freedom of choice and the security and rights of human health professionals in the workplace.  

The results show how notions of being human – as well as the boundaries between humans and human-like technology, fiction and non-fiction, working life and everyday life – were challenged and reproduced when human-like technology moved into people’s homes.

This article examines the role of a civil society organisation that offers parental support to migrant parents with regard to meanings of parenthood and citizenship. It is based on the results of an action research study of a civil society organisation. The material consists of notes from participatory work in a local centre for children, youth and their parents, and of interviews with professionals, a project manager of the local organisation, and a public servant and a social worker who both work for the district council. Additional material is taken from notes of study visits to organisations working with the same target group. The results highlight four central themes. The first two themes, difficult parents in a precarious place and a place with a future?, revolves around parental needs in relation to place, the suburb. The third theme, civic parenting practices, focuses on parenting practices as civic practices. The fourth theme, gendering parent citizens, discusses the gendered meanings of the parent citizen as both an object and an agent of integration.

The aim of this paper is to explore how a digital caregiver, developed within a Swedish interdisciplinary research project, is humanised through health-enhancing practices of personalisation and friendliness. The digital caregiver is developed for being used in older patients' homes to enhance their health. The paper explores how the participants (researchers and user study participants) of the research project navigate through the humanisation of technology in relation to practices of personalisation and friendliness. The participants were involved in a balancing act between making the digital caregiver person-like and friend-like enough to ensure the health of the patient. Simultaneously, trying to make the patients feel like as if they were interacting with someone rather than something-while at the same time not making the digital caregiver seem like a real person or a real friend. This illustrates the participants' discursive negotiations of the degree of humanisation the digital caregiver needs in order to promote the health of the patient. A discursive conflict was identified between a patient discourse of self-determination versus a healthcare professional discourse of authority and medical responsibility: whether the digital caregiver should follow the patient's health-related preferences or follow the healthcare professionals' health rules. Hence, a possible conflict between the patient and the digital caregiver might arise due to different understandings of friendliness and health; between friendliness (humanisation) as a health-enhancing practice governed by the patient or by the healthcare professionals (healthcare professionalism).

The Swedish sci-fi drama TV series Real Humans (original title in Swedish: Äkta människor) can be viewed as a playground for trying out imagined possible future human-robot relationships that can tell us something regarding ideas about possible futures for being human. In the paper, representations of transhumansexual relationships are explored, specifically how these representations reproduce and possibly challenge notions of being human. Three articulations of transhumansexual relationships are identified: authenticity, legal subjectivity, and failure of heterosexuality. The negotiations of being human take place in three different discourses – a heteronormative and humanonormative discourse on gender and sexuality, a biological discourse, and a citizenship discourse. Transhumansexuals and hubots in transhumansexual relationships are humanized – anthropomorphized – and made more intelligible as human(-like) beings. However, the quest to make transhumansexual relationships intelligible as something human tends to (hetero- and humano-)normalize the queer potential of transhumansexual relationships.

This paper explores virtual health professionals (VHPs), digital health technology software, in Swedish health care. The aim is to analyze how health professionalismis (re)negotiated through avatar embodiments of VHPs and to explore the informants’ notions of what a health professional is, behaves and looks like. The paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork with informants working directly or indirectly with questions of digital health technology and professionalism. Discourse theory is used to analyze the material. Subjectification, authenticity, and diversity were found to be crucial for informants to articulate health professionalism when discussing human avatars, professional attire, gendered and ethnified embodiments. The informants attempted to make the VHPs credibly professional but inauthentcally human. A discursive struggle over health professionalism between patient choice and diversity within health care was identified where the patient’s choice of avatars—if based on prejudices—might threaten healthcare professionalism and healthcare professionals by (re)producing racism and sexism.

In this article I analyse the renegotiations and re-establishments of borders between humans and hubots (humanoid robots) in the Swedish sf television series Akta manniskor (Real Humans) through the concepts of trans-corporeality and recyclability, where the concept of being 'recyclable' prompts questions of life and death. The use of anthropomorphism and the recyclability of the characters paradoxically articulates sameness while referring to differences, and it suggests that humans and hubots are entangled and always composed, decomposed and recomposed by, and into, other bodies. This might have practical implications for modern society in terms of ethics and rights for anthropomorphic robots.