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In this article, promotion is an institutionally mediated effort to bolster or redirect a person's health, strength, and other assets to build resilience. We analyse a Swedish version of the Life in Action promotion programme used in secondary schools in three municipalities. Focusing on types of alienation as framed in the programme, we argue that Life in Action's treatment of the psyche as an object in need of conscious monitoring, nurturing, and enhancement of qualities such as positive attitude and self-discipline signals the teenage participants' required alienation. Concluding the article, we discuss how this type of alienation may already be present in participating students, and also how it may be necessary for young people about to enter work-life in the era of late capitalism.

The interaction that takes place in Internet forum environments is performed through a compressed and dense form of writing and is highly dependent on the user's rhetorical and narrative skills. This article, which uses data from a Swedish parents' website, demonstrates the structure of aggression and defence in a conflict around appropriate mothering and seeks to demonstrate how the written subjectivity of a user relies also on particular alignments with ideologies on responsibility. The author argues that the hurting narrative, apart from using stacked-up information previously provided by other users, confiscates the dominant discursive position, thereby claiming a powerful evaluative role in relation to the counterpart. The article further argues that when accepting ideologies on responsibility, the defence of the counterpart becomes incapacitated and the protest itself is understood as a sign of discursive approval.

In Sweden, local municipalities, working in collaboration with the police, are assigned an important role in community-based crime prevention and the promotion of safer neighbourhoods/cities. The strategies adopted are supposed to be informed by the policies of national advisory bodies, which emphasize surveying the current situation, problem analyses, systematic planning of interventions and evaluation of efforts. This paper reports on a three-year research project that studied local crime prevention/safer community practices in four so-called ‘particularly vulnerable areas’ (PVAs) using meeting observations and stakeholder interviews. The analysis shows that when constructing intervention strategies, the actors involved had to navigate between different organizational logics and found it difficult to demarcate a suitable object for joint efforts. When they were able to find an object to be targeted, such as youth at risk of drug abuse or low-level criminality, they could rely on a collective mindset, but they struggled in situations where a joint effort was not possible, such as when dealing with the risk of aggravated violence or when the operations got close to more organized crime—both elements that form part of the definition of PVAs. This failure may partly be explained by competing logics dominated by idiosyncratic action in line with bureaucratic rules and routines. This finding raises questions about a putative but non-articulated limit to crime prevention and whether a predetermined approach aligns with the prescribed sequence of survey, analysis, intervention planning and evaluation when faced with more brutish violence.