Fredrik Sandberg

• Adult education
• Vocational education
• Validation
• HRD
• Recognition and education
• Critical social theory
• Trust
• Qualitative methods

The research has had three themes over the years. In my thesis, I studied the validation of the knowledge and competences of care assistants. The study was based on a small field study and mainly interviews with care assistants and the teachers who carried out the validation. Theoretically, the empirical data was analysed based on critical social theory, where Habermas' theory of communicative action was central. The analysis was also based on Axel Honneth's theory of recognition. The analysis was theoretically reconstructive.

As a postdoc, I was involved in a research project on adult education and citizenship. I was responsible for interviews with students and teachers at adult education centres. 30 interviews were conducted. Before the interviews, the students had to document how they viewed citizenship and document this through photos, films and audio recordings. This then formed the basis for the interviews. The project mainly involved discourse analyses of the empirical data, which were interpreted primarily based on Foucault's ideas on governance rationality, but an article for which I was responsible also included the concept of heterotopia in the analysis. I also made independent analyses of the empirical data based on Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, which resulted in an article I wrote myself.

At the moment I am interested in trust and am currently writing essays on love and trust. Theoretically, these texts currently cover thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Erich Fromm, Axel Honneth, Niklas Luhmann and others. An interest in these texts is also the link between psychoanalysis and critical sociology.

I mainly teach on the Bachelor's Programme in Human Resources, but also on the Master's Programme in HR and the Behavioural Science Programme.