This ethnography draws upon fieldwork experiences in South Manchester, England. The central theme is an exploration of the everyday relatedness of mothering practices, class, space and belonging. I examine mothering as practiced in both the politics of state intervention and through the mundane experiences of women living in a specific social space: the Wythenshawe Council Estate.This research explores how support programs for raising children and a specific home-visiting volunteer project to support mothers promote the production and reproduction of a particular kind of moral citizen (individualised, autonomous, and disciplined selves). I argue that volunteering schemes come to play a key role as government technology. Women volunteers who live in the community in which they volunteer (indigenous experts) come to act as a model for other local women, who are usually defined by the authorities (professional experts), as lacking the right kind of knowledge The volunteers are thus challenged to enhance and empower their neighbors and friends. However, this transmission does not occur in a linear fashion, but in quite subversive ways. While local women are actively involved in the use and appropriation of the resources provided by these programs, at the same time, they resist and transform them according to their own needs and desires.I also argue that mothering functions as metaphor and metonym for the imagined nation-state. The experience of living on the Estate is not just a physical act, but a permanent negotiation of who you are as a person in the defined social space of the Estate. I learned what it means to belong to Wythenshawe through its spatiality, but I also learnt a particular mode of belonging through my own racial and class background. My experiences of being a Latin-American ethnographer living on the Estate, whose population is mostly white and living on low income, significantly shaped my fieldwork experiences

In this thesis, a phenomenological approach is taken as the purpose is to discuss how the healthcare experiences of Swedish patients with chronic illness are affected by political state reforms and governing technologies. The thesis compares the discourse of Swedish healthcare policy with the discourse of healthcare in practice. Swedish healthcare has gone through major changes during the past decades, which have affected the state-to-patient relationship. This shift involved a transfer of responsibility from the state to its citizens, enabled through patient empowerment. In this change, a new ideal patient-role emerged, which is the patient as an informed and active consumer. What this thesis shows is the existence of a discrepancy between the ideal patient-role in governmental writing and the same ideal patient-role in the reality of the healthcare system. The ethnography consists of a literature study of healthcare policy documents and interviews with ten informants about their experiences of healthcare, in connection with the chronic diseases that affected their lives. The aim has been to examine the governing qualities of healthcare policy and practice, implementing Foucault’s theory of governmentality and technologies of the self.