Johan Lindwall
About Johan Lindwall
Johan Lindwall holds a PhD in Social Work and has a professional background as a social worker, with many years of experience from the social services in Gothenburg.
A central research interest concerns what happens in the encounter between clients and the systems intended to support them, with a particular focus on various forms of institutional interaction, communication and processes of social exclusion. He is especially interested in questions of power, governance, and professional practice in human service organisations, with an emphasis on substance use services and social services. Other areas of research that he engages with include homelessness and different forms of preventive social work. A recurring theme in his research is how the agency of both clients and professionals are shaped within institutional contexts.
Johan Lindwall teaches at the undergraduate, advanced, and doctoral levels, including courses on substance use, exercise of public authority in social work, the political and historical conditions of social work, and microsociological theory and method. He supervises theses at both undergraduate and advanced levels and is also involved in doctoral supervision. He also held the role of Director of Studies for the advanced level from 2022 to 2025.
Johan Lindwall is currently working on two research projects. In the project Klienters handlingsrum (“Clients’ space for agency”), he problematises concepts such as user involvement and user influence by examining the conditions and dilemmas that shape encounters between support systems and clients experiencing homelessness and using drugs. In this project, he interviews people with experience of being clients within the social services due to homelessness and drug use, focusing on issues related to autonomy, integrity, knowledge, and responsibility. In the ethnographic FORTE-funded project Skadereducerande socialt arbete för hemlösa personer med drogproblem och psykisk ohälsa (“Harm Reduction-Oriented Social Work for Homeless People with Drug Problems and Mental Ill-Health”) he, together with two other researchers at the Department of Social Work, studies how harm-reduction social interventions are implemented, developed, and experienced by both staff and residents in a newly established housing unit in the City of Gothenburg.
Johan Lindwall represents the Department of Social Work on the steering committee of the research centre CERA (Centre for Education and Research on Addiction). He is also a member of the research platform SEK (Social Exclusion and Control), Sonad (the Social Science Network for Alcohol and Drug Research), and RC25 Language and Society within the International Sociological Association (ISA).