The purpose of this study has been to follow how the Swedish press covers the Swedish music competition Melodifestivalen and the Eurovision Song Contest. To do so, I have followed how the image of The Ark, a Swedish rock group, changed in the press during Melodifestivalen and the Eurovision Song Contest 2007. They won in Sweden, but in the big European finale they ended up in 18th place. The study is based on a discourse analysis with the focus on the social dialogue of the band in the newspapers. I have applied the analysis on 14 articles published the day after Melodifestivalen and a week ahead, and 14 articles published the day after the Eurovision Song Contest and a week ahead.

In our study we examined recurrent patterns and changes in the representation ofhomosexual persons in Swedish daily newspapers 1987, 1997 and 2007.We analysed articles about HIV-infected persons and articles with a view to portray thelife conditions of gay and lesbian persons from the three different years. We chose toonly analyze news articles that intend to represent real human beings, which mean thatwe did not analyze reports that only reproduce abstract knowledge from authorities.With analytical tools from semiotics and discourse analysis we identified some recurrentpatterns in the representation of homosexual people. We found that a recurrent pattern inthat when homosexual people are seen as groups, they are described as deviant,discriminated and some times as a threat. When portrayed as individuals the nonanonymouspersons appear in articles and pictures as normal, strong and healthy. Lesbianwomen are not represented in the articles from 1987, but in articles from 1997 and 2007they appear as unhappy when single and happy in a relationship.The results also showed some interesting differences in news representation ofhomosexual persons between the three investigated years.

This bachelor thesis is based on interviews with staff from three Egyptian NGOs in Cairo during the spring of 2013. The study examines how three Egyptian NGOs discuss the woman?s situation within the Islamic legal discourse in the contemporary Egypt. The empiric material was analysed through a theoretical framework of gender in Islam, and a discussion of the concept of human rights laws in a local context.The respondents emphasize the societies gender stereotypes as obstacles in the discussion regarding women?s rights.

In the late 1900s the Islamic feminist movement arose in a time of an Islamic renaissance in the Arab world. Even though it started as an Arabic movement it quickly spread to the international arena and became global. Today there are Islamic feminists all over the globe and this study is a discourse analysis with a focus on the Islamic feminist movement of today. The aim of the study is to investigate what the members of the movement have in common and on what viewpoints their opinions differ. The material used for the study is Internet blogs written by Islamic feminists and the timeframe of the blog posts stretches from the start of the Arab Spring until today.

Debates about suitable content in children's literature occur regularly. In spring 2010 such a debate took place in Sweden. The purpose of this Bachelor's thesis is to analyse the debate to identify ideas concerning the role of children's literature in society. A second aim is to examine how children's literature is described and which concepts are used by the debaters. The empirical material used for the analysis consists of ten articles, blog posts, radio- and TV- features published in March 2010.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the tendencies among pupils concerning their attitudes towards History and some of the stated goals in the present and in the proposed course plan of History, since there is, probably, a change coming in 2011. The study is built on questionnaires answered by one hundred pupils at a Swedish upper-secondary-school. The results point to the fact that most of these pupils like history, but still they do not wish to make it an obligatory subject, which is a government proposal at the moment. Furthermore, the answers about sources, democracy, the use of History and the consciousness about History, have a clear tendency; there have been too little education about these areas during the pupils former nine years in school, still the pupils think that these are important areas to work with. Moreover, this study shows a disheartening picture when it comes to pupils knowledge of their cultural heritage. Only half of the pupils know which century Gustav Vasa lived in and just a third know what year universal suffrage was introduced in Sweden, two facts that ought to be set in most Swedes? mind..

The need for a more efficient electrical grid has made the smart grid concept popular in recent years. The aims of this study are to identify the conditions in Sweden for implementing a smart grid and to analyse the opinions of stakeholders. One finding is that the large capacity of Sweden?s existing electrical grid decreases the immediate need for smart grid solutions. However, the rapid increase in wind power might push the development of a smart grid in the coming years.

The aim of this essay is to analyze how students are constituted as subjects in local curricula. The theoretical perspective is grounded in Michel Foucault?s notion of governmentality and power/knowledge and his critique of a sovereign subject. From this theoretical perspective I use Foucault?s concept of formation of objects and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe?s idea of subject positioning as tools for a discourse analysis.

 Prostitution has been intensely debated in Sweden for nearly four decades. Two major investigations have so far been initiated by the government and numerous propositions have been put forward in the Swedish parliament resulting in the sexköpslag from 1999 that criminalizes purchase of sexual services. The law aims at punishing the buyer and protecting the women in prostitution, thus making it possible for women to be helped by various social interventions rather than punished. Swedish society has undergone major changes in these decades. Globalization, the internet and the membership in the EU have changed the Swedish society and influenced the discourse on prostitution.This paper has a twofold aim, on the one hand investigating if and how these changes have had an impact on the prostitution discourse in texts produced by the government and analyze how female and male sexuality in connection to prostitution is constructed.

In this essay I have studied how the kid?s school start are described in picture books. The studied questions are: How the school is described in these selected picture books; what feeling does the main character have into the school start; how the teachers are described in this selected picture books and how are the power relationship described in these selected picture books?The method I have chosen for this essay is a discourse analysis of seven selected picture books with the meaning of starting school. All books studied are written during the 1990 and forward.

This study focuses the development on the protection of landscapes with old industries and how it nowadays is appreciated by the inhabitants. The overall aim of this study is to increase the knowledge about how the so called industrial landscape in Norrköping became a cultural heritage that the citizens want to protect. The study also aims to investigate the citizens´ knowledge about the industrial landscape in Norrköping, and what value they think that the place possesses. Data was collected by an information research and six qualitative interviews. The interviews where analysed by qualitative methods techniques.

This thesis aims at exploring a national collaborative gateway-service, PictureAustralia, hosted at the National Library of Australia. This will be done by means of investigating some underlying principles for descriptive standards and conventions as of the library discourse which is the objective of bibliographic control and access. The reason to do this is to bring some main features of these principles into the context of a cross-institutional cooperation between libraries, galleries/museums and archives in a picture database service. The attention will lay on the objectives of what functions the system is designed to perform to give access, as defined by Elaine Svenonius in the Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization 2000, and how these objectives will affect this particular database-service collocating performance, which is a system- and logical approach. Though, this study will be done in an explorative and qualitative way, by a case-study, which is to examine some sample metadata records emanated from different institutions in this project.

The aim of this master thesis is to examine the attitudes among library staff regarding a music downloading service called Musikwebb, which is available in many Swedish public libraries. It focuses on the impact of Musikwebb on the process of music selection, the relationship between Musikwebb and the digital development in public libraries and what service Musikwebb offers its users. The gathering of material was executed through focus group interviews with library staff in four libraries. This empirical material we divided in three categories: Music selection, The Library and its digital services, and Library services. We use the results of Sanna Talja?s discourse analysis regarding the relationship between Music, Culture and the Library to analyze our material.

The purpose of this essay is to shed some light upon the children who grew up in Sweden after their parents fled the war in former Yugoslavia. Did the parents spread their own opinions about the other ethnicities which they fought against in the war to the children, even though they live in a new country? And if so, was it an act of patriotism for the country they once lived in and who was to blame for the war? Did the children who grew up in Sweden share the same attitudes as their parents? To find out about this we used interviews with four people, all with heritage from former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Croatia. What we found out was that the thoughts from the parents partially were passed down to their children, even though the children thought that they had formed their own opinions. In this case the thoughts didn?t relate to any kind of patriotism or who to blame for the war, they rather believed that they shouldn?t blame the other ethnic groups for the war.

The purpose of this essay is to examine at how to portray characters in the stories and narratives which depicts one of these children's books and if they really have something to ethnicity and its identification to be done.The Research questions is: What are the different identification markers given, to the reading child in the books, which might indicate that the story depicts people of different ethnicities? How are the characters portrayed in the story and which role is assigned to the main character? What story is portrayed and is it relevant to an identifier can occur?The conclusions of the five children's books shows that it is important with identifications markers, to show that there are different ethnicities. For example the analysis revealed the specific features of the illustrations and how the books portrayes someone with a different ethnicity and cultural background as something exotic.In the texts, the analysis showed how it occurred ethnic differences, by explicitly demonstrating differences between the characters. It was found that the characters were produced mostly as good, happy, curious, suspicious and unsympathetic. Common to all the main characters was that they had been placed, in one for them unusual context and that they were trying to assimilate to the new situations.Depictions consisted of realism and fiction.