Cynthia Voigt is a well-known author of children?s books. She deals mainly with contemporary issues, although she also has written some fantasy. The Tillerman saga consists of 7 books. This essay deals with the first two, Homecoming and Dicey´s Song.

The pdf is excluding images, because of uncertainties regarding copyrights. Instead I have put links for each picture so you may find them on the Internet. For a list of links to the online sourcematerial, please visit http://del.icio.us/Cyborguppsats.

Popular culture is a phenomenon of growing importance in the society today. Children and teenagers are increasingly using popular culture in their everyday life to reflect and answer questions about their identities and the meaning of life. Swedish primary and upper secondary schools are expected to prepare their students for adulthood and to provide them with tools to explain understand and problematize contemporary society. From this perspective it is relevant to question whether the schools achieve this and whether the instruction given there represents the contemporary society. For the purpose of knowing more about how popular culture is perceived and dealt with in the Swedish education system, this study examines how eight textbooks in Religious Education (RE) and the national curriculum for upper secondary school discuss and treat popular culture.  The study focuses on when and in what ways the textbooks mention popular culture and if the curriculum provides any supportive base for including popular culture in religious education.

The swedish education system in general and the swedish gymnasium in particular is at the point of a thorough reform of the guidelines in education. One major difference given in the guidelines is that the former core subject of arts education is abandoned in favour of making history a mandatory class. This despite the curriculum outlined in 1994 remains. Through comparativ text analysis of the documents and reports outlining this reform and defining the curriculum as well as the guidelines for the education system this study aims to point out the reasons for this change. Through in depth interviews with teachers, educators and authorities in addition to readings of contemporary research on arts in education the study will depict a larger picture of the scheme of things.

The purpose of this study was to to examine what teachers think about visual art and how the learning process in this subject does look like. To answer these issues, I made interviews with five teachers of visual art from different schools, and I examined several examples of pupils? artworks. The stories of the teachers were analyzed in relation to governing documents and with assumptions from sociocultural theory, postmodernism and pedagogical - aesthetic research as theoretical point of view.By the qualitative interview method, the observations of the pupil?s artworks, and by the analysis of the interviews with the teachers, I have come to the conclusion that teachers think differently about art but they try to keep themselves in line with the national governing documents.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the function of the budget as a means of control within an organisation in the public sector. To accomplish this, a case study has been conducted on a certain business unit within Luftfartsverket responsible for providing Air Traffic Control services. The thesis is built on a framework of contemporary theories of budgeting and includes a brief discussion of the weaknesses usually associated with the traditional budget. The conclusion of the study is that the use of budget as a means of financial control within Luftfartsverket is not efficient enough at the moment.

Syftet med föreliggande studie är att undersöka relationen mellan styrdokumen­tens föreskrifter gällande jämställdhet och lärares hantering av detta i ensemble­undervisning inom jazz och populärmusik på gymnasiet. Jag har valt att analysera ensemblepedagogernas förhållningssätt och handlingar vid ensembleundervisning utifrån ett genusperspektiv. Denna studie tar avstamp i synen på genus som en social konstruktion, där genusmönster genereras i möten mellan människor, genom ständig upprepning av handlingar och beteenden.För att få svar på mina frågor har jag genomfört halvstrukturerade kvalitativa in­tervjuer med fyra verksamma ensemblelärare vid fyra olika gymnasieskolor. Efter att ha analyserat intervjumaterialet visar resultatet att alla informanter anser att synen på jämställdhet och människors lika värde är grundläggande för hela under­visningen. Tillvägagångssätten för hur pedagogerna hanterar jämställdhet i en­sembleundervisningen skiljer sig något.

In this bachelor essay an attempt is done, to recreate a probable Bronze Age landscape on Gotland, with GIS as a tool. The landscape on Gotland is situated with many different monuments dated Bronze Age, such as cairns and stone ships. In creating of the maps, two possible shorelines contemporary with the Bronze Age have been calculated and marked on the maps. Furthermore, peat lands have been drawn upon the maps, by using the information from geological maps.A landscape variable have been compared between Bronze Age places and Early Iron Age houses; the soil type. On Bronze Age places gravel is the most common, while moraine marl is the most common on places with Early Iron Age houses.From a selection that were made, all Bronze Age places where within 3 km from the water, either the recreated shoreline or peat land.

In this bachelor essay an attempt is done, to recreate a probable Bronze Age landscape on Gotland, with GIS as a tool. The landscape on Gotland is situated with many different monuments dated Bronze Age, such as cairns and stone ships. In creating of the maps, two possible shorelines contemporary with the Bronze Age have been calculated and marked on the maps. Furthermore, peat lands have been drawn upon the maps, by using the information from geological maps.A landscape variable have been compared between Bronze Age places and Early Iron Age houses; the soil type. On Bronze Age places gravel is the most common, while moraine marl is the most common on places with Early Iron Age houses.From a selection that were made, all Bronze Age places where within 3 km from the water, either the recreated shoreline or peat land.

This essay discusses the Nordic region Bohuslän the decade after it became "Swedish" in 1658, during what I call the region's "transition period". The wide cause of the study is to show how the traditional understanding of this state shift (and of state shifts in general) need to be problemized and understood in the light of the state conditions of Early Modern Europe. By examine court protocols from the local-court of Orust and Tjörn (one of five local courts in contemporary Bohuslän) and the local noble's writings to the Swedish parliament, a tricky mixture of references to different territories gets observed and analyzed.To approach the difficult identity problems, I have assistance in Peter Sahlins' conclusions from his study of the French-Spanish borderland during the same period. Especially helpful are his identity schemes by which he (inspired by the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth) supposes that each identity originates from a counter-identity. This study ends up in an attempt to reconstruct the landscape of identities and counter-identities found in the sources, according to professor Sahlins' schemes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how contemporary attitudes towards death andsexuality is made visible and connected in the vampire novels Interview with the Vampire andDead Until Dark. The aim is to investigate why the vampire novel has reached today?samount of popularity and if it can be explained by theories of death and sexuality in modernsociety and in popular culture.The most important theories in this examination are Zygmunt Bauman?s theories aboutmodern society, Jean Baudrillard?s thoughts about death in the postmodernity and MichelFoucault?s studies regarding sexuality in the Western societies. The conclusion presented isthat sexuality and death are well connected in the examined novels and in popular culture as awhole and death?s popularity in popular culture could be a result of repressed emotionsregarding death and sorrow, which can be helped by us working on handle death more visiblyand with higher regard..

This thesis examines the relationship between OECD-DAC and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) within an aid efficiency context. The ability for these two actors to cooperate is highly important and determines the outcome for a major part of the development aid in the new millennium. The development agenda for the new millennium emphasizes aid efficiency as a key to a more successful aid, and this requires increased cooperation between all actors. The analysis made is a discourse analysis. The discourse of aid efficiency is analyzed, both its preconditions and results.The analyze finds out that there is a gap between OECD-DAC and CSOs in terms of how to handle aid efficiency.

This study is based on six narrative interviews which I conducted with students at the University of Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. My aim is to find out how these students are creating their identity in the environment of the university, how they look at their family structure and how Namibia´s independence in 1990 has created new opportunities for young people in contemporary Namibia. I have been using postcolonial theory and identity theories to analyse the interviews. Five of the six respondents are from the northern parts of Namibia, Ovamboland, and this area is seen as a rural area. The students have made an emotional journey from the rural areas in the north to the urban area of Windhoek and they feel that they have many new opportunities and they are willing to change Namibia into a more developed country..

This exploratory thesis uses qualitative research to investigate how digital music is beeing packaged. The main study consists of 11 deep interviews with key representatives of the digital music industry in Sweden. These are (record companies) EMI, SonyBMG, Universal, Warner, (DSP) InProdicon, (mobile operators) 3, TeliaSonera and (cell phone producer) SonyEricsson. Packaging is a concept of marketing that has specific implications depending on which good or service that is being packaged. Packaging occurs at different levels in the production chain.

The fact that we apprehend certain phenomena as more convenient than others generate questions about what constitute and decide what we think of as normal and appropriate. The aim of this thesis is to explore the immense conception of power and authority through a narrower approach that focuses on the EU.With this in mind I examine the penetration of the neo-liberal ideology in the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe to see if there are any implications for hegemony. This is achieved through a discourse analysis which is strengthened with empirical cases of EU policies.The result of the discourse analysis of selected parts of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe reveals that there are in fact tendencies which indicate that our society and reality is dominated by a neo-liberal hegemonic discourse. Subsequently the contemporary discourse broadly infiltrates the entire European Union, and therefore also its member states..