The thesis analyzes the making of Nordic identity after the cold war which brought an end to Nordic exclusiveness of emphasizing ?soft power?. A need for a revitalization combined with an effort to enter History as an active subject, created constructivist project of a narrative style.My study relies on contemporary literature, focusing mainly on the construction of Nordic identity and regional cooperation in the 1990: s.I argue that Nordic identity was, and still is, determined of its comparable weakness in regard to the superpowers of the cold war, and, nowadays, to the EU.The architects of establishing a new Nordic identity, able to challenge a new Europe, fails in their effort, and what is left of their endeavour are separate states, each following their own agenda..

Purpose/Aim: The aim is to study the critics own views upon their profession and upon the development of criticism, and to thereafter set this in relation to contemporary theory and debates.Material/Method: A qualitative study pursued through personal interviews. The results are categorized and split into different themes.Main Results: Through media convergence and a changed media culture the conditions for criticism have also been altered. But in spite of various negative prophecies, these changes cause no serious threat to criticism. New forums and new forms of criticism actually increase the importance of the traditional ditto as the authoritative voice that holds the field together. Still, there are questions and fears about a future seemingly less and less predictable.

This essay examines the relationships between the different elements in Lisa Jonasson?s collage Existentiell Progg #6 and her very detailed technique. The essay has as its aims to understand and analyze both the details and the wholeness of the artwork and to try to put the collage in an art historical context. The thesis finds that Existentiell Progg #6 has a connection to the imagery of Africa and other collage artist such as Hannah Höch and Nancy Spero, which also gives the paper a perspective of feminism in the arts. The paper continues to create an understanding for the collage work by putting it in to Theodor Adorno?s theories about nature, the human being and the animal kingdom.

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.

The essay investigates the visual element as seen by the audience and artist to be of greatest importance to a musicalperformance. The study was conducted in the form of a field work which included doing interviews with artists, surveys of the audience and interpretive observations of live performance. The fieldwork was conducted in three different environments in which I found myself on the spot and performed the various stages included in the field work. It was done to create a surface that could be used in an essay, and through that use this material to compare and analyze my results and in the end be able to answer my questions. I started from eight different factors which all could beexperienced visually on stage.

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.

The concept of quality is difficult to identify clearly. Many attempts to define quality havebeen made, but the resulting definition remains vague.The quality concept (in the artistic sense) has since 1974 played a leading role in Swedishcultural policy. In the spring of 2009, a publication, named ?Kulturutredningen? waspublished. This report suggested a number of changes for the Swedish cultural policy.

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..