This essay deals with the rationale and aims for doing cultural or aesthetic activities and projects in schools, and gives special focus to a specific group of students, attending schools provided at special residential homes for young people (sa?rskilda ungdomshem). These homes receive young people with psychosocial and substance misuse problems and who show tendencies towards criminal behavior. The essay investigates how working with a cultural project in schools at these residential homes is justified and also elucidates how this specific group of students and their problems are constructed in the documents surrounding the project. The essay will further ponder over possible educational and pedagogical consequences of these constructions.The investigation has its theoretical frame work in curriculum theory.

ABSTRACT Title: the Power distance star ? A study on how cultural power distance affects the business relation between Japanese and multinational companiesLevel: Final assignment for Bachelor Degree in Business AdministrationAuthor: Therese Elofsson and Anna NyströmSupervisor: Jens Eklinder Frick and Jonas MolinDate: 2015 - JanuaryAim: The purpose of this study is to compile available research regarding the cultural aspect power distance, as it is being displayed and handled in business-relations between Japanese and multicultural business contacts. The culture in Japan differs from the culture in the western world and several companies testify that the Japanese market is difficult to act and expand upon. This study aims to provide explanations to these difficulties from a power distance perspective.Method: This study has compiled the theoretical knowledge and research in a model called ?the Power distance Star? (Figure 1), which is created and designed for this purpose.

This thesis takes as its starting-point the different stands on the ever ongoing growth of multinational corporations (MNCs) and its consequences. Two opposing branches of theories, arguing that the establishment of MNCs in developing countries is good respectively bad for these countries, are tested for the aspect of state capacity. A quantitative method is then used to test if there exists such a relationship at all and if so, which of the two notions that are right.The presence of MNCs is measured as FDI of GDP while state capacity is defined as a combined index for three of ICRG's Political risk indicators. The two variables are analysed, mainly by cross tabulation, using an extensive dataset of 130 developing countries measured for a period of 20 years.The outcome is though ambiguous: No solid correlation can be found, but countries with a higher rate of FDI of GDP tend to have a slight worse rate of state capacity throughout the analysis. Thus the result points in favour of the notion that MNCs are bad for developing countries? state capacity.

Since the 1990?s the Swedish school system has undergone major and recurring structural reforms. Two of the most comprehensive changes has been the shift of primary schools as an integral part of the welfare state to the responsibility of the municipalities as well as the introduction of free school choice for the students. Through two months of participant observations and semi-structured interviews this thesis seeks to answer the question of how these reforms has come to effect the work of teachers in a medium sized public school in a small municipality in the outskirts of Stockholm. Earlier research has shown that public schools in socio-economically vulnerable areas are disadvantaged due to the reformation of the school system (Beach & Sernhede, 2011; Östh, Andersson, & Malmberg, 2013).

AbstractTitle: DREAMING OF A UNITED ?NORDEN? (The North)? Four central Nordic actors about the progress and extent of Nordic cooperationThe Nordic cooperation are often spoken as in terms of a peaceful international cooperation that is built upon a wide range of similarities among its members, such as a common culture, language similarities and a related kind of political system etc. But in spite of the fact that these so called propitious factors are present, many of the attempts that has been made trying to bring the states of the North (Norden) closer together has turned out unsuccessfully. Therefore no far-reaching Nordic cooperation has come to be implemented. The aim of this essay is to find out what the main reasons could be why this has been the case.I have chosen to take a closer look at the motives given by the former Nordic Prime ministers Tage Erlander (Sweden), Karl August Fagerholm (Finland), Einar Gerardsen (Norway) and Mauno Koivisto (Finland).

 The theme of this essay arises from problematic pictures which travel journalism can bring about foreign countries, and in this specific case Mexico. These pictures can be problematic in the way that they can carry colonial elements and form colonial discourses. The main purpose of this study is therefore to investigate the Swedish travel magazines, Vagabond, RES and Allt om resor, and how they portray places and people in the written texts and photographs. This was done with a postcolonial and discourse theoretical framework, whereas empowerment of certain pictures can lead to formation of discourses, myths and stereotypes about places and people in Mexico. The method used to reveal different aspects of the travel reports was semiotic analysis, Norman Fairclough?s critical discourse analysis and critical linguistics.

Uppsatsen undersöker med konstformen ljudkonst och den konstnärliga hanteringen av ljud i fokus en interaktion mellan finkultur och populärkultur. Fokus ligger på aktörer inom populärkulturen som använt sig av konstnärliga strategier med rötter i finkulturen. Undersökningen spårar ljudkonstens historiska bakgrund och främst de förlopp som bidragit till att det är en gränsöverskridande konstform. Den populärkulturella konstvärldens etablering som en social organisation där konstnärlig verksamhet är möjlig undersöks..

The aim of this study is, from a norm-critical approach, to find, investigate and analyse human representation in the visual culture of one preschool in order to understand if the children enrolled are represented or not. The research questions are: In what ways is there imagery of human representations in images and materials designed for play? What skin-colors and origins are dominant in the data collected?We carried out a qualitative study in the form of visual ethnography. This method allowed us to use a combination of different data collection tools such as photography and ethnographic field notes to collect our data. The photographs we took of images and material used for play, was then analysed through semiotic picture analysis.

Abraham is the original patriarch. How does his leadership compare with a modern day popular culture patriarch with his roots in advertising, the shopkeeper Stig, star of the ICA advertising? The essay compares the leadership and masculinity of two male leaders from different backgrounds and settings, and discusses similiarities and differences.

This essay is an examination of the examples in Kant?s Critique of Judgement. The examples which I have focused on all converge in an idea of wildness. These examples of the beautiful are illuminated by a culture-historical perspective, where the literary and scientific travelogue genre is of great importance. Apart from being exegetic and culture historical, my method is also analytic.

Fire has historically been of great ecological importance in the boreal forests of Sweden. The forest fire regime has, however, varied between different parts of the country. The objective of this thesis is therefore to investigate the fire history in Fulufjället National Park and, on this basis, give suggestions for future fire management. The reconstruction of fire history was done by cross-dating fire scars in samples taken from living and dead Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). Local fire chronologies were established at 17 points in the forests in and around Fulufjället National Park by cross-dating fire scars on 54 samples. The oldest year-ring dated from year 968.

AbstractA Problem to Every SolutionThe Corrymeela Community, René Girard and the ambiguous pluralismThe main purpose of this study is to examine how Girard´s ideas of society, culture andreligion have become part of the reflexion in the praxis of Corrymeela Community through the work of Roel Kaptein and how this praxis can shed light over the work with dissonances of faith and values in education in RE, Social Studies and other subjects.In earlier publications I have studied how dissonances of faith and values can beunderstood in educational settings and in connection with issues of interreligious dialogue.The extensive discussion of how differences in culture, religion and value in a pluralisticsociety are to be analysed and treated in pedagogical reflexion seems to increasingly occupyactors in different parts of the educational system. It is obvious that these issues also arebrought into focus as an important field of research. My main interest in this paper is to study how a reconciliation group in the middle of the conflict in Northern Ireland has developed a view of conflict reason and conflict resolution under the influence of the French researcher René Girard and what aspects of this study that can improve the reflection over pluralism and dissonances of faith and values in everyday praxis in education.For a period of more than a decade I have been in contact with actors in the peace process inNorthern Ireland in connection to different educational projects. The attempts to analyse the different aspects of ?The Troubles? and the efforts to find ways out of conflicts and civil war are many and the literature on subjects related to these tragic history of social, cultural and religious conflicts is difficult to survey.

Our main objective with this essay was to study VisitSweden?s effort to sell Sweden to foreign markets.This has been studied in relation to VisitScotland work and approach. We collected empirical data consisting of document studies and interviews with representatives of VisitSweden and VisitScotland. In addition, we have supplemented with an interview with a representative of Svensk Destinationsutveckling AB. We based our analysis of our empirical data on previous research in destination marketing.

Blood-borne infectious diseases such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) spread when the addicts share needles and injecting equipmentwithin contact networks. A quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted in Winnipeg,Canada in December 2003 - September 2004. Through a special questionnaire, respondentswere asked to answer questions about themselves and about their contacts, about relationshipsand how they shared syringes and other injection supplies. Blood tests were used to identifywhether they carried any blood-borne infectious diseases. We selected some variables from theoriginal data set.

To publish research articles by the means of open access is to provide them for free to the reader. An increasing number of universities around the world have begun to institute open access policies regarding their researchers academic output, requiring them to primarily publish in open access journals and / or archive their pre- or post- prints in institutional archives.The aim of this this thesis is to explore how the adoption of the open access policy at the Swedish Universi- ty of Agricultural Sciences in 2008 has affected how their researchers publish and if this has had any effect on how their academic output are cited and distributed online. To reach this goal a combination of bibliometric and altmetric methods were used as well as cross-referencing between Scopus, Altmetric.com, Google Scholar and the SHERPA/RoMEO database.The results points towards a mostly open access positive trend with an increase in articles published in jour- nals that allow archiving of both pre- and post-prints. There also seems to be a correlation between these journals and which kind of articles gets the most mentions in social media..