The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine boys?/young men?s forming of masculinity and gender identity and how discussions around gender stereotypes and conceptions represents themselves in contemporary youth novels. Gender theory based upon R.W. Connell?s theoretical framework which discusses masculinities in plural is used.

This essay focuses on Finnish immigrants living in Sweden and their experiences of educationof literature in Swedish upper secondary school. It concerns the fact of how education ofliterature can be used to strengthen students? formation of cultural identity. The essay tries toidentify obstacles as well as possibilities in the teaching of literature with a view to deepenand enrich this process. The method consists of a phenomenological approach includinginterviews with a group of Finnish immigrants living in Sweden.

In recent years, the Internet has exploded with different kinds of social media, where a significant function is to share your life in text and images. This changes how we form our identity, our religious identity included. The aim of this paper was to study how Instagram forms a space for the creation and development of religious and spiritual beliefs. For this purpose, Instagram updates from five women with yoga oriented Instagram accounts have been analyzed in relation to two theories: Paul Heelas? och Linda Woodhead?s theory of a spiritual revolution and Heidi Campbell?s theory of networked religion.The aim of the study was to explore how these women presented themselves in their Instagram flow and what part religion and spirituality had in their presentations.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how today?s consumer society can be understood from ananalysis of the phenomenon Every Day Carry (EDC). The aim is thus to problematize the daily useof the artifacts that surrounds us and investigate how these can be understood as networks of humanand non-human actors, aswell as identity- and meaning-making practices in today?s consumersociety.The theoretical and methodical framework is built upon an eclectic variety of consumptiontheories,Michel Callon?s, John Law?s and Bruno Latour?s work on Actor-Network-Theory,Discourse analysis inspired by Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and anethnographic methodology specifically adapted for online research. The empirical material consistsof photographs and commentaries from two EDC blogs aswell as commentaries regarding EDCfrom a commentary field on Youtube.com.

The purpose of this essay was to examine the packaging design´s communications related to the colloquially brand's symbolic capital and how they became meaningful through experience and perceptions that led to the identification processes in the consumer society. There were eight interviews of snuff users who became my main collections materials. My theoretical framework was discourse psychology´s emphasis on language and Bourdieu´s concept provided important tools in the analysis of the material.I could highlight that packaging design and the brand had influenced the informants and given them symbolic beliefs and what it meant to sniff a certain brand. Color, brand awareness and price were crucial in choosing where the informants attributed themselves the cans symbolic values to their identity. It could be inferred high and low status perceptions based on stereotypes in the design itself..

AbstractBackground: Countries can be seen as brands (nation brands) with brand values that transmitto the country?s products. Country-of-origin (COO), the brands nationality, links the productto an associative network of cultural shared national stereotypes. Through associating thebrand with a country or a region, the credibility of the brand can increase and strengthen thebrand. Therefore COO is used in marketing to position a brand.Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how luxury fashion brands communicatetheir national identity through analyzing their advertising.

We started out the study with a preconception of culture as something that creates difference between groups of people, which had been verified by our prior research. We also had a sense of culture as a polysemous term. Our assumption is also that there is an opinion within social work practice that Swedish social workers are faced with a cultural barrier when encountering immigrant clients.In this study our aim is to examine constructions of the terms cultural competence and culture. Constructions of the terms ethnicity and ethnic diversity are also observed, although the main reason for this is to show what relation these terms have to the terms cultural competence and culture, and how they may give each other meaning, according to the theory of social construction. In addition to constructions, we also aim to bring out discourses around the terms, upon which we will create a discussion about power and dominance informed by post-colonial theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA).

Syftet med denna studie är att se på hur begreppet etniskt mode används i praktiken inom dagens modejournalistik och inom den mode- och dräkthistoriska litteraturen, med utgångspunkt i hur etniskt mode och dräkt presenteras i forskningen.Etniskt mode som idag är ett väl använt begrepp som visar sig ha många olika innebörder. För det har visat sig att man med begreppet etniskt mode menar olika saker inom forskningen respektive inom mode- och dräkthistoriska översiktsverk samt inom modejournalistiken..

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent  young adults use media to create the image of themselves. The questions we wanted to answer was as follows: what does the media use of young adults look like compared to their attitudes towards media content; what awareness do they have of other young adults attitudes concerning media content; and finally, how do these attitudes affect their own media use?Media consumption is a great part of  the daily lives of young adults living in Sweden: the national  average media consumption is seven hours a day, for 15-24 year olds. This provides a new way for young adults to express their identity - by showing their use of different media content, they can change other's perception of themselves.The method we used in our study was a combination between a quantitative and a qualitative method. We first made a survey in three classes with senior year high school-students, in a Swedish school.

Media and social media have been proved to occupy an increased amount of time in people's everyday lives and affect how individuals interpret reality. This phenomenon is referred to as the medialization and its implications on organizations and their members become important to understand. The purpose of this study was therefore to examine how members of an organization under intense scrutiny from the media are affected by this exposure in their everyday work. To gain knowledge about the area a qualitative case study was performed on the Swedish train operator SJ AB - one of the most media exposed organizations in the country. A theoretical framework is developed for the study and discusses organizational identity, stigmatization and motivation.

The purpose of this study has been to examine how collaborations between clothingcompanies and fashion designers can influence their brands. Our ambition has been todescribe this phenomenon by describing how collaborations can affect and influencethe clothing companies? brand identity, image and positioning. Furthermore, we wantto describe how these collaborations have changed the fashion industry and what thefuture holds for it. We find this topic relevant since collaborations are becoming anadvantage for companies in a competitive industry that is constantly in change.

I meet in my work as art teacher many students of different descent, were they, or their parents, have different school experience than the Swedish. This, in combination with therecent discussion after the Muhammad caricatures about the banning of images in Islamic religion, made me curious to study what art education in a Muslim country looked like. I went to visit the Maramra Egitim Köyü school in Istanbul, Turkey, and especially their art classesfrom grade five to eight, which are the same age of students that I have been working with thelast ten years. This was my first visit to Turkey.The question I ask is: What does the practice of Turkish art education look like, using the Marmara school as an example. Which discourses can I identify in the art teacher practice? What surprised me the most was the frequent visual exposure of the founder of the Turkishstate, Kemal Atatürk.

This study is about the significance of dual citizenship and the feeling of belonging people experience. Descriptions about the problems with being a citizen in a state, but not being accepted as one, is also discussed in the thesis. The juristic aspects, what it means to be possessed of dual citizenship and the consequences when the negative aspects of dual citizenship arise, is also discribed. The reasons for having dual citizenship is very analogous but at the same time different. The common denominator is however pragmatics.

This study aims to investigate, describe and discuss the views of group new arrived pupils from the preparatory training to the compulsory school level. They all came to Sweden and started in the preparatory training there they also started studying Swedish as a second language. This study aims to investigate the creation of identities and how the pupils socialize in the Swedish school. The study has been conducted with respect to the pupil´s own perspectives and what they consider important.The methods used are interviews together with an interpreter. Their voices are used and described in this paper.

In these days we can witness a growing number of combined school and public libraries in Sweden. It can be explained as an economy measure or as an attempt to develop the library work. The aim of this thesis is to picture how working in combined libraries affects high school librarians? own apprehensions of their professional identity. The results are based on in-depth interviews made with four high school librarians, working not only towards the students but also the public.