This study analyzes the discursive content of four history textbooks in order to demonstrate how national identities are formed and how they differ from each other. This was done through discourse analysis guided by social constructivism and John M. Hobson?s dichotomy of East and West. The study shows that textbooks mainly construct national identities in three ways; first by making a clear distinction between ?The Self? and ?The Other?, second by preserving a world order based on the notions of the invariant hegemony of the nation-state, and third by utilizing stereotype based dissimilarities in order to accentuate existing differences between nationalities. Implicit ideals and values in the historical discourse play an important part in the construction of identities; however sends a contradictory and ambiguous message.

Presentations of Oriental people as subordinated the West and their ideals was one way for Europeans to expand and keep control over their colonies in Africa during the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. France and Great Britain controlled their colonies in different ways which has led to diverse legacies. Today, tourism is a source of revenue for former colonies, such as Tunisia and Kenya, and tourism also helps to spread knowledge and images of distant countries. A guidebook is one way that knowledge of other countries and people are spread to travelers. During history, images of distant people were based on a colonial discourse in which the west was seen as superior; but is that still the case? The purpose of this paper was to analyze how Tunisia and Kenya are presented in the Lonely Planet guide to Tunisia and the Lonely Planet guide to Kenya to investigate if they are constructed through a colonial discourse, and to see if there are any dissimilarities on how they are presented.

Our purpose is to analyse three different epistemological discourses that exist in the social practice, Library and Information Science LIS, using the strategy for interpretation from the mimesis model by Paul Ricoeur and the terms from the critical discourse analysis by Norman Fairclough. The aim is also to explore there different views of knowledge organisation. We review previous research involving epistemology, knowledge organisation and discourse analysis in LIS. These show that there are many different epistemological standpoints and that later research has shown a more critical and sceptical state of knowledge organisation than earlier traditional positivist ideals. Discourse analysis is described as an important theory and method in LIS.

The purpose with this work is to describe the language that is built around the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in Sweden. Our questions are: What does the professional field look like; who writes, about what and for which kind of readers? How do they describe the expressions and the upcoming of CFS? For which reasons can CFS be considered as a medical diagnosis/illness? How can CFS be understood from a social perspective? Our theoretical starting point is a social constructive theory and also Karin Johannisson's theory about medicalization and Foucault?s theory about power. We have from a literature-exposition of Swedish articles from 1989 to 2006, done a social constructive discourse analysis with help from Laclau & Mouffe's discourse theory, and Fairclough's model of social practices. In our textual analysis we found three dominating discourses: A medical discourse, a social/cultural discourse and a general/popular discourse.

The essay explores nationalism in the curriculum of the swedish school from 1878 to 1994. The text has been undertaken an analysis in three levels of discourse based on Norman Faircloughs critical language analysis. The first level is the text, the second is types of discourses and the third is order of discourse.The nationalism in the curriculum has been related to three nationalistic types of discourses, derived from earlier studies on Swedish nationalism. They are conservative nationalism, ?folkhemsnationalism? and contemporary nationalism.

This Master's thesis aims to investigate the reference interview using the discourse analytical method discourse psychology. The reference interview has been studied thoroughly, and its importance has been proven repeatedly within the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). However, it has never been studied from a discourse analytical point of view before.The material for our study was gathered at Malmö public library, and consists of 10 tape-recorded and then transcribed reference interviews. Our study shows that there are several discourses within the reference situation. The dominating discourse, the reference interview discourse, is found within all the reference interviews.

The purpose of this Master thesis is to investigate how the relation between users and librarians is affected by higher education librarians? talk about information literacy. The thesis uses Norman Fairclough?s critical discourse analysis in analysing four articles written by Swedish higher education librarians and in answering how information literacy, users and librarians are constituted. The analysis indicate that the questions have no distinct answers, there are discrepancies between, as well as within the texts.

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to study how undocumented migrants situation is constructed inSwedish massmedia discourse. The purpose has also been to study how the compromisedhuman rights of undocumented migrants in Sweden are legitimated in massmedia discourseand how resistance is constructed. The following main questions have been processed in this essay:- How are undocumented migrants and their situation constructed in Swedish massmediadiscourse?- How is society?s part in the situation constructed?Following questions are related to the main questions:- How is the situation that undocumented migrants face in Sweden legitimated in discourse?-What social consequences do the constructions have for undocumented migrants and for theSwedish society?The questions have been answered through a discourse analysis on empirical materialconsisting of ten news clips from Swedish public service television SVT and ten articles fromthe online editions of the main national newspapers Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and Expressen. The analysis was done with analytic methods from discursivepsychology and with the sociological theories at hand in this essay.The conclusions drawn from the analysis are that the situation is constructed according todifferent interpretative repertoires drawing on humanitarian discourses and economicdiscourses, which lead to separate social consequences and ideological categorisations of ?usand them?.

Abortion remains a contentious issue, which greatly raises ethical problems. This thesis examines the leading arguments in the Swedish abortion debate around the ? in terms of legislation ? critical years of 1938 and 1974. With Foucault's genealogical method, Butler's theories of gender as a social construction in relation to power and doxa, the study examines what the development of the argumentation says about the views on morality, the woman's body, life, individual and state? How has the arguments pro and against abortion changed over time and what does this say about the norms that guide and orientate the arguments? The most obvious change in argumentation is seen in the shift from an absolute moral and conservative position into an increasingly relativistic and liberal position, and this study will argue that this shift has its prerequisites in the changing status of the citizen and state.

The objective of this essay has been to show how the image of the Soviet Union in ?Alla tiders historia? differs in the 1989 and 2004 editions of the book. To explain these differences I have used a discourse analytic perspective, mainly inspired by Michel Foucault and his philosophical theories of the constructions of objects, and also Faircloughs critical discourse analysis inspired by Gramsci.In this paper the two editions of ?Alla tiders historia? are presented with quotes which are then analysed from using my theoretical framework. In the 1989 edition three themes emerged: continuity, undecidability and ambivalence, which together present an image of a Soviet Union which is not clearly defined within the political discourse.In the 2004 edition this struggle over the discourse has been settled and the Soviet Union?s position as a dictatorship has been determined, at the same time as the Soviet Union is put in a negative relationship with Czar Russia and is connected with Nazi Germany.

This master thesis examines the copyright law with the purpose of sorting out the consequences and the effects of the law impacted on libraries. The theories used are mainly discourse analysis and public domain theory. At the centre of the examination is the effects that copyright law bring to libraries and their ability to perform their work. A major part of this thesis is gathered around the analysis of the presumptive key words that give the structures of copyright law the possibility to claim rightfulness. This is an outspoken strategy to illustrate the discourse of copyright law.

The purpose of this study is to analyse and compare how religious and non-religious world views are described and represented in three Swedish textbooks. The main question of this study is: How do three textbooks for the first stage of religious studies in high school represent non-religious and religious world views based on the text analysis tools: ethos, modality and transitivity?The three textbooks that are being analysed and compared were produced in the years of 2000, 2002 and 2009. The textbooks are used when teaching the first stage of religious studies in Swedish high school. The text analysis that I´ve chosen to use in this study is a part of Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analysis.

Sweden has had laws protecting nature for about a hundred years. In this paper the views of nature and the values that serve as a rationale for protective measures are analyzed as results of a social process characterized by the dialectic relationship between institutions and discourse. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is used to study this relationship and the discursive practices used by institutions, which reproduce or reshape views of nature that define the relationship between society and nature. Institutional design contributes to shaping discourse in the field of nature protection, while being originally shaped by discourse. In Sweden, the national park is an institution that reproduces a view of nature as the wild and untamed opposite of society, and the natural reserves reproduce a view of nature as holder of a multi-faceted set of values intertwined with society.

This essay is about security and safety in the city. More precisely it is concerned about the role of the institutions that aims to raise the perceived security and safety and their understanding of these concepts. I study two of the municipality's project in this field in the city of Malmö. Documents concerning these projects are analysed with a discourse analysis inspired by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau as well as Michel Foucault. The two projects consist of one discourse each; the surveillance discourse and the discourse about meetings.

The aim of this undergraduate thesis was to examine the media?s portrayal of overweight and obese children and their surroundings, using the first and third dimensions of Fairclough?s three dimensional model for critical discourse analysis. The study addressed the following questions: How does the press, in this study represented by two newspapers, portray overweight and obese children? What discourses regarding overweight and obesity among children are the most prominent in these two newspapers? What risks and negative influences in the child?s surroundings are identified, and how are they described? What social representations can the images of overweight and obese children originate from? The analyzed material consisted of 62 articles from Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet, which were analyzed using the earlier mentioned method for discourse analysis, as well as the theory of social representations. The results showed that ?the fat child? and its environment were portrayed exclusively in negative terms, and a discourse linking obesity and ill-health dominated a large part of the material.