The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine and analyse how the public librarys mission is interpreted and formulated in a selection of library related journals. The journals are both international scientific referee journals from the LIS field and journals with a closer connection to the practitioners within the public library field. The idea is that these journals can be seen as windows to an academic theoretic perspective on public libraries, as well as to the practitioners way of talking about the librarys mission. The study also aims to examine if there is a difference in the way that the librarys mission is interpreted and discussed among theorists and among practitioners within the field. The theoretical starting-point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory, and the method is text analytic.

The aim of this thesis is to study through discourse analysis how users talk about librarians and the librarian profession and what perceptions they have regarding it. I have tried to do this by asking the questions: How do the users describe librarians and the librarian profession? Are there any patterns in what they say? The method and theory I have used is Laclau and Mouffes? discourse theory and partially structured interviews. The material consists of interviews with eight users that are both women and men, both students and members of the public and they were between 25 and 50 years old. In the material I found two discourses: the discourse about librarians and the discourse about the librarian profession.

This essay ? Discourse and Dissonance ? deals with Mary Shelley?s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). The focal point is the construction of ?Them and Us?, as defined by scholars such as Stuart Hall, viewed in terms of the following categories: race, gender and family, class, and sexuality. Rather than applying an outside perspective, e.g.

The purpose of this study is to examine the changes in law and other types of politicialregulation regarding unauthorized absence during the reformation of the Swedish schoolsystem in 2010. How was this ?new? approach on unauthorized absence established; whatmade it possible and which view on ?unauthorized absence? does it implicate? The study hasa discourse analytic approach in which it examines central policy documents regarding thetopic of inquiry. The study has found that the alliance-government?s education policy onunauthorized absence is pervaded by one hegemonic discourse termed the mono-culturaldisciplinary discourse.

This study is based on the will to understand the importance of a specific theory within social work. From the concept of neo-liberal governmentality, the aim is to critically examine and discuss how governance and self-governance is manifested in social work methods and interventions, exemplified by the theory cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). This will be accomplished through an analysis of:? How governance (and self-governance) is manifested in text through the advocacy of CBT and methods based on CBT.? How (governance and) self-governance is manifested in text through the contents of CBT and methods based on CBT. The study has a deductive approach including the hypothesis that the discourses inherent in social work methods and interventions, exemplified by the theory of CBT and methods based on CBT, may be related to the West?s development of a neo-liberal concept of governance.

This master?s thesis aims to study the practice of separating popular genres of fiction from the rest of the fiction stock, often seen at public libraries. The method being used is critical discourse analysis according to Norman Fairclough?s three-dimensional conception of discourse. The textual dimension of this analysis is the book shelf itself and the sociocultural practice is the everyday practice at a public library of supplying and mediating books to the visitors.

This thesis is a discourse analysis of six rape trials, with the intention to analyze how the plaintiffs?? resistance is described. The overall aim is to investigate whether there are forms of resistance that the courts find more desirable and if there are any rules for how resistance should manifest itself. I will also investigate how the rape is itself described by the plaintiff and courts, respectively. I will analyze how this affects the understanding and attitude toward what has happened.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how the supernatural and the occult are portrayed inpopular culture. To be able to do this, I have chosen to perform a discourse analysis of the twofirst novels in the L. J Smith series The Vampire Diaries. The novels are called TheAwakening and The Struggle.I apply the following questions in my analysis to narrow down the perspective further.?In what situations are supernatural used in the books and what part does it play??How does the supernatural affect the main characters and how is this portrayed in the novel??How is the supernatural portrayed depending on the gender of the character?I will focus mostly on the vampires since they generally are the ones who introduce thesupernatural elements into the story.I am applying gender theory in my discourse analyses of the novels, to hopefully be able togive a wider picture of the supernatural in relation to gender in the novels.I begin with analyzing the main discourses in the story, revolving around the supernatural.Secondly I analyze what impact the supernatural has on the main character.

 The main purpose is to investigate the main fea-tures of the discourse in the social medias about the legal view on cimes and criminals.                                                The special questions that are investigated are:1)    What specific features characterize the discourse in the social medias?2)    What are the legal restrictions for the freedom of speech on the Internet?3)    What attitudes can you find among lawyers towards the discourse in the social medias?4)    Are there grounds for presuming that the discourse in the social medias can effect the judgement in a special case?         .

During my time as a student at the School of Library and Information Science in Borås there was an ongoing discussion regarding whether or not the library and librarian were facing an identity crisis and what future consequences this may lead to. The discussion was and still is of interest to me since it most likely will have an impact on the identity I soon will make part of my self as a professional librarian. This master?s thesis is an attempt that to through discourse analysis seek clarity in what the future identity of the library and the librarian may consist of. I do so by examining articles from the two library journals Ikoner and Biblioteksbladet.

During the changes of time, the stipulations for the existence of books and libraries also change. With technical advances come new possibilities, and the option to publish literature electronically is one of them. The purpose of this Master's thesis is to answer the question how the advantages and disadvantages of electronically published literature is described and constructed. To further deepen the analysis these questions were asked: What aims are the electronically published literature said to achieve? Why are the electronically published literature said to achieve these aims? And who are favoured/disfavoured by electronically published literature? The analyzed publications are four Swedish library related publications: Biblioteksbladet, Dik-forum, Ikoner and Nya Ciceron.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how a Swedish public library's collection of books on African history looks like, who the writers are and how Africa and its history areportrayed. The focus of the analysis is on the front and back covers and in some cases on theinformation texts inside the books. The chosen library is the city library of Umeå. The 15books examined were found on the shelf classified as Kp ? the classification for African history according to the Swedish SAB-classification system.

Reading and analyzing literature has a long tradition of being an essential part of the teaching of English in Sweden. As the offers of entertainment have increased in popular culture with the introduction of computer games, internet and other media, interest in reading novels has decreased. Literature is still a compulsory part of English teaching and the question is how teachers of today use literature and what kind of literary instruction they use.The aim of this study is to explore and discuss the literary instruction discourse in pedagogical texts, lessons, created by and for English teachers of Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. The lessons have been collected from the site lektion.se, where teachers are able to share knowledge and lessons. The study uses an analytical method based on Norman Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis in order to analyze the lessons.

This thesis studies how the Swedish government articulates social exclusion within the spring budget of 2007. Through a discourse theoretical approach, inspired by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the empirical findings are reconstructed through the nodal point of labour and two chains of equivalence, based upon the duality between employment and unemployment. By viewing social exclusion as a phenomenon concerning discourse, identity and politics, this duality forms the basis of a deconstructive and hegemonic analysis.I argue that the term social exclusion is a powerful and flexible political concept in that it obscures ideological assumptions and objectives as well as draws attention away from alternative social concepts. Throughout the thesis social exclusion is stressed as a social category constituting the relation between individual and society. Hence I argue that it is of vital importance that the values underlying its usage are made explicit and that social exclusion as a floating signifier is made an object of academic analysis..

This study concerns how Muslims are portrayed in a choice of twelve news articles from Swedish dailies and tabloid newspapers on the aftermath of the film Innocence of Muslims published on YouTube. All articles are distributed in the newspapers Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet in the period of September 11th, 2012 until September 30th, 2012.For this study, a qualitative text analysis has been embraced and focus has been on van Dijk?s Critical discourse analysis to the texts, with additional features from semiotics applied on the images.The theories consist of Critical discourse analysis, hegemony, ideology and power, postcolonialism and stereotyping.In the qualitative content analysis, concrete examples from the articles are retrieved and commented. These have been divided into various themes, which are trends that the authors have been able to distinguish in the analysis.The result shows that Muslims in the analyzed newspapers are portrayed as the others, unimportant and extremely religious, in a negative manner rather than a positive. Moreover the press has tendencies to generalize Muslims as a group.