In this bachelor's thesis, we investigate the Swedish folk high school?s role in neoliberal society, which is analyzed through the lens of Norman Fairclough's critical discourse theory as well as Erving Goffman's theory of social deviants. The focus of our study has been participants in creative education, such as art, theater and creative writing. Our findings include that participants at folk high schools find great value in their education, both creatively and personally. They note that they have experienced a large amount of personal growth, regarding both openness towards others and higher confidence and their own abilities and identity.

For over 40 years, there's been a debate in Sweden of whether it's good or bad with maintenance therapy for heroin addicts. This method is far more acknowledged in other parts of Europe and in USA. The aim of this paper was to explore how public actors manifest their thoughts concerning the subject of the substitution program in Sweden. This approach includes the complex of problems that can be found in statements and the discourses that these operators stand for and support. In my analysis the philosophical thread was principally based on Michael Foucault ideas, but also on other theories related to social constructionism.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the ideological currents that have influenced the swedish school system since the 1990's. The background of my interest is the lively debate in schools and media about the new School reform 2011. My hypothesis is that education in 2011 largely will be influenced by neoliberal and neoconservative values. The method I`ve used is discourse and ideology critique, which examines the relationship between rhetoric and power. These concepts are useful to explain the ideological change in different policy documents and in curricula, for example Lpf 94 and School 2001. The theoretical framework is based primarily on the neoliberal and the neoconservative agenda, which are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary postmodern world.

The purpose of this study was to examine how a local newspaper, Landskrona Posten, describes the youth that commit crimes. More specifically the aim was to see what kind of discourse the newspaper had about the young criminal and to see if that picture could create and confirm stereotypes. The theory and method used in the study is a discourse analysis. The study was based on nearly seventy articles that were published in Landskrona Posten in 2006. Three items were identified in the newspaper's description of the youth.

This paper examines the opportunities and challenges of integrating conservation practice and the circular economy into practical planning processes. In recent years, the discussion of circular economy and its relevance in the sustainability debate has intensified. According to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the transition to a circular economy is crucial to achieving the national and international environmental and climate goals as well as the global goals in Agenda 2030. Parallel to this, there is a long established heritage discourse that emphasizes the importance of preserving buildings and cultural environments as part of our cultural heritage. These two discourses have common goals, but they differ in how they present their respective arguments.

This thesis uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the English-speaking press in Hong Kong constructs the conflict between the political movement Occupy Central and the Chinese central government. The empirical material consists of ten articles from the region?s two largest English-speaking newspapers, Hong Kong?s oldest newspaper, the South China Morning Post, and China?s only national English-speaking newspaper, the China Daily. Building on the works of Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson it examines what political ideologies that are favoured by the press and what attitude the press shows for democratic development.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine in what way library users are depicted on images at two academic libraries; the University College of Borås Library & Learning Resources (BLR) and the Gothenburg University Library (GUB). 62 images, from websites and information brochures, are analyzed and the main questions are: How are users represented on images? What activities are shown? What is the difference between BLR and GUB? How can the consequences of the representations be understood? Little is currently known in the LIS-field about how images work as constructors of the social reality. The theoretical and methodological point of departure of the study is discourse analysis, new institutional theory and picture analysis.

The aim of this essay is to show if and how group identities are being constructed in maindocuments from three political parties in the Swedish parliament, focusing on class, genderand ethnic identities. The three parties who?s documents are being analyzed are theModerate Party, the Sweden Democrats and the Left Party. The conclusion of the essay isthat the Moderate Party is so focused on the individual that they are not promoting groupidentity based on class, gender or ethnicity. The Sweden Democrats are mostly discussing,and therefore creating a discourse of, cultural identity, where Swedish, Nordic, Europeanand Western culture are being created as the ?us?, and others are being created as ?them?.They are also promoting difference between men and women, therefore dividing the sexesin groups.

The overall aim of this thesis is to examine how Easy-to-Read information, used by governmental agencies, facilitates and limits the field of possibilities for the intended recipient, based on the information.This, in anera of e-government.The theoretical framework is based on two Foucauldian concepts governmentality and discourse analysis. Representatives from five Swedish governmental agencies have been interviewed and the results have been analyzed based on the following questions: (1) How do the representatives construct the category Easy-to-Read? (2) How do these representatives construct the recipients of Easy-to-Read? In order to broaden the understanding of Easy-to-Read, an important national level policy document, containing a summary of strategies and goals for e-government has also been analyzed based on the following questions: (3) How is the e-government constructed in the text? (4) How is the citizen constructed and positioned in the text? The collected material is analyzed using a discourse analysis inspired by Foucault.With the results from the interviews and the analyzis of the policy document, Easy-to-Read information has been discussed and examined as a technology to meet the needs of people with reading difficulties, putin an era of e-government.The findings of the study include the following: (1) The e-government is constructed as a service agency and the citizens are positioned as clients. Furthermore, the citizens are expected to participate digitally and be digitally competent. (2)Some of the representatives does not know, with certainty, to whom the texts are directed or if they are used.

This thesis analyzes the media debates generated by the election of Omar Mustafa to the board of the social democratic party, and the appointment of the conservative Minister of Labour, Elisabeth Svantesson. More specifically, the aim is to analyze newspaper material through a discourse analyze, to see if and how religious affiliation effects the possibilities to act as a political representative. Theories of othering and intersectionality serve as theoretical points of departure. Further, chains of equivalence from Laclau and Mouffe?s discourse theory are used to study how categories as ?us? and ?the other? are constructed in the material, and how these processes of categorization relate to the intersection of religion, gender and ethnicity.

In the era of urbanization and globalization, many small, rural and post-industrialcities struggle for growth. The competition for citizens and visitors is intense, andone commonly used strategy is to promote the city to a target audience. Placemarketing, however, is homogenized to a great extent. Marketing thus seems likea useless approach, yet almost every city does it.By using discourse analysis and institutional theory, this essay aims to explainwhy the city of Kramfors markets itself. There are several problems arising due tothe marketing of places, especially concerning the discrepancy between the city?simage and identity.

The main purpose of this study is to show how narrative can be understood as cultural practice, how it can be said to function both internally and externally, and to ask questions about how the narrating subject, through the organizing of narrative, positions it self and mediates between the different discoursive contexts of which it is a part. This is done by an analisys of how six swedish soldiers tells the tale of how they came to choose a military carrer and why they have served or want to serve in peace-keeping missions abroad. The source material is primarily collected through unstructured interviews with theese soldiers, but also through textual analysis of a soldier blog. Theoretically the study draws on a combination of the discourse theory of Michel Foucault, narrative theory, Richard Jenkins theory of the internal-external dialectic of identifikation and intersectionality to construct a framework that allows the narratives to be deconstructed and understood as discoursive products of both the military contexts as such and the larger cultrual context that surrounds it. The conclusions of this study suggests that the organizing of soldier narratives are a complex and multifaceted process, in which the soliders must balance between the ideals, values and norms of the military context while also taking into account how society at large views and interprets the practices and forms of military life.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the field ofinformation politics, in the areas of the future regulationof The Fundamental Law on Freedom of Expression andThe Freedom of the Press Act. The focus of the study is todiscursively examine how ideas and perspectives ontechnological developments are expressed in a pendingSwedish legislative proposal. The empirical data consistsof an interim government report, SOU 2010:68, writtenby Yttrandefrihetskommittén (Committee on Freedom ofExpression) and analysed using Norman Fairclough'sCritical Discourse Analysis. The analysis is conducted onthree levels: a textual level, a discursive practice level anda social practice level.On the textual level we found that the committeecontinously uses significantly charged expressions todescribe technological development. On the discursivepractice level two discourses were identified.

The aim of this study is to analyse the sexual power relations in contemporary urban novels of Swedish female writers.I have identified a discourse in these novels as a heteronormative matrix which power is ruled by norms and assumptions about normality in both the heterosexual and lesbian stories. For this purpose I have related to Ivar B. Neumanns theory that individuals always find a way to confront the discourse by three different strategies. These strategies are used in my study as tools to organise these novels, because it is possible to see that the protagonists find at least one of these strategy?s to her protest.The first strategy I studied was the docile.

This thesis consists of a discourse and queer theoretical text and image analysis of school books in English used in the Swedish upper secondary school.  The whole content of two school books have been analysed from a norm critical perspective but one chapter in each of them has been analysed more thoroughly than the rest. These two chapters form the major part of the analysis.The thesis? problem formulation and objective derive from a personal experience of being a teacher student and part time teacher in Swedish schools. This experience shows the prevalence of a strong heteronormativity both in the schools? every day life and in the used school books.