My ambition with his exam is to study how young girls are being depicted in swedish novels of 2010. I have analyzed how the identity and the search for identity are produced in these books. To be able to make my analysis of these books I have used Maria Nikolajeva?s book Barnbokens byggklossar. From wich I have worked out a few questions that I have used my analysis in the portrayal of these girls.

This essay is called What kind of history? and is about how history teachers think when they chose what to teach about and why. In the curriculum there are no guidelines about what substance you have to teach about. This gives the schools and teachers a big freedom. At the same time there is a kind of informal canon which says that it is the European perspective that is the important one.

AbstractThis essay is based on a qualitative and quantitative study. We have compared history textbooks on an upper secondary level and how the books handle the Soviet Union. This study is done in Växjö as a region. Furthermore we also made interviews with upper secondary teachers and forms with upper secondary students. Our study of the textbooks has been ranges within the period from 1917 until 2009: we choose the year 1917 because the Soviet revolution started at the former date.

AbstractThis essay is based on a qualitative and quantitative study. We have compared history textbooks on an upper secondary level and how the books handle the Soviet Union. This study is done in Växjö as a region. Furthermore we also made interviews with upper secondary teachers and forms with upper secondary students. Our study of the textbooks has been ranges within the period from 1917 until 2009: we choose the year 1917 because the Soviet revolution started at the former date.

The aim of this essay has been to show how the object America is constructed in two of the most used History books in Swedish high school. The theoretical framework used in this paper is based on the post-structural discourse analysis as presented by Michel Foucault. More specifically can be said that Foucault´s theories about formation of objects have been used as a tool to show how the image of America is constructed in the books. Later this paper also discuses which subject positioning the studied books take, also this inspired by Foucault´s theories.The study is presented with long quotes from the studied material to reach a transparency that enables the reader to see which dictums the conclusions are based on. This also makes it easy for the reader to judge whether or not the conclusions are reasonable.

This thesis investigates young people´s (16-21) preferences in reading through a survey including interviews and questionnaires. The groups attitudes towards reading and libraries, their reading and library habits, and to what extent eight libraries had bought the preferred literature were also examined. Some reports from the 80´s were used to find the changes. The result shows that youngsters read and visit libraries somewhat more frequently. Trivial literature is not as dominant, more teenage-books were read.

The purpose of this study is to examin the depiction of culturalmeetings in History books in relatioon to the schoolguidelines, and how and why the description may have changed over time. To achieve this, a qualitative method was used to analyze the content of cultural meetings in Swedish schoolbooks after the World War II. The material used in the study was taken from eight editions of Alla tiders historia published between 1985-2011. The material was then put together and analyzed from the theoretical perspectives, which try to explain the factors that influenced the depiction of the texts.The results of this study shows, that over time, the school guidelines have incresed their focus on human value and the need for students to interact with people from other cultures. The depictions in the History books lives upp to the demands of the school guidelines, but this study shows that the main influence of the content of the book is the social context.

This thesis has been written with the intention of investigating a commercial lending library to be found in Stockholm in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We chose this subject because it is a relatively unexplored area. Furthermore, we were curious to know what books could be found in the library. The lending library was run as a business thus giving a good indication of the contemporary reader's taste in literature. The lending library that we chose had a total of three thousand titles in those of its catalogues that have survived to the present day and was run by a woman called Eva Unander.

The purpose of this study was to examine gender depiction in picture books in preschools. Our experience is that many picture books contain old-fashioned gender stereotypes. During the analysing process, we used the following theories: Yvonne Hirdman?s theory about the stereotypic gender contract and Lev Vygotskij?s theory about experiences increasing our ability to fantasize. We read through 154 picture books in two preschools and categorized them into two categories: normative and non-normative books.

The purpose of our master thesis was to investigate how a multicultural society is reflected in childrens books picture books, books for children and young people, published in 2002. We found this issue interesting since children of today experience a change in society, where people of many ethnicities, cultures and religions live together to a greater extent than before. Since children in their everyday life are exposed to these different cultures, we think they also should be exposed to them in the books they read. In order to enhance an understanding of why such books are important to children, especially immigrant children, we have in our thesis included a passage with childrens linguistic development, identification and stereotypes. Other passages concern libraries and their roles in a multicultural society.

This thesis investigates young people's (16-21) preferences in reading through a surveyincluding interviews and questionnaires. The groups attitudes towards reading and libraries,their reading and library habits, and to what extent eight libraries had bought the preferredliterature were also examined.Some reports from the 80's were used to find the changes. The result shows that youngstersread and visit libraries somewhat more frequently. Trivial literature is not as dominant, moreteenage-books were read. Popular themes are love, history, reality, fantasy/sf, and detectivestories.

Books and reading are important elements in cultural policy. On 1 January 2002 VAT on books and magazines was reduced from 25 per cent to 6 per cent. The purpose was to increase reading in all sections of the population. A special Book Price Commission was appointed to follow and examine price trends and to work for an enhancement of reading in all groups of the Swedish population. But what form of reading are the BPC talking about? With a theoretical point of departure in the theory of power and discourse by Michel Foucault the aim of this thesis is to explore if there is an existing discourse about reading and, if so, how this discourse is operating in the BPC reports.

This thesis is intended to respond to the extent to which South African textbooks on the subject of history is linked to the governmental policy documents and whether they are producing and reproducing national identity. The two textbooks are aimed at students in grade 10. Both books were produced in 2008 but published by different publishers.The essay is based on Norman Faircloughs critical discourse theory which has been supplemented by Michael Billings theory Banal Nationalism, which assumes that it is the national words that remind us daily of our homeland that is producing and reproducing national identity.  The survey shows that both textbooks are closely tied to the government policy document for the teaching of history. The textbooks refer to the policy, both explicitly and implicitly. The two textbooks reproduce a common national identity in South Africa based on the discussions taking place in society.

Local history collections are fairly common among the Swedish public libraries and these collections often contain older or rare material. There are no national policies concerning the preservation of rare books at the public libraries, and the librarians of public libraries may lack that knowledge. The aim of this study is to examine librarians? attitudes toward their libraries? local history collections. We interviewed five librarians in the county of Västra Götaland and also made a small observation study of their local history collections.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine to what extent series books for children and youth are included in the acquisitions of public libraries. It also examines which needs series books fulfil among a group of 13-15 year old children. The main question of this thesis was: To what extent do libraries provide series books for children and youth? An inquiry investigation showed that a majority of the libraries in Sweden provide these books. The main reason to provide the books was that the demand is large.