In the year 1783 a fissure eruption from Laki in the southern part of Iceland produced a large amount of volcanic gases during a period of eight months. The volcanic gases and aerosols spread across the northern hem sphere due to ideal weather conditions and had a substantial impact on the environment, human health and also climate effects. This, so called dry fog, caused severe health problems, which led to death casualties, killing animals, crops and other vegetation. The consequence was a widespread famine which was aggravated by a hard and long winter in 1783/84. Analysis shows that the Icelandic volcanoes are the primary risk to produce dry fog that can affect Sweden.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to describe by a gender approach what ideas and values are expressed in the novel One Night at Bullar Lake and how they do coincide to a tendency. We also want to discuss authority and class divisions and how these can be connected to the novel and the author. Our final question is to examine in what way the voice of the female author is represented in the novel. To approach our material we use Yvonne Hirdman?s theories about the construction of sexes and Susan Sniader Lanser?s work about voices of female authors, as well as Horace Engdahl?s studies about the silent voice in literature.

The technological progress of the world has had a massive effect on how we communicate with one and other, it also has had an big impact on how companies communicate with their customers and consumers. Today you cannot only communicate a ?promise to your costumers and consumers you also have to ?deliver? what it is you promise. Strategic communication is today not only to market your product but to ensure that your strategic communication is shown even in you innovation, design and product development.  This thesis is conducted in collaboration with No Picnic AB.The purpose of this study was to get an insight in how Swedish companies use their strategic communication. We aim on bringing a new point of view of strategic communication with innovation, design and product development also as a communication channel.

This study, a narrative analysis of it, deals with the term, home, its importance and the use of it by Child welfare investigators in the city of Malmö between the years 1930-1936. Commonly used and acknowledged, home stood for security and order while the term, street, had just the opposite meaning. Living in the countryside symbolized health and sensibility, while city life was considered to be cramped, dirty and immoral. The responsibility of achieving the liberals and conservatives ideal of a sunny, clean and orderly home was given to the woman of the house, as was the task of keeping the home morally correct, and providing the necessary atmosphere for proper upbringing of the children. Consequently, the basis of theory, using Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in regards to the conflicts between the upper and lower classes, and even theories of Jane Lewis of woman´s connection to home and family, have been the grounds for the study.

Mastitis is an important disease in dairy cattle. It is very costly for the farmers and affects a large number of animals. Few studies have been made investigating the outcome of treatment for acute clinical mastitis under Swedish conditions, and it can be problematic to use the results in foreign studies since both the microbial flora as well as treatments may be different from the situation in Sweden. In this project we have investigated data on clinical mastitis and antibiotic treatment in the dairy herd at Jällaskolan, Uppsala based on recordings during the last ten years. The material includes both Swedish Red (SRB) and Swedish Holstein (SLB) breeds, which have been kept at the farm under similar conditions.

When communications traffic increasingly turned into data, IP telephony became a disruptive technology for the telecommunication business. IP telephony was a hot topic when voice over IP services started to become available to consumers in the 1990s. The new technology changed the rules of the game and many new actors entered the market.The purpose of this study is to describe, study, and analyze how the business models of the Swedish telecom sector developed in the middle of the 2000s. The study is delimited to the Swedish consumer market for telephony.The study is built mainly upon deep interviews with 24 prominent persons in the telecom sector in 2006. To aid understanding, two telecom companies that have been chosen to represent different kinds of actors are described and analyzed more closely.

This thesis aims at analysing conflicts between different ideals of democracy, using the example of a newly implemented citizen´s initiative reform. This reform gives citizens the right to make policy proposals to Swedish municipal councils. The proposals are to be handled in the same way as proposals from the municipal council members. An ideology analysis of various government documents as well as of an official state study (SOU) is carried out to identify and discuss the ideals of democracy that underpin the reform. The analysis is based on participatory democracy and electoral democracy theory and Arnstein's Eight Rungs on the Ladder of Citizen Participation is used to discuss different types of participation by the citizens.

The aim of this study is to examine and map out the different ways that theconception of information literacy (IL) is used in the governing documents ofthe Swedish elementary school. IL is a controversial concept around which thereis no proper consensus. Despite that fact, the word is used in a vast number ofcontexts. In the school world as well as in the library sphere the different waysof using the concept often appear to overlap although rarely in ways that seemconducive to one another. My work therefore, is aimed at finding out how theconcept is used within these two discourses and if or in what ways the usagescoincide and are compatible.

Den högre utbildningen och dess bildningssyfte har i enlighet med tidigare forskning och mediedebatter i viss mån skiftat från att vara en arena för bildning, för att mot modernare tider allt mer anpassats till nyttoinriktade och samhälleliga krav, såväl nationellt som globalt. Det som inspirerade till uppsatsen var då frågor som vad händer med talet om bildning i den högre utbildningen i denna utveckling? Hur talar utbildningspolitiken om bildning idag? Syftet med studien var att undersöka talet om bildning i relation till den högre utbildningens syften och mål från 2005 fram till nutid. Med hjälp av diskursteoretiska utgångspunkter och åtta utbildningspolitiska dokument för den aktuella tiden visar resultatet att diskurser om bildning i den högre utbildningen är mångtydiga och betydelseskiftande. Artikulationerna om bildning anger inte en entydig bild om dess innehåll där diskurserna som påträffas sker parallellt med varandra.

Bilden av ?manligt? och ?kvinnligt? har i skräck- och action-filmer/TV-serier länge varit väldigt stereotyp. Kvinnan har ofta spelat rollen som den utsatta, den svaga, det som kallas ?Damsel in distress? i karaktärsbeskrivningar. Mannen har å sin sida varit den mer eller mindre felfria hjälten, som alltid vet råd.

Over the past thirty years the political parties in Sweden have lost five out of six members. In order to retain existing members leadership in these organizations has become increasingly important. The aim of this paper is to identify what group leaders for party groups within the municipal council believe are the driving forces that underlie the councillors' voluntary commitment, identify the group leaders' leadership style and identify whether there exist a relationship between these driving forces and the leadership style. The approach applied is qualitative consisting of twelve interviews with twelve group leaders from six different municipalities in Stockholm county. The theoretical framework of this paper includes the Volunteer Functions Inventory and the Full Range Leadership Theory.

Idag betonas medborgarnas möjlighet, rättighet och ansvar att delta i samhällslivet och ha inflytande över frågor som rör vardagslivet. Detta kan ses som en fördjupning av demokratin mot en deltagardemokrati. Antologin syftar till att problematisera diskussionen om vikten av medborgares delaktighet genom att titta på hur delaktighet konstrueras i olika sociala sammanhang. Utifrån kommunala tjänstemän som arbetar med samhällsplanering, medlemmar i en pensionärsorganisation, föräldrar i skolan, ungdomar i politiska ungdomsförbund och ideellt arbetande eldsjälar i ett bostadsområde har vi belyst delaktighetens variationer. Antologin baseras på kvalitativa studier med intervjuer och observationer.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how theory and practice intertwines through theactivism of the feminist punk performance collective Pussy Riot. I have also focussed on the political tools with which the activism is performed. Within the academic context of gender studies, I believe there is a need for research that aims to reduce the gap between scholarly and activist feminism. The theoretical framework for the analysis in this essay consists of material feminist theory and postmodern theory. The empirical material is a diversified assemblage of images, court excerpts, newspaper columns, interviews, lyrics and videos.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att se hur migrationsverkets dokument förhåller sig till personer som söker asyl i Sverige på grund av könsidentitet eller sexuell läggning. Våra frågeställningar är: vilka begrepp framstår som viktiga i vår empiri och hur används dem? Hur förhåller sig migrationsverket till heteronormativitet i de dokument som vi analyserar? Presenteras det en ideal person som söker asyl på grund av könsidentitet eller sexuell läggning i dokumenten? För att få svar på våra frågeställningar så har vi använt oss av kritisk diskursanalys som metod och queerteori och makt som teoretisk tolkningsram.Våra huvudresultat i uppsatsen är att migrationsverket använder sig av trovärdighet och öppenhet utifrån en bestämd uppfattning kring vad dessa begrepp ska innebära. Detta leder i sin tur till gränsdragningar och en heteronormativ uppfattning gällande den asylsökande. I och med att man har en tydlig bild av vad som ska ingå i trovärdighet och öppenhet så sker det automatiskt ett osynliggörande av människor som inte uppfyller de rätta kriterierna..

The aim of this study is to analyze and describe the research front within information science. To reach this purpose we ask the following research question: Which research themes can be identified within the subject field of information science by using bibliographic coupling in combination with cluster analysis.The data for our study consists of articles from the journals Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and Journal of Documentation throughout the years 2004-2006. The bibliographic information from the articles was analyzed with the combined methods of bibliographic coupling and cluster analysis. This gave fifteen clusters within which we identified research themes. When analyzing these results we found four main fields of research within the research front of information science: Information retrieval, bibliometrics, knowledge organization and information science as research discipline.