The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the professional discourses that can be identified in the public library field. My main focus is to look at the professional views on the added value of public library. Questions posed in this study are: how does the professional language look when it comes of speaking and reasoning about the public librarys added value and function, which discourses can be identified in the professional language about the public library, what could the discourses entail for the future of public library? The empirical data consist of four interviews where the respondents have been constituted by public librarians.

Den här uppsatsen syftar till att undersöka hur media framställer Malmö stad i samband med bombdådet på Rättscentrum natten till den 1 december 2014. Detta sker genom en diskursanalys av sex svenska kvälls- och dagstidningar. Uppsatsens teoretiska utgångspunkter är Stanley Cohen's Moralpanik samt Ernesto Laclau's och Chantal Mouffe's Diskursteori. De sex kvälls- och dagstidningar som valts ut är de allra första rapporteringarna om bombdådet i Malmö. Under analysen har tidningarna analyserats utifrån sex olika diskurser.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att med hjälp av diskursanalys granska hur makt, motstånd och identiteter skildras i de seriösa serieböckerna Persepolis av Marjane Satrapi, An Arab in America av Toufic El Rassi samt Maus av Art Spiegelman, som alla på ett eller annat sätt handlar om migration. Jag använder teorier som Michel Foucault och Chandra Talpade Mohanty har lagt fram och också litteratur om diskursanalys. Syftet är även att studera synen på serier som berättandeform. Jag diskuterar målgrupper för serieberättelser och huruvida serier håller på att ta sig in i "finkulturen". Där använder jag bland annat Ernesto Laclau och Chantal Mouffes teorier om diskursers kamp med varandra om makt och hegemoni.

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..

I denna uppsats undersöker författarna orsaker till och konsekvenser av beställar- utförarmodellernas införande genom att undersöka tre landsting och deras styrmodeller. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten hämtas från diskursanalysen, med bas i Laclau, Mouffes och Faircloughs diskursteori, samt principal- agentteorin. Med dessa verktyg utkristalliseras de element som kringgärdar beställar- utförarmodellen och intervjuresultat används för att se hur stort genomslag dessa har fått i undersökta landsting. Resultatet blir en identifikation av demokrati och effektivitet som centrala mål för modellens införande. Alltfler landsting har på senare tid modifierat beställar- utförarmodellen mot en kongruens mellan demokrati och effektivitet.

Through a discourse theoretical apparatus, this study examines Sweden's national curriculum, which is constructed for primary schools, pre-school class and leisure time classes. The study also examines the syllabus in physical education and the supplied comment material to the syllabus, the above mentioned material all valid from 1 July 2011. Using cultural researcher Marianne Winther Jørgensen's and communication researcher Louise Phillips interpretation of the political theorists Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory, the study identifies several discourses in the new curriculums. The analysis shows that the curriculums writers construct their expectations through a rhetoric that is perceived as instructional and descriptive. The analysis identified eight discourses, woven into three "orders of discourse", the body, health and physical education.

"Race" is often used as a marker to exclude people from a society. What is interesting is not so much what terms that are used to describe people, but by what meaning they are associated with. For this thesis articles published in daily magazines have been the material used. An argument driven in the essay is that identity and oppression is not constituted from one subject position, but from several, such as class, sexuality and gender. The first question posed is how "race" is constituted through discourses throughout the subject positions class, sexuality and gender.

This study treats cultural policy, it´s view of the value of literature, and how this view varies within different fields of cultural policy. The aim of the essay is to find different competing approaches through an investigation of texts from three different fields within cultural policy. The fields investigated are: The publishing subsidy of the National Council for Cultural Affairs, which values above all quality literature. En bok för alla, concentrates on spreading quality literature to new groups in society. Centrum för lättläst, which values that the contents of a text are successfully delivered to, and understood by, the reader.

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate changes within four discourses identified in the curriculum material of the Swedish library education in Borås Bibliotekarielinjen dating from 1977 and 1985 and its successor Library and Information Science Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap dating from 1995, 1999. My method used is a text analytic method primarily derived from the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, yet with addition of tools from the critical discourse analysis of Fairclough. By identifying three floating signifiers within the material, i.e information, library, and librarian, and thereafter identifying their fixation, a pattern of resemblance and diversity in the fixating signs appeared between different courses of the curriculum dating from 1999. Hence I could establish an order of discourse consisting of four library discourses, a knowledge organisation discourse, a user discourse, a society discourse and a management discourse. Using this discursive order as a pattern, I could trace these four discourses back in time within the material dating from 1995, 1985 and 1977.

The aim of this thesis is to seek understanding to how a national identity is constructed. Five women and five men at the age of 21-37 years old have been interviewed during November 2005 and January 2006. All of them lived Oslo at the time. The informants have been divided into two groups, `Swedish immigrants` and `Norwegian immigrants`, none of the people interviewed is ethnic `Swedish` or `Norwegian`. The empirical material has been analysed with the help of Billig´s theory about banal nationalism and Laclau and Mouffe´s discourse analysis.

Youth unemployement in Sweden is at an all-time high, a fifth of all university and college students live in poverty and the number of young on welfare is increasing. This study attempts to answer the question of how youth deprivation has been made possible as a consequence of political action, focusing on youth unemployment. I critically examine the role of the Swedish government, the Swedish Labour Organisation (LO), and the various government departments through text analysis, in order to answer the question of how the current discourse on youth position in the labor market. Because youth unemployment is not an isolated phenomena the analysis covers several policy areas, such as education policy, labor market regulation and housing policy. I use discourse theories drawn from Laclau and Mouffe to expose how language is used as an instrument of political power. I conclude that the current situation is a result of policy choices where the young have fallen behind due to lack of political organization. Their situation is not problematized to the required degree and is often explained on an individual level rather than on a structural level. .

In august 2006 the Swedish government official report (SOU) about the structural discrimination was published and caused a lot of debate in the media. This paper is about the report as such, as much as the academic quarrel it caused in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. My aim is to explore why the report is so provocative and what the debate actually is about. I use discourse analysis both as a method and theoretical framework, inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Using this methodology I explore which discourses that are articulated.

Med utgångspunkt i orientalism har denna studie granskat framställningen om Mellanöstern ihistorieläroböcker för gymnasieskolan för att undersöka förekomsten av orientalism inomlärobokstexterna. Med hjälp av en diskursanalys utifrån Laclau och Mouffes diskursteori, harläroböcker för gymnasieskolan undersökts från tre olika tidsperioder; 1980-tal, 1990-tal och 2010-tal. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur historieläroböcker i gymnasieskolan upprätthåller ellermotverkar orientalism samt se hur dessa har förändrats över tid.Den analys som genomförts visar på två huvudteman i de läroböcker som ingått iundersökningen. Dels en dikotomi mellan mellanöstern som ?de andra? eller ?det annorlunda? iförhållande till ?vi?, det vill säga, Europa och västvärlden och dels en framställning av islam somfår utgöra en viktig del i skapandet av en över- och underordnad ställning mellan dessa två parter.Detta ger eleverna som läser dessa böcker en bild av världen och dess historia där det modernaoch beaktansvärda i världen är skapat av ? och viss mån tillhör ? Europa och västvärlden medandet omoderna och destruktiva kopplas samman med mellanöstern..

Given the possibility that the world, as we know it, is a consequence of human interaction and verbal communication our understanding of the world can be seen as contingent rather than essentially given. Conceptions such as "entrepreneur", "woman" and "man" can then be understood as socially constructed subjects. Departing from poststructural and social constructionist perspectives I will examine medial representation of women and men as entrepreneurs. My main purpose is to examine how the entrepreneur is constructed as a discursive subject in the journal Eget Företag. Drawing upon Ernesto Laclau´s and Chantal Mouffe´s Discourse Theory and the poststructuralist feminist theoretical perspective of Judith Butler I will discuss both the construction of the entrepreneur as well as the more explicit question; is gender significant for the construction of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship in Eget Företag? In this study I come to the conclusion that the discourse of entrepreneurship, as well as the journalistic discourse, draws upon discourses of femininity and masculinity but also upon discourses of ethnicity.

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.