This thesis intends to examine the role of the city, Dublin, in the Irish economic growth during the 1990s. It is a case study where Dublin is compared with current theories on post modern cities as growth machines and increasingly prominent actors in the global context. The study has an interdisciplinary approach but focuses on political science issues such as power distribution, global-local governance and local political organisation. It is a theory driven study that also intends to add aspects to the understanding of the cities of our time. I argue that Dublin has faced a lot of changes during the last decades in accordance with the post modern city.

The following essay aims at the interplay between regional och municipal growth work, and theway cultural heritage is used in growth work strategies. The main issue has been whether theregional strategies are followed up in the municipal strategies, which has been investigated bymeans of question which impact the region?s strategies has at the local level.The essay draws upon an instrumental perspective on cultural heritage and cultural environment,here defined as instruments in the national development and growth efforts. Three publicationsthat highlights potential roles of cultural heritage and cultural environment to act as instrumentsin the regional and municipal development and growth efforts has thereby been selected astheoretical models. These roles has further been summarized in a tabular form as a schematicdivision of main themes with sub-categories, used as a framework for deciphering the regionaland municipal strategies.A content analysis of available strategies at both regional and local levels have been used as amethod for investigating the issue, where the role of cultural heritage and cultural environment(as defined in the schematic table) has guided the reading.

”Fan fiction writing”, or the writing of stories based upon a popular entertainment franchise, has become a topic of academic discussion. Fan fiction writers have waked the ire of movie producers, since they often write fiction that is in direct contradiction to the movie’s plot or spirit. While most academic studies on fan fiction have concentrated on his confrontational aspect of the writers’ psyches, we have found that the writers actually have a much more nuanced approach to their work, and are not necessarily hostile towards the directors and producers. Even more surprising is the fact that the internet, beyond giving the writers a forum to post their writings, has potentially had a transformative impact on how the writers interact with each other and with the outside world. .

Allocation of funds to public libraries is uneven and this study will try to explain the reasons and clarify why the allocations of funds are distributed like they are and what calculations influenced the financial apportionment. This master thesis accounts for allocation in seven public libraries in Uppsala. The study shows that one reason for uneven allocations is demographic. Another reason is that the library has come into a good or bad circle. There are no models for allocation of funds to public libraries in Uppsala, thats why their allocations are given after a percentage increase of earlier years allocations, and that leads to a good or bad circle.

A great fire seized a suburb in a small town in Sweden in the autumn of 2011. Parts of a shopping mall were burnt to the ground by youngsters. Due to the suburb's earlier problems, the event was a tough ethical dilemma for the town's journalists.The purpose of this thesis was to study and examine the local newspapers ethical treatment of this event. How do they motivate their decisions on what to publish and what not to publish? How do the articles treat ethical dilemmas? What do the journalists think about ethical journalism?This study is based on a survey of the articles published about the fire in the two local newspapers seven days after the fire.

When SKL (Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science) gets images to analyse, the task often is to identify a person or an object. In that work it?s important to find features. Unfortunately images from camera surveillances often contain a lot of noise, so details can be hard to discern.A simple method to improve an image from a sequence is to compute the mean of some of the images. However, the part of interest in the image has to be in the same position in all images.

AbstractDuring the last five years there has been a considerable immigration from the Netherlands to Värmland in Sweden. INVA, Invest in Värmland, wanted to highlight this phenomenon and therefore contacted Karlstad University to make a survey about how extensive the immigration is and what consequences it brings for the business life and municipalities in Värmland. We were luckily chosen to perform this research and the main focus in this study has been the following questions:? Why do the Dutchmen choose to buy their house in Värmland?? What are the main reasons for leaving the Netherlands?? What consequences does the immigration cause for the business life in Värmland?? How do the Dutchmen experience the contact with Swedish authorities?To answer the questions we designed a questionnaire that was sent to 200 Dutch house purchasers. The ambition was to survey all the Dutch house purchasers in Värmland, but with the time constrains and the municipalities having problem to find complete data, we limited the survey to 200 households.

This Master?s thesis is one of two parts of a combined project called Sustainable development around the Lake Victoria, the purpose of which is to investigate the importance of local anchoring and active participation in the work towards sustainable development. The present study aims to investigate whether men and women are empowered by the participatory rural appraisal (PRA) process promoted in their villages by the VI Agroforestry Project Masaka/Rakai. The study is primarily based on interviews with farmers within the project area and brings up a local perspective on the concepts sustainable development, active participation and empowerment. The study shows that to improve the farmers? livelihood and to create a sustainable development in the community, the farmers have to be actively involved in, and in control of, the process.

Care and solicitude about Swedish documentary heritage has varied substantially throughout the years. The main purpose of this essay has been to investigate what efforts have been made to preserve rare book collections at public libraries. These cultural policies have been studied from both a national as well as local perspective. What we have tried to explore can be condensed into three questions: What national initiatives have been taken in the past century to preserve the municipal documentary heritage?What initiatives have been taken in the past century to preserve thedocumentary heritage of what is presently the municipality of Jönköping? What value do rare book collections at public libraries represent? The results indicate few national efforts were initially made to preserve rare book collections in the timeframe we studied.

This essay deals with the question of lines of development within the politics in the rural municipality of Nyed 1950-1962. The aim is to explore how local politics and policies were handled from two perspectives. Firstly the issue of conflict and consensus or majority rule and consensus. Here Arend Lijphard's theory of majority and consensus provides a theoretical base for the essay. Secondly the aim is to explore the actions of the local politicians with regards to leisure time policies to find out whether or not they ideologically belonged to the concept of ?folkhemmets kommun? by Ulla Ekström von Essen.The source material for this essay has been the minutes from the two major bodies of local politics in Nyed, kommunalfullmäktige and kommunalnämnden.

This bachelor thesis is based on interviews with staff from three Egyptian NGOs in Cairo during the spring of 2013. The study examines how three Egyptian NGOs discuss the woman?s situation within the Islamic legal discourse in the contemporary Egypt. The empiric material was analysed through a theoretical framework of gender in Islam, and a discussion of the concept of human rights laws in a local context.The respondents emphasize the societies gender stereotypes as obstacles in the discussion regarding women?s rights.

This is a master thesis on how to develop the central area of Norra Fäladen, a suburban housing area in the town of Lund, Sweden. The area is discussed on the basis of literature studies, analysis, and place descriptions, which leads on to a proposal. The starting point for the proposal is to create a more lively local centre and to make the area pleasanter for the visitor. A large part of the thesis is devoted to giving a background about local centres and to describe and analyse the area. Fäladstorget has an important role as a central place for supply and services and as a local meeting place for the inhabitants of Norra Fäladen.

The aim of this study was to analyze how discourses about domestic violence emerges in policy and practice, and to investigate how those discourses may change from a structural, political level to a local, practical level. The research questions focused how the problem of domestic violence is formulated at national and local level, scrutinizing the different discourses framing and reproducing the causes and solutions of the problem, and also to deduce how different context affects formulations. The empirical material consists of policy plans and interviews with social workers. The findings indicates that the issue of domestic violence is articulated differently on different levels. In action plans on the national level, the domestic violence is formulated within a structural discourse, being a problem on a (gender-) political level, whereas professional social workers recognizes domestic violence as a personal problem within an individual oriented discourse.

The present study discusses the political integration of immigrants in local government in the muncipality of Växjö from 1971 to 1991 in the form of representation. The main data source consists of lists of people holding local commissions of trust in the various boards and committés appointed by the municipality council, as well as in the council itself. These data are then compared to population statistics from Statistics Sweden. Main findings of the study are that immigrants are insufficiently represented in relation to their proportion of the population. It is suggested that this is a result of structural discrimination and possibly insufficient socialisation..

The development of solar photovoltaic (PV) is increasing,with declining module prices and with a strongenvironmental profile. Policies are developed around theworld to achieve the targets set for renewable energy.In Helsingborg, the local power company Öresundskraft isworking with solar PV to achieve the goals of the city.With their vision: - Energy for a Better World and Powerfor the Region, their work with developing the local solarPV market is continuing and the next step is to create asolar PV policy. Today their offer is 1 SEK/kWh for theexcess electricity delivered to the grid.It turns out that compensating the customer is a vitalpolicy and it has to be dynamic to follow the decisions ofpolitics. The same survey shows indeed, thatenvironmental and technical part is of interest. Solar PVwill be supported locally to act on environmentalsustainability and locally produced electricity and withthis Öresundskrafts vision will be achieved..