The aim of this Master thesis was to examine news journalism covering expressions of mourning related to violent or unexpected deaths. What rituals for mourning are brought out in media and do media present guidance to how mourners should behave? The questions examined were: What characterised news events that leaded to texts on expressions of mourning? How was grief framed? Which narrative patterns were there in the texts? How was the deceased represented? How were the mourners represented? 165 texts, from Swedish daily newspapers, covering 93 different news events were analysed. The methods were mainly discourse analysis with focus on identities and relations, but also semiotic analysis with focus on staging and symbols and narrative analysis with focus on patterns for storytelling. The result showed that a news story about ordinary people expressing their feelings of grief has elements of melodrama. The news story is based on the myth of the victim, and formed as a typical story where equilibrium is disturbed when the inconceivable happens and the mourners can by their actions restore equilibrium.

The intention of this essay is to put the light on and to discuss if there is a connection between a pre-Christian creation mythology and naked rocks on prehistoric sacred places in Scandinavia. Archaeological as well as historical materials are studied. The historical material is mostly from Snorre Sturlasons Asasagan with the explanation of the creation of the world. In this story the world was built from the body of a killed and deposited giant named Ymer. Almost the same myth is told in all Indo-European countries.

The written sources concerning the process of christianization in Sweden has for a long time been limited to two main texts, Rimberts vita of St. Ansgarius and Adam of Bremen´s History of the bishops of Hamburg. This is due to a rigid source criticism in the beginning of the 20th century, which put other material ? in particular the norse sagas ? out of consideration. The last twenty years however, new questions have been raised concerning the christianization, partly because of new archaeological findings, new interpretations of the significance of runic stones and the recent debate about the formation of the Swedish medieval kingdom.

The purpose of this thesis is to bring forward and discuss the American vision for space exploration found at NASA's homepage, how the vision is popularised and why. NASA's homepage is analyzed as popularized science and the theoretical perspective emanates from the field of popular science and especially the work of Johan Kärnfelt. The historical reference is made up by Howard E McCurdy and he's thoughts about space and the American imagination. The analysis is based on a number of documents that popularize the vision for space exploration and is intended for the public. These documents describe the future plan for NASA and US space exploration..

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the relationship between feelings and visualizations of climate change. A case study was done on visualizations of climate change from a web page concerning climate change published by the Swedish newspaper Expressen and from the American photographer Gary Braasch?s web page ?World view of global warming?. The thesis is based on the article ?Emotional anchoring and objectification in the media reporting on climate change? by Birgitta Höijer.

The purpose of this study was to see if there are any differences between high school girls and boy?s reception ability and memory after reading two Swedish lifestyle magazines.9 boys and 9 girls from ages 17-18 were chosen to participate in the study. They were placed in a room one by one where they had to read one women?s magazine (Cosmopolitan) and one men?s magazine (Café). They did not know this was a memory and reception test until after they finished their reading.With help from former reception studies and the magazines, questions were selected so the interviews would give as much information as possible.The study gave some unexpected results, for example both genders seemed to remember numbers very well even if they didn?t remember the article itself.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the discourses of concepts related to diversity and ethnicity in Swedish cultural policy. It focuses on how the society is presented in different contexts and how people with a different ethnic origin than the majority, are represented in the cultural policy of the Swedish State. The study is restricted to concern immigrants. Six governmental cultural policy documents, reaching over a time period of eight years 1995-2003 are examined as follows: Which key terms are used in the presentations? Which contexts and discourses can be distinguished? Have the discourses changed over the time period examined, and if so, how? The theoretical starting point in the thesis is the discourse perspective of Laclau and Mouffe.

Denna uppsats syftar till att göra en religionsvetenskaplig analys av filmen Thor från 2011.De grundläggande metoderna som använts i arbetet är en diskursanalysmetod som är influerad av Simon Lindgrens populärkulturella arbetsfält, och en komparativ studie av Joseph Campbells teoriom monomyten.Våra tolkningar och arbetet kommer fram till att Thor passar in i Campbells teori om monomyten.This essay aims to make a religious scientific based analysis of the movie Thor from 2011.The basic methods used in this work are a discourse analysis, influenced by Simon Lindgren?s popular culture field of expertise, and a comparative study of Joseph Campbell's theory of the monomyth.Our interpretations and this work concludes that Thor fits into Campbell's theory of the monomyth. The results imply that Campbell's theory proves to be applicable in modern times narration on film. Events and actors in the film fit with several elementary parts in a hero-myth according to Campbell..

Travel literature and especially the ?adventure story? has excited young British boys for over two centuries. However, it has also been a vehicle for the assertion of male dominance and European supremacy. The story of a British man who goes to the colonies, performs some test which is essentially a test of his manliness, and whose compulsory victory marks the end of the book, has been a central myth in colonial masculinity.Through looking at three Anglo-Saxon male travel writers from the 20th century, this essay aims to study the different ways in which Western male identity is shaped against an Indian background. The novels analysed are Topee and Turban or Here and There in India by H.A.

For some time, there has been a general thought that churches built in the Early Middle Ages in Scandinavia, around the 12th century, directly replaced cult buildings or cult sites from the Late Iron Age. There are archaeologists who have criticized this and were instead skeptical that churches at all were built on places where a pre-Christian cult building existed. Several examples from Scandinavia contradict this and show a continuity of place and cult from the Late Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages. The aim of this thesis is through a spatial analysis, study Late Iron Age archaeological sites in the landscape around thirteen churches located around lake T?kern in the western part of ?sterg?tland, to see if there is a place and cult continuity from the Late Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages at the selected locations.

The purpose of this examination is to identify how notions of Swedishness is created artistically, and from where these notions come. My method is to make a study on exhibition catalogues on the theme Swedishness/Nordism, with focus on the contemporary Swedish artist Peter Johansson. With a retrospect of his childhood in Dalecarlia, he investigates a Swedish iconography with it?s roots in national romanticism, which for more than one hundred years has been preserved and exploited of the tourist industry to market Sweden. It?s this monotonous iconography that Johansson deconstructs to make it appear like something else ? namely an iconography based on ethnic purity, which pushes away the foreign and protects the own.

This essay is called In the head of Garibaldi ? a study about the portrayal of Garibaldi in biographies and focuses on the literary portrayal of Garibaldi in biographies published in the early 20th century and the early 21st century. The purpose of the essay is to describe the possible changes in the way of portraying Garibaldi in biographies and compare the portraying to the portrayal of Garibaldi that Garibaldi himself gives in the American translation of his memoirs, which were published in New York 1859.I have in this study used a constructivist approach with focus on the attributes, ideals and roles of Garibaldi. Research and thoughts from a wide field of science has been used, for example the works on nationalism by Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner. The thoughts on biographies as a scientific genre as described in the anthologies Att skriva människan (Ambjörnsson, Ringby & Åkerman red.) and Med livet som insats (Rosengren & Östling red.) has also been of the utmost importance of the study.The results of the study shows that there has been changes in the way of portraying Garibaldi in biographies, as showed in the more unbiased portrayals in the newer biographies.

The purpose of this study is to examine a brand?s green marketing and its consumers? perception of it in order to compare these views. The idea is to find a potential gap and what effect it may have on the brand. A case study has therefore been made with the grocery market brand Coop with focus on organic food. The material used consists of texts from Coop?s website to represent their brand.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the use of social media by the Swedish Police for democratic purposes. The idea of citizen empowerment is closely related to the development of new communication technologies such as social media. Yet many studies indicate that governmental institutions rarely make use of the assumed potentials of social media.In this study, the democratic potential of social media is derived from Habermas normative concept of deliberative participation. Operational definitions emphasize discursive equality, interactive reciprocity and external impact. The analytical framework is combined with qualitative text analysis to highlight the conditions of interaction between representatives of the Police and citizens.In conclusion: the democratic potential of social media, from a Habermasian point of view, is to a significant extent neglected at the expense of its strategic advantages.

This essay examines the way the recurring motifs in Karin Boye's poetry might be read as expressions of queer or subversive desire. The fact that the lyrical I is not gendered in the poems opens up for a queer reading. In adherence to Sara Ahmed's notion of desire lines and sexual orientation I discuss the spatial aspects of desire, and explore the positions and movements of the lyrical I in Boye's poetic landscape as deviations from the concept of the straight and marked path, into the queer and unknown.I trace desire in Boye's poetry mainly through the themes of nature and night, and the ways in which these phenomena deviate from the normative structures laid out by the poems. Usually the motifs of night (such as fog, shadows and darkness) are associated with the fading of the senses. The night obscures the vision of the lyrical I and wraps them in heavy silence, making them experience and desire in new ways. Through motifs related to nature Boye formulates a feminine, matriarchal myth.