In recent years, the characterization of the Third World and its inhabitants in West-originated children?s books has been subject to debate. Media attention around a selection of books has generated discussions on how this relates and aligns with Sweden?s national teaching curriculum. The objective of this study is to explore how a selection of authors, born in Western countries, have characterized and presented the Third World and its inhabitants in its literature.

The City Library has a problem getting children interested in reading. Futhermore, there are no clear signs to aid children to navigate themselves to books targeted to their age group. To solve this problem, this thesis aims to design signs that is both illustrative and informative.Of the images that were tested during the research, I would assume that children in such a wide age range requires the simplest level of abstraction from testing the three testing icons, since the second level of abstraction was not interesting enough for the kids. The third, nearphotorealistic level was most liked by the children who were in the city library more often and looked for books themselves..

This two years master?s thesis is about book circles for children, arranged by the public libraries in Sweden. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how children experience their participation in book circles, and how they experience their own reading. It focuses on children aged 10 to 12 years, and their leisure reading. The research questions are: What are the book circles? function for the participants? How and why do the children read? What kind of literature do they like? Do the children experience that their reading has developed through their participation in the book circles? What parts of the reading process do the book circles influence?The theoretical framework is threefold.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the new Swedish curriculum, GY11 brought with it changes to how non-religious world-views are presented in five different books in religious education, RE. The method used to analyze the material was a qualitative content analysis as well as counting the pages that dealt with secular world-views. This was later analyzed using philosopher Charles Taylors description and theory on secularization. This was used to identify secular processes as well as to define wether the books definition and description of secular world-views using Taylors concept of ?exclusive humanism?.The research questions are:? What are the authors writing about when describing the secular world- views?? What differences and similarities are there between the different editions prior and after the implementation of the new curriculum, GY11?? Are the secular world-views presented in a way that is compatible with Taylors concept of ?exclusive humanism??The results that are being presented are, first of all that the change between the different editions are not big.

The purpose of this paper is to give a view of how violence and victims has been portrayed in novels. I have chosen 6 books where the main character is a child who has been exposed to physical, mental and/or sexual violence. I have asked questions to the book and I have tried to find patterns in the child's strategy to cope with violence and how the violence is described. I have also written two chapters about earlier studies of this field and theoretical standpoints. The main perspective I present is the salutogenese perspective and how people create meaningfulness in their lives.The children in the books have different ways to handle their situations.

This paper intends to examine how parents think and reflect on gender issues when they borrow books for their children at the library. The theory applied is Yvonne Hirdman?s theory of a gender system. A questionnaire was made available at the Children's department of Uppsala City Library in February, 2010. The material was compiled and analyzed with the intention to try to detect trends, patterns and themes, rather than statistics and hard data.Parents in the study perceive themselves as gender-conscious.

This thesis is about how to criticize the large number of non-fiction for children which is published nowadays. I have noticed that both librarians and teachers do not know what perspective to apply with regard to this category of books. There are some good ones, but also a lot of bad ones and some really bad ones. The purpose of this essay is to search by means of criteria from history of art, history of literature ? principally history of children's literature ? and pedagogy, for prevalent attitudes towards non-fiction for children.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the construction of the norm-breaking characters Saga from the young adult novel Tusen gånger starkare written by Christina Herrström and Pippi Longstocking from the books written by Astrid Lindgren. In order to do this I have applied queer theory as well as theories of narrative in my analysis.To be able to study the breaking of norms, it has been essential to first examine the way the norm itself is manifested in the books. Because of this I have chosen to begin my analysis with an examination of two other characters who by their normative behavior contrasts against Pippi and Saga, namely Signe and Annika. The understanding of the normative discourse that Signe and Annika represent is crucial in understanding the way Saga and Pippi later turn against it.After that I examine in which ways Saga and Pippi breaks prevalent norms and how they as characters are constructed as being different. Subsequently I study the effects of Saga?s and Pippi?s norm-breaking, taking focus on how it influences Signe and Annika.Finally I discuss the view of Saga and Pippi as subversive characters, and however the books can be said to have a subversive effect.

The purpose of this thesis is to see how the Swedish public libraries present e-books on their website. This study has tried to answer the following questions:1. How do the public libraries construct their definitions of the word e-book, and what patterns are there in the definitions?2. How is the e-book definition presented in the context of the public library websites?This study has formulated its own theoretical framework in regards to how you can categorize definitions in four different categories to help see the way a definition is constructed.

The aim of this study is to point out different aspects of modernity in the cookbook Husmoderns Köksalmanack. It is a publication that has been published annually since 1933. The books have been studied in the light of Anthony Giddens´ theoretical perspective on modernity. The study is based on three different themes that all can be linked to modernity. These themes are; Time and space, Locally, regionally and globally, and Advice.

The purpose of this study is to examine what readers of fiction literature are influenced by when they choose books. What libraries and bookstores do to influence readers in their choice of literature and how readers perceive the librarys and the bookstores influence on them in their choice of fiction literature. We have also studied which factors outside the library and the bookstore that readers are influenced by when borrowing or buying a certain book and to what extent readers are influenced by the books appearance. To answer our questions we chose a public library and a bookstore, where we interviewed six persons in each place. We have interviewed a librarian and a bookstore manager for information about how these two cultural institutions work with marketing of their fiction literature.

This Masters thesis is a study of the truck-driver profession and their use of libraries located in gas-stations and restaurants along the highways in Sweden. The reason for this interest is the positive trend that has occurred concerning men without any university education and their reading-habits, that is due to their increased interest in listening to audio books. This challenges the general opinion that this group is not particularly interested in reading literature. Questions posed in this study are: How do the truck-drivers relate to the activity of reading literature, what part does the road-libraries play, and how can the services that the road-libraries offer be improved according to the truck-drivers. The method used in the study is interviews made by telephone.

In this study, pollen contamination (measured by the number of seeds pollinated by pollen not belonging to any of the clones on the seed orchard) is compared between open pollination and isolated pollination environments in a Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) seed orchard called Västerhus, located outside Önsköldsvik. In this seed orchard a tent experiment is taking place. Skogforsk has built six large tents covering 12-14 trees with each tent. Fertilization patterns were compared between one tree in a tent with a supplementation of pollen from five clones not represented in the tent and another tree of the same clone subject to open pollination outside the tents. By using DNA markers the paternity was determined for 48 seeds from each tree.

In this study, pollen contamination (measured by the number of seeds pollinated by pollen not belonging to any of the clones on the seed orchard) is compared between open pollination and isolated pollination environments in a Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) seed orchard called Västerhus, located outside Önsköldsvik. In this seed orchard a tent experiment is taking place. Skogforsk has built six large tents covering 12-14 trees with each tent. Fertilization patterns were compared between one tree in a tent with a supplementation of pollen from five clones not represented in the tent and another tree of the same clone subject to open pollination outside the tents. By using DNA markers the paternity was determined for 48 seeds from each tree.

For centuries Islam and Muslims have been subject to islamophobic attitudes in the west. The purpose with this study was to see into the making of open and closed attitudes against Islam and Muslims from a conflict in southern Thailand, and also to so see if Muslims are portrayed as more violent than the Buddhist groups in the conflict. The aim of the study is also to see if Muslims fall into a violent stereotype. This was studied by looking at five Swedish newspapers coverage of the conflict, during a given time. To be able to look into this, two theories will be used, the first one is the Runnymede Trust theory, which is about open and closed attitudes against Islam and Muslims.