Title: Creativity and blockings: Non-musicians? experiences of music making The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the ability of music-making can benefit from and/or be inhibited by extra-musical factors, such as one's own or other people's opinions, criticism, prejudice and values. An experiment was carried out, where 10 nonmusicians were instructed to solve a compositional problem (writing pieces of music to a picture) which had been expressed in two different ways, one of which (A) was intended to block creativity and the other (B) to facilitate the creative process. All subjects also had to answer a questionnaire, where their experiences in connection with the task and their attitudes towards music and composition were mapped. The result was that all subjects succeeded in composing one or more pieces of music, regardless of which instruction they had been given.

The essay is an effort to examine and define three examples of liminal dance performances through an aesthetic, hermeneutic and semiotic analysis. The examples are three dance or liminal performances, made by three different choreographers and performed at ?Moderna Dansteatern? and ?Dansens Hus? in Stockholm during September and October 2005. In the effort to determine the liminal and cross-over in the performances, the analysis focus on aspects such as: the character of the work, choreography, the use of scenery, stage light, requisites, conception of place and interior room, the use of costume and mask, the use of different media as text, pictures, film, and music or not using any these, and the interaction with the audience. The analysis depends on a historical background and the use of literature in the subject.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the representation of race, social class and gender in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V. Postcolonial theory, including terms such as cultural hegemony, whiteness and Michel Foucaults definition of power, has served as the basis for the analysis. The postcolonial theory has been combined with class theory and gender theory for an intersectional analysis. Semiotic analysis has been used as the method in the thesis, and a total of nine story missions ? three for each protagonist in the game ? have constituted the material.

This study examines how masculinity is portrayed in podcasts. Our original materialconsisted of four episodes of C/o Hannah & Amanda and four episodes of Filip &Fredrik's podcast. We analyzed the programs both individually and in comparison toeach other. Using a rhetorical analysis, we found that the perception of men in thepodcasts conforms to societal norms. The theoretical basis underlying ouranalysis can be expected to strengthen our findings and made us also realize that theimage of masculinity is constantly evolving..

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a highly used concept in contemporary organizations, especially in the recruitment process or education of employees and managers. The aim of this study was to examine the discursive production of the concept emotional intelligence and how it, linked to an organizational context, is expressed in web-based articles and course homepages. In total 11 texts related to emotional intelligence and organizational contexts were used as the object of study. A three-stage model was used as a method for analysis. The model included a content analysis, argument analysis and a deconstruction analysis in order to expose what was said about emotional intelligence and how it was said.

Title: Women's best beautiful will never be good enough: a rethoric and semiotic analysis of four advertisements for beauty products.Because of the medias central role in peoples lives in the modern society we today live in, they have become a reference in peoples processes of making sence of their subsistences and environments. Commercial companies also want to present an as good image as possible of them towards the recipients through their marketing. Both parts can lead to a distorted picture of the real och everyday and norms and ideals easily form, for example about the correct way a woman should act and be, as the media affect which references should be made available for society.The purpose of this thesis is to examine how four advertisements for beauty products produce ideals and norms of beauty as well as construct and reconstruct femininity through the ways women are represented. The study will also contain the question about how rethoric and semiotic tools are used to strengthen the messages and sell the products. The following questions will be answered within this study:How is femininity being represented in the advertisements?How can the advertisements contribute to the creation of ideals and norms of beauty? How do the companies use rethoric and semiotic tools in the four advertisements to sell their products and/or strengthen their brands?The study will be executed with a qualitative rethoric and semiotic analysis and the theories applied to it are Mediatization theory, Envisionment theory as well as a theory about gender and femininity.   The foremost results of this study has been that women are represented as constantly striving towards a better beauty to be able to also feel better about themselves, gain better self-esteem and to have more fulfilled and successful lives.

The rural development programme is a tool for promoting sustainable development in the Swedish countryside. The master plan should, for example, give directions for the national interest and describe how it will follow up national and regional targets such as the EU's environmental quality standards. Because the municipality has considerable freedom to formulate the plan in its sole discretion, and that it contains the municipality's political vision, it is also feasible to make a discourse analysis of the plan text.In discourse analysis, including articles and documents written by Rural Network Working Group on land use planning to be included. The purpose of discourse analysis is to see if there are differences in the way rural areas are described and if there are any flaws in how the designer interprets the rural development programme. Furthermore, the analysis result in tools that are adapted to the standards we create and choose.The standards we have are being designed based on our values, which differ.

The aim of this two year master thesis is to study the knowledge production within the field of Textile Studies at Uppsala University, with special focus on the use of artifact documentation as a research method. With domain analysis as a theoretical framework, ontological and epistemological assumptions as well as historical and social aspects are studied in relation to the research process. Qualitative research methods are used, including interviews, observations and text analysis. In the analysis of the knowledge processes in the field, perspectives on tacit knowledge and the concept of documents, are used as a theoretical basis. In the field of Textile Studies, the artifacts are used as one of the main objects of study, along with archival and pictorial sources. The main epistemological assumptions are that artifact analysis is dependent on a knowledge base, where technical handicraft skills, contextual knowledge and practical experience of object observation are the most important qualifications.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the representation of student life in Uppsala in the 1860s and 1870s in memoirs. This purpose is achieved by contextualising the memoirs in two different analyses. In the first, the representation of student life in the memoirs is compared to that in another literary genre, the university novel, and it is found that the two representational forms paint completely contradictory pictures, where in the novels the higher education is depicted as rotten and in dire need of reformation, whereas in the memoirs the system, albeit somewhat flawed, works. The memoirs and the novels thus seem to be competing systems of representation, created in different discourses, wherein the purpose and nature of higher education widely differed. In the second analysis, the examination of the memoirs is based on research concerning the nation building process in Sweden during the 19th century.

This master?s thesis aims to analyze the ongoing debate in Scandinavia on research evaluation of the humanities. This field of research uses bibliometrics, quantative analysis of bibliographical units as a research assessment tool. In recent years evaluative bibliometrics has been an increasingly used method. In Scandinavia, governments have introduced new funding models for research in higher educational institutions.

The crisis on Wall Street. This essay is a comparative study of how two business newspapers report on the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings in September 2008. Seven articles from the Swedish European financial newspaper Affärsvärlden (Business World) and five articles from the Chinese-Asian news agency XINHUA FINANCE are examined. The aim is to analyze, understand and evaluate from a rhetorical perspective. My thesis is that rhetors storytelling can tell us more about how we cope with crisis in the global economic discourse. The texts can portray man as a narrative creature when identification as a rational actor is not enough. The analytical methods used are linguistic analysis with an emphasis on metaphor analysis, narrative analysis based on pentad - Critical dramatism, and discourse analysis with doxological outlook. The results show that both newspapers seek to defend the global economic discourse, but they do so in different ways. Affärsvärlden advocates calmness and conveys a cautious attitude. The heart of the crisis, as well as its solution, is on Wall Street. XINHUA advocates control and expresses confidence in authorities and the system. Asia is presented as Wall Street's savior..

This master thesis is developed based on the desire of the water and sewage department in the municipality of Karlskrona. The department, which vouches for the quality of produced drinking water and sewage cleaning, was in need of help dealing with risk analysis.The water and sewage department is obliged to identify and assess risks according to Swedish legislation. However, no guides for this purpose regarding safety, health, environment and quality were available. The aim of this report was to accomplish a guideline for the performance of risk analysis within water and sewage plants. If the guideline is used, the requirements in the legislation will be obtained.

During my time as a student at the School of Library and Information Science in Borås there was an ongoing discussion regarding whether or not the library and librarian were facing an identity crisis and what future consequences this may lead to. The discussion was and still is of interest to me since it most likely will have an impact on the identity I soon will make part of my self as a professional librarian. This master?s thesis is an attempt that to through discourse analysis seek clarity in what the future identity of the library and the librarian may consist of. I do so by examining articles from the two library journals Ikoner and Biblioteksbladet.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how masculinity and femininity are constructed in the magazine Veckorevyn, through a critical discourse analysis of 18 articles from six issues in 2011. This is done by using a variety of theories and previous research results, which is gender theory, the theory of late-modern society and media theory. The analysis shows that Veckorevyn depicts virility and feminine differently. Furthermore, pointing the results from the analysis that a change of manhood and womanhood takes place in the social practice. The selection of articles from the magazine also shows that Veckorevyn seems to promote gender equality. .

PURPOSE: To analyze how companies in the Swedish beer industry strategically workingwith CSR externally in order to increase their legitimacy.METHOD: Qualitative interviews and text analysis to enable data to stakeholder analysis.MATERIAL: Respondent interviews with key individuals, textual analysis of CSR-relateddocuments of the largest beer producers in Sweden.MAIN RESULTS: The study shows that it is possible to distinguish three main categories ofstakeholders to the beer producers. These have various high stakeholder values, wherecustomers are those with the highest value, then consumers and third critics. That these havevarious high values allows different strategic approach to the key issue of how preventivemeasures, that can be said to work against their own products, affects the beer producerslegitimacy among stakeholders..