This is a sociological study of religion that examines how gender and female Muslim identity is expressed during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in the swedish paper Dagens Nyheter in the year 1951, 1989 and 2009. The aim is to see who creates the image of Islam and Muslims in general and in particular the image of the Muslim woman and whose Islam is given space in the article material. The picture has changed with the increase in immigration from Muslim countries and that we have gone from a modern to a late modern society in which other patterns shape our identity. The historical summary of the paper Dagens Nyheter illustrates how the Swedish society is formed in relation to Islam and Muslims. It provides a deeper understanding of the problems in the swedish multicultural society today..

Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka vilka historiska händelser och begrepp som är det samlande kittet för ungdomars svenska kulturella identitet idag. För att undersöka detta har vi genomfört en kvantitativ studie på Pauliskolan, en gymnasieskola i Malmö. Enkäten fokuserar på frågeställningar som berör den svenska efterkrigsidentiteten. Begrepp som vi har lyft fram är bl.a. den svenska neutraliteten och folkhemmet.

The way in which media discusses religion has changed over time. Due to the separation of state and church in 2000, the Swedish state to a lesser extent legitimizes its political ruling with references to religious concepts. As a result, a higher tolerance towards religious minorities can be said to have taken place. This is an ambiguous change however, where critique raised towards religious practices and expressions of minorities also occurs to a higher extent. The public debate is in large part conducted through the media, but is also seen to be produced and reproduced through the media?s discourse.

The purpose of this study was to illustrate how children of the "digital generation" used their computers in their everyday practice. The important in the study was children's perspective on computers interactions and communications in a digital arena.An essential item about understanding children's way to think about computers was to let children themselves speak by taking part in the study, because children's voices are seldom heard in public. The empirical material used was interviews with sex children between 13 and 15 years old. My method was qualitative.The main results showed that social relations are very important for children. The Internet gives children access to an arena where they are able to make new contacts with others as well as transcend their biological as their physical identity.An important accepts for the children in the study was the option to be anonymous.

The aim of this study is to analyze how individuals experience their eating disorder, the focus being if anorexia may be perceived as a secure safe zone in the new modern world. The aim is to examine if individuals affected with anorexia nervosa understand the disorder as a solution to the modern worlds changes and the new individual freedom that it entails. This will be analyzed with the help of terms in Erich Fromms theories about escape mechanisms and Catarina Kinnvalls theories about the modern worlds ontological insecurity.The study is based on data collected from four informants of different ages and gender. The interviews were conducted through email and informants were chosen based on a strategic selection and snowball sampling. For the analysis of the empirical material Fromms escape mechanisms (authoritarianism, destructiveness and automaton conformity) and Kinnvalls theories of identity in the modern world have been used.The results of the analysis show that the eating disorder has a great significance for the individual construction and maintenance of identity and that the eating disorder becomes a safe zone to retreat to in a world of performance anxiety.

Undersökningen syftade till att beskriva upplevelsen av sitt eget och andras sätt att konsumera. I relation till faktorer baserade på ?social identity theory? (Tajfel & Turner. 1979, refererat i Myers, 2007) men också egna individuella upplevelser om påverkan på det egna konsumtionssättet hos kvinnor i åldern 20-24 år. Strävan efter att uppnå en positiv social identitet och undvika en negativ social identitet upplevs påverka sättet att konsumera.

The purpose of this essay has been to describe and compare the personal qualities that the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) tried to associate Barack Obama and John McCain with during the American presidential election campaign 2008. The main question to be answered is: What social and physical characters as well as what personal experiences, interest and resources did DN tried to emphasize regarding John McCain and Barack Obama during the American presidential election campaign 2008. The theoretical starting-point has been John B Thompson?s theory of the mediated publicity and John Corner´s theory of political persona and spheres of action. Various DN news texts, in all 38 articles, have been examined by content analysis from 25th of august to the 4th of November.

Nation building is vital in post-war states to bring the people that have been at war together. To restore peace in a state, many different actors need to work together to bring stability, safety, and advancement to a new nation. There are several methods of nation building, and this thesis evolves around three of them. This is a qualitative study where three theories on nation building are used to analyze the development of nation building, and the obstacles Bosnia and Herzegovina still has to reach a national identity. Several studies are used in this thesis to show how the development has evolved in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This study deals with the concept of ?integration?. Starting from the concept of reality as socially and linguistically constructed, it is an attempt to see how lingual constructions and perceptions affect the official structures of society and vice versa. The main purpose is to compare the different meanings integration has in a sociological context and in a political one. Further, the purpose is to see how the relationship between the sociological and political concepts affects the integrational work in the Swedish County Administrative Boards, and which consequences these effects might have.

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

The aim with this essay has been to see how students use drinking-songs and what function they have. I have also wanted to see how the traditions are carried on between the students. In order to do this, I have been observing three parties organised by three different student associations at Växjö University: Västkustens nation, Föreningarnas Festeri and Isterbandet. I have interviewed five people that have been attending the dinners. I have used Alan Merriam?s theory of use/function and made interpretations of his theory.

This thesis takes as its point of departure the Swedish governmental family policy and the debate on the proposed reform ?vårdnadsbidraget?. The supporters of the reform present it as something that will increase the freedom of choice for families and benefit the children, whereas the opponents warn for decreased equality and a return to the male breadwinner-model.From a constructivist perspective, language is closely related to power through defining and ascribing meaning to reality. By applying a feminist political theory on the debate within the Swedish national parliament 2007/2008 and conducting a discourse analysis, the aim of this paper is to analyse which concepts are used and how they construct to what makes a family within the political debate ? is there any difference or similarity between the view of the opponents and the supporters of ?vårdnadsbidraget??The main conclusion of this paper is that even though the political ideal and rhetorical concepts differ between the supporters and the opponents, they still constitute the heterosexual nuclear family as an obvious norm in family politics.

The newspaper industry changes with the society. New trends and developments affect how layout and design are perceived. Therefore it is important for the survival of a news­paper to catch up with trends and retain contemporaneity. This demands that a daily paper frequently updates its appearance and sometimes even redesign the whole newspaper. Folkbladet, a newspaper in Norrköping, is currently in need of a new layout. The employees often deviate from the graphic guidelines that exist at the company today, due to that it doesn?t feel contemporary, but also because they don?t appreciate the appearance as it is today. This thesis is based on a study of the layout of Folkbladet and analyse: which tools can be used to create a distinct identity regarding layout, which tools you can use to create a clear structure and readability in a newspaper, and how Folkbladet can make use of these tools. To find out about the company?s situation today and their identity, interviews have been made with employees.

In recent years, the Internet has exploded with different kinds of social media, where a significant function is to share your life in text and images. This changes how we form our identity, our religious identity included. The aim of this paper was to study how Instagram forms a space for the creation and development of religious and spiritual beliefs. For this purpose, Instagram updates from five women with yoga oriented Instagram accounts have been analyzed in relation to two theories: Paul Heelas? och Linda Woodhead?s theory of a spiritual revolution and Heidi Campbell?s theory of networked religion.The aim of the study was to explore how these women presented themselves in their Instagram flow and what part religion and spirituality had in their presentations.

Muslims and islam are unquestionably a part of European social life. In recent times, however, different events, such as the enlargement of the EU and the fact that muslims to a higher extent demand their rights, have brought a number of questions to the fore concerning muslims and islam in Europe. Moreover, we can see an increasing level of islamophobia in contemporary Europe, but also that the EU has launched several programs to increase both the diversity and the unity throughout the Union and to combat islamophobia. However, most of these programs focus on islam as religion and muslims in general, and such a narrow viewpoint runs the risk of missing important issues.In this new context it would be interesting to widen the scope and ask what place not only the muslim community and islam, but also sharia (an important element in islam), may have in future Europe ? especially when it comes to muslim identity?My main objects are to see how the concept of sharia is constructed in the debates in the European Parliament, how that discourse relates to a social practice ? the increasing islamophobic ideas in Europe ? and what effect this may have on muslim identity in a European context.The results shows that the Parliament constructs sharia as, for example, something archaic, threatening, inhuman and misogynistic.