The purpose of this master thesis is to examine different factors that may influence the librarian in the selection of popular music. The study is conducted through a qualitative method, influenced by grounded theory. The results are based on patterns drawn from both interviews with six libraries and from literature. The literature review concerns foremost cultural politics, music aesthetics, the sphere of popular music in Sweden today and the impact of commercialism. Also the purposes of popular music in a library, aspects of values of popular music and assortment policies are being discussed.

This is a case study of Carlstad Comic Con 2011 and 2012.The purpose is to study the event in relation to a project management and a local culture policy perspective. This in order to analyze the organization of a popular culture event and see how such a local event may benefit Karlstad as a city. Besides studying the organization of Carlstad Comic Con and its outcomes I am sketching a short cultural history of popular culture media and its context within recent year?s globalization.The study shows that the events have had a great beneficial impact on the local industry; lacking any negative sides, and have put Karlstad in an international context which goes directly in line with the standard guidelines for project management of region culture policy. Concerning how to organize the event the organizers have not followed a strict project structure.

The essay is about the concept of text in a wider perspective, what can be included in that, how it can be used and above all, why one might want to use it. The essay will also include what the term popular culture implies, and school?s attitude towards it, since some of the medias that are a part of the text in a wider perspective, many times fits the description ?popular culture?. Most of the earlier research show that the positive aspects of the use of text in a wider perspective as the same time as it attacks school because school is opposing the popular culture.       The essay consists of two parts and it begins with a theoretical part where I present existing research about the concept of text in a wider perspective and the research about popular culture.

The name of the study means ?The short arm - a study in diversity and arm?s length in the cultural collaboration model?. Right now there is a reform in the Swedish cultural administration where the responsibility for handing out state funds and grants to cultural organizations is changing from the state government to the local regional governments. The purpose of this study is to map the organisational changes caused by the reform and investigate how this affects the regional policies concerning cultural diversity and the arm?s length principle.

The essay is about the concept of text in a wider perspective, what can be included in that, how it can be used and above all, why one might want to use it. The essay will also include what the term popular culture implies, and school?s attitude towards it, since some of the medias that are a part of the text in a wider perspective, many times fits the description ?popular culture?. Most of the earlier research show that the positive aspects of the use of text in a wider perspective as the same time as it attacks school because school is opposing the popular culture.       The essay consists of two parts and it begins with a theoretical part where I present existing research about the concept of text in a wider perspective and the research about popular culture.

The discussion about high culture and popular culture in our society has been going on for decades. In few places is it as loud as within culture journalism and the critics? society, where the question of what is good taste and what is dumb entertainment constantly gets brought to the surface. Film is a particularly vulnerable area, since it is such a universally appealing and rather young medium. In America and England several studies have been performed of the reviewing society and reveiwers? use of high and low art-discourse in their writing.

This paper examines the concept of heritage and which factors that determines how we evaluate and select what should be considered cultural heritage. This has been examined using a qualitative study involving interviews with seven people working within different parts of the cultural heritage sector. The purpose was to get a picture of what the public sector?s cultural heritage consists of and why so. The research question was: What gives the status of cultural heritage? This was examined by looking at further questions: What defines the concept of cultural heritage? Who decides what should be considered cultural heritage? What is significant when discussing cultural heritage? One conclusion is that the concept itself is experienced as diffuse but that the meaning can be summarized as the traces we leave behind to be preserved by future generations.

I approach the subject of adult readers of young adult fiction through an analytical framework influenced by Cultural Studies, implicating that young adult fiction is caught up in a system of distinction between popular literature and high literature. I contrast this with theories that suggest that there has been a loosening of this hierarchy and that they now coexist, even borrowing features from one another. I also examine questions of ideology, namely the ideology of mass culture, the ironical attitude and the ideology of populism. I also use Andreas Huyssen?s theory of mass culture as a woman, seeing as popular literature often tends to be categorized with feminine traits.

Music and religion are concepts, which have been continually associated with spirituality throughout the history of Western religion. Since the dawn of mankind, it has been considered that music has had a clear function about how individuals grasp their inner emotions to reach the transcendent and comprehend "Self". The aim of this thesis is to gain greater understanding as to how a group of young catechists in the Swedish Lutheran Church feel, interpret and construct their identities through popular music. An exploration as to how this specific group perceives concepts such as the Bible, church, spirituality, and religion was undertaken. The theory forming the basis of this essay is derived from a sociological perspective of postmodernism.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine the use of the concept cultural heritage in Swedish governmental cultural policy. Ten official reports, reaching over a time period of seven years (1997-2004) are examined in the following way: What is cultural heritage? What functions/ values does the cultural heritage have? Whose heritage is a cultural heritage? With some simplification you can say that there are two different views on cultural heritage in the documents. The most common way to refer to cultural heritage is a category of chosen historical objects whose preservation is motivated by their function as sources of information and knowledge about the history and development of the Swedish society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how contemporary attitudes towards death andsexuality is made visible and connected in the vampire novels Interview with the Vampire andDead Until Dark. The aim is to investigate why the vampire novel has reached today?samount of popularity and if it can be explained by theories of death and sexuality in modernsociety and in popular culture.The most important theories in this examination are Zygmunt Bauman?s theories aboutmodern society, Jean Baudrillard?s thoughts about death in the postmodernity and MichelFoucault?s studies regarding sexuality in the Western societies. The conclusion presented isthat sexuality and death are well connected in the examined novels and in popular culture as awhole and death?s popularity in popular culture could be a result of repressed emotionsregarding death and sorrow, which can be helped by us working on handle death more visiblyand with higher regard..

This study examines the cultural place and status of video and computer games in the Swedish public library. Using works on popular culture and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, this study employs quantitative methods, as well as textual analysis, to analyze the results of an online questionnaire with 19 questions focusing on selection criteria, shelf placement, perceived competence, as well as reasoning for having or not having these games in the library. 286 out of the 440 libraries contacted is participating in the study, and the libraries consist exclusively of public libraries in Sweden that are found in the database of the Royal Library.The results of this study show that a larger number of libraries than previously indicated have started to provide electronic games to their patrons. At the same time, patterns in the data and comments suggests that these games in many cases still do not enjoy the same level of cultural recognition as other media. Indicative of this is the way most libraries seem to focus on the medium being exclusively for their young patrons, with seem-ingly very little in the way of investment for adults.

The aim of this study has been to analyze how society is constructed in the workbook Möte med människor från andra kulturer, a popular material within the ?cultural competency? industry. The analysis has largely been carried out from the perspective of a pedagogy against oppression as it has been outlined by Kevin Kumashiro. I have found that the material combines discursive movements, which in complex and hybrid ways deconstruct, decenter, recenter and reproduce stereotypes and norms, through its normative language and pedagogy. A language constructing culture as cleanly demarcated, static and homogenous.

This thesis aims to develop a theory in the under researched field of international comparative cultural policy studies. lt does so by combining theories from the fields of political scienceand cultural studies, researching how and to what extent the concepts of culture of different states have an impact on the way cultural policies are constructed.The thesis uses this theoretical development in order to research a specific problem, namely the perceived possibility that Swedish and German cultural structures are slowly converging. Two recent official policy documents from each country are the objects of study. Through comparative idea analysis and with Michiel S. D Vries theories on decentralization, the thesis explains the convergence between the countries by differing cultural views between them.

This paper examines a popular music song (Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez) as a sign system in television advertising. The study was conducted through qualitative questionnaires in connection to an audio-visual method of analysis called Masking. The method facilitates the analysis of isolated parts in the audio-visual spectrum by masking/hiding parts of the audio-visual totality.The survey had seven respondents where a hermeneutic epistemological approach was used. For the analysis Cooper's theory of brand identity (Practical and Symbolic Attitudes to Buying Brands) was used together with an interaction model for music in audio-visual advertising called "Modes of music-image interaction?.