Due to the forest industry downsizing, many communities in rural forest regions in Canada and Sweden are facing problems to survive. In order to create community sustainability, resilience and well-being in remote forest regions, the view on the forest resources has shifted towards multiple use, through the concept of sustainable forest management (SFM). Beside the economic and ecological elements of sustainability, the social forest values are needed, contributing to the human well-being, local participation, stakeholder collaboration, human rights and cultural connection. In this thesis the embodiment of the social component of SFM within Prince Albert Model Forest (Canada), and Vilhelmina Model Forest (Sweden) will be examined. Being partners and facing similar challenges as rural boreal forest regions, the two model forests are compared through analysis of projects and activities, conducted interviews and organization documents. Looking at projects mentioned as successful by the interviewees, they all have elements from the social values of SFM. The direction can be explained by the introduction of the Forest Communities Program in Canada, demanding the Model Forests to work towards community stability and resilience, the Model Forest organization concept itself and the way global focus are increasing around social forest values. In the future, it may be important that the role of the MFs enable some kind of political authorization and legitimacy in order to improve conflict solving and indigenous rights equality.

Human rights have been added to the new curriculum which came into force the 1st of July 2011 in the Swedish Upper Secondary school. The purpose with this master thesis is to compare the old and the new curriculum as part of an examination of what way they affect the Social Science education. Further the analysis focus on what is affecting discourses in the Social Science about human rights, as well as its communication and incorporation in its education. The empirical material consists of the schools steering documents and interviews with Social Science teachers. The theoretical framework is based on human rights education (HRE) and curriculum theory.

The aim of this paper is to perform a comparative study between France and Sweden analyzing the veil debate that took place in 2003 and 2004. This debate has been one of the central features of the renewed conflict between the West and Islam post 9/11, and has the presumed oppression of the Muslim veil in focus. With help of critical theory and a differentiated citizenship theory, including gender and post-colonial perspectives, I analyse the veil in a Western context in the arguments presented and the actions taken. Through that I try to distinguish the potential problems posed for the Muslim minorities living in the two countries.Three main areas are covered: the different political actions in the two countries, the consequences for this sidestep in liberal citizenship theory and in what way the view on equality splits the two parties. I conclude: that the French secularism and the Swedish equality have played key roles; the ideal of liberal citizenship is being abandoned for a more partial state; and the view of the veil as simply oppressive is part of a colonial heritage that can be challenged..

This paper presents the results of a study of dyscalculia. It is a retrospective archival study implemented with a deductive approach. On the basis of established research and theory 18 analytical categories were formulated, before a deductive thematic analysis of empirical material, consisting of journal data of 17 students investigated for dyscalculia, 14 girls (82.4%) and 3 boys (17.6%).The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the concepts formulated in research on dyscalculia and actual mathematical difficulties as those found in practice of students at school.All pupils had early and long-term difficulties with mathematics, while not showing any difficulties in other subjects. Most have had an unsatisfactory learning environment. All had normal intelligence but difficulty with certain cognitive, self-regulatory and linguistic features.

Denna studie bearbetar hur vattenbrist i tredjevärldens storstäder kan innebära en ökad osäkerhet för individer. Genom att se till en breddad betydelse av det traditionella säkerhetsbegreppet är ambitionen med uppsatsen att visa på hur vattenbrist kan analyseras som en säkerhetsfråga och därigenom också öka förståelsen för många individers ökade osäkerhet i utvecklingsvärldens storstäder. För att göra detta har jag valt att använda mig av en teoriutvecklande metod, där fokus ligger på att bidra med kompletterande förklaringsfaktorer till mänsklig osäkerhet. Som komplement till mänsklig säkerhetsteori har jag valt att också lägga fokus på tre andra teorier: miljösäkerhet, utvecklingsteori och perspektivet om mänskliga rättigheter. Genom en kombination av dessa teorier anser jag att många nya och viktiga infallsvinklar, på såväl säkerhet som vattenbrist, kan komma fram och kanske också utmana gamla idéer och föreställningar..

The aim of this essay is to create an understanding, of how teachers comprehend knowledge, grades and tests in a school context. It is important to get a grip of the different parts of the teacher?s reality. The test, the grades and knowledge are deeply connected as a part of a whole. The teachers view on knowledge can not be understood without asking about the practical parts of their work and understand how the different parts are dependent on each other.The main material consists of interviews with four teachers that work in a public mandatory school in the south suburbs of Stockholm.

Social work is a social phenomenon, existing in most societies, that has given rise to a multitude of special organizations and professions. For that reason social work is dealing with a complex identity. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how social workers and the scientific discourse interpret the concept of social work. In addition to that the study intends to show similarities and differencies. The research process containes two studies, one based on qualitative interviews with five social workers and the other consisting a surway of academic litterature.

En kvantitativ studie har gjorts för att undersöka skillnader i konfliktstil enligt Thomas och Kilmanns-Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) samt arbetskontrollokus mellan personal på olika organisationsnivåer. Det undersöktes även om det fanns skillnader mellan könen och om äldre respondenter hade högre inre arbetskontrollokus än yngre respondenter. 99 personer deltog i studien, varav 74 var tjänstemän och 24 var underställda. Respondenterna besvarade en enkät baserad på de teorier som låg till grund för studien, Thomas och Kilmanns-Conflict Mode samt Spectors teori om arbetskontrollokus. Resultatet visade att chefer var mer självhävdande i sin konfliktstil än underställda och män var mer konkurrerande i sin konfliktstil än kvinnor.

The aim of this thesis is to seek understanding to how a national identity is constructed. Five women and five men at the age of 21-37 years old have been interviewed during November 2005 and January 2006. All of them lived Oslo at the time. The informants have been divided into two groups, `Swedish immigrants` and `Norwegian immigrants`, none of the people interviewed is ethnic `Swedish` or `Norwegian`. The empirical material has been analysed with the help of Billig´s theory about banal nationalism and Laclau and Mouffe´s discourse analysis.

The topic of this thesis interest is the relation between branding as a place making/marketing technology and the process of regionalization. The main proposition advocated is that the officially communicated image of the Øresund Region, as a cohesive place and community, is a space that has been configured with branding and can be described as a territorial simulation. The concept of territorial simulation consists of two conjoined terms: simulation which aim at explaining the idiosyncratic brand image, as a social formation, which does not represent the place it imitates but commoditise it; and territorial which seeks to visualize the process of the unfolding of this image as a territory. The main argument is made in the third chapter, which traces the process of actualization of the brand image as a territory: ?Øresund?.

In august 2006 the Swedish government official report (SOU) about the structural discrimination was published and caused a lot of debate in the media. This paper is about the report as such, as much as the academic quarrel it caused in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. My aim is to explore why the report is so provocative and what the debate actually is about. I use discourse analysis both as a method and theoretical framework, inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Using this methodology I explore which discourses that are articulated.

Words like pirates and anti-pirates are becoming common features in the cultural political debate of today, and the file-sharing phenomenon has become a more and more delicate and disputed subject. The fact that people are organizing in networks to swap computerfiles with each other has, among other things, led film and music companies from all over the world to initiate a number of anti-piracy organizations, assigned to protect the right to culture and information. The industrial organization Antipiratbyrån (the Anti-pirate Bureau) and the network Piratbyrån (the Pirate Bureau) have on several occasions been used to represent the prevailing conflict in Sweden. The purpose of this study is to apply a sociological perspective to the collective act of file sharing. Additionally, the purpose is to argue that the activity can be understood as a social movement, although it is rarely referred to as such.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how social procurement can be a further development of public-private partnership. This is done with interviews and a case study of the social procurement Mitt Gröna Kvarter and its labor effort Boendebyggarna. The theoretical framework used in the thesis consists of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility. It tries to answer the following questions:What does this social procurement mean by the concept of public-private partnership?What does this social procurement mean for the participants involved?How can social procurement be seen as a further development of public-private partnership?The thesis uses the theory development around the concepts of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility and shows that social procurement does indeed have similarities to public-private partnership and could very well be a further development of it..

Syftet med denna studie var att ta reda på hur en utanförstående upplever, påverkas av, och hanterar en konflikt mellan arbetskamrater på arbetsplatsen. En kvalitativ studie med öppna intervjuer genomfördes med åtta deltagare. Data analyserades med induktiv tematisk analys. Resultatet visade att konflikter på arbetsplatsen påverkar såväl individen, arbetsgruppen som hela arbetsplatsen negativt. Den utanförstående upplever konflikter på arbetsplatsen som påfrestande och att de på flera olika sätt påverkas negativt av dem.

The aim of this essay is to illustrate a fundamental question; what is a democracy allowed to do to protect itself from enemies? I´ve chosen to analyze the conflict between the two values; individual integrity and state´s security. The individual integrity refers to every person's right to have a protected sphere, and the stat´s security refers to its right to protect itself, and these two positions are often time incompatible. This conflict of value is shown in a normative analysis, where depending on which perspective or normative logic is seen as primate, it gives different conclusions to what a democracy should do to defend itself.To demonstrate how severe the threats are against the society, I choose to examine a specific part of the organized crime, the outlaw motorcycle gangs. They have a special position in affecting the legal system because they have an explicit aim to influence the judicial system with scaremongering and threats.