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 purpose with this study is to examine how the twelve-step program is described by the author J Keith Miller (2004) in his book Steg in i livet and by the author Olle Carlsson (2012) in his book 12steg för hopplösa. The aim for the study is to highlight the twelve steps usage on people without addiction problems. In the study, the two author?s thoughts and experience of the twelve-step program is analysed and interpreted by Pargaments (1997) theory of religious coping. The research questions in this study are: 1.

Epiphany is a significant feature for a certain kind of short stories. In this essay Anna Westberg studies its importance for her short story writings in comparison to Alice Munro, one of the short story most prominent authors. The analysis is supported by a brief overview of the history of the short story and its development..

In my study, I aim to examine how the printed Swedish media depicts Jews and Judaism.How the agenda is for the depiction of Jews and Judaism and how it can be related todidactic challenges within the school subject religion. The study is based on 194 articlesfrom the Swedish newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, in July and August 2014. I use a qualitative and a quantitative text analysis where I put articles in different categories. The study?s theoretical framework is The Agenda-Setting Theory and my study leans against Bachner (2006), von Brömssen (2012) and Revell's (2010) thoughts on the media having great influence over our image of religion and religious groups.My study shows, among other things, that Jews and Judaism are mainly mentioned in the media in relation to the conflict in Israel and Palestine, World War II or anti-Semitism.

The aim in this bachelor thesis is to describe and analyze ritual performance and transference of religious traditions in some Hindu homes in Varanasi (India). In particular from the children?s perspective. The curriculum of Religious Education in the Swedish schooling system focuses on religious life, expression and practice. Thus, this thesis is about ?lived Hinduism?, ritual performance and religious practices.

Den du är, inte den du förväntas vara ? en kvalitativ studie av läroböcker i religionskunskap och dess behandling av kön, sexualitet och etnicitet (Who you are, not who you are expected to be - a qualitative studie of textbooks in religious studies and the treatment of gender, sexuality and ethnicithy) is a qualitative study with the primary focus to examine textbooks as a resource for the teacher. Focus is put on how gender, sexuality and ethnicity is portrayed in textbooks for religious studies in upper secondary school. The textbooks are also examined as a resource based on their usefulness. To do this a hermeneutic approach was taken and the textbooks were studied based on the knowledge they provided and their readability.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of how belonging and community is created in one of the aesir faith communities in Sweden. The study examines the aesir faith communities ability to develop the community members religious identity as well as their understanding of the importance of cultural heritage and how it affects the members in their practices of their aesir faith. The main argument in this study is that cultural heritage creates a sense of community that makes the members want to stay and develop their religious identity together with the other members of the aesir faith community. I have used cultural heritage, symbols and rituals, belonging, community and religious identity as concepts in order to answer my research questions. The methods used in this study are participant observation during the group's public activities, as well as interviews with the members of the aesir faith community in order to confirm the analysis I made during the participant observation.

The purpose of this study is to examine how different religious traditions are portrayed in teaching materials based on news reports. The main question concerns the way in which religious practices and holidays are described and in which contexts religion is presented. The method includes a both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The study concludes that certain religious practices are presented in a way that describes the practitioners as more faithful and homogenous than others. This was especially prominent among Muslims and to a certain extent Hindus.

This report is an attempt to clarify how religious and non-religious views-of-life [livsåskådningar] are created through the collaboration and opposition of religious and scientific elements/ideas. This with the hope of reaching a fruitful result related to the solution of world-view related conflicts, such as the ones existing between science and religion, on an individual and societal level.This is accomplished with the help of two assertions: (1) Mankind has a need to explain its existence and surroundings. (2) Religion and science has their origins in the same seed and aim to serve the same purpose, or function. Together these two assertions lay the theoretical foundations of this report which implies that all humans have an innate need of sustaining a stable world-view.The result of this report is that a final solution to world-view related conflicts are beyond reach as our mental and physical nature limits us. However there are strategies for minimizing world-view related conflicts effect on society..

In this thesis I have done a discourse analysis of the documentary movie A Jihad for Love. A Jihad for Love came out 2007 and is directed by Parvez Sharma. The documentary movie is about homosexual Muslims and their jihad, struggle, for love and to be accepted in a world where they are barely recognized as a group. My aim of the thesis was to see how the movie portrays the persons who are in the film and their relationship to Islam and who gets access to the religion. I have also analyzed if Islam can be used to strengthen the sexual identity or if it works in the opposite way.

This thesis aims to explore the representations of musicians and soundscapes on the column of Trajan in Rome. While many different parts of the column have been explored thoroughly, the musicians are not such a part. As such, this thesis aims to explore this gap in research as well as explore how the soundscapes have been represented on the column. By sorting and grouping scenes with musicians into different groups, this thesis has been able to find patterns of representation such as musicians being represented in religious scenes more often than in military scenes and the fact that there seem to be some compositional overlap between the different groups in how the musicians are represented. Grounding the thesis in a theoretical approach that uses the presumed audience and their experiences as a guide for how to represent different scenes, it is argued that part of the reason for musicians being more present in religious scenes than in military ones is because the roman audience were more aware of the actual religious soundscapes.

I wanted to focus this essay on the operative?s perspective of running religious organizations in the city of Karlstad and to see positive and negative aspects of their day-to-day life working with their organization, following up with a comparison of the difference and the similarities between those groups. After delimitating which groups I was going to examine, I implemented a qualitative study of four people, from two different religious groups, whom I performed interviews with. My method of performing these interviews and understanding the perspective of the informants, I had a semi structured interview guide along with a recent study that was opting for similar conclusions, only in a different county and with different input perspective. The result of my study showed a difference in establishment of their region but with a lot of similarities in problems with their religious and structural premises.

The previous research in the field of new religious movements has mostly focused on the spectacular parts where phenomena such as ?brainwashing? and the ?charismatic leader? have attracted both media and the scientific studies of religion. Professor Liselotte Frisks has done several enquiries about sects and new religious movements in Sweden. One of her main conclusions is that the relation between these new religious movements and the rest of society has changed; a relation that used to be characterized by conflicts and tension is now becoming more open as both parts are changing.This study does not focus on the spectacular parts. Instead I have studied something more common and general.

Faith is a phenomenon that engages the individual into emotional, social and daily manners.Religion tends to engage the individual in different levels in the daily life. In the church communion, there is a belief to the traditional and the repeteated behaviour. This shared group is strength by ceremonies and rituals and people in this collective somehow experience another type of reality. This study has a social - psychological perspective and the purpose is to study people?s know-how of faith and why they seek religion in today´s secularized society.

This is a study of Sensus Barnmusikskola ? Children?s School of Music, in Karlstad, Sweden?s attempts to facilitate integration and diversity in their operation. The Culture and Recreation Management in Karlstad town?s conditions to award the school their grant in 2009 was that Sensus Children?s school of Music should make targeted interventions in the socioeconomic exposed areas Gruvlyckan/Våxnäs and Kronoparken to increase the number of children with foreign background. This would according to the Culture and Recreation Management bring more integration and diversity in to the school?s operation.