The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the implications and challenges of intercultural communication. An in-depth study was performed of the perspectives from people who work within an international organization. How they experience cultural differences and how they handle them, in particular when it comes to communication. Also, their perceptions of communicative competence were explored. The study was carried out at Svalorna India Bangladesh, at the Swedish office in Lund.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the communication between exchange students and their host student trough Facebook. The study shows the importance of social cues and self-disclosure to maintain a relationship. The students? everyday use of Facebook helps them to remain connected to their social life locally and create new friendships. Cultural differences were shown in the way the students formed their expressions trough their messages to each other.

All around the world there are several armed conflicts, where rape is used as a weapon of war against the civilian population. Many take refuge from their countries of origin and may end up in Sweden, where they build a new life for themselves. What preparation is there to welcome these women and help them obtain a deeper sense of psychological well-being? The aim of this study was to reach an understanding of how professionals view the meeting between themselves and women who have been subjected to rape in times of armed conflict, as well as how the work with this group could be improved. The study had a qualitative approach and has been carried out with semi-structured interviews.

"Food security is a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life" (FAO Summit, 2003, pp. 28).Food insecurity is of concern regarding the Republic of Mauritius (ROM) since it is defined as a net food importing country. (Farming news, 2008). The impacts of climate change followed by their complexity could potentially have an increased risk effect upon the social and environmental welfare as well as the economic drivers in the ROM (www, UNESCO1, 2009). The primary victims when it comes to the impacts of climate change are the Mauritian agricultural producers since agriculture is highly dependent on climate stability, therefore affecting the yields of the producers.

This paper is about the new programming language from Microsoft, C# (See Sharp) and the .NET Framework. They are still in beta-version, but will be released on the market in February 2002. This paper presents C#, not in detail but the characteristics that distinguish the language. A comparison is done with C++ and Java, since C# is most resembling to these languages. Both C# and Java have been developed from the mother- language C++.

Body image is a term that refers to a person?s feelings and attitudes toward his or her body. There are many different factors that influence a person?s body image: historical, cultural, social, biological and individual. The purpose of this study was to investigate young Indian women?s body image in India from a cultural perspective.

To create fair conditions between the majority and minorities in a cultural diverse society poses a challenge for both the makers of government policy and the political theorist. The aim of this thesis is to examine the Swedish government official reports concerning integration and minority rights, with a special interest in values and cultural rights. As a methodological tool a theoretical model that classifies cultural rights is developed and the three normative doctrines lockean libertarianism, comprehensive liberalism and multiculturalism are distinguished from the discussion about how politics ought to be in a multicultural society. Through this perspective rights and values in the official reports are identified and analyzed. The result shows three different standpoints in the reports concerning which cultural minority group they are discussing.

This essay, with the title: Among children, laser swords and lions. ? How do we approach and utilize the cultural experiences of children? is an approach to participate in a scientific discussion in the field of cultural experiences. This text is an attempt to show the importance of paying attention to, how children express themselves, and place their activities in social and cultural contexts. By doing so and approaching children and their activities with an intercultural point of view, I can use my new found knowledge and use it to stimulate their future learning progresses in different fields.

The basic intention of this study is founded on an ambition to make change within the competing activity at ?Svenska Brukshundklubbens Halmstadavdelning? (SBK Halmstad). This is a local association for owners of working dogs, where I am one of the members. A problem in engage a larger number of voluntarily working members in the association has been established and discussed over several years. My premier aim was to make the members award of different perspectives of the problem.

This paper explores the interaction of children with language impairment (LI). The present essay is a conversation analytic study of child-child and child-therapist dyads. The aim was to explore in what ways children with LI reach common understanding. Another purpose was to investigate if there are differences in interaction between dyads with children with LI and dyads with children with LI and speech language therapist. Seven children, three girls and four boys, with LI participated in the study.

The aim of this study is to describe and analyze the history and the current situation of the Church of Sweden. The renovation of Skalljö church in Lerum municipality has been used as an example to enlighten the common changes in the church buildings. The long history of the Church of Sweden as the state church has resulted in the fact that it carries a remarkable part of the Swedish cultural heritage. The reason why the Heritage Conservation Act (1988:950) was altered in January 2000 was due to the change of relations between the State and the Church of Sweden. According to the Act, all church sites owned or managed by the Church of Sweden shall be maintained in such a way that their cultural historic value is not diminished and their appearance and character are not violated.Sweden is today considered to be a secularised country where religion is an individuals? private matter.

 In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) Saul Kripke claims that Wittgenstein argues for a certain form of scepticism in his book Philosophical Investigations (1953), namely a new form of philosophical scepticism, a result of Wittgenstein´s idea of language as language games. Nihilism, scepticism of meaning or of concept, constitutive scepticism are other commentators´ different names of the same phenomenon. The philosophy of Wittgenstein accounts for how our words, including the words of mathematics, have no meaning and there are no a priori justified objective facts as to what I mean about a word. We follow the rules blindly and without justification. We are unable to find any facts against this proposal.

Coping theory asks what the cognitive and behavioral patterns of individuals dealing with stress are. This essay includes, besides the perspective of the psychology of religion, theories of culture and ritual in exploring two Swedes coping with the natural disaster in Thailand year 2004. The vacation paradise was struck by an enormous flood wave, called a tsunami, causing vast destruction and the death of over 200.000 people. Among these 543 were Swedes on vacation. When a disaster of such measures happens, what kind of stress does it cause? How do you cope? Are religion and ritual important? What is the function of the culture in the copingprocess? Using hermeneutical analysis this essay interprets the material from two books by Swedes, who not only experienced the disaster, but lost two children and husband and wife in the flood wave.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the three main translation methods used in experimental Cross-language Information Retrieval CLIR research today, namely translation using either machine-readable dictionaries, machine translation systems or corpus-based methods. Working notes from research groups participating in the Text Retrieval Conference TREC and the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum CLEF between 1997 and 2000 have provided the main source material used to discuss the possible advantages and drawbacks that each method presents. It appears that all three approaches have their pros and cons, and because the different researchers tend to favour their own chosen method, it is not possible to establish a "winner approach" to CLIR translation by studying the working notes alone. One should remember however that the present interest in cross-language-applications of information retrieval has arisen as late as in the 1990s, and thus the research is yet in its early stages. The methods discussed in this paper may well be improved, or perhaps replaced by others in the future..

This thesis presents a study aiming to identify the selection criteria for the digitization of posters at the National Library of Sweden (Kungl. biblioteket). The theory is that cultural heritage institutions are empowered to decide how our cultural heritage is presented as they select what items (or, as in this study, posters) will be digitized. The poster is studied as it is an interesting media form which historically was an important means of communication. The poster can represent and reflect historical events and opinions in society.