In 2010 the Church of Sweden initiated a project to elaborate a new handbook for church services and church documents. This handbook draft was ready to be tested in 2012. The first Sunday of Advent 2012 the church launched an extensive trial for the draft for the new handbook; this handbook draft will now be tested in a selected variety of Swedish parishes until Judgment Sunday 2013. Upon which the Church of Sweden will evaluate and respond to the comments and reactions from the Swedish congregations in terms of the handbooks proposal. My main goal with this paper is that I?m hoping to be able to examine where the need for a new handbook for church services originates.

The purpose of the thesis is to examine the relation between art, politics and ideology in contemporary art, focusing on the drawings depicting Mohammed the prophet as a dog, made by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks. His work is contextual in accordance with current art practice, thus letting everything related to the artwork become part of it, a circumstance the thesis tries to grasp in the widest respect possible. The drawings were published and spread throughout Swedish media, where they were later defended and criticized by a number of writers. Many debaters argued that the art work represents Western freedom of speech, and that to criticize them is to criticize fundamental democratic rights. This discourse tended to disqualify all arguments that questioned why such force was put into defending and spreading offensive pictures.

AbstractBetween 1989-1996 and 2000-2003 a civil war took place in Liberia. During the war many, many people were killed or were forced to flee. Another of the war's characteristics was the high number of women being sexually abused and beaten by the soldiers. The aim of this thesis is to analyze to what degree the peacekeeping personnel in Liberia, foremost staff working for the UN and agencies related to the UN, have implemented Resolution 1325 in their work. Resolution 1325 was adopted by the members of the United Nations Security Council in year 2000 and aims to increase the efforts made to secure women's rights and security in parts of the world where war and crisis prevail.

This research shows and analyses how pupils in ninth grade in the nine-year compulsory school look at being multilingual, at the Swedish language and at Swedish as a second language. I also want to know if language and culture knowledge are taken care of in school as it says in official documents for the Swedish school and as it also is desired in an intercultural education. For my research I do eight interviews in a suburb school south of Stockholm.My work includes a limited account for the current research about being multilingual, Swedish as a second language and about the close relationship between language and culture. The applied theory is a social constructivist theory which in short can be explained like that we construct social structures that have consequences on the individual as well as on the society.I show in my research how the view of the world around the pupils influences their view on their languages, their school and their neighbourhood. I also draw conclusions from my interviews that language knowledge is little appreciated in school and that Swedish as a second language has a low status..

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the debate concerning Agnes von Krusenstjernas Fröknarna von Pahlen-novels from a ideological analytic perspective. This debate came to be called The Krusenstjerna feud Krusenstjernafejden and was most intensive in the years 1934-35 after Porten vid Johannes and Älskande par had been published. We examine 8 articles using a text analytic method. We have limited ourselves to public material that is available in Swedish press and Swedish magazines. Our ambition is, through this, to determine the articles authors political point of view and ideas of preference.

The main purpose of this study is to examine celebrity candidates in the European Parliament election in Sweden and Finland. The theoretical background assumes that candidate voting is beneficial in the election to the European Parliament. Previous research also shows that there are some opponents towards candidate voting, claiming it personalizes politics and it might lead to celebrities getting elected simply because they are well known to the voters.This study is a comparative analysis and analyzes the differences between Sweden and Finland when it comes to celebrity candidates. Furthermore, Max Weber?s theory on leadership will be used to categorize the celebrity candidates further.

The Saami, a Nordic indigenous people scattered over four countries, has for centuries been regarded as parts of the national populations of the countries in which they live. During the 19th century saami demands for greater influence resulted en several changes, among them the founding of a Swedish Saami Council in 1993. The council became a popularly elected, representative institution with an agenda of its own, but also a public authority answerable to the government. The decision to attribute the council this twofold role was unusual and, from a certain point of view, even controversial: it makes it difficult to determine the location of the power to act in saami-related issues and the legitimacy to do so.This essay is about how the twofold role came into existence, what it leads to and how the seemingly contradictive duality is managed. It has an institutional approach with theories concerning institutions and etnicity as well as institutional change and handling of complicated and ambiguous demands.

The aim of my thesis is to unveil orientalistic powerstructures in the new national curriculum for religious studies in Swedish upper secondary schools. Western imperialism and modernistic ideals has formed the Swedish perception of what constitutes as Swedish, this perception also influences the Swedish religious understanding. This understanding is imbedded in the national curriculum for religious studies which enables a western hegemony to prevail..

The purpose of this study is to analyze how university students, who are not members of a political party, experiencing existing selective and collective incentives for involvement in a political party. Furthermore, the study will highlight incentives which could help the political parties to increase their membership. The study is based on seven interviews and the respondents were selected after conducting a survey of students? political involvement. The interviews were analyzed through the theory of selective and collective incentives. The study shows that the incentives, both selective and collective, for involvement in a political party in general are weak and that the costs in terms of time, money and education are seen as too high.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how teachers in Swedish schools abroad reason about their work developing the Swedish language as the students live in a non-Swedish speaking country although going to a Swedish school. Furthermore the study intends to examine the teachers' attitudes towards the impact the Swedish language has upon the school. Research questions:What thoughts do the teachers signify in reference to the language development of the students?How do the teachers reason about the role of the Swedish language in the school?In order to answer these questions, qualitative measures has been used in terms of observations and interviews. The study is based upon a social constructivist perspective with the idea that reality is socially constructed.

Studies have found that the applicability of commercial marketing strategies within politics have increased in recent years as a result of a rising number of swing voters. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of the commercial theory of incongruent information in political marketing in Sweden. Subsequently, an experiment with 742 participants was conducted, testing the effects of congruent and incongruent ad messages for two established Swedish parties. The effect of ad message choice on several well-established measures of ad effectiveness such as awareness, credibility, attitude, conviction and voting intentions was analyzed. The results showed that incongruent information effectively increases attitude, conviction and voting intention for voters who decide on the election day what party to vote for.

The concept of the dynamic region has become a more prospering thought in the era of globalisation. This concerns in particular, cross border regions ? well-integrated territorial regions crossing more than one nation. In this paper I examine the development from a critical perspective and I map the democratic pitfalls of new territorial political constructions across national borders. The empirical analysis is a case report taken from the Öresund region, a cross border region between Sweden and Denmark.

This study focused on how local politicians in Kalmar perceive journalists and their intertwined relationship. We based our study on the theoretical understanding of today?s media-centric democratic society. The ?adversary model? offered an understanding of the intricate relations between politicians and journalists.

The present memorandum outlines the structure, theoretical starting points and disposition of a thesis about the activities of Finnish immigrants in a Swedish local community, more specifically their political integration. The intention is to study the municipality of Katrineholm in the years 1944 to 1991.Previous research about the actorship of immigrants in spheres such as politics, labour unions, immigrant associations, educational associations and mass-education, as well as churches and religion, is presented to give an overview of possible areas connected to political integration that can be studied. The overview of previous research also covers local immigrant politics.The intended theoretical starting points for the proposed thesis are political economy and hegemony. The latter is intended to be investigated through its expression in the social relations class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and generation. It is suggested in this memorandum that hegemonies and social relations within a local political economy can be operationalised fruitfully in a study of political integration.

The public libraries in Sweden has an obligation to serve all of its citizens, but despite of this they often fail to include their LGBTQ-patrons. Since the year of 2008 RFSL (the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights) have arranged a specially designed certification-process based on normcritical criterias that a chosen institution should fulfill to make their work more inclusive for LGBTQ-people. Sollentuna is the first municipal in Sweden to certificate all of their libraries. This study aims to examine what the certification have meant for the public library in Sollentuna and how a normcritical view can contribute to include LGBTQ-patrons at the library. As a method we used a qualitative interview-study to get a full picture of the certification-process and its influence on the public library of Sollentuna.