The main issue of this master is to investigate what influence the phenomenon of postmodernity has on the Swedish public library. Is it possible to talk about the Swedish public library as postmodern, and if so, is it expressed by a postmodern discourse? The concept of postmodernity is defined as an open and inclusive value system where all kind of opinions and preferences take place. According to a postmodern point of view there is no such thing as an objective or general truth. A postmodern ideology does not talk about reality but about realities.

This Masters thesis concerns a series of ten police procedural novels, Roman om ett brott, Novel of a crime, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. These books are among the most translated Swedish novels and have been popular among audiences and critics all over the world. The books were produced 1965 1975, a period during which a left wing movement swept over the Western world. Besides from being detective stories Novel of a crime is an analysis of contemporary society, and this thesis will focus on the social and political ideas and the criticism expressed in the books. Theories used in this study are the Sociology of Literature and the Analysis of Ideas.

Textbooks are a very influential medium considering the fact that they often introduce students to information they have never read or heard about before, and as such they become very important in forming students? opinions on different matters. In this study I have taken a closer look at five textbooks in history that are currently being used in the Swedish upper secondary school. My aim has been to find out how East Asia is pictured and also how much space East Asian history is given in these textbooks with the postcolonial theory as theoretical basis. My study shows that East Asia is given very little space compared to Europe in these books, with an average of less than a twentieth of the number of pages that deal with European history.

This master?s thesis discusses the term physical theatre from a discourse point of view. It also focuses on aspects of power from a field theory perspective. The main theory used is Pierre Bourdieu?s field theory, and I try to apply this onto critical discourse analysis, mainly taken from Michel Foucault.

This study concerns how Muslims are portrayed in a choice of twelve news articles from Swedish dailies and tabloid newspapers on the aftermath of the film Innocence of Muslims published on YouTube. All articles are distributed in the newspapers Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet in the period of September 11th, 2012 until September 30th, 2012.For this study, a qualitative text analysis has been embraced and focus has been on van Dijk?s Critical discourse analysis to the texts, with additional features from semiotics applied on the images.The theories consist of Critical discourse analysis, hegemony, ideology and power, postcolonialism and stereotyping.In the qualitative content analysis, concrete examples from the articles are retrieved and commented. These have been divided into various themes, which are trends that the authors have been able to distinguish in the analysis.The result shows that Muslims in the analyzed newspapers are portrayed as the others, unimportant and extremely religious, in a negative manner rather than a positive. Moreover the press has tendencies to generalize Muslims as a group.

          .

In this essay, I explore the history of the ideas that have shaped the profession of landscape architecture, in a Swedish context. To this purpose, I have sampled the professional debate on landscape architecture at four points in time. These are the years around 1890, 1930, 1970 and 2010. Drawing on G N Brandt (1920), I make the distinction between two arguably crucial approaches, i . e., naturalism and formalism. By identifying these perspectives, and by dividing the arguments of each time period according to this classification, I am able to compare the course of the debate over time. I take on the task through hermeneutics.

The aim of the thesis is to examine discourses about political violence categorised as ?ethnic? in academic literature and the media. Employing the method of discourse analysis, the study analyses news coverage of the wars in former Yugoslavia 1991-1995. The theory applied is based on Michel Foucault?s theory of the relationship between power and discourse in the constitution of knowledge, and the main arguments are supported by the work of the political scientist V.

The aim with this thesis was to investigate how the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet construct and reproduce imaginations of gender and gender order. An important premise for our work is the agenda theory, which states that media has great impact on what is on their audience mind. We chose to investigate how Aftonbladet wrote about two Swedish footballers, Lotta Schelin and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, during a European championship with each players national team. By using a method of critical discourse analysis based on Teun van Dijks idea and with gender glasses, we analysed eight articles and two chronicles regarding each player.Our results show that Aftonbladet construct and reproduce gender and gender order by its different ways of portraying Lotta Schelin and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Articles regarding Lotta Schelin tend to be more audience oriented, focus more on her and her teammates emotions and more often focus on things outside her profession as a footballer.

AbstractSweden is a country with good reputation when it comes to questions aboutequality. The definition of equality is not always explicit though. The aim of thisthesis is to examine what Swedish equality is and what it should be. By studyingdescriptions of equality and discrimination in the political programs of the partiesof the Swedish parliament from the sixties until today, I examine which groupsare included and excluded from the concept of equality. The analyse shows thatthe concept initially was only referring to class matters.

Youth unemployement in Sweden is at an all-time high, a fifth of all university and college students live in poverty and the number of young on welfare is increasing. This study attempts to answer the question of how youth deprivation has been made possible as a consequence of political action, focusing on youth unemployment.I critically examine the role of the Swedish government, the Swedish Labour Organisation (LO), and the various government departments through text analysis, in order to answer the question of how the current discourse on youth position in the labor market. Because youth unemployment is not an isolated phenomena the analysis covers several policy areas, such as education policy, labor market regulation and housing policy. I use discourse theories drawn from Laclau and Mouffe to expose how language is used as an instrument of political power.I conclude that the current situation is a result of policy choices where the young have fallen behind due to lack of political organization. Their situation is not problematized to the required degree and is often explained on an individual level rather than on a structural level..

The way society categorize different people into groups is problematic in the sense that the categorization can seem stigmatizing and have social consequences for those being categorized. Immigrants are one of those problematic categories.The following essay studies this categorization of ?immigrants? based on a governmental investigation of structural discrimination that took place in 2002-2008. The aim is to study the use of the category ?immigrant? and the consequences that follows such a categorization.

This study focuses on single peoples construction of their lifes in relation to normative heterosexual coupledom. It is based on five interviews made with single women and men at the age of 24 to 51 who live by themselves. The queer theory which puts the heteronormativity in question is used as a theoretical framework. Discourse psychology functions as an analytic approach. It focuses on the use of language in the construction of reality in a world of determinant discourses.

My own experiences as an upper secondary school teacher and the increase in research on masculinity in educational settings that occurred during the late 1990 emphasizing on the gender gap in achievement and grades is the point of departure for this thesis. The aim is to investigate how boys in upper secondary school are constituted and constitute themselves as motivated and achieving learning subjects. Another aim is to see what possibilities there are to form different teaching practices to create other possible positions for me and the pupils. The research questions are 1) How does boys´ construction of masculinity constitute how they see their own ability to be motivated and achieve in school 2) What significance do my shifting approaches and expectations on the pupils as well as teaching have on the boys constitution as learning subjects? To answer these questions I use a theoretical framework of feminist poststructuralist.

The aim of this study is to examine the existence of norms in three Spanish textbooks intended for upper secondary school in Sweden. One category of norms, gender norms, is selected for analysis. The focus of the analysis is on how gender norms are represented in the textbooks. The concept of gender also includes - in addition to the relation between man och woman - ethnicity, sexuality and disability. The three analysed textbooks are Caminando 3, Vistas 3 and El Sur paso 3.