Menopause is a complex, paradoxical totality and every menopausal experience is differentfrom the other. This essay aims to capture some of the experiences surrounding it.The main questions is what it is that the women of the study share about menopause, andhow they talk about it. The material consists of interviews with eight women from the ages 51to 81, all of whom are either in menopause or have come out of it, and narratives collectedpartly on my own website ?Övergången? (?Transition?) and on the Internet via blogs and adiscussion board on menopause.Using Goffmans theories on interaction and roles and theories about gender and age as asocial construction I discovered that it is ambiguous messages that are thrown at the middleaged woman in menopause. Menopause is not always a welcome part of the role as a woman.The menopause is also associated with aging and a woman is expected to experiencemenopause during a certain age and period in the life schedule, often the middle age.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka vilka historiska händelser och begrepp som är det samlande kittet för ungdomars svenska kulturella identitet idag. För att undersöka detta har vi genomfört en kvantitativ studie på Pauliskolan, en gymnasieskola i Malmö. Enkäten fokuserar på frågeställningar som berör den svenska efterkrigsidentiteten. Begrepp som vi har lyft fram är bl.a. den svenska neutraliteten och folkhemmet.

This study is based on six narrative interviews which I conducted with students at the University of Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. My aim is to find out how these students are creating their identity in the environment of the university, how they look at their family structure and how Namibia´s independence in 1990 has created new opportunities for young people in contemporary Namibia. I have been using postcolonial theory and identity theories to analyse the interviews. Five of the six respondents are from the northern parts of Namibia, Ovamboland, and this area is seen as a rural area. The students have made an emotional journey from the rural areas in the north to the urban area of Windhoek and they feel that they have many new opportunities and they are willing to change Namibia into a more developed country..

This study has been carried out as a part of the EC funded project, SMARTDOC IST-2000-28137, with the objective of developing application components that provide highly interactive visualization and collaboration functionalities. The low-level components from the graphics library AVS OpenViz 2.0 are used as the development basis. The application components can be inserted into electronic documents that allow embedded controls such as web documents or Microsoft Word or PowerPoint documents. Instead of displaying results as static images, a SMARTDOC component provides the ability to visualize data and interact with it inside the document. Although the principal goal of the SMARTDOC project is to create components in a number of different application domains this study concentrates on developing a medical imaging application component in collaboration with the project partners AETmed and professor Alan Jackson at the University of Manchester.

Syftet med uppsatsen har varit att synliggöra livsberättelsens och berättandets menings- och identitetsskapande kraft och funktion. Det är en metodologisk studie med strävan att fokusera på livsberättelse, både som fenomen och som social handling. För att göra detta har uppsatsen koncentrerats på min informants, Sveas, livshistoria.Narrativ metod, som legat till grund för studien, har varit av kvalitativ art i form av livsberättelseintervju i kombination med dialogisk-performance analysmodell med utgångspunkt i hermeneutiken.Som teoretisk referensram för arbetet ligger livsvärldbegreppet, social konstruktionism, livsberättelseperspektivet och minnets roll.En muntlig livsberättelse berättas alltid i enlighet med kulturella konventioner och i relation till olika diskurser och offentliga berättelser som dominerar det sociala och kulturella sammanhang som berättaren lever i..

The topic of this essay is how art exhibitions can be made available for - and conveyed to ? a visually impaired audience. Two visual impairment-displays and one available museum will be analyzed in this essay. They will be shown during the time period 2006 ? 2007 and focus on exhibitions in Sweden.Complex of problems that arises when art exhibitions are to be conveyed for those without eyesight is how you choose what can be conveyed and how this shall be conveyed.

An array of different retinal disorders is present as a threat in quite a number of dog breeds. These often lead to profound visual impairment or blindness. Many of the disorders are genetic, and they are, in Sweden as well as in other countries, subject to breeding programmes. The anatomy of the eye and the retina, as well as current examination techniques (ophthalmoscopy, electroretinography (ERG) and genetic analysis) are described. The more common retinal disorders encountered in dogs in Sweden are discussed: retinal dysplasia, generalized progressive retinal dystrophy, retinal pigment epithelial dystrophy, collie eye anomaly, sudden acquired retinal degeneration, retinal detachment and choroiditis. The possibly affected breeds are listed. The value of diagnostic findings is discussed and current advances on the subject in ophthalmologic research are accounted for..

Visuella vägledande element kan höja eller sänka en spelupplevelse. Därför har vi gjort en studie kring hur man kan uppnå intuitiv visuell navigation med fyra beprövade visuella vägledande element, nämligen ljussättning, färgkulör, färgmättnad samt objektplacering. Dessa element har använts för att skapa ett visuellt språk i en bana som vi har låtit ett antal respondenter spela och simultant kommentera. Resultaten har varit som väntat, att ljussättning fungerar som det starkast vägledande elementet, samt att respondenterna reagerade på, samt vägleddes av, nämnda element..

Personal assistants ' descriptions of their own professional role are usually removed for the benefit of users ' description of the profession. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the assistants perceive their profession by providing assistants a possibility to talk about their experiences of the profession. Data has been collected by twelve interviews with active working personal assistants aged 22-57 years. Assistants interviewed have different experiences and working with people with various disabilities. The method used is a qualitative method with a narrative analysis method, where the twelve interviews have been merged into four fictional stories.

This thesis is a qualitative study in which 12 award-winning printed adverts, awarded with either a Swedish ?Guldägg? or an international Clio Award, have been analyzed from a rhetorical perspective. Visual rhetorics were used to analyze the adverts in order to expose the rhetorical concepts and to find out whether the rhetorical concepts represented in the Swedish adverts are the same concepts represented in the international adverts. One of the conclusions drawn is that pathos-arguments, a rhetorical concept where the senders allude to the emotions of the receivers, are the most prominent in both Swedish and international adverts, but are used in different ways. Another conclusion drawn is that the adverts are overall characterized by their messages not being explicit.

This thesis deals with the question of how and to what degree Swedish history books for schools changed between the early 20th century and the 1960s. The theoretical foundation for this study is a perspective which treats historical accounts as narratives, bringing meaning and orientation to the present. According to this perspective, historical accounts may be divided into four different types of narratives, traditional, exemplary, critical and genetical. The basis for this division is how the narratives use the past to make the present understandable.The following conclusions are reached:That Swedish history books for schools have changed less, and in a moore gradual way than those dealing with general history. There is a growing use of genetical narratives at the expense of mainly exemplary ones.

The essay is a text centred study of ten Young Adult Novels, in which Internet plays an essential part. The structure is put into light out of used narrative techniques of how to create stories and its construction elements. I compare the ten Young Adult novels to each other. My aim is to analyze the functions of the Internet motive in the chosen novels, using different approaches, and enlighten it with concerns to the new phenomenon that Internet is in society. Consequently the essay will also have a mimetic touch to it.The ten novels that I base the analysis on are written of both med and women and have both male and female as main fictive persons, and are from different parts of the world.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. The individual who fall ill can be in an age between 40-65 years old. When dementia affects individuals at this age, many relatives take their responsibility for taking care of them at home for a long time.The aim of this study was to illustrate emotions relatives experienced when a close family member's suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The study was intended to show relatives emotions, and therefor four self-biographies were chosen to read. The method used to analyze was a narrative literature review.

The topic of our thesis is Packaging Design as a Brand Building Tool and we are presenting the Scandinavian perspective. We found the topic interesting because, from a theoretical point of view, we identified a scarcity in research focusing on packaging design as a brand management tool, and from a practical point of view, we found out that businesses use packaging design at different levels in their communication efforts. Thus we wanted to provide both academia and business world with a clear picture to what extent and how businesses use packaging design in their brand-building process. Therefore the aim of our thesis is to provide practitioners and academicians alike with a better understanding of how packaging design can be used to create strong brands in the FMCG sector in the Scandinavian market. To reach the stated aim first we provided a solid theoretical background of packaging, its elements and its role in the marketing mix.

This work is meant to show how memory can work within a smaller society when it comes to folklore and local history. What is remembered, how it is remembered and why it is remembered. Sprung from the older collections of folklore within the selected area - which is Glaskogen in western V?rmland - the purpose is to look at different types of memorizing and how it can work. The purpose is also to analyze some of the folklore from Glaskogen via narrative analyzing methods of Palmenfelt, Labov and Young, and also to understand Glaskogen from a cultural heritage perspective, looking at the valuation process and attitude towards the immaterial heritage.