The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent some Swedish bishops (1972-2014), mainly archbishops, were influenced by postmodernity as described by Lyotard in his report La Condition postmoderne (1979).This report had a tremendous impact on the western cultural and philosophical debate in general during the very end of the twentieth century. I am trying to find out if this impact could also be observed in the religious sphere and particularly in the Church of Sweden. My theory used, is mainly based on the ideas presented in La Condition postmoderne and my method is a hermeneutical reading of eight pastoral letters. These letters were written during the time that the Church of Sweden transformed from being an officially recognized national church to a free church among other free churches and in this respect ended to be a part of the official governmental power. The terms postmodernism or post-modernity were scarcely used at all in the pastoral letters but on the other hand the bishops seemed to share many of the ideas that Lyotard presented, such as the view on the metahistory/metanarrative and the connection of knowledge to power, the necessity of dialogue and openness and the importance and the role of creating and maintaining language games..

Increasing attention has been given to men?s experiences as victims of intimate partner violence in the Western world, mostly in quantitative research, within different research fields. The aim of this research paper is to explore men?sspecific experiences of intimate partner violence in heterosexual relationships in a Swedish context, through a gender perspective and with a qualitative research approach. The paper begins by briefly mentioning key findings in existing quantitative and qualitative research, focusing on Sweden.

Denna magisteruppsats i sociologi avser att beskriva och analysera genusforskningens utveckling från det politiska och det filosofiska till det vetenskapliga tänkandet. Anledningen till att denna uppsats kom att handla om genusforskningen var för att ämnet känns aktuellt både ur en privat - och samhällssynvinkel. Dessutom är ämnet genusforskningen något som blir mer och mer uppmärksammat och då genusforskningen i Sverige fyller 30 år känns det angeläget att uppmärksamma det i en uppsats och redogöra för hur viktigt det är att uppmärksamma ämnet och se på världen med genusglasögon. Den teoretiska delen avser att förklara de olika begreppen inom genusforskningen för att läsaren ska få en förförståelse. En analys kommer att genomföras hur genusforskningen har utvecklats från det politiska och filosofiska tänkandet till det vetenskapliga.

Officially, the EU gender policy since 2000 has been guided by the strategy of Gender Mainstreaming. This strategy aims to promote gender equality and is informed by a feminist ontology which stipulates that women are structurally subordinated.In this essay, I examine whether the European Commission has adequately adhered to this gender policy in its free trade negotiations with the ACP (African, Caribbean, and Pacific) countries as part of the Cotonou Agreement. As a result of my text analysis of documents related to the negotiations, opinion pieces by interested actors and policy papers of the EU, I find that the Commission does not act in accordance to its stated gender policy.To explain this discrepancy between policy intent and actions, I employ postliberal feminist theory and Robert Putnam's Two-Level Game Theory Model. By analyzing statistics and published research, I explore how gender issues are being represented politically on a domestic and international level.My findings show that a key cause of this discrepancy lies in the low levels of female participation in the political institutions of the EU and ACP; a lack of participation that is especially pronounced in the area of international economics. In explaining the constraints on female participation and the prospects of full implementation of the EU's gender policy in the international political economy, I emphasize the role of culturally and historically gendered institutions..

Sexuality has an important role in human life and there are many opinions about how to handle questions about sexuality. The attitudes have change over time and differ between different cultures, gender and age. This study deals with the question about youth attitudes to sex and personal relationships and what impact the education in this filed have on the youth. We have also studied how the education is organized. To get answers to these questions we have performed a questionnaire study among 116 students in grade seven to nine in an elementary school in Western Sweden.

This thesis deals with the characterization of Japan and Japanese people by Swedish travelers during the Meiji period. It seeks to answer what aspects of Japanese people two Swedish travelers chose to highlight, and how these aspects were presented in their travelogues. This thesis also has a second aim. By applying Edward Said?s theory of orientalism, it wants to answer if Swedish travelogues were influenced by western 19th century ideas of colonialism and imperialism.

Obesity and overweight are today classified as one of the largest epidemics in the Western world and is threaten a large part of the population. As a reaction to this a major health trend has emerged in recent decades. Every day consumers are exposed to information from the media about what is healthy or unhealthy to eat and the recommendations change frequently.There is great interest in healthy food on the Swedish food market, but still healthy foods only represents a small proportion of the total food sales. The essay examines the gap between the current and potential demand for healthy food and if it can be explained by any of the following factors: lack of information, price, taste or cognitive behavioral.To study these questions a quantitative method have been used and 213 questionnaires were collected. The intention is to draw general conclusions about the entire population.

This thesis applies a discourse theoretical approach in order to examine in whatways and with what possible meanings the library at KVINFO participates in the overall gender discourse in society. This means that our reading takes place at a metatheoretical level, focussing on the library as a constructor of meaning in relation to society's gender discourse.Besides the actual reading, the thesis argues for the fruitfulness of using both a discourse theoretical and a feministic perspective in the field of Library and Information Science. By looking at libraries in general through a lens provided by these perspectives, libraries are staged as battlegrounds for competing discourses,that attempt to promote its particular knowledge claim on how reality should be perceived.The reading shows that it is possible to perceive the library at KVINFO as amaterial articulation that takes shape by and is part in a feministic counterdiscourse against the masculinistic hegemonic discourse, which throughout ?hisstory? has positioned women as ?the other?, and established men as the normative category in society, including the libraries. Through its practise KVINFO has contributed to a change in the collective identity ascribed to women.

Music and religion are concepts, which have been continually associated with spirituality throughout the history of Western religion. Since the dawn of mankind, it has been considered that music has had a clear function about how individuals grasp their inner emotions to reach the transcendent and comprehend "Self". The aim of this thesis is to gain greater understanding as to how a group of young catechists in the Swedish Lutheran Church feel, interpret and construct their identities through popular music. An exploration as to how this specific group perceives concepts such as the Bible, church, spirituality, and religion was undertaken. The theory forming the basis of this essay is derived from a sociological perspective of postmodernism.

There is always an endeavor to govern the initial products in the plant cultivation with precision in order to keep down the expenditure and in order to decrease environmental impact. Initial phosphorus fertilizer can then be one possibility in order to keep down the fertilizer cost and to decrease environmental impact. This exam study includes a literature study about location of fertilizer and which effects this give and two field experiments. The aim with initial phosphorus fertilizer to autumn wheat is to accelerate the root growth and to give the crop a big root system before the growth stagnates before the winter. Easy to access phosphorus favours the root growth.

The purpose with this report was to compare three commonly occurring methods for measuring plant available nitrogen in soils. The methods extraction, incubation and Plant root simulator (PRS) probe - an ion exchange membrane (Western Ag Innovations, Inc., Saskatoon, Canada) method were used and comparison between these methods were conducted. A full factorial experiment were set up in northern Finland with the treatments excluding herbivores, warming and fertilization to see how the inorganic nitrogen content in the soil was effected by the treatments. Soil cores were taken and from them a subsample was incubated for 18 days and thereafter analyzed for inorganic N in laboratory. PRS- probes were in the ground for 1 month.

The purpose of this paper is to find out how a few different women with a Roma heritage sees their to succeed possibilities in Sweden.To illustrate these issues has an hermeneutical approach been used. Materials were collected through interviews with Romani women in a municipality in western Sweden. The material created during the interview sessions is based on the five interviewees' interpretations of how they look at their life and the recognition of Roma people.The interview results show that Roma women have gone through various changes linked to school, language, family, work. Young women and their parents have become more aware that education is an important capital to invest in, in order to later obtain a good job and future. When it comes to school the results show that Roma children have become better at reading but there is still some Roma children who do not attend school, even though there is their native language, Romani, in many schools.

The abscence of the brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886?1973) in the general art history is investigated, using the colonial structure as a starting point. In South America she is regarded as one of the greatest artists in modern time, in the rest of the world she is more or less unknown. The conclusion is that the colonial mechanisms are still in progress in our assumed postcolonial world, and has excluded Tarsila do Amaral, and the anthropophagic movement she was a part of, from the art history. The study points out the importance of looking into this neglected artist and the historic event.

This thesis presents an adaptive tuning system that can be described as a dynamic Just Intonation tuning system, being compatible with equally tempered instruments. The tuning system is called Hermode Tuning (HMT) and the tuning used as comparison for evaluation is the standardized western tuning, the equal tempered tuning. This study investigates preferences for these two musical tuning systems, depending on whether the tunings are presented on a piano or with woodwind instruments. A listening test was done with students at the Falun Conservatory of Music, including both a vertical listening (intervalls) and a horizontal listening (cadenses and musical compositions) of Hermode tuned musical material. Overall the results showed no significant preferences for either tuning system irrespectively of what instrument it was presented with.

The aim of this study was to investigate how preschool teachers think about preschoolscience, what they consider science to be and how they deal with specific curricular objectivesrelated to science.Science is a part of our everyday life, it is a prerequisite for understanding everydayphenomena and how the world is working. Nevertheless it is often dropped in favour of othersubjects in Swedish preschools.The eight preschool teachers participating in this study are all working in the samemunicipality in the western part of Sweden with children aged 1- 5 years. The method used inthis study was interviews. The interviews were recorded to facilitate the transcriptions.The results show that preschool teachers find that science is an important subject that shouldbe introduced to the children early on in life. They also show that preschool teachers considerscience to have a preventive effect on the learning to the children, and it is needed for them tounderstand everyday processes and phenomena.