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Choose the right methodological tools to answer your research question and know how to use them with this anthology of textual analysis approaches. 

Each chapter provides not only relevant theoretical background behind each methodology, but also its advantages and challenges, its potential applications, and its relationship to studying social phenomenon. Through step-by-step worked examples of real-world data, you get an in-depth window into each method in action and learn how to apply the same techniques successfully and confidently in your own research. 

Methods include:

• Content analysis
• Narrative analysis
• Critical discourse studies
• Multimodal discourse analysis 

Following demands to regulate biomedicine in the post-war period, Sweden saw several political debates about research ethics in the 1970s. Many of the debates centered on fetal research and animal experiments. At stake were questions of moral permissibility, public transparency, and scientific freedom. However, these debates did not only reveal ethical disagreement—they also contributed to constructing new boundaries between life-forms. Taking a post-Marxist approach to discursive policy analysis, we argue that the meaning of both the “human” and the “animal” in these debates was shaped by a need to manage a legitimacy crisis for medical science. By analyzing Swedish government bills, motions, parliamentary debates, and committee memorials from the 1970s, we map out how fetal and animal research were constituted as policy problems. We place particular emphasis on the problematization of fetal and animal vulnerability. By comparing the debates, we trace out how a particular vision of the ideal life defined the human-animal distinction.

Vanliga människor är för obildade och inkompetenta för att vara med och fatta politiska beslut. Dessutom gör själva demokratin dem ännu dummare. Det menar den amerikanske statsvetaren Jason Brennan. Per-Anders Svärd har läst hans bok Efter demokratin och förutspår att den kommer att användas som testballong av nyauktoritära samhällskrafter.