To Örebro University

Denna uppsats handlar om den skeva könsfördelningen bland ungdomar i åldern 20-24 år i Sverige.

Fokus som kommer framförallt att ligga på ett kommunalt perspektiv men också efter SKL:s kommungruppsindelning. Syftet är dels att undersöka hur själva könsfördelningen ser ut runt om i landet, men också genom att undersöka vad konsekvenserna kan bli för Sverige på en kommunal såväl som en nationell nivå. Nedslag kommer att göras i två kommuner i olika delar av landet. Båda kommunerna har en väldigt stor snedfördelning mellan könen i ålderskategorin 20-24 år. Frågeställningarna som uppsatsen utgår från är: – I vilka typer av kommuner finns det en obalans mellan män och kvinnor i åldern 20-24 år? – Vilka konsekvenser skapar en skev könsfördelning för Sverige på såväl nationell som kommunal nivå? – Hur arbetas det förebyggande för att minska den skeva könsfördelningen på kommunal nivå? – Hur kommer det sig att vissa kommuner har en större könsobalans är andras? Hur kan detta motverkas? I uppsatsen kommer både kvalitativ och kvantitativ metod att användas. Den kvalitativa delen utgörs av två intervjuer och den kvantitativa delen utgörs av offentlig statistik som presenteras med hjälp av kartor och tabeller.

De huvudsakliga slutsatserna som arbetet kommer fram till att anledningen till att vi på ett nationellt perspektiv gått från ett kvinnoöverskott till ett mansöverskott framförallt har orsakas av att dagens män lever allt längre i kombination med att det föds fler män än kvinnor. Den kommunala snedfördelningen är framförallt orsakad av flyttningar där kvinnor i lite högre utsträckning än männen väljer att lämna hemkommunen för storstäder respektive studentstäder. Orsaken grundas bland annat i att kvinnor i högre utsträckning påbörjar högskolestudier än vad män gör. De kommungrupperna med skevast könsfördelning, från högst till lägst är "varuproducerande kommuner, "glesbygdskommuner" och slutligen "pendlingskommuner". De kommungrupper med jämnast könsfördelning är "större städer" följt av "storstäder". De konsekvenser som kan uppkomma ur ett nationellt perspektiv är bland annat samhällsklimatet blir hårdare. En större andel bittra män som upplever sig som ratade av både samhället och av kvinnor löper ökad risk för att utveckla kriminellt beteende och extremism. Svårigheterna med att hitta en partner leder till att vi får barn allt senare. Ur ett kommunalt perspektiv är den minskande andelen ung och arbetsför befolkning de största problemen. Många mindre kommuner har en högre andel äldre vars vårdbehov ökar. Kommuner med en hög andel män utvecklar lätt ett väldigt patriarkal samhällsklimat vilket både skrämmer bort unga kvinnor men också har en negativ effekt på männens hälsa. För att undvika ovanstående problem behövs det bland annat att det arbetas mer aktivt med jämställdhetsfrågor ute bland mindre orter. Det måste även bli mer attraktivt att stanna kvar i småkommunerna och arbetsgivare måste visa att det finns andra yrken än bara inom industrin och vården. Ur ett nationellt perspektiv måste det satsas på att höja mäns betyg i skolan.

This essay examines the communication strategies employed by Jacinda Ardern and Erna Solberg during the Covid 19 crisis, with a focus on how they exhibit feminine leadership at- tribute s that show empathetic and interpersonal skills . W e find that both Ardern and Solberg demonstrated similarities in language and visual elements from their Facebook posts during the selected period 21 03 2020 to18 06 2021 to communicate their main messages. They em- phasize interpersonal communication to establish and maintain relationships by expressing gratitude towards their respective populations. By categorizing the behaviours observed in Ardern and Solberg’s communication, specifically the pract ices of preserving, mutual em- powerment, and team creation as described by Fletcher (1999), skills such as empathy, caring and cooperation were identified . This essay's results indicate that feminine leadership utes, as exemplified by Ardern and Solbe rg, prove effective in crisis management, particu- larly in addressing concerns, fostering empathy, and promoting collective responsibility.

Do external factors, such as war, affect rhetoric used by presidents during speeches, and do they affect what journalists write about said speeches? These are questions raised and answered in this paper. The research material consists of three speeches by Vladimir Putin, three speeches by Volodymyr Zelenskyj, and seven articles discussing these speeches during Russia's invasion of Ukraine 2022. We also analyze factors within Social identity theory (Dashtipour, 2012), such as how the creation of an identity is portrayed in both speeches and articles. Summatively, we found that both analyses deemed different external factors to be influencing, and both results confirmed that external factors contribute to change.

The purpose of this study is to examine how three volunteer organizations present volunteer projects on their websites to identify who is constructed as central in the description of the project and which role is created for the reader. This study uses Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Post-colonial theory as a theoretical framework to analyze visual and textual elements from three project descriptions. The findings indicate that the project descriptions of two of the organizations highlight the volunteer worker, while at the same time using a tourism discourse in creating the reader’s role. The findings also show that the third organization highlights the beneficiaries of the volunteer work, while creating the reader role of a friend. Additionally, the findings indicate the existence of underlying collective beliefs that can be connected to post-colonial structures in two of the project descriptions but not in the third. The conclusion is that who is highlighted, and the role created for the reader, differ between the three organizations. Two of the organizations focus more on the volunteer worker, and this coincides with the occurrence of Othering. The third organization focus more on the beneficiaries, with no occurrence of Othering.

Background: International studies of the health of Indigenous and tribal peoples provide important public health insights. Reliable data are required for the development of policy and health services. Previous studies document poorer outcomes for Indigenous peoples compared with benchmark populations, but have been restricted in their coverage of countries or the range of health indicators. Our objective is to describe the health and social status of Indigenous and tribal peoples relative to benchmark populations from a sample of countries.

Methods: Collaborators with expertise in Indigenous health data systems were identified for each country. Data were obtained for population, life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, low and high birthweight, maternal mortality, nutritional status, educational attainment, and economic status. Data sources consisted of governmental data, data from non-governmental organisations such as UNICEF, and other research. Absolute and relative differences were calculated.

Findings: Our data (23 countries, 28 populations) provide evidence of poorer health and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples than for non-Indigenous populations. However, this is not uniformly the case, and the size of the rate difference varies. We document poorer outcomes for Indigenous populations for: life expectancy at birth for 16 of 18 populations with a difference greater than 1 year in 15 populations; infant mortality rate for 18 of 19 populations with a rate difference greater than one per 1000 livebirths in 16 populations; maternal mortality in ten populations; low birthweight with the rate difference greater than 2% in three populations; high birthweight with the rate difference greater than 2% in one population; child malnutrition for ten of 16 populations with a difference greater than 10% in five populations; child obesity for eight of 12 populations with a difference greater than 5% in four populations; adult obesity for seven of 13 populations with a difference greater than 10% in four populations; educational attainment for 26 of 27 populations with a difference greater than 1% in 24 populations; and economic status for 15 of 18 populations with a difference greater than 1% in 14 populations.

Interpretation: We systematically collated data across a broader sample of countries and indicators than done in previous studies. Taking into account the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we recommend that national governments develop targeted policy responses to Indigenous health, improving access to health services, and Indigenous data within national surveillance systems.

Uppsatsen innefattar en analys av reklamfilmer från företagen Garnier, Head and Shouldersoch Philips. En reklamfilm från varje företag analyseras genom att studera vilka retoriskamoment och semiotiska resurser som används för att göra en jämförelse möjlig. Syftet är attur ett genusperspektiv studera hur reklamfilmer riktas mot män respektive kvinnor, samt attställa dessa mot reklamfilmer som inte är riktade mot ett specifikt genus. Syftet är även attbidra till yrkesprofessionen för svensklärare, då en liknande analys kan leda till retorikgrunderoch därför skulle kunna vara en del av svenskundervisningen på gymnasiet. Uppsatsen utgårfrån teorierna diskurs och genus och är möjlig genom metoden multimodal kritiskdiskursanalys med genusinriktning. Resultatet visar att alla tre företag använder sig avflertalet retoriska metoder och semiotiska resurser för att kunna påverka den tänktamålgruppen. Garnier, vars reklamfilm representerar en kvinnlig målgrupp, fokuserar på eninformativ reklamfilm där utseende står i fokus. Head and Shoulders, vars reklamfilmrepresenterar en manlig målgrupp, fokuserar på framgång och ledarskap och innefattas avliten del av produktinformationen. Philips, vars reklamfilm representerar den genusneutralamålgruppen, fokuserar på informativ reklamfilm i kombination av framgång och kan därförses som en reklamfilm som riktas till både män och kvinnor.

This article argues that the American TV-series The Wire poses complicated political and ideological questions rather than attempting to deliver clear-cut answers or solutions to the problems represented. The Wire is analysed both as an aesthetic phenomenon (narratological and thematic analysis) and as a representation of societal elements (which demands analysis based on sociological, historical and criminological perspectives). After a brief overview of the series, the authors aim to generalise the results of the analysis of a particular part of the five-season series, namely the “Hamsterdam-episode”.

The following essay is based on an anonymous organization. We are calling the organization Company X. Our main goal is to emphasize Company X internal communication with a focus on the company's values. We have chosen to start from the company's values and brand, as this should set the tone for their internal communication and brand strategy. The analyzes are based on Company X's employee magazine which consists of informational texts. The method is based on the rhetorical situation and social identity theory. We have chosen to analyze from a top-down perspective within the company. The analysis is divided in two parts, 7.1 is written by Sanna and 7.2 is written by Michaela. The result shows that Company X has varied success in communicating their values. Our result shows that Company X personal magazine as an internal communication channel could be more effective if they did a rhetorical situation analysis. The discussion includes a result from interviews we conducted to investigate whether our analysis is consistent or not and how our study is complemented by previous research.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att skapa en djupare förståelse för hur olika modelläsare konstrueras i externkommunicerande texter från Försäkringskassan ur ett diakront perspektiv. Modelläsaren är en prototypisk läsare som är inbyggd i texter och besitter en viss social identitet. Studien har undersökt både förändringar och likheter i läsarens identitet mellan Försäkringskassans informationsbroschyrer publicerade mellan 1969 och 1980, samt den modelläsare som framträder på Försäkringskassans sociala mediekonto "forsakringskassan.se" idag. Genom att analysera ämnena föräldra- och sjukförsäkring undersökte studien hur modelläsarens identitet har utvecklats över tid och därmed erbjudit medborgararna olika identiteter. Med vetskapen om att texter alltid är multimodala tar studien avstamp i socialsemiotiken som studerar hur skriftspråkliga och visuella resurser samverkar och används för att skapa mening. För att identifiera textens modelläsare och relationen mellan avsändaren och läsaren använder studien sig av analysverktyg från den interpersonella metafunktionen inklusive språkhandlingar, bildhandlingar och modalitet samt distans och formalitetsgrad. Resultaten visade på både likheter och skillnader mellan modelläsare som konstrueras över tid, främst observerades skillnader i materialet från sjukförsäkring. Modelläsarens roll övergår från den formella och auktoritärt styrda till den sociala modelläsaren som utvecklats till att aktivt identifiera sig med “Du” i relation till Försäkringskassan. Modelläsaren i sjukförsäkringen går från att vara en orolig person som gärna har en översikt på kostnader, till att vara förebyggande i sitt mående. Modelläsaren i föräldraförsäkringen har en mer konsekvent visuell framställning som en föräldraledig pappa, medan den skriftliga framställningen emellertid visar en förändring från frånvarande förälder med begränsad kunskap till en aktiv och närvarande förälder som har utvecklat sin förståelse över tid.

This study shows how the female body can be used as a rhetorical means of persuasion in visual settings. The analysis is conducted using Instagram posts by ANI Jewels over a period of six months. ANI Jewels is a jewelry company founded by Bianca Ingrosso and Lovisa Worge. Influencers create a virtual world of enticing products and aesthetic ideals, functioning as digital storefront windows. By using visual rhetoric in this digital advertisement, individuals are encouraged to consume and normalize a certain body ideal in a complex way. A communication strategy of this visual rhetoric is the use of the human female body as a powerful means of persuasion. The conclusion of this thesis emphasizes the importance of being aware of rhetorical influences. By understanding how these influences operate, one can avoid falling victim to such marketing strategies and help prevent the stereotypical portrayal and objectification of women.

Studies regarding memes have long been a subject of interest for academics. However, the emphasis has mainly been on the cultural evolution of memes and not on attempting to describe what characterizes the genre. Our study introduces four different companies, all of which incorporate the use of memes on some level in their marketing strategy on the social media platform X. By analyzing their language use and the implicit message in their posts and by identifying the type of exigence that their posts belong to, we then cross-reference our findings with Aaker’s brand personality model. Through the lens of Aaker’s brand personality model we attempt to uncover shared personality attributes that play a part in the social actions that make up this genre. The most prominent brand personalities were shown to be excitement, competence and ruggedness. We find that companies within this meme genre inhabit a high amount of cultural capital due to their understanding of meme culture and the appropriate usage of memes. We also find that they rely heavily on the usage of different types of irony and often apply a somewhat aggressive, although still humoristic communication style toward their competitors as well as their followers.

Stockholm är Sveriges största stad och marknadsför sig som ”The Capital of Scandinavia”. De flesta resenärer som besöker Sverige åker till just Stockholm. År 2010 nådde Stockholms län 10 miljoner kommersiella övernattningar. Det är lätt att ta sig till Stockholm med både flyg, tåg, båt, bil och buss. Stockholm har ett brett utbud av kongress- och mässanläggningar. År 2009 var Stockholm den sjunde mest populära staden i världen att förlägga kongresser på. I dagsläget är Sverige på väg ur den lågkonjunktur som startade år 2008. Sveriges BNP och valuta är på väg att stabiliseras och stärkas. Regeringen har även lagt in ett förslag om att sänka tjänstemomsen inom hotell- och restaurangbranschen. I denna rapport har vi valt att avgränsa oss till ett eget utvalt område inom Stockholm. Detta område innefattar 143 hotell med 20 054 hotellrum.De prognoser vi gjort gällande staden Stockholm och segmenten affärsresenärer och fritidsresenärer pekar på en ökning av besökare till staden. Detta kommer resultera i att hotellens beläggning, snittpris och RevPAR kommer att öka framtill år 2013. Efter år 2013 tror vi att segmentet affärsresenärer kommer att minska något procentuellt och kurvan för belagda nätter kommer att stabiliseras. Dock tror vi att segmentet fritidsresenärer kommer att öka procentuellt efter år 2013 och antalet belagda hotellrum kommer att successivt öka mellan åren 2011 – 2015. Vi tror att snittpris och RevPAR kommer att sjunka på grund av att en fritidsresenär generellt sätt inte betalar lika mycket för ett hotellrum som en affärsresenär gör.

Uppsatsen undersöker hur en religiös föreställningsvärld framställs och vill övertyga i den moderna berättelsen Ödehuset av William Paul Young. Detta kontrasteras mot en klassisk berättelse från 1678, Kristens resa av John Bunyan. Analysen utgår från ett narrativt perspektiv där handling, karaktärer och miljö är viktigaste begrepp för att ge metaforerna kontext. I narrativet finns peripetier – vändpunkter – som utgör undervisningen om föreställningsvärlden. Metaforerna kring dessa analyseras utifrån en trestegsmetod som innehåller sortering, generell och kontextuell analys. Metaforerna analyseras också med hjälp av metaforteori om riktningar, jämförelse med objekt, och kulturell prioritering. Resultatet visar en förskjutning i det metaforiska språket som betonar miljön, ”kvinnliga” uttryckssätt, och individualism. Metaforerna kategoriseras i natur och riktning och vill anknyta till det jordnära och till ett positivt växande som har med kärlek och inre mognad att göra. Till skillnad från det äldre metaforspråket är de inte heller så explicit knutna till Bibeln.

Den här uppsatsen handlar om mötet mellan regional utveckling och Ställbergs gruva, en postindustriell plats som idag fått en ny funktion i form av ett konstcenter.  Gruvan ligger i Ställberg i Ljusnarsbergs kommun, en kommun som sedan 1970-talet har en kraftigt minskande befolkning. Idag ägs gruvområdet av konstgruppen The non existent Center vars verksamhet vid gruvan sedan 2017 till stor del finansieras genom att de är med i en modell för finansiering av regionala kulturaktörer och institutioner; kultur- samverkansmodellen. Syftet med uppsatsen är att förstå vad verksamheten i gruvan innebär och vilka idéer om regional utveckling som aktualiseras  genom deras  medverkan i samverkansmodellen.  Detta sätts i perspektiv med hur den regionalpolitiska diskursen präglas av tanken om konkurrens och tillväxt. Uppsatsen är upplagd som en kvalitativ fallstudie där det huvudsakliga empiriska materialet består av intervjuer   med   representanter   från   fyra   geografiska   och   samhälleliga   nivåer;   konstgruppen, lokalsamhället, kommunen och regionen. Regional utveckling i teori och praktik tillsammans med hur kultur  ses  som  en  utvecklingsfaktor  för  regional  utveckling  utgör  studiens  huvudsakliga  teoretiska ramverk. Andra viktiga teorier är den om socialt kapital och teorin om släta och räfflade rum.Studien visar att gruppens arbete vid Ställbergs gruva har ett bredare fokus än att enbart fungera som en konstscen,  gruppen kan även beskrivas som en social rörelse där  de strävar  efter att  ifrågasätta och utmana normer och värderingar i samhället. I mötet med regional utveckling uppstår vissa svårigheter då regionen och konstgruppen har en del olika viljor och uppfattningar om vad det regionala arbetet för konstgruppen ska innebära. Konsten som en utmanande samhällskraft både uppmuntras och i praktiken begränsas  från  kulturpolitiskt  håll.  Konstgruppen  vill  även  vara  en  plattform  och  mötesplats  för lokalsamhällets  invånare  vilket  främst  aktualiserar  idén  om  socialt  kapital som  viktig  grogrund  för utveckling och tillväxt, enligt idéer om regional utveckling. Svårigheter som kan möta gruppen i strävan efter att vara en lokal mötesplats är att några av de intervjuade ger uttryck för att många i samhället inte förstår vad verksamheten vid  Ställbergs  gruva innebär och inte  heller  har  något intresse av att veta. Utifrån den konkurrensfokuserade regionala utvecklingsdiskursen kan konstateras att diskursen även är synlig i den mer välfärdsinriktade kulturpolitiken då medel ej satsas på Ställbergs gruva för att stärka en av regionens ”svagare” platser utan för vad verksamheten kan bidra med för regionen som helhet.

Okorafor’s term Africanfuturism has been picked up by many in the speculative fiction communities and discussions about the term have often focused on what it has to say about the limits and possibilities of Afrofuturism as a category or social movement. In this paper, I instead center the animist tradition which is part of the “African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view” in which “Africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted” (Africanfuturism Defined | Nnedi's Wahala Zone Blog). I do so through Harry Garuba’s argument in “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society” that a “re-enchantment” is occurring in African cultures where “the rational and scientific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical” (267). This process “subverts the authority of Western science by reinscribing the authority of magic within the interstices of the rational/secular/modern” (271). Given how traditional histories of science fiction carve out a specific science fiction identity through inextricably linking the genre with this “Western science,” an Africanfuturism that draws on animist traditions, I argue, does more than simply incorporate fantasy elements. Rather, as I will explore in my readings, it challenges us to rethink the relation between the rational and the magical, between science and myth. In this way, it asks us to again rethink the stories we tell about progress and modernity, especially as these continue to underpin science fiction as a genre. A focus on animist logics also provides alternative ways of framing materialism that resonate with current theories in posthumanism and feminist materialism, but which cannot be subsumed by them. In this way, too, Okorafor’s work challenges Western genealogies of rational thought. My reading will focus on the Binti trilogy, but also engage with The Book of Phoenix and Remote Control. 

Works cited

Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.” Public Culture, vol.15, no. 2, 2003, pp.261-285.

This article explores the ways in which reproductive technology is used as a literary trope to enable or embody adesired social order in a utopian setting. It discusses Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995), Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). In these American classics of feminist science fiction, reproduction is a key element, and they are rooted in a feminist understanding of power that sees the organization of both reproductive and child-care labor as central to analyses of patriarchy, as well as to any attempts to re-imagine patriarchal structures. The analysis draws on critical kinship studies that see the forming of kinship and families as a form of “cultural technology” and which thus opens these relationships to critical examination. It explores how the kind of change reproductive technologies can effect is not a property simply inherent in the technologiesthemselves. Rather, these medical technologies intersect with and become part of pre-existing cultural technologies of family and gender. Finally, the article addresses the question of how feminist futurities or feminist conceptions of time can be mobilized to enable resistance and change.

Taking as starting points the two ideas that “kin-making is making persons” (Haraway 161) and “kin is an assembling sort of word” (162), this paper explores how transspecies kin-making can be understood specifically in terms of the connection between making and sustaining kin and making and sustaining worlds. Taking transspecies kinning to include a broad spectrum of more-than-human life, what kinds of assemblages can enable sustainable worlds? Moreover, rethinking kin-making entails rethinking world-making in ways that are amenable to new kinds of assemblages. Here, Levi R. Bryant’s “hominid ecologies” can function as a space for conceptualizing alternatives to anthropocentric kinship constructions predicated on human singularity and mastery. To help formulate what the assembling of kin in these ecologies could involve, I draw on Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality. If bodies are not only micro-ecologies in themselves but also always involved in complex biological and material exchanges with human and more-than-human life, then reconfiguring kinship necessarily involves rethinking the role of biological matter. 

These ideas are explored in relation to two novels by Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean and Daughter of Elysium, set in a distant future and in a distant part of the universe, in a reality brought about through an Earth-centered apocalypse. This future includes over-population, terra-forming and colonization processes as well as struggles for the rights of both human, non-human animals and artificial intelligences. The two novels construct rich forms of relatedness and create worlds in which kin and kin-making are continuously negotiated.  Moreover, readings of these texts can help us be attentive to the limits of the assemblages we manage to put together and the kinds of persons we can create through kinning processes. This paper thus argues for the necessity of rethinking kin-making and points to the possibilities involved in radically doing so, while also recognizing and engaging with the limits of such theoretical and imaginative moves. 

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010. 

Bryant, Levi R. “Hominid Ecologies.” Blog entry on larvalsubjects.wordpress.org. Hominid Ecology | Larval Subjects . (wordpress.com). Posted May 10, 2012. Accessed September 22, 2022.   

Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” in Environmental Humanities, vol 6, 2015, pp. 159-165. 

That single women protagonists in Hollywood movies spend much of their time “finding a man” to marry and have a family with is a phenomenon as old as, well, Hollywood. As Michele Schreiber has shown in American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture, the heterosexual romance remains a powerful narrative, even as Hollywood productions attempt to stay attuned to social change. In line with this, the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries have seen new variations on the heterosexual romance, variations connected to the increasing availability of assisted reproductive  technologies (ARTs) such as donor insemination and IVF and the possibilities these open up for new ways of making families. Quite simply, ARTs offer the makers of these movies an array of possible new plot twists and complications.

This paper will explore ways in which the employment of reproductive technologies as plot elements activate and engage with current cultural discourses on family. It will do so through an analysis of two romantic comedies, The Back-Up Plan and The Switch, both from 2010 and both featuring single women who use insemination to become pregnant. The specific focus is on ideas of family as naturally and necessarily predicated on romantic love, a construction of family that, as Stephanie Coontz notes in The Way We Never Were, is a highly historically and socially contingent construction.  It is also presently a culturally and socially powerful one, and thus particularly worth exploring in the relatively new context of assisted reproductive technologies. As will be shown, while these movies to some extent play with traditional notions of family, the need to reconcile romantic love and motherhood is central to both narratives. Consequently, single motherhood, despite its planned and voluntary character, comes across as a state to overcome rather than a valid form of family life.

Works cited

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. BasicBooks, 1992.

Schreiber, Michelle. American Postfeminist Cinema: Women Romance and Contemporary Culture. Edinburgh UP, 2014.

This chapter examines two romantic comedies, The Back-Up Plan and The Switch, both from 2010 and both featuring single women who use insemination to become pregnant. While the traditional heterosexual romance remains a powerful Hollywood narrative, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen new variations on this tale, connected to the increasing availability of assisted reproductive technologies. The analysis explores how the employment of reproductive technologies as plot elements activate and engage with current cultural discourses on family, focusing specifically on the historically and socially contingent conception of family as naturally and necessarily predicated on romantic love. Single motherhood, despite its planned and voluntary character, comes across as a state to overcome rather than a valid form of family life.

In many Swedish English departments today, the majority of our students study English as part of teacher education. This context is often discussed as a problem, characterized by lack of time to develop subject knowledge, competing demands of subject and pedagogical content, and sometimes also connected to a lack in intellectual engagement on the part of our students. In this presentation, I will instead focus on the ways in which teacher education can create a context that makes aspect of teaching American culture particularly rewarding, through the framing of certain issues as central to the democratic mission of the Swedish school. The presentation will explore these possibilities through a course module called “In/Equality in American Culture and Society” that is offered as part of students’ third term of English and seventh term in the program for upper secondary school teachers at Örebro University. I will both address methods developed to teach from the microcosm (a term coined by Elaine Showalter) of nonfiction texts to address larger and historically complex ideas and developments, and the role of inter- or transcultural language teaching as a productive way of integrating pedagogical content in a way that positively affects students’ way of relating to the American studies content of the course. The presentation will also highlight the challenges that remain, mainly those related to selection of materials.

The family has been a contested site throughout American history. More or less constantly perceived to be in crisis, in need of defending or in need of redefining, the family has been portrayed both, and often simultaneously, as the origin of the strength of the nation and the source of the threat to the survival of that same nation (see eg Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World). The family figures primarily as an ideal space, a blank canvas on which hopes and fears are projected.

In contemporary American discourse, these hopes and fears are increasingly entangled with or informed by reproductive technology. While abortion dominates political or public debates on gender issues in the US, there is no doubt that other forms of reproductive technology such as surrogacy, in vitro fertilization and sperm donation are increasingly becoming part of the gender debate, where women’s bodies are arenas for contesting the meaning of family, kinship in a wider sense, and the intersection between nature and technology. 

This paper explores the ways in which narratives of reproductive technologies are inflected by the categories of race, gender and sexuality and made to interplay with powerful narratives of family in two movies, the 1993 Made in America and the 2010 The Kids are all right. While reproductive technology is often discussed as disruptive to traditional discourses on family, I argue that although the movies encourage critical perspectives the narrative of family becomes the dominant one and that, in the end, not only familial, but also national cohesion and stability is re-affirmed.

In the tv-series Raised by Wolves (HBO, 2020-2022) and the feature film I am Mother (2019), androids take on parental roles towards human children. This activates gendered discourses, simultaneously drawing on and challenging cultural conceptualizations of male and female parenting. The analysis investigates two aspects of the characters’ construction and understanding of their parental roles. First, parenting as an embodied activity is analyzed in relation to physical processes intimately connected with discourses of motherhood such as gestation and lactation, and to caregiving, nurturing and disciplining activities, exploring the shift between care and control, and the notion of the AI parenting body as a potential threat. Second, the purpose of parenting as perceived by the characters is examined. Drawing on an understanding of reproduction and parenting as a form of futurity where children are posited as the future of both the individual parent and humanity, as explored and critiqued by Edelman, the analysis will show that the narratives simultaneously build on and undermine such an understanding. The latter is identified as the result of transspecies parenting where narcissistic projections of self onto offspring are necessarily challenged. In this context, the discussion also pays attention to how gender inflects constructions of the purpose of parenting, exploring the complex positionings of Father and Mother in Raised by Wolves and the effect of the lack of a character functioning as a father in I am Mother. Ultimately, we ask the question – what would successful android parenting of human entail and whose future is secured? 

This particular study is part of a larger research project on ‘Discursive Representations of the Roma in European Media’. It focuses on the discursive representations of the Roma community in two influential Romanian newspapers, which are available both inprint and online. Drawing on a critical perspective, I intend to reveal the global forms of representation of this ethnic group and other social actors in two well-known daily broadsheets which are believed to be the leading newspapers on the Romanian market. The study includes the analysis of the most frequent themes in which Roma are portrayed explicitly or implicitly, along with the semantic macrostructure of the selected news reports published within a four-year period (2011-2014). Employing a variety of approaches under the repertoire of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper illustrates how Romanian newspapers build the discourse surrounding the Roma minority, especially in the post European Union accession context. First, I argue that Romanianmedia coverage of Roma issues is influenced or tries to imitate western media, especially British and French press; the construct of reverse discourse is used to legitimize or delegitimize controversial actions in which Roma/Romanians make headlines in the international news. It is also my query that political affiliation and sympathy of the selected newspapers do not influence the talk about Roma to a large extent. Secondly, in the context of European integration, the institutionalized discourse of recognition is based on a politics of universalism, where integration equals assimilation, abandonment of cultural identities, and the realization of a homogenous society

This thesis explores how verbal and nonverbal signs communicate attitudes and the rhetorical functions of such attitudinal signs. Attitudes are regarded as rationalized evaluations of attitudinal objects, and through their manifestation in signs an attitudinal gestalt is communicated. This gestalt is regarded as the audiences perception of the rhetors attitude. It is shown that the attitudinal signs function as ethical, logical and pathetic proofs and that they can create identification between the audience and the rhetor. The signs can have effects on the audiences perception of the attitudinal objects, their perception of the rhetor and influence the social dynamic of the discourse. A three-step method of rhetorical criticism is proposed, where the rhetors display of attitudinal signs is analyzed according to form & meaning, the attitudinal gestalts they convey, and the rhetorical effects they have.

Denna uppsats avser att analysera bokomslagens retoriska argumentation. Genom att studera vilka argument som förekommer på omslagen, är arbetets syfte att undersöka hur en potentiell läsare lockas till att köpa just den boken. Totalt tolv titlar, sex från Albert Bonniers förlag och sex från Norstedts, utgör analysmaterialet. Detta analyseras med hjälp av en hermeneutisk retorisk metod, tillsammans med teorier från den klassiska såväl som den visuella retoriken. Även litteraturvetenskaplig teori rörande bokomslagets uppbyggnad används. Efter genomförda analyser konstateras att pathosargument, som syftar till att väcka känslor hos den potentielle läsaren, är tydligt framträdande. Bland annat fungerar kontrasterande antiteser, realistiska fotografier, metonymier, utstickande färgval och evidentia i målande beskrivningar som känslomässiga appeller. Även ethosargument förekommer i stor utsträckning. Namnets storlek på framsidan, presscitat, författarfotografier samt bio- och bibliografisk information fungerar argumentativt i detta syfte.

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of modern times. Environmental organizations do their utmost to inform the public about environmental problems and to invite action to prevent them. To this direction, they run campaigns with posters that combine images and text and evoke emotions in the recipient about these issues. The study focuses on such multimodal texts and analyzes the multimodal resources used in environmental campaign posters from a visual rhetorical perspective with a focus on fear appeals and their expected persuasiveness. More specifically, the study examines how the environmental organizations WWF and Greenpeace use fear appeal as a rhetorical strategy in their campaigns. The visual and textual resources are analyzed to identify the purpose, arguments and emotional appeals of the posters that seek to increase people's awareness and power to act. The study also examines how the rhetorical strategies and effectiveness of the multimodal resources differ between the two organizations. The study shows that the two organizations make use of appeals to fear in a way that matches their different profiles to create awareness and encourage action concerning climate change.