Foreign aid is a constantly debated and researched subject. Chinese foreign aid towards Africa and other parts of the world is not without scrutiny. China sees their foreign aid as a tool of soft power, that they use to gain a more positive image and increase cooperation. This study aims to add to the debate through an investigation of how Chinese foreign aid is portrayed in Tanzanian and Kenyan newspapers. The method used to examine newspaper articles in this study is a Critical Discourse Analysis based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. The study uses the concept of soft power to analyse different themes found through the CDA. In addition, a comparison between Tanzania and Kenyan newspapers is made.  The findings of this study show a variation of positive and more critical themes in Tanzanian news media while Kenyan news media has themes based on a more critical point of view. The critical themes may show challenges towards Chinese soft power and its strive for a positive image of their foreign aid towards the Tanzanian and Kenyan public. However, how much of a challenge this poses cannot be concluded within this study. As government leaders and heads of states are contributing to uphold a positive image of Chinese aid, particularly in Tanzania this is seen as a positive thing for China’s aim to gain a more attractive image.

This dissertation is a critical discourse analysis of how anti-Islamic rhetoric in prominent online forums is articulated within the context of popular discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance. According to Melanie McAlister, perceptions of Muslims within the United States are unique in comparison to other minority groups in that they are almost entirely mediated, whether it is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, or the various Muhammad cartoon controversies. While much work has been done analyzing how Islam and Muslims are mediated in popular film and television, very little attention has been given to how these perspectives are mediated through the Internet. Using Erving Goffman's theory of performativity and Kristine Fitch's notion of persuadables, I examine how both prominent bloggers and pseudonymous commentators work in a "back stage" context to bring Islamophobic norms and premises within the sphere of acceptable opinions for the "front stage" of mainstream media discourses. In particular, I examine how these discourses have evolved over the past few years on three prominent weblogs: the anti-jihadist Little Green Footballs, the liberal-atheist advocacy blog One Good Move, and the popular news aggregate Fark. In light of increasing evidence that weblogs exert a high level of influence over popular media discourses disproportionate to their readership, these websites offer a glimpse "back stage" into how contemporary American discourses on Islam and Muslims are articulated across a broad array of political perspectives, particularly in relation to norms and premises regarding multiculturalism, tolerance, and freedom of expression. While Islamophobic rhetoric has become firmly embedded within discourses of the American Right, each of the three sites examined show a steady integration of anti-Islamic perspectives within the American Left. Leftist anti-Islamic discourses are frequently articulated within the context of general anti-religious sentiment, misanthropy, and a belief that the values of "the Islamic world" are inherently incompatible with the liberal, democratic, and multicultural values of "the West." While by no means universal, these perspectives have become sufficiently common, recognizable, and sensible to be granted the status of persuadables within these particular web forums, which in turn helps to move them into the realm of popular American cultural persuadables.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att studera hur urfolket Samernas rättigheter var beskrivna i den offentliga debatten i Sverige genom att analyser svenska artiklar. Under studien, olika konstruktioner av samiska rättigheter hittades, vilka har blivit analyserade genom metoden kritisk diskurs analys, specifikt den tre dimensionella modellen av Norman Fairclough. Det empiriska materialet utgjordes av debatt-artiklar och nyhetsartiklar från olika tidningar och nyhetsbyårer i Sverige. Perspektivet i analysen var klargjord genom teorin om grupprättigheter. Resultatet visade, bland annat, hur diskussioner om ratificering av ILO-169konventionen har pågått under lång tid och att den har aldrig ratificerats. Detta är på grund av tvetydigheten i hur en kan säkra de samiska land rättigheterna samtidigt som att säkra den svenska statens ekonomiska intressen. / The purpose of this thesis was to study how the rights of the Indigenous Sami people were described in the public debate of Sweden through analysing Swedish articles. During the study, different constructions of Sami rights were found which have been analysed through the method of critical discourse analysis, specifically the three dimensional model by Norman Fairclough. The empirical material consisted of debate articles and news articles from different newspapers and news agencies of Sweden. The perspective of the analysis was clarified through the theory of group rights. The result showed, among other things, how discussions of the ratification of ILO 169-convention have been going on for a long time, and that it has never been ratified. This is due to the ambiguity in how to secure the Sami land rights at the same time as securing the Swedish state’s economical interests.

Entangled in a context of increased use of private military and security companies globally, this study sets out to investigate the motivation for Denmark to use private military and security companies (PMSCs) for maritime security in parilious international waters. This study examines the decision making process taking place in the Danish Parliament in 2012 prior to the passing of ​ Law 116 The amendment of the Firearms Act and the Act on Warfare, etc. that mandated the shipping industry to hire PMSCs for armed protection of their vessels. A critical discourse analysis has been applied in order to understand the discursive mechanisms present in the political debate prior to the adoption of the law. The analysis shows that a neoliberal market discourse of necessity, efficiency and competition informs the parliamentary debate on international maritime security and pirate threats. That is, the protecting of the Danish industry and trade are found to be a first priority whereas personal security of the employees, the pirates, and control over weapons are only secondary. The findings indicate that in the political discourse, security has become subjected to a marketlogic. Thus, security is referred to as security for ​the market more than for the population.The thesis argues that this change in thinking about security needs a critical public debate in order to make sure that issues of security stay within the political sphere.

The purpose of this study is to look at how women are represented in neoliberal discourses of development, if there has been a change on representation of women over the last three decades and how these discourses reflect broader developments in gender equality. The World Bank has been selected to serve as an instance of neoliberal development discourse and one World Development Report (WDR) from each decade is analysed. The theoretical perspectives include discourse analysis and the three Western main approaches to feminist development theory; Women In Development (WID), Woman And Development (WAD) and Gender And Development (GAD); the methodology is related to critical discourse analysis. The analysis suggests that the Bank discourse on women has changed from a predominant WID approach in the end of the 90s where women were mainly depicted as passive and poor objects, and moved closer towards a GAD approach in the latest WDR that constructs women as empowered agents with aspirations. Despite changes in Bank language use over time, the underlying message has remained the same; women are discursively framed as a means to enhance economic efficiency. The discursive changes in the analysed WDRs have to a large extent followed the global developments on discourses on women and gender equality, of which the Bank itself is a key influencer. The discursive construction of women in development, structured around efficiency and economic growth thus sustains, rather than challenges, the hegemonic power structures that sustain gender inequalities. The practical consequences of the current development discourse of constructing women as economic actors without addressing the root causes to their subordination will most likely translate into an increase in the workload of women on the ground while gender inequality and poverty continue to exist.

CDA is a multi-disciplinary approach to discourse which study the relationship between discourse, power and ideology. This makes the application of it on political discourse very suitable since it can be applied to analyse the specific structures of language and ideologies used by politicians to influence the recipient’s mind and hence their actions. This paper, based on a CDA’s framework, investigates the connection between the discursive strategies and the ideological strategies used by Donald Trump to represent immigrants during the 2016 presidential campaign. In so doing this study utilizes Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (2001) of doing CDA and Van Dijk’s ideological Square (2006,2011) to analyse Trump’s speech on immigration delivered in Phoenix, Arizona during the elections of 2016. The results have shown that when talking about immigrants Trump represents them only negatively by describing them as being a threat, economic burden and deviant.This is done by exploiting the strategies of actor description, polarization, victimization, empathy, topos, number game, illustrations, lexicalization, syntax, predicational strategies, comparison, evidentiality, local coherence, implication and generalization. This led to the conclusion that by choosing to emphasize the bad actions of immigrants and ignoring their positive actions, Trump was addressing and appealing to the White Americans only.

This thesis sets out to design and execute an in-depth study of the True Fruits controversial advertisements by applying Encoding/Decoding as a theoretical model. It aims at examining visual rhetoric and through Critical Discourse Analysis understanding the cause and effect of the controversial True Fruits advertisements in their 2017 campaign. The research attempts to answer the question: ‘What happened on social media after True Fruits published their controversial advertisements in 2017?’. The thesis presents an analysis of True Fruits´ visual rhetoric in #jetztösterreichts campaign advertisements and then reveals consumer responses to it on social media in 2017. Thus, the thesis presents a comprehensive review of the relevant literature leading toward the key themes of German advertisement, controversial advertisement, and the representation of immigration in advertisements. Towards the end, it states the final remarks concluding the entire discussion and reflects upon the attempts that True Fruits made to communicate a political message and how consumers in social media responded to it.

Representing “Oriental” men as sexual predators in the media is a recurring theme that has proliferated since the New Year’s night in Cologne in 2015/2016. This study investigates how the representation of men with an immigrant background as sexual predators has developed in the year before and after the New Year’s night in Cologne in 2015/2016 in the Bremen local newspaper Weser Kurier. The aim of the study is to find out in what ways the representation of “Oriental” man has changed, how a moral panic is established, and how an idea of fear is created. To reach this aim Critical Discourse Analysis will be used in combination with theories concerned with “Othering”, moral panic and Orientalism. Because of the limited scope of this study, it should be considered as a base for future research into the field.

This Degree Project (DP) deals with the discourses about collective memory in Chile 45 years after a coup d’état that gave way to a dictatorship that lasted for 17 years, during which serious human rights violations were committed. How different actors relate to this traumatic period shows how this is a field of struggle in contemporary Chile.Collective memory has become a key theoretical concept for describing how social groups make sense of their common past. It is deeply entrenched with notions of identity, agency and change. Whereas collective memory is an abstract notion, it has to be somehow concretized in order to allow individuals to activate their own memories, opinions and reactions. Thus, media play a fundamental role in the construction of collective memory. Drawing on a constructivist approach, media are not fixed containers of memories but they actually work on how people perceive their past in relation to the present and the future. This (DP) focuses on the following questions: How do media contribute to the construction of the collective memory around the coup d’état and the military dictatorship in Chile? What are the discourses they diffuse and to what end? Which are the other counter-hegemonic discourses available in the Chilean society?In order to answer these questions, this DP uses a Critical Discourse Analysis of of the two main Chilean newspapers (La Tercera and El Mercurio) complemented with interviews to memory agents. The conclusions point out that these newspapers have a role in diffusing as well as constructing hegemonic discourses around this period of the Chilean history. They do so, mainly by silencing the voices of the civil society making their goals of social change difficult to achieve.

With the help of various advertising strategies this study addresses the Swedish, plant-basedfood-production company Oatly, and their advertisements to see how the discourse onsustainability is approached. By using critical discourse analysis, and primarily Fairclough’sthree-dimensional-model for analysing discourse (1989, 1995) as well as the marketingframework AIDA, these advertisements have been analysed to see how the companymanages to tempt and persuade their consumers into consumption. This paper seeks tounderstand how Oatly portrays their products as the “right” choice, by acting on and creatingsocial, public understandings. But who decides what is “correct” and what is not, and howdoes a company act on contemporary social conventions to portray themselves as the “good”choice? Through a textual analysis of Oatly’s product descriptions on their website as well asof the product packaging in-store, this report has established that Oatly acts on publicunderstandings of environmental sustainability to persuade their audience into consumption.