Previous research has shown that welfare recipients are subject to prejudicial attitudes from others while welfare recipients themselves experience feelings of shame related to their need to apply for help for their subsistence. The aim of this study was to analyse how welfare recipients are depicted in Swedish newspaper media in order to better understand the role that the media can potentially play in how welfare recipients are perceived by others and by themselves. The empirical material consists of 74 articles published in two leading Swedish tabloid newspapers - Aftonbladet and Expressen - during the years 2011 and 2017. With Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory, we have been able to identify six discursive subject positions that welfare recipients are offered in the material. Our findings show that these subject positions contribute to creating a picture of “deserving” and “undeserving” welfare recipients with the latter representing a threat to the cornerstones of the Swedish welfare state. This picture, however, is not static and between 2011 and 2017, subject positions that can be seen as “undeserving” have become more dominant in the discourse around welfare recipients.

This study examines how local journalists in Sweden view, understand and manage threats, hatred and harassment in their professional role. The study is based on qualitative interviews with eight journalists, four men and four women, from different local newspapers in Sweden. The interviews are analyzed through a theoretical framework inspired by discourse theory. The purpose of this study is to examine how journalists are affected by threats, hatred and harassment. All material has been collected throughout the study and is used to understand how journalists being victims of hatred, threats and harassment affects their duty to society as being a democratic vessel for the public opinion. The research questions for the study are:  1. How do journalists experience safety risks in their professional practice? 2. How do journalists weigh the risk of being exposed to hatred, threats and harassment as opposed to reporting about subjects they are interested in and find important? 3. Do journalists experience institutional support and how safe does the support make them feel?  Theories such as the media's democratic role in society and the journalistic standard of practice are used to answer the research questions and analyze the material. The result of the study shows that hatred, threats and harassment is an established part of journalistic practice that is known throughout institutions and by journalists themselves. Furthermore the result shows a lack of institutionalized support. Neither their previous education discussed how they’re supposed to handle hatred, threats and harassments nor does their current workplace discuss it. In line with previous research, the informants believed that hatred, threats and harassment take different forms depending on the gender of the journalist and that women are more vulnerable, which they claimed were because of the patriarchal structures of our society. The result shows that the informants use avoidance strategies when it comes to reducing the risk of exposure. Subconsciously, they may have reframed, changed the narrative or censored themselves – but in such cases without their direct knowledge.

Relating to issues of democracy and security, the thesis examines suggested parallels inSwedish politics to the culture war phenomenon in the United States. Are there signs of asimilar development in Sweden? By examining political rhetoric by the political parties in theRiksdag, the aim is to find out how the parties relate to the concept of culture, what purposecultural policy should have and whether there are indications of securitisation in the discourseand potential implications for cultural polarisation. Utilising a theoretical frameworkconsisting of discourse theory and securitisation theory, various party programs andparliamentary documents are analysed with a focus on comparing discursive articulations,with a starting point in the ideological positioning around the creation of a culture canon. Thefindings show that the parties are divided in how they view culture along three differentscales, with several parties expressing securitising tendencies. Discursive polarisation isapparent in the material, with one party in particular articulated as a threat to the survival ofSwedish culture. Increasing polarisation in cultural rhetoric may lead to a culture war, thoughno such phenomenon is found at the moment in the current political discourse.

Äldre personer, det vill säga personer som är 65 år eller äldre, är en relativt bortglömd grupp inom medias rapportering. Gruppen syns sällan i mediesammanhang, och kommer mycket sällan till tals. Detta blir mest tydligt när det gäller frågor som rör äldre personer, då äldres röster lyser med sin frånvaro. Denna studie har till syfte att undersöka hur äldre personer framställs i media idag. Med hjälp av den kritiska diskursanalysen analyseras 20 artiklar från de två största dagstidningarna i Sverige: Aftonbladet och Expressen. Faircloughs kritiska diskursanalys samt Laclaus och Mouffes diskursteori används för att bidra till ökad förståelse för hur diskurser kring äldre personer kommer till uttryck i media. / Elderly people, meaning people who are 65 years of age or older, is a relatively forgotten group within the media covering. The group is rarely seen within the media, and they rarely get an opportunity to speak their mind. This is mostly visible when questions regarding older people are discussed, since older people will rarely be involved. This study aims to investigate how older people are portrayed in media today. Using the critical discourse analysis, 20 articles from the two biggest daily newspapers in Sweden: Aftonbladet and Expressen will be analyzed. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory are used to contribute to increased understanding of how the situation of how discourses regarding older people is presented by the media.

In 2010, the populist radical right party the Sweden Democrats were voted into the Swedish parliament, which rattled the mainstream parties. The Sweden Democrats’ stance on migration policy was clear from the start, with their MPs promoting a radical decrease, if not a complete stop, to all immigration. This thesis aims to expand the existing research about populism in Sweden and contribute to the field of political science by analysing the general policy debates on migration policy held after the entry of the Sweden Democrats into parliament. The study examines the debates to get answers to several questions: What do politicians think is the main problem with migration policy over the years and how are the problems represented? Is it possible to find indications of populism during the debates and are there signs of the Sweden Democrats' discourse being normalized? Are there any discursive shifts made by the mainstream parties and is there a hegemonic discourse visible throughout the debates? The results show four dominating problem representations on the topic of migration over the years, with the problem representation of the Sweden Democrats gaining support from the Liberals and the Christian Democrats in the debate of 2018. Tendencies of normalization of the Sweden Democrats’ discourse are also detectable in the 2018 debate, as well as some discursive shifts by mainstream parties. A hegemonic discourse is visible during the 2010 and 2014 debates, but it has lost its hegemonic position during the 2018 debate.

This thesis aims to explore how participants of community gardening understand and give meaning to gardening and everyday practices in the context of sustainability. It uses a theoretical framework of political discourse theory to examine how discourses of sustainability are created, negotiated and spread through everyday and gardening practices. The study concludes that community gardening provides an opportunity for participants to materialize discourses of ecological as well as social and economic sustainability. Ecological sustainability discourse is being materialized in gardening practices, while the community aspect provides opportunities for building local social and economic relationships with the potential to spread ideas of sustainability. While some real and potential problems are accounted for by participants, community gardening is mainly presented as positive and an essential part of a development towards a sustainable future.

The aim of this study is to examine homosexual men’s identities, and focus on how they form their identities in fiction when it comes to being both homosexual and religious. In order to be able to approach and study this phenomenon, three research questions are used: how is identity constructed discursively when it comes to the combination of homo- sexuality and religiosity, what affects the formation of homosexual men’s religious/non- religious identity and how do homosexuality and religiosity affect one another in identity formation? The theory used in this study is discourse theory which includes the following concepts that have been chosen and used to analyze the material: antagonism, hegemonic interven- tion, hegemony, interpellation, subject position and the chain of equivalence. Together with these concepts and with template analysis style, a qualitative discourse analysis is made to categorize and analyze the findings made in the material. The material in this study consists of Jonas Gardell’s novel Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar, 1. Kärleken and Tony Kushner’s play script Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The material was chosen because of the themes homosexuality and religiosity are includ- ed, and thus were eligible to be used in this study. Three religious groups are being touched upon in this study, namely Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism and Judaism. This study showed that the relationship between the identities homosexual and religious is mostly antagonistic in the material used in this study, but there was an exception in once case where the combination of these two identities seemed to be possible. The an- tagonistic relationship between these identities lead to a hegemonic intervention where the individual had to choose the one or the other of the identities in order to reach hegem- ony. In most cases homosexual and religious were not included in the same chain of equivalence, and seemed to rule each other out. / Syftet i denna studie var att göra en kvalitativ diskursanalys av homosexuella mäns identiteter och fokusera på relationen mellan identiteterna homosexuell och religiös hos homosexuella män i skönlitteratur. För att kunna närma sig och analysera detta fenomen formulerades tre frågor: hur konstrueras identitet diskursivt när det gäller kombinationen av homosexualitet och religiositet, vad påverkar formandet av homosexuella mäns religiös/icke-religiös identitet och hur påverkar homosexualitet och religiositet varandra i formandet av identitet? Den teori som används i denna studie är diskursteori som innehåller de följande begrepp som har valts och använts för att kunna analysera materialet: antagonism, hegemonisk intervention, hegemoni, interpellation, subjektsposition och ekviva- lenskedja. Dessa begrepp tillsammans med template analysis style användes för att kategorisera och göra en kvalitativ diskursanalys av materialet. Materialet i denna studie består av Jonas Gardells roman Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar, 1. Kärleken och Tony Kushners pjäsmanus Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Materialet valdes på grund av de gemensamma teman, homosexualitet och religiositet, som förekommer i båda verken. De tre religiösa grupper som förekommer i dessa verk är Jehovas vittnen, mormonism och judendom. Resultatet visar att relationen mellan identiteterna homosexuell och religiös mestadels är antagonistisk i det material som använts i studien, men det fanns ett undantag där kombinationen av dessa två identiteter var möjlig. Den antagonist- iska relationen mellan dessa två identiteter ledde till en hegemonisk intervention där individen var tvungen att välja den ena eller den andra av de två identiteterna för att kunna uppnå hegemoni. I majoriteten av fallen var inte homosexuell och religiös inkluderade i samma ekvivalenskedja, utan de utesluter snarare varandra.

This study aims to analyze whether the discourses of the phenomenon of honor-related violence and oppression have changed over time in the Swedish daily press. This is operated through a discourse analysis of debate articles from seven newspapers published around the country. The methodological and theoretical premise is based on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. Further, three theories has been applied; The construction of “the others” by Jonsson, de Beauvoir’s theory of The Second Sex and Nussbaum’s universal theory of justice. The purpose of selection of articles has been to find relevant debate articles concerning opinions on the phenomenon of honor-related violence and oppression. The results and analysis has been divided into three main themes: a legal discourse, a discourse of "us " and " them " as well as a discourse of patriarchy. The results indicate that the phenomenon is influenced by its time in the shape of current events and areas of conflict.

The past two decades of political and social disintegration in Bosnia and Herzegovina have given birth to literary counterreactions against hegemonic ways of imagining social life in the country. This thesis deals with a particular practice in BosnianHerzegovinian war and post-war literature, which uses infantile perspectives to critically address issues related to the socialist history of Bosnia as part of Yugoslavia, the war in the 1990s, and the socalled transitional post-war period. Drawing on an old Western literary tradition of using the child character to estrange conventional experiences of the world, the texts (by authors such as Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković, Alma Lazarevska, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišić) use the skewing and dislocating outlook associated with the infantile subject to expose and undermine perceivably problematic mechanisms in socialist, ethnonationalist, and Western liberal hegemonic discourses. In contrast to previous research on the topic, which has primarily focussed upon the narratological conditions for the infantile perspective, the focus here is on the subversive infantilisation of hegemonic discourse—that is, the very discursive act of representing and contesting dominant concepts, narratives, and representations. The texts are seen as transitional areas through which input from the social world passes and, in this process, is restructured and ultimately transformed into a configuration slightly or radically different from the original input. Theoretically inspired by discourse theory and ideas from New Historicism, the study isolates and investigates a set of techniques through which this reconfiguration occurs. Apart from discussing the use of the basic infantile perspective as such a technique, the study also considers how the notion of the infantile influences techniques of dichotomisation (the production of positional counterpoints), appropriation (the critical subsuming of dominant discourse), and blending (the mixing of dominant and childish imagery). The thesis also addresses the possible political implications of the strategy of subversive infantilisation. Here the approach is influenced by the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, which enables an understanding of the aesthetic reconfiguration of how Bosnian social life is imagined as a way of constituting a new form of subjectivity that evades the excluding and oppressive framework of hegemonic discourse.

The use of civil dialogue has increased in Sweden during the past decades. Civil dialogue is advocated by important operators as the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and promoted in the Official Reports of the Swedish Government as a way forward for the Swedish democracy. The aim of this study is to examine what the civil dialogue is trying to solve and how it´s supposed to work as a solution. This study carries out a discourse analysis using poststructural theory as Laclau & Mouffes discourse theory and Bacchis What’s the problem represented to be to analyse three Swedish local policy’s on civil dialogue. The study can identify what´s the problem represented to be in the civil dialogue policy´s and identifies the civil dialogue discourse to be constructed by three nodal points to make sense. The study also identifies the specific subject positions represented within the local policy´s and come to the conclusion that civil dialogue not only involves people into politics but also act as a technique of govern and may have counterproductive effect.