This essay explores genre pedagogy with a main focus on an analysis of teaching material used in upper secondary school in the B-course in English. The aim of the analysis is to determine if the writing exercises in the books, which are not specifically designed for genre pedagogy, can be used genre pedagogically as they are presented in the books. The result shows that they are not well suited for this; two of the books are poorly designed for genrepedagogy and they do not show any thoughts or links to genre pedagogy while the other two show some links to genre pedagogy. This essay also explores the field of genre pedagogy. This exploration shows that genre pedagogy fans out and is not unitary, and especially not in its definition of genre.

This study examined the media portrayals of Roma in the United States by taking a closer look at ―Gypsy crime‖ articles in a purposive sample of newspaper articles. These newspaper articles give details of ―confidence‖ crimes and name the alleged perpetrators as Roma or members of the ethnic minority group commonly known as Gypsies. A textual analysis was conducted of 23 articles appearing in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel from August 16, 2011 to February 8, 2013 covering fraud charges against several members of the Marks family. This primary evaluation narrowed the initial sample to nine articles that contained references to Roma, Romani, or Gypsy. Further analysis of these nine articles revealed four major categories of findings regarding the representation of the ethnic minority. The categories included: 1) the pairing of the preferred term, Roma with the pejorative term, Gypsy; 2) reinforcement of stereotypes; 3) portrayal of the ethnic group as foreign others; and 4) Roma portrayed as a threat to the dominant culture and its members. The theoretical bases for the study included Social Stigma Theory (Goffman, 1963) and Orientalism (Said, 1978) both of which offer a critical lens through which to examine the portrayals of this ethnic minority.

In a world in which current events increasingly evoke episodes from the past and former crises, understanding history becomes fundamental in order to build an informed solution strategy. Nevertheless, one should also recognize to leave one’s contemporary judgment and knowledge in the present, while dissecting the past for valuable insights. In this master thesis, I am submitting a research proposal to fellow students and the research community at large, which includes a case study that, firstly, analyses the Weimar Republic’s newspaper landscape and the lack of an extensive and centralized digitized archive of its widely decentralised press, and, secondly, analyses the transformation of language over time in a newspaper sample from the Aachener Anzeiger. Through the analysed sample and analysis, I wish to highlight the importance of understanding the past so that future adversities can be easier resolved by a combination of distant and close reading techniques. The interest in the history of Weimar Germany is steadily regaining momentum within and outside academia, as several contemporary events seem to establish a certain parallel with this short-lived first attempt at democracy that emerged after the end of the former German Empire. In this thesis, history will be analysed through the digital textual analysis of newspapers. The limitations of this approach will be illustrated and discussed, such as the challenges posed by decentralized archival material, the issues OCR encounters when digitizing the Fraktur typeface, and the deriving importance of digitizing such typeface to avoid historical erasure. Furthermore, the need to render such findings and research accessible to society at large is fundamental, as the contemporary political developments of our times affect everyone, whether they belong to academia or not. In the final chapter, new research pathways will be proposed and discussed, while also considering the case of contemporary history and politics and the essential aspects of digitization and social acceleration of life through technology.

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