The current research aims to integrate previous research on the host of negative consequences associated with women’s experience of stereotype threat in a science context. Using an expectancy-value framework, the current research explores potential indirect effects of a communal goal affordance intervention on science motivation, via stereotype threat, state anxiety, communal goal affordances, and belonging in science. Building upon the previous literature, the current research attempts to link stereotype threat to science motivation via communal goal affordances and state anxiety’s effect on belonging in science. Additionally, the current research attempts to illustrate the efficacy of a communal goal affordance intervention by increasing perceptions of communal goal affordances and reducing anxiety in a science context. The current study found no evidence of a successful implementation of the communal goal affordance intervention, as evident by non-significant results on parametric and non-parametric tests of central tendencies between interaction type. Additionally, no indirect effects on science motivation were discovered within either tested pathway. However, a significant positive relationship between stereotype threat and state anxiety, communal goal affordances and belonging in science, and belonging in science and science motivation were found. Limitations to the current study and the communal goal affordance intervention, as well as the implications for these findings and future directions for research are discussed.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise porte sur l’implication de la « loi sur le membership et le droit de résidence à Kahnawà:ke » sur six femmes mixtes Mohawks de la communauté Mohawk de Kahnawà:ke. Nous utilisons une méthodologie de recherche qualitative pour analyser les récits de vie des participantes et leurs expériences en tant que personnes ayant un héritage culturel mixte. Dans ce contexte, nous explorons certains facteurs qui ont facilité ou atténué leur identité culturelle et leur sentiment d’appartenance. Nous explorons aussi la question de la transmission culturelle à la prochaine génération. Les résultats de cette étude suggèrent que l’identité culturelle et les modes de vie Mohawk sont transmis de manière intergénérationnelle dans les familles des participantes. Dans cette étude, les femmes font des efforts tenaces pour se réapproprier leur culture et de créer un sentiment d’appartenance qui leur est propre. Ces récits détaillés des participantes s’ajoutent à la recherche canadienne sur l’identité mixte et la transmission culturelle dans un contexte autochtone. / In this master’s thesis, I examine the implications of the Kahnawà:ke membership and residency law on six mixed-blood women from the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk community. With the use of qualitative research methodology, I analyze the participants’ narratives of their experiences with growing up racially mixed. In this context, I explore some of the factors that facilitated or mitigated their sense of cultural identity and belonging. I also explore the question of cultural transmission to the future generation. The findings from this study suggest that Mohawk cultural identity and ways of life are perpetuated intergenerationally in these women’s’ families. The participants make tenacious efforts to re-appropriate their culture and find ways to create their space of belonging. These participants’ detailed accounts add to the Canadian body of research on mixed-race identity and cultural transmission in an Indigenous context.

Grounded in a theoretical debate between anthropological studies on Roma/Gypsies and anthropological studies of Christianity, the focus of this thesis is on the experience of social and religious life among members of a traditional minority in Finland, the Finnish Kaale/Finnish Roma, a population of approximately 13.000 people living in Finland and Sweden. Over the past decades, the processes of urbanisation and sedentarisation have led to shifts in the ways in which the social lives of Kaale families are lived. A shift towards individualisation is interlinked with the continuous importance placed on family and kin belonging, which come together in a re-assessment of people's central attachments in the world. At the same time, over the same period of time, a large number of this population have converted to Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the country, leading to subtle changes in the shape of social relations within and outside their own community: between believers and non-believers, between Kaale and non-Kaale. Making use of participant observation, interviews, conversion stories and individual life histories among Finnish Kaale living in the capital city of Helsinki and in Eastern parts of the country, this ethnography provides an insight into the multiple, overlapping and complex ways in which Kaale belonging is understood and into the ways in which Pentecostal religious life takes shape among born-again Kaale. Furthermore, looking specifically at the practice of Evangelism and missionary work, which defines the life of Pentecostal Kaale believers, the role of faith as an enhanced engagement with the world is analysed. A conversation therefore emerges also on the role of Pentecostal belonging in mobilising believers in relation to the world around them and, more specifically, on the way in which Pentecostal faith provides an avenue for a further social engagement and social mobilisation of individual Kaale believers.

This thesis reports on the bonds that unify imagined communities (Anderson 1983) that are created in 40 letters prominently displayed on the opinions pages of the Daily Sun, a popular tabloid, and The Times, a daily offshoot of the mainstream national Sunday Times. An APPRAISAL analysis of these letters reveals how the imagined communities attempt to align their audiences around distinctive couplings of interpersonal and ideational meaning. Such couplings represent the bonds around which community identities are co-constructed through affiliation and are evidence of the shared feelings that unite the communities of readership. Inferences drawn from this APPRAISAL information allow for a comparison of the natures of the two communities in terms of how they view their agency and group cohesion. Central to the analysis and interpretation of the data is the letters’ evaluative prosody, traced in order to determine the polarity of readers’ stances over four weeks. Asymmetrical prosodies are construed as pointing to the validity of ‘linguistic ventriloquism’, a term whose definition is refined and used as a diagnostic for whether the newspapers use their readers’ letters to promote their own stances on controversial matters. Principal findings show that both communities affiliate around the value of education, and dissatisfaction with the country’s political leaders, however The Times’ readers are more individualistic than the Daily Sun’s community members, who are concerned with the wellbeing of the group. The analysis highlights limitations to the application of the APPRAISAL framework, the value of subjectivity in the analytical process, and adds a new dimension to South African media studies, as it provides linguistic insights into the construction of imagined communities of newspaper readership.

Föreliggande arbete är en kvalitativ studie som behandlar valet att bli förälder. Det som undersöks är svenska unga vuxnas samtal kring när tiden är rätt för att bli förälder, livet som förälder kontra livet utan barn, det ideala livet, det goda föräldraskapet och en bra barndom. Studien är ett bidrag till den västerländska debatten om sjunkande födelsetal och uppskjutet barnafödande. De empiriska analyserna i arbetet är baserade på fokusgrupper med sammanlagt 35 individer mellan 24 och 39 år. Deltagarna har olika bakgrunder sett till utbildning, arbete och bostadsort. 15 var förstagångsföräldrar eller väntade sitt första barn. Resterande 20 hade inte barn. När är tiden rätt för barn? Varför har medelåldern för förstagångsföräldrar ökat? Vilka föreställningar finns kring livet som förälder jämfört med livet utan barn? Dessa var de övergripande frågorna som diskuterades i grupperna. Användandet av fokusgrupper och den diskursiva analysen visade sig vara fruktbara i studiet av ideal och föreställningar kring föräldraskap och övergången till föräldraskap. Resultatet av studien belyser komplexiteten kring valet att bli eller att vänta med att bli förälder; det visar på hur människors liv och förståelse av sig själva påverkas av många motstridiga föreställningar och ideal. Föräldraskap, familj, släktskap, vänskap, kärlek, ålder, biologi, och den oberoende individen är några av de fenomen som framstår som diskurser i fokusgruppsdeltagarnas diskussioner kring tiden för föräldraskap. Denna studie visar hur olika individer förhåller sig till olika diskurser och subjektspositioner, och hur olika individer på olika sätt löser dilemman som motstridiga ideal resulterar i. I avhandlingen undersöks och belyses diskursiva, kulturella strukturer och individers aktiva positionerande gentemot dessa. / The present thesis is a qualitative study of reproductive decision-making. It explores ways in which Swedish young adults talk about the timing of parenthood, the ideal life, good parenthood and the auspicious childhood. The work contributes to the debate on why fertility rates are declining and why the transition to parenthood is being postponed in the contemporary Western world. The empirical analysis is based on focus group data including in total 35 participants, between 24 and 39 years of age, with varying educational, occupational, and geographical backgrounds. The participants were new first-time parents, a few who were expecting their first child and some who were childless. The broad guiding questions of the focus group discussions were the timing of parenthood, the general postponement of parenthood, and the childless life contra life as a parent. The focus group method proved to be very useful in exploring ideas and ideals related to the timing of parenthood, as did the discourse analytical approach that was applied. The study illuminates the complexity of reproductive decision-making; it is an exploration of a range of notions and discourses that impact on people’s lives and ways of understanding the world, such as discourses on kin, family, friendship, the romantic relationship, parenthood, age, biology, and the independent, individualized individual. It is also a study of individual positioning towards different, often contradictory ideals, and individual strategies when trying to solve the pertinent dilemmas caused by contrasting notions. Thus, the study is an exploration of general, cultural discursive structures as well as of the different ways in which the subject actively draws upon them.

Les espaces européen et francophone, qui se recoupent partiellement, sont marqués par la diversité culturelle de leurs peuples. Pourtant ces derniers se sentent éloignés de l’Europe technocratique et de la Francophonie à la fois méconnue et réduite aux colloques et aux cocktails. L’Union européenne (UE) a instauré une citoyenneté européenne et un certain sentiment d’être européen coexiste avec les identités multiples forgées par le processus de la mondialisation actuelle. Pour sa part, l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), qui n’est pas une organisation d’intégration régionale, n’a pas pu instituer un tel instrument et la question de l’identité francophone se pose toujours avec autant d’acuité. Portées par la solidarité dans une perspective de paix durable, ces deux organisations internationales ont mis en place des outils de rapprochement dans les domaines de l’éducation, de la culture et des médias auxquels les nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication apportent un concours appréciable / The European and the Francophone spaces, which partly intersect, are marked with the cultural diversity of their people. Nonetheless these last ones feel far from technocratic Europe and Francophonie which is both unknown and reduced to colloquia and cocktail parties. The European Union (EU) has established a European citizenship and a certain feeling of being European coexists with the many identities made by the process of the current globalization. For its part, the International Organization of Francophonie (IOF), which is not a regional integration organization, could not institute such an instrument and the Francophone identity is still at issue. Leaded by solidarity in a prospect of a long-lasting peace, these two international organizations have created tools of rapprochement in the fields of education, culture and media with the useful support of new information and communication technologies.

Aktuella studier visar att risken för psykisk ohälsa är större för människor som inte fullföljer gymnasiestudier. I Sverige saknar en fjärdedel av högstadieeleverna betyg i något eller flera ämnen och är därmed inte behöriga till gymnasiet. Då skolor har dokumenterade svårigheter att erbjuda bra stöd för elever med olika funktionsnedsättningar finns ett starkt samhällsintresse av att synliggöra vilka faktorer i skolans lärandemiljö som är stödjande för dessa elever för att möjliggöra förbättringar. Utifrån en fenomenografisk ansats, med empiri baserad på tretton semistrukturerade intervjuer, undersöker aktuell studie vad ungdomar med erfarenhet av svårigheter i grundskolan utifrån funktionsvariation uppfattar som bra stöd. I den kollektiva beskrivningen av fenomenet bra stöd i skolan framträder erkännande, i betydelsen att skolans personal möter eleven som en unik person med förmågor, vilken vill utvecklas och lära men samtidigt erkännas vara i behov av stöd och anpassningar av olika karaktär. Härmed identifieras lärares förväntningar på sina elever som en viktig påverkansfaktor. Fem områden lyfts fram som betydelsefulla för att erkännande ska manifesteras: trygghet och trivsel, deltagande, autonomi, tillhörighet och meningsfullhet. Eftersom skolor anmodas arbeta förebyggande och hälsofrämjande med stöd av en samlad elevhälsa sätts studiens resultat slutligen i relation till ett salutogent förhållningssätt. / Recent studies show that the risk of mental illness is higher for people that don’t graduate from upper secondary school. In Sweden, a quarter of the primary school pupils have insufficient grades in one or more subjects which makes them ineligible for upper secondary school. Since schools have documented difficulties in offering good support for students with various disabilities, there is a strong public interest to make visible factors in learning environments that could improve the results. Based on a phenomenographic approach, with empirical data based on thirteen semi-structured interviews, the current study examines what young people perceive as good support, based on their experience of difficulties in primary school, due to various functional disabilities. In the collective description of the phenomenon good support at school, the word acknowledgement emerges, in the sense that the school needs to meet the student as a unique person with abilities, and who wants to develop and learn, but at the same time needs support and adaptations of various kinds. Herein teachers’ expectations of the students are identified as an important influential factor. Five areas are highlighted as important to manifest acknowledgement: security and well-being, involvement, autonomy, belonging, and meaningfulness. When schools are asked to work proactively to promote health supported by the school health team, the result is put in relation to a salutogenic approach.

Västergarn is a medieval settlement situated on the west coast of the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. It has for a long time been the focus of study for researchers due to its cultural heritage in regards of its church, rampart and archaeological remains of a settlement dating to the Early Middle Ages. The University of Uppsala conducted excavations at the site during 2005–2013 which have led to large amounts of archaeological material which enabled several theses being written about the place. This thesis aims to study metal dress accessories from Västergarn and the people behind these artifacts who lived there during the early medieval period. Gender identity, ethnicity and cultural belonging will be addressed. The main part of the thesis focuses on typology and chronology. This will be achieved by a morphological study of the material. In addition to this, an ArcGis study is conducted to study distribution patterns in the settlement. The conclusion is that dress accessories allow different conclusions on the population of Västergarn. In terms of gender, it is argued that both men and women were present, albeit artefacts of male gender dominate the assemblages. The majority of the material in terms of ethnicity and cultural identity can be attributed to a Gotlandic tradition, while some dress accessories seem to come from abroad, to the Slavonic areas and other regions in the Baltic Sea. Also, oriental influences can be seen, mainly in regard to the decorated belt mounts. in conclusion, the result of this thesis indicates that two separate groups, both Gotlanders and non-Gotlanders were active in Västergarn during the early Middle Ages which is visible in the two churches, the Baltic ware pottery and the form of dress accessories people wore at the time.

This study explores the engagement with music among second-generation migrants in Sweden in connection to their cultural identity and sense of belonging. First, a theoretical frame is developed that illustrates how music practices can contribute to the creation of ‘sense of place’ and ‘sense of belonging’ and how they are linked to ‘collective memory’ and ‘cultural identity’. Consequently, it is also explained how all this can be understood from a ‘generational perspective’. A qualitative approach has been chosen for this study and semi-structured interviews with 9 emerging adults living in Sweden, were conducted. The main results show that there is a high engagement with music among second-generation migrants in Sweden, many of them possessing a broad repertoire of favorite songs and genres. Mainly, it is through listening to the music coming from the home countries of their parents that they can express and navigate their cultural identities. Such kind of music carries meanings and mediates collective experiences and memories which can be passed on from one generation to the next one. These practices are important for second-generation migrants in terms of their sense of belonging to certain groups with which they can identify and feel connected to. In this sense, such kind of music helps them make sense of themselves in the world and in connection to others.

The aim of this essay is to study how internationally adopted people of colours’ national identifications are created in interaction with other people outside of their closest social networks of people, and how this can affect their feelings of social belonging and exclusion. This is accomplished by examining qualitative ethnographic interviews through social constructivist theories and concepts such as Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionism and theories behind national identifications. The essay explores how the internationally adopted participants are met by other people and how these social situations are constructed. The question “where are you from?” is central in this study. The essay studies how the participants identify themselves and how they express these self-identifications. Results show that the informants relate to a Swedish national identity one way or another and that they express this to others with the help of different symbols, behaviours and actions. The study material shows that the internationally adopted participants get stigmatised in Sweden both for being adopted and for being non-white, and thus risk getting feelings of exclusion from a Swedish national identity. Although there are some social interactions which make them feel connected to and included in certain communities of people which often include other adopted individuals or people of colour.