In this study I have examined how Swedish artists are portrayed in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. I have been using a critical discourse analysis to analyze twelve articles, whereof six interviews with female performing artists and six with male performing artists. The main findings show that the journalist mostly describes the artists in ways that can be seen as normative for the female and male gender. The female artists are described  as strong and caring about relationships, while the majority of the male artists are described as brave and tough. Both the female and male performing artists are described as outreach and people who are not affraid to express themselves.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

<p>This research paper aims to show how racism, power, social representations and identity are created and reproduced through the media. The research paper will analyse newspaper articles presented about <em>Cronulla</em><em> riot </em>in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, CDA, as a theory and method. The research paper aims to demonstrate how inequality in the Australian society is reproduced by the media through the use stereotypes and certain social representations and how knowledge and awareness about this is relevant to social work of today.</p>

Though the field of Spanish heritage language (SHL) studies has seen a boom in research, such research has not yet addressed the materials available for SHL classes. This dissertation fills a gap in previous research by addressing the representation of US Latinos and US varieties of Spanish in the SHL context. The current study involves a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the presentation of both culture and language in intermediate level university SHL textbooks, in order to show how such texts present US Spanish-speaking people’s culture and their language varieties. Previous research on both history and Spanish as a foreign language textbooks show that US Latino populations in such texts are frequently reduced to numbers, faceless statistics or stereotypes (Arizpe & Aguirre, 1987; Cruz, 1994; Elissondo, 2001; Ramírez and Hall, 1990; Rodríguez and Ruiz, 2005; and van Dijk, 2004a; 2004b). Additionally, previous analyses of the presentation of Spanish in Spanish foreign language (SFL) textbooks show SFL texts provide “…varying or misleading intuitions about dialects of Spanish” (Wieczorek 1992, p.34; see also Fonseca-Greber & Waugh, 2003). This dissertation corroborates these findings in the SHL context and presents suggestions for improving the quality of materials used in the SHL context. The results of the current study clearly parallel those found by van Dijk (2004b); though the texts present “factual” information, it is the selective presentation of this information that culminates in an overall negative representation of immigrant and minority cultures, which is rooted in a metonymical understanding of what it means to be immigrant. Additionally, all the texts continue to promote a pseudo-Castilian variety of Spanish, while delegating student varieties of the language to appropriate home contexts. This bidialectal treatment of US varieties of Spanish excludes critical based dialect awareness altogether. This dissertation addresses the need to both improve and develop “…pedagogically sound textbooks and new technology materials designed to meet the Hispanic bilingual student’s linguistic needs” (Roca, 1997, pp.37-43). It is only through critical discourse analysis that we can assure that textbooks are indeed presenting a positive image of US Latinos and their language to students enrolled in university SHL classes.

This research paper takes departure from the contradictions of understandings regarding the purpose of operation EUNAVFOR Med, which operates in the Mediterranean aiming at disrupting the business model of human smugglers. The alteration of opinions concerns the question(s) regarding, to what extent the operation should be considered a securitization, and if so, of what? Research has consequently been drawn from the Copenhagen’s School theory of securitization, looking deeper into the involvement of the main actors in the operation, the EU, the human smugglers and the migrants, in order to identify if this operation could indeed be considered a securitization act. By placing the main actors of the operation in the center of the theoretical framework this research has been able to identify how this operation can be understood from a securitization theory and also what has been securitized. The methodological approach is based upon Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, framing both the structure and the analytical apparatus of the research paper, enabling an even broader understanding of the case. The result showed that there are indeed indicators demonstrating that operation EUNAVFOR Med could be considered a successful securitization of human smugglers. Also, in line with this operation, there are several indicators that shows how the EU has managed to pull a securitization move of migration, arguing that the migrants has formed an ‘uncontrolled problem’ for the EU.

This master thesis aims to examine texts of an international tourism promotional magazine Gotland 2016 to figure out whether it will help or on the contrary hinder sustainable development. Though promoters and writers held the beliefs to sustain tourism by prolonging tourism seasons and attracting international tourists, to our bewilderment, they not only failed to stick to its point as such but also expressed the opposite thoughts and notions among the texts. During the process of the analysis, the author found out that in Gotland 2016, the images of Visby, oceans scenes, summer, nature / tourist scenes and exoticism are strengthened while the opposite of these images are inevitably weakened simultaneously, which obstruct the extension of tourism seasons as well as lowering expectations for international tourists. This, in the long run, will hinder continuous development of local area in economic, environment and social sense. Particularly in this master thesis, social sustainability is discussed with priority since it is always likely to be overlooked and seen as less important than other aspects of sustainable tourism. In consequence, it is suggested that the wellbeing of local communities is equally important as environment protection and economic growth when promoting tourism development.

The issue of the Mapuches conflict has received different reactions from stakeholders and most important, government in the countries where they exist. This issue has gained much attention in Chile, where the Mapuche form the largest ratio of the indigenous group. The issue started more than seven centuries ago when neighboring groups started to invade the mapuches land, the aggressors where mainly Inka. And the reason for invading was that the mapuche land had dense forests and were rich in minerals. The fight for the mapuches rights on these resources culminated with the entry of the Spanish. The Mapuche were involved in a war with the Spanish for about three and a half decades. When the Spanish eventually took over the territory, they divided it between Chile and Argentina to facilitate smooth governance. The Spaniards who succeeded in overcoming the Mapuche had seceded from Spain and had become permanent residents of South America under the new name “Chile”. This meant that they laid claim on the resources and territory in the mapuches land. While the Argentine Mapuche have experienced relative peace, except for the Argentine war of extermination in the 19th Century, their counterparts in Chile have had a poor relationship with most government. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations between the Mapuche and the Chilean government over four decades. The study will examine the presidential discourse on the issue of the Mapuche conflict under six governments, during the periods between 1970 and 2010. I am interested in understanding the factors that led to the change of narrative from referring to the Mapuche as peasants/farmers entitled to resources as part of their cultural heritage to finally being labeled as terrorists by the Chilean Government. In meeting the research aims, I will examine the historical development of the Mapuche and the factors that have defined their attitude and perception of various laws, policies and government actions on them. The study will employ Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis method where I will carry out text analysis, processing analysis and eventually the social analysis of the discourse simultaneously.

This study focuses on how minorities are stigmatized in the French media. It limits itself to the case of the proposal of the denaturalization law and the consequent discourse about it. The subject is introduced through a short background on the law and its relevance to the possible racist nature of the debate, followed by some background on racism in France, an overview of the theory on new racism and how it can explain stigmatizating discourses. Critical Discourse Analysis is used as the method to uncover said discourses as it is a method related to the in-depth analysis of implicit dominant ideologies and power-structures. The study analyzes twenty articles from two French newspapers in order to determine how stigmatizing discourses are expressed. The results in the discussion show recurrent racist narratives that systematically denigrate and stereotype Muslims and immigrants. They also show a pattern of the dominant culture negating space to minorities.

In this multi-methodological (Gee, 2011; Hult & D. Johnson, 2015) study, I examine Richard Ruiz's (2014) original concept of the epiphenomenal nature of language in language policy and planning (LPP) across social scales (Hult, 2013) in Hong Kong. While research in Hong Kong has focused on interactions between schools, teachers, students, parents, business, and the government, the work on non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) remains a neglected social scale. Addressing this gap, I examine the role of a local NGO, Hong Kong Unison (Unison), as a social actor involved in the negotiation of language-in-education policies for the city's ethnic minority students. Through the collection of one decade of publically accessible documents, I created a corpus of Unison's work. Corpus linguistics approaches and a wider-angle perspective to critical discourse analysis (cf. Tian, 2006, 2008) were combined in order to highlight salient patterns and discourses within the data (cf. Baker, 2016). Corpus and discursive analyses indicate that Unison is primarily involved in transforming language policies through their active role in increasing public awareness about the social, political, and educational difficulties ethnic minority students encounter in Hong Kong. Furthermore, the NGO’s ideologies reveal the epiphenomenal nature of LPP. Epiphenomenality reflects how decisions made about language are influenced and shaped by non-linguistic phenomena. Unison's negotiation of LPP demonstrates how their decisions about language are connected to issues of equality, justice, economic opportunity, educational attainment, and social advancement. These ideologies manifest themselves in dialogue across social scales, demonstrating Unison's impact in negotiating LPP in Hong Kong. This study, while providing more insight into LPP research by examining the role of a local NGO, continues to raise questions on how to best understand how multiple scales intersect in the policymaking process, and how the epiphenomenal nature of language shapes decision-making.

A growing number of companies, both multinationals and local firms, have begun to adopt the idea of sustainability development, and develop and market their green products/services with green advertising in developing countries. However, in the context of China where the idea of commercial environmentalism or green consumption is emerging and transported from the West, it is not clear that how the green consumption is advocated and how consumption practices are connected to environmental protection, and how the meaning of green consumption is constructed by firms operating in China. This study explores the Internet as a rich text for environmental marketing by analyzing the ways firms showcase details of their green products/services, production methods, business philosophy and other facets of their environmental practices and values. The online promotional information can be seen as corporate green advertising. Focused on the advertisings from corporate websites, and through the analytical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (e.g., Faircloug, 1992; 1995(a) (b); Wodak and Chilton, 2005), this study presents how a number of environmental conscious firms in China are portraying and promoting their environmental responsible image and green products/services, and aims to examine what firms are really telling and how they are discursively constructing corporate “greenness”. Based on the analyses of green advertisements from websites of four case companies (two MNCs in China: General Electric in China, Unilever in China, and two Chinese local firms: BYD automobile, and Landsea Real Estate), the study suggests that corporate green advertising discourse plays an active role in defining “reality” of greenness and imbuing meanings of consumption into environmentalism, as well as in achieving the hegemonic construction of corporate greenness. In addition, the corporate greenness is anthropocentric and embraces consumerist and post-materialist values. Instead of endorsing the environmentalism which appeals for a change of the current over-consumption lifestyle in capitalist development, the corporate green advertising strategically integrates lineages from green discourse of ecological modernization and political discourse of neoliberalism. In addition to similarities, dissimilarities existing between discourses from MNCs’ and Chinese local firms are identified in two aspects: greenness integration and greenness level. The differences in advertising discourses derive from both organizational resources and firms’ embedded economic, historical, and social-cultural contexts. Such differences prove the mutual constitutive or dialectical relationship between language and society and develop the argument that although firms play active role in constructing discourse, and green advertising discourse can be seen as corporations’ discursive approach to achieve environmental governance, their discourse is nevertheless constrained by both organizational internal and external influences.