There is a current widespread knowledge about what factors that is of importance when explaining levels of individuals political trust. Unfortunately, the same knowledge is not at hand as to whether these ‘determinants’ of political have changed over time and if so how? In other words, can we assume that citizens form their trust in similar matters over time or has there been a shift? With the purpose of contributing to new knowledge about political trust, this thesis mainly explored if there has been a change in the effects of often argued to be strong determinants on political trust and secondly if there are any trends as to how these effects has changed over time. In order to realize answers to these most likely never posed questions, the theoretical framework departed from Mishler and Rose’s sectioning of cultural and institutional theory which entail very different views on the origin and dynamic of political trust. Later the two theories were operationalized into cultural and institutional related variables in accordance to available variables found in “The SOM Institute Cumulative Dataset 1986-2019”. Through numerous multiple linear regression analyses utilizing Swedish data between 1998 and 2019 it shows that the effect of most explanatory variables on political trust changes, but since these effects were small from the start there are reasons to question what weight the changes are carrying. Onwards, by performing interaction analyses the thesis was able to conclude a handful of positive and negative linear trends arching over the 22-year period meaning that some explanatory variables have become increasingly and decreasingly important when explaining the variation in political trust, which in turn indicates that the Swedish population on average tends to form their trust slightly different in 2019 as opposed to in 1998.

This essay is the result of a close-reading of the male protagonist’s narrative in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). His narrative was examined through an interpretive lens layered with a combination of several critical onsets that form the pillars of Elaine Showalter’s theory of a metaphysical female crescent outside of male consciousness. With a combination of gynocriticism, postcolonial feminism, cultural theory and psychoanalysis, this essay charted the inner expedition of the male protagonist as he travels to the Caribbean and marries his new wife. The findings showed how his inner journey takes him to the borderlands of his consciousness and language. On the other side of the border is the female crescent, the wild zone, where women and wilderness taunt him and hide from him in plain sight. Stretching himself to the limits of his conscious mind, the male protagonist Rochester loses his grip on reality and gets overwhelmed by feelings of fear and anger.

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This licentiate thesis, When emotions are allowed to rule, a study on reading literature in a multicultural classroom in upper secondary school, attempts from a didactic perspective to understand literature reading in the school subject Swedish in the light of a multicultural and changing society. From a socio-cultural perspective, the study illustrates the teacher's choice of literature, the teacher's and the students' attitudes to literature, and the ways of reading that are being negotiated in the common reading and what opportunities for understanding and meaning making that are made available. The analyses are based on reception theories and have an underlying intercultural perspective. The study has been conducted in a class represented by students with many different mother tongues in the school subject Swedish during the first year at the natural science programme at an upper secondary school. The main methods are recordings of literature discussions, which have been documented by video and digital voice recorder, qualitative interviews with students and teacher, log books, and the students' novel reading logs. The empirical material is presented in two chapters. The first chapter, The conditions of the reading, focuses on the teacher's and the students' attitudes to literature and literature reading while the second chapter, The actual reading, brings forward the ways of reading that are being negotiated in the common reading of two novels in the class. The results show that there are several factors that are of importance to the understanding and the meaning making that are made possible in the teaching of literature. The students speak about experience oriented attitudes focusing on life experiences and cultural meetings. This differs from the teacher's attitude which is focused on providing the students with language skills and literary history education. The study shows how the reading of the novel Herakles (Kallifatides 2006) results in ethic ways of reading and a rejection of the text while the reading of the optional novel leads to a subjective reading and a common interpretation from ways of reading of enjoyment. The study discusses the importance of safeguarding the students' knowledge, experiences, and emotions and of making explicit their different ways of reading as well as the different readings of the teaching. Discussed further is the need for a teaching that catches and challenges the students' general and literary repertoires from various perspectives in order to provide context and contribute to an active meaning making. The study suggests a caring way of reading, which is characterised by interpretive communities focused on openness to the foreign and different view and a reading that strives towards a cognitive, moral, and emotional understanding.

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Walter Benjamin warned in 1940 of a certain inconspicuous threat to political thinking, not least of all to materialism, that takes progress as an historical norm. Implicit in this conception is what he describes as an empty continuum of time along which the prevailing tradition chronicles its own mythic development and drains everyday life of genuine historical experience. The myth of progressive history advances insidiously today in consumeristic and technocratic attempts at reconciling cultural imagery with organic nature. In this dissertation, I pursue the contradictions of such images as they crystallize around the natural history of twenty-first century commodity society, where promises of ecological remediation, sustainable urban development, and climate change mitigation have yet to introduce a true crisis of historical experience to the ongoing environmental crisis of capitalism. A more radical way of seeing the cultural representation of nature would, I argue, penetrate its mythic determination by market forces and bear witness to the natural-historical ruins and traces that constitute, in Benjamin's terms, a single "catastrophe" where others perceive historical continuity. I argue that Benjamin's critique of progress is instructive to interpreting those utopian dreams, ablaze in consumer life and technological fantasy, that recent decades of growing environmental concern have channeled into the recovery of an experience of the natural world. His dialectics of nature and alienated history confront the wish-image of organic abundance with the transience of its appropriated expression in the commodity-form. Drawing together this confrontation with a varied literature on collective memory, nature, and the city, I suggest that our poverty of experience is more than simply a technical, economic, or even ecological problem, but rather follows from the commodification of history itself. The goal of this work is to reflect upon the potentiality of communal politics that subsist not in rushing headlong into a progressive future but, as Benjamin urges, in reaching for the emergency brake on the runaway train of progress.

The changing role of literacy in primary education, with its emphasis on the acknowledgement of the learner’s values, beliefs, culture, background and language is the focus of this study. The research was concerned with understanding the literacy practices of Foundation Phase Grade 3 teachers who are able to intentionally promote and mediate literacy acquisition among their learners. A qualitative design was used to describe the approaches of effective literacy teachers. The research study discovered that while the teachers made use of a number of teaching methods that underpinned a de-contextualised and constructivist approach, a socio-cultural approach to literacy was lacking. The results call for a broadening of the definition of literacy; one that acknowledges the socio-cultural background of the learners in developing a literacy disposition that prepares learners for a changing world. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Didactics)

The screen, as recent studies in a number of fields indicate, is a cultural object due for critical reappraisal. Work on the theoretical status of screen objects tends to focus upon the materialisation of surface; in other words, it attempts to rethink the relationship between the supposedly 'superficial' facade and the 'functional' object itself. I suggest that this work, while usefully chipping away at the dichotomy between the 'superficial' and the 'functional', can lead us to a more radical conclusion when read in the context of subjectivity. By rethinking the relationship between the surface and the obverse face of the screen as the terms of a dialectic, we can ‘read’ the screen as the vital component in a process which constitutes the Subject. In order to demonstrate this, I analyse productions of subjectivity in literary texts of the twenty-first century — in doing so, I assume the novel as nonpareil arena of the dramatisation of subjectivity — and I propose a reading of the work of Jacques Lacan as hitherto unacknowledged theorist par excellence of the form and function of the screen. Lacan describes, with the function of desire and the formation of the screen of fantasy, the primary position this ‘screen-form' inhabits in the constitution of the Subject. Lacan’s work forms a critical juncture through which we must proceed if we are to properly read and understand the chosen texts: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber; The Tain by China Miéville; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. In each text, I analyse the particular materialisations of the screen and interrogate the constitution of the subject and the locus of desire. By analysing the vicissitudes of subjectivity in these texts, I make a claim for the study of the screen as constituting a central question in the field of contemporary literature.