<p>I denna etnografiska studie kommer fokus att ligga på hur unga vuxna ser på livet i en transnationell familjekonstellation. Genom data från fem kvalitativa intervjuer och användning av tidigare forskning kommer olika aspekter av globalisering och dess inverkan på familjer att lyftas fram. Hur identitetsprocessen går till när man har släkt i olika länder kommer också att belysas. En viktig del av studien är även hur man kommunicerar och upprätthåller ett transnationellt släktskap.</p>

<p>The thesis is an ethnographic study of children’s identity work and social geographies in the schools and neighbourhoods of a Swedish suburb. The aim of the reported research is to study children’s agency and their narratives of different places. The findings show how identity work can be understood from the viewpoint of children as social agents taking part in reconstructing their own social geographies. It is the social aspect of the identity work that is the focus here and how it is a relational process constructed in interaction in different contexts. In the analyses, the children’s agency and narratives, such as interviews, maps and photographs, are seen as identity performances.</p><p>The findings show how identity work is situated. Identity work takes place in places that invite participation in various activities but these places are also constructed by the children and their identity work. The construction of <i>us</i> and <i>them</i> is a continuous process whereby the children (re)construct both structural conditions and conditions of a more local character. The children construct both shared and segregated places in the school yard, while performing as “us-in-the-school class”, “best friends” or “football player”, as well as more traditional categories such as age, ethnicity, gender and social class. The results also show the close relation between school and neighbourhood, and how segregation between two neighbourhoods in the suburb increased because of school choice. Children from middle-class areas took part in reconstructing the multiethnic neighbourhood as a no-go area and one of the schools as a no-go school. In the narratives of their neighbourhood, the children used community discourses when making identity claims such as “rich Swedish kids from Tallvik”. Thus, segregation and identity work are intimately connected when children construct an <i>us, </i>in close relation with some and distanced to others at the same time. </p>

This Cultural Studies dissertation comes from extended research on three East Tennessee school districts as they attempted to integrate after the Supreme Court mandated an end to segregation in the United States. The study focuses on the experiences of former students of Austin High School, the segregated black school on the eastern edge of Knoxville, Tennessee. From looking at their schooling experiences in the context of the area's failed attempts to integrate, I address the myriad ways these participants and white citizens took up the term community to advance or block integration efforts. Community, I argue from this research, is a socially constructed discourse situated in a specific context of power that can simultaneously empower and oppress targeted groups in its creation. This study that centers on the stories of alumni of Austin High shows the negotiation of local power as defined through the efforts to maintain geographically separate spaces for each race in their schools and neighborhoods. In my research, I developed a methodology called historical ethnography to address these questions. By employing a historical ethnographic approach, I attempted to show that the history of education must take into account that schooling is not an experience lived and remembered, but one that is continually relived in every act of remembering. Therefore, it is not a standard historical account of a segregated school. It is an interdisciplinary exploration of how power can be recreated in schools through claims to community and how my participants engaged that power still in recounting their own school experiences.

This thesis explores the everyday practice of school bullying by examining children's participation in peer group activities as well as in school-based anti-bullying activities within an educational setting. The empirical material is drawn from a long-term (1 year) ethnographic study conducted among preadolescent children in a 5th grade class in a Swedish elementary school. An ethnomethodological approach is used in analysis of ethnographically based fieldnotes, and in detailed analysis of video recordings collected during participant observations.    The first study examines, through elaborated investigation of a peer group's everyday peer encounters, how social exclusion is situated within the flow of intricate, subtle and seemingly innocent interactions. In this, the study offers detailed information about how girls' everyday peer group interactions, taken across a range of activities, may be consequential for the process of social exclusion.    The second study examines the interactional moral work accomplished within the situated practice of ART classroom sessions on moral reasoning used as part of the school's anti-bullying prevention program. The study contributes an understanding of the interactional managment of children's moral stance-taking, something that has previously been overshadowed by the quest to project the outcomes for individual children's moral reasoning. The third study examines a gossip dispute event, in which a group of girls take action against another girl for reporting school bullying to the teacher. The study demonstrates how, as the gossip dispute unfolds, the girls accused of bullying appropriate and even subvert the social organization of the school's anti-bullying program, and manage to turn the tables so that the girl initially reporting to be a victim of bullying is cast as an instigator, and the girls accused of the bullying as victims of false accusations.    The thesis illuminates the complex meanings and functions of social actions referred to as bullying within a school context and in the literature. Also, it sheds light on the difficulties that come with teachers' attempts to structure children's social relationships. All in all, the thesis illuminates the need to challange an individualistic approach to bullying, recognizing the social and moral orders children orient to in their everyday life at school.

Up until now the discipline of history has most often used maps as a convenient tool for illustration. Scholars have thus touched only briefly upon the development of maps and their role in the processes underlying the formation of national territories and the establishment of ethnic boundaries. It is against this backdrop that the present study focuses on the use of maps and their significance during the construction of the Lithuanian ethnic/national territories in the period prior to 1914. The work employs a wide spatial and contextual perspective. One of its main arguments is that at the beginning of the 20th century the Russian Empire could be perceived as a multi-ethnic and regional state. Although the imperial authorities and wider public may have rejected this notion or found it problematic to accept, it was a fact which was clearly evident in the research of Russian scholars. To demonstrate this, I focus on two processes: the gradual formation of the Lithuanian ethnic space on maps, and its transformation from an ethnographical concept to an ethnic and national territory. The attempt to introduce a rational and optimal form of territorial governance in the Russian Empire depended on an increased level of geographical and statistical knowledge of the land and its peoples. Various investigations started in the early 18th century. A geographical perception was largely dependent on the mapping of the country, and from this perspective it can be argued that the Empire only really started to become visible in detail in around 1840, with the establishment of a stable administrative-territorial system. From this time onwards, Russian ethnographers, geographers, cartographers and statisticians started to investigate the state’s western borderlands, collecting, scrutinising and presenting information about the peoples that lived there. However, while the imperial authorities envisioned Russia as a solid “Russian” state, the work of scientists revealed that the Empire was not just regional, but also multi-ethnic. In the case of the Lithuanians the separation of their ethnic territory occurred most clearly after the 1863-1864 uprising, and the growth and spread of propagandistic ethnic cartography that took place in its wake, which had as its goal the Russification and de-Polonisation of the western borderlands. Although the imperial authorities were able to identify the inhabitants of the multi-ethnic North Western provinces as a result of this process, at the same time it enabled the educated and nationalistically inclined local population to begin to perceive its own ethnic space. Therefore, every ethnic line placed on a map during this period not only allowed these peoples to be ethnographically separated, but also allowed the territory to be simultaneously disassociated in a nationalistic sense from its “other” neighbours. For the Lithuanian nationalists the imperial maps and other data acted as the springboard from which they produced their own cartographic responses designed to counter the Russian and Polish points of view. The specificity of the Lithuanian maps was that even though they claimed to depict either ethnographic, or ethno-linguistic Lithuanian territory, they nonetheless emphasised Lithuania in geo-political terms, thus undermining the claims of other ethnic groups living in the border areas. The methods employed in this study can also be used in other contexts to undertake similar investigations on other ethnic groups, thus opening the possibility to obtain a better understanding of the evolution of particular territorial constructions, territorial conflicts, border disputes and so on. Moreover, although much work still remains to be done in developing this approach, the present study nevertheless points to the way in which a fusion of the history of cartography, historical geography and other related disciplines offers the historian a new way of understanding the past.

The thesis is an ethnographic study of children’s identity work and social geographies in the schools and neighbourhoods of a Swedish suburb. The aim of the reported research is to study children’s agency and their narratives of different places. The findings show how identity work can be understood from the viewpoint of children as social agents taking part in reconstructing their own social geographies. It is the social aspect of the identity work that is the focus here and how it is a relational process constructed in interaction in different contexts. In the analyses, the children’s agency and narratives, such as interviews, maps and photographs, are seen as identity performances. The findings show how identity work is situated. Identity work takes place in places that invite participation in various activities but these places are also constructed by the children and their identity work. The construction of us and them is a continuous process whereby the children (re)construct both structural conditions and conditions of a more local character. The children construct both shared and segregated places in the school yard, while performing as “us-in-the-school class”, “best friends” or “football player”, as well as more traditional categories such as age, ethnicity, gender and social class. The results also show the close relation between school and neighbourhood, and how segregation between two neighbourhoods in the suburb increased because of school choice. Children from middle-class areas took part in reconstructing the multiethnic neighbourhood as a no-go area and one of the schools as a no-go school. In the narratives of their neighbourhood, the children used community discourses when making identity claims such as “rich Swedish kids from Tallvik”. Thus, segregation and identity work are intimately connected when children construct an us, in close relation with some and distanced to others at the same time.

The aim of this study is to enlarge knowledge concerning teachers´ knowledge creation in their everyday practices. Of central importance are questions concerned with what a teacher’s daily work looks like, to what areas does the knowledge a teacher develops in her/his daily work belong and what is their content. The major area of interest involves how the day-to-day knowledge is created as well as which type of teaching that dominates. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork. That implies the use of a wide range of data from different sources, in my case, participating observations, different kinds of interviews and informal conversations. I followed two senior level teachers over time, one for half a year and the other for almost a whole year. Teachers´ work. The results show that teachers’ work is immediate, unpredictable, intensive and oriented by action. The relational character of the work is in focus however. Teacher’s work on building relationships with their pupils is continuously ongoing the whole time and everywhere. Relationships are created and upheld. The teaching, which is the teachers’ main task, does not take the pure form that one could assume but in many respects consists of relationships, even if at a first glance this does not appear to be the case. I have found that beyond a teacher’s actions there is often a relationship-based explanation. Yet another task that takes another form than that one could imagine and that is continually present in the everyday work is that which I call work related to grade-setting. Teachers´ knowledge. I have discovered a number of dimensions of teachers’ practical knowledge that can be considered as ”new”. These originate principally from two main areas: Pupils and teaching. The pupil-related knowledge consists of four categories: individual knowledge, “reading” knowledge, relational knowledge and care knowledge. The teaching-related categories of knowledge are: tactical didactic knowledge, subject-didactic knowledge, meta-knowledge and survival knowledge. I regard all these forms of knowledge as contextual. They are also personal as they are created by the teacher in a unique environment. My impression is that the forms of knowledge are also use-oriented and that most of them comprise a social dimension. Teachers´ knowledge creation. My findings show that teachers´ knowledge creation in everyday practice takes place within three areas, relational work, practical didactic improvement and work related to grade-setting. What I mostly find in the teachers is knowledge creation of an extremely refined manner. They test, adapt, change and improve both for their own sake and for the pupils. I use the term refinement learning for this process. Most of the knowledge creation in teachers takes place through interaction foremost with individuals, but even with texts and objects. This is explained by the profession’s relational character. The situations the teachers are involved in are never exactly the same but demand modifications to strategies previously used. Learning is here seen as invite-initiated and is best understood from a situated perspective. The interplay processes alone however cannot explain the knowledge creation that occurs. The teachers’ reflections about their teaching, which lead to new lesson elements is one example. The creation of knowledge can then best be explained from a constructivist perspective even if it also has its origin in interactive situations. Here, learning is more self-initiated. Knowledge creation can be regarded as necessary, as all the situations the teacher is involved in require solutions. They can also be regarded as natural situations as the teacher is obliged to promote both the pupils’ learning and development. This forces them to formulate explanations in all possible ways and means so that the pupils understand, as well as their creating a favourable environment so that both learning and development are encouraged. Thus teachers’ knowledge creation arises when they are working. They must learn in order to be able to handle the job itself.

I denna etnografiska studie kommer fokus att ligga på hur unga vuxna ser på livet i en transnationell familjekonstellation. Genom data från fem kvalitativa intervjuer och användning av tidigare forskning kommer olika aspekter av globalisering och dess inverkan på familjer att lyftas fram. Hur identitetsprocessen går till när man har släkt i olika länder kommer också att belysas. En viktig del av studien är även hur man kommunicerar och upprätthåller ett transnationellt släktskap.

Title: Constructing identity on Facebook.com – A qualitative ethnographyNumber of pages: 40 (34)Author: Clara LindholmTutor: Amelie HössjerCourse: Media and communications studies CPeriod: HT (Autumn) 2009University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of InformationScience, Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The purpose is to study how the social community Facebook.com canbe used in order to construct identity. The study follows three Facebook users in anobservation where they are able to document their thoughts and reflections in anprivate media diary. This study investigates their use of the medium and focuses onthe functions with which they are able to alter their profiles. The result consists of acombination of these reflections, interviews and a selection of literature relevant tothe subject of new media, the use of social internet communities and social sciencetheories. The social theories are a selection of theories from the social scientist ErvingGoffman.Material/Method: This study is based on a qualitative research method and anethnographic method. The ethnography is a combination of an observation where theobserved are asked to keep a diary over the changes and updates they make on theirFacebook profiles. The ethnographic method further consists of selected literature andpersonal interviews. Finally the results are analyzed and presented.Main results: The three people in this study admit to being worried about uploadingpersonal information on the community Facebook. Still they found the socialcommunity Facebook as something positive which they all use several times per weekand in some cases daily. The conclusion shows that there is an uncertaintysurrounding the ethics of the use of Facebook when it comes to the differencebetween private and public and how to handle the personal information of others.Also it is concluded that an important part of the construction of identity on Facebookprofiles is the activity of deleting information whilst trying to uphold an image thatgoes along with the person’s percepted role in the society.Keywords: Facebook, social network, community, ethnography, Digital identity,Web 2.0

There are certain organizations that manage to handle risk in such a successful way that they almost stay error-free, in spite of the fact that they daily face the risks of accidents. These organizations are usually given the name High Reliability Organizations (HRO). While the most common example is that of a nuclear plant the variety of what organizations can fit into the category is extensive. The purpose of this study is to describe safety culture and theories about HRO and how these can be found in practise within an organization. This qualitative research uses influences of ethnography in its method. The ethnographical approach was picked due to the field of the study and the cultural context in which it is set. The results of the study identify a number of elements sorted into four themes. These themes are deemed compatible or non-compatible with relevant existing theories. While most of the results match, the issue of routine-based work is not coherent with leading theories of HRO. An effort in making an alternative explanation proposing a balance between routines and mindfulness is taken on the subject.