Why, and what does it involve for an individual to perform Arts and Crafts, are the questions studied in this thesis. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the pedagogical conditions of Arts and Crafts objects, through studying the processes that take place where people give form to personal expressions and to understand the meanings these processes have for them. Phenomenological theory, especially the theory of the lived body, which presents the body as a unity not separated into body and thought, with object and subject in an inter-relationship, is used as a theoretical standpoint throughout the thesis. A phenomenological and a semiotic approach have been used to analyse and describe the empirical data. This thesis consists of three different studies, the examination of a place where Arts and Crafts are performed, the study of people's experiences of creating Arts and Crafts objects, and finally how people relate to their chosen Art and Craft materials. This contributes to an understanding of the pedagogical conditions and processes present in their relationship to work materials. The analysis illustrates that an opportunity for a new level of understanding is reached when particular pedagogical processes are carried out whilst working with various forms of Arts and Crafts materials. These processes understood as pedagogical conditions consist of: time and pace, physical and mental environment, materialization, the object and experience. Another finding is that there are different ways of relating to the Arts and Crafts materials, a bodily relation or a cognitive relation. These ways of relating exist in one person, but one of these relating attitudes is often more salient than the other. Making Arts and Crafts is in this thesis seen as an activity of both bodily and cognitive meaning making.

World Social Forum, and the worldwide appearance of regional, national and local Social Forums (SF), is an important part of the movement for global justice. The aim of this thesis is to explore how the SF as a global phenomenon is interpreted and staged locally in Sweden. Central questions are: What local meanings are given to the SF phenomenon when it is introduced and organized in a local context? What relations are created between the various actors in this organizational process in terms of coalitions and power relations? How do the SFs relate to the Swedish institutionalized popular adult education? These questions are explored in the four articles on which this thesis rests. Ethnographic field studies of local organizational processes constitute the empirical basis of theoretically informed hermeneutic interpretations. A neo-gramscian perspective is used to analyze the SF as a potentially counter-hegemonic popular education phenomenon. This perspective has been complemented by mainly two theoretical concepts, that is, framing and symbolic capital. Results demonstrate how the emergence of SFs in Sweden is characterized by a widespread desire among various activists and organizations to build coalitions. In the establishment of SFs the institutionalized popular adult education play both the role of a source of economic and material resources and of being a link between various organizations. However, in the wide and formally open organizational process, specific distinctions and hierarchies arise that might neutralize the SF’s ideological impact and its potential for counter-hegemonic coalition construction. Finally, a Swedish academic debate on the concept of “folkbildning” (popular adult education) is addressed. It is argued that there is a need to widen the scope of this debate to more frequently focus on global (popular) educational phenomena (such as the social forums) in research on “folkbildning”, and not only pay attention to “typical” national or Nordic institutions and traditions.

This thesis is a study of three global issues – development cooperation, education and gender - and their transformation to local circumstances in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), a landlocked country in Southeast Asia. Combining post-colonial and post-structural perspectives, it sets out to understand how discourses of education and gender in Laos intersect with discourses of education and gender within development cooperation represented by organisations such as the World Bank and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). Through field observations, analysis of national and donor policies on education and gender, and interviews with Lao educationalists, this thesis offers an analysis that shows the complexities arising at the intersection where the first-world-north meets the local in the context of development cooperation. Foucault’s notion of the production and reproduction of discourses through different power-knowledge relations is used to show that the meanings accorded to education and gender within development cooperation, indeed are historically, culturally and contextually constructed. Within development cooperation policy, first-world-north discourses appear to have a hegemonic status in defining education and gender. Thus ‘Education for All’ and ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ become privileged discourses that also take root in Lao national policy-making. Development cooperation further brings with it discourses defining the cooperation itself. Partnership is one such privileged donor discourse. These policy discourses are however interpreted by Lao educationalists that are not influenced by policy alone; rather, contextual discourses also affect how policies are understood and negotiated. It is when these discourses intersect that structures of power and preferential rights of interpretation become visible. The analysis points to how the perspectives of international development cooperation organisations representing the first-world-north are in positions to set the agenda for development cooperation within policy. This position of power can, from a post-colonial perspective, be traced back to how former colonial structures created a privileged position for first-world-north knowledge that still prevails. This is to some extent acknowledged by development cooperation organisations through the emphasis on partnership. However, in the local context, partnership is not experienced as a discourse which has the effects of redistributing power. Partnership is rather transformed into a discourse of superiority and subordination where development cooperation organisations monitor and evaluate and local actors adjust and implement. Lao education officials however express alternative interpretations of partnership that are based on face-to-face collaboration and collective effort. These strategies have closer links to local practices and also reflect contextual discourse-power-knowledge relations which the education officials are well aware of. These strategies of negotiation also extend to the issues of education and gender. Discourses of ‘Education for All’ and ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ are acknowledged among the education officials as policy goals which to some extent also extend into practice. These discourses are however renegotiated to accommodate local circumstances. ‘Education for All’ is thus replaced by the ‘5-pointed star’ which serves as an operationalisation of the concept of ‘learner-centred education’. ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ has to co-exist with local discourses that on the one hand build on patriarchal organisations of society and on the other hand build on local strategies for access which weaken patriarchal structures. The analysis ultimately stresses the importance of incorporating local, contextual knowledge in educational development cooperation processes, both among international and national stakeholders. This process can be supported by a willingness to deconstruct taken-for-granted understandings and value systems; and in doing so, recognising the normative aspects operating both in the areas of education and gender.

A continuing debate within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research is how to elucidate, improve, and optimize the relationship between social context and technology use. Social context is conventionally understood as immediate use context while an understanding informed by social science suggests a wider scope, involving actors and structures. The focus of this thesis is the use of a communication environment using audio and video, established to span and connect three geographically distant call-centre workplaces in the Stockholm archipelago, Sweden. The research was carried out as intermittent fieldwork, spanning unevenly over a period of three years. The fieldwork was carried out at two sites: the premises of the Swedish Police Contact Centre in the archipelago and within the research project Community at a Distance. Methods included participant observation, interviews, and the analysis of documents, everyday talk, and images. This thesis offers a broad analysis of the socio-cultural context of technology use investigating the question how a sense of togetherness is promoted and negotiated at the Swedish Police Contact Centre and around and across the communication environment. The technology served as a means of overcoming the distance between the sites and making everyday encounters between the dispersed staff members possible. The sense of togetherness—fellowship and belonging, caring for each other, fostering a sense of solidarity, and achieving consensus in everyday practices—had an impact on the uses (and non-uses) of the technology. The use of the communication environment reflects the values and arrangements of the workplace and reproduces its conventions. The discussion is explorative, outlining an analytical approach to the socio-cultural context of technology use informed by interpretive social science, and provides a partial analysis of the organizational culture of the Contact Centre and its technology use. The argument is that analysis should aim at exploring the relationship between individual actors and social structures. Rewriting context allows us to understand the socio-cultural embeddedness of technology. While the analytic framework is not comprehensive for the purpose of detailed design implications in HCI research, it does provide a reconsidered terminology that links individual practices to socio-cultural context. / QC 20100629

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and analyze practices in multilingual mathematics classrooms in compulsory school in Sweden. By using ethnographic methods, mainly participant observation, data were collected in a number of multilingual mathematics classrooms in suburban areas of a major city. The data include field notes, interviews and informal conversations with students, teachers and school administrators. The analysis is based on a coordination of Foucault’s discourse theory and Skovsmose’s critical mathematics education. The socio-political viewpoint defines power as relational and as having an effect on school mathematics practices. Discourse, agency, foreground and identity are used as analytic tools. In five articles, the thesis investigates how the various discourses affect multilingual students’ agency, foreground and identity formation as engaged mathematics learners. The effects of students’ and teachers’ agency on discourse switching in multilingual mathematics classrooms are also investigated. The findings indicate that bilingual communication in the mathematics classroom enhances students’ identity formation as engaged mathematics learners. Language- and content-based instruction seems to do the same, though monolingual instruction may jeopardize students’ identities as bilinguals while the discourse may normalize Swedish and Swedishness exclusively. Focus on linguistic dimensions in mathematics build up a communicative reform-oriented school mathematics discourse. The competing and intersecting discourses available in the multilingual mathematics classroom affect students’ agency, foreground and identity formation as engaged mathematics learners. For example, a reform-oriented school mathematics discourse intersecting with a social-relational discourse affects students’ active agency allowing power relations to be negotiated. A principal conclusion is that the success or failure of multilingual students in multilingual mathematics classrooms cannot be explained in terms of language and cultural factors alone, but only in relation discourse, and to social and political conditions in society at large. / At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Accepted. Paper 4: Manuscript. Paper 5: Manuscript.

Applying a human rights perspective on plurilingualism as a national as well as a transnational concern, with a focus on the interaction taking place in foreign language teaching and learning practices at a Swedish Special Needs School for pupils with deafness or impaired hearing, the overall aim of this study is to describe and discuss this interaction in performative terms, i.e. in terms of what is said by whom, to whom, why, and with what consequences. Although extensive research has already been carried out within the field of plurilingualism, for example from linguistic, sociological and political points of departure, research on plurilingualism with regard to foreign language teaching and learning interaction in Swedish sign language contexts has been largely missing. The ambition of this work, therefore, is to add to the diversity of research on plurilingualism. It is also hoped that this work will contribute to the debate in educational politics concerning a human rights perspective on plurilingualism, especially with regard to modern European languages as a transnational issue. Methodologically, an ethnographic approach has been employed to document, by means of two video cameras in combination with field notes, the practices of communication emerging from teacherstudent interaction. Using notions from Conversational Analysis and alongside established conventions of sign language transcription, a model of transcription was designed for the specific purpose of describing, in detail, the plurilingual interaction where Swedish sign language is used as a mediating tool. Three lessons in English and four lessons – or lesson extracts – in Spanish, at secondary level in a Special Needs School for pupils with deafness or impaired hearing, have been documented and analysed. The analyses were carried out in two different steps, one describing and one discussing the results of the empirical investigation. The institutionally formalised interaction observed appears to have contributed to the heavy dominance of the teacher, and of the IRE sequence used during the lessons, to a much greater extent than students’ deafness or impaired hearing. Although the aims and objectives of the curricular texts intended for these students, as well as for hearing ones, are expressed in communicative terms – for example, learning to read texts of relatively high complexity, or developing writing skills for communication across linguistic boundaries – almost all the lessons that were investigated concerned the translation of isolated words into sign language, often taken out of their English or Spanish context. Nonetheless, the students took part in the classroom interaction when protesting, joking, asking questions and helping each other. Thus, the teacher dominance noted does not imply suppression, but rather a tendency on the part of the teacher to underestimate the students, as well as reflecting a selective tradition within foreign language teaching and learning practices in a general Swedish school context. However, when viewed from a human rights perspective on future plurilingual European citizens, using their language skills to reach out into the world for mutual understanding, the students involved in the language teaching and learning interaction observed in this study may hardly be expected to reach out across linguistic boundaries, at least not as a result of the language education they have experienced.

This thesis explores the role of drama in creating transformative schooling practices with at-risk youth. Specifically, through an auto-ethnographic study of my own experiences in the dramatic arts as a student and teacher, I analyze the potential of drama education to disrupt hegemonic performances of gender and sexuality in the classroom. By using feminist and queer theories, I analyze my experiences and then share key insights through narrative writing. My narrative, analysis and findings are organized into three thematic lenses: body as a site of knowing, drama space as a queer space, and drama as a method for creating change. This thesis also offers specific pedagogical, curricular and relational strategies for developing a transformative schooling practice. Finally, the study examines the role of teacher positionality in creating a transformative practice, and the potential of using a queer pedagogy.

In this thesis the relationship between the physical environment of preschool, children and preschool teachers is studied. Children participate in preschool from an early age and thus are expected to find themselves within an institutional framework (Eilard & Tallberg Broman, 2011) early in life. Today preschool as an institution can be seen as a place where childhood to a great extent is spent and created (Halldén, 2007e). The physical environment of preschool can consequently be regarded as a structure within which childhood is institutionalized (Kampmann, 2004). In general the thesis deals with how children are shaped by and shape the physical environment that they spend so much time in during early childhood. The purpose is clarified in the following questions: How does the physical environment of preschool structure and organise the activities of chil-dren? What activities are created in relation to the possibilities and limitations of the physical environment? In what way can the relationship between the invitations of the physical environment, the child’s scope for action, and preschool teachers be seen? To understand the empirical material in the thesis the concept of affordance (J.J.Gibson, 1986) and the activity theory (Leontiev, 1986; Engeström, 1987) has been used. The empirical evidence in the thesis is based on both video observations and interviews. The study was designed as a multiple case study (Stake, 1995), and three preschool classes each formed a case. The study was inspired by ethnography. The significance of seeing the environment as a set of affordances (J.J.Gibson, 1986) is that it, to a greater degree, can lead to children being allowed to discover the invitations to action there are and as a result freedom to act and negotiations can be created in both inside and outside environments. Through this way of thinking a free zone is created in an institutionalised childhood where children through their agency handle and redesign that which was intended to regulate and give structure. As a counterbalance to the institutionalisation of childhood this study contribute to an understanding of children’s individual and collective activities as a free zone in an otherwise controlled and regulated milieu. The contribution of this thesis consists of the study of the physical environment and the importance of the material in forming the child.

This thesis examines strategies and practices, in Soviet ethnographic research, concerning terminologies for and classifications of what in research texts are conventionally called “supernatural beings” in the world views of the Samoyedic peoples. The question is put whether there are any general rules for the terminology used by scholars for these kinds of beings. The thesis also explores claims that a conventional ethnographic terminology, consisting of technical terms such as gods, goddesses, spirits, owners etc., leads to misinterpretations of the indigenous conceptions under study. By presenting, analysing and discussing Soviet scholars’ strategies and practices in this regard, the thesis is a contribution to the ongoing debate among historians of religions on the use of scientific terminology for beings in different world views. It is also, to a limited extent, a source critical investigation of Soviet research on the religions of the Samoyedic peoples. In chapter 2 the international scholarly debate on terminology for so called supernatural beings is summarized and discussed. The principles for constructing concepts in general are also delineated, using prototype theory and a model for polythetic definition. In chapter 3 a survey over the purposes, main fields of interest, and theoretical and methodological development of Soviet ethnography is presented as an essential background to the investigation of individual ethnographic texts. Chapter 4 and 5 constitute the empirical part of the thesis, with a presentation and analysis of Soviet ethnographic descriptions of beings in the world views of the Samoyedic speaking Nenets, Enets, Sel’kup and Nganasan. Since findings on Nganasan world view in Soviet ethnography was seen as particularly viable for reconstructions of proposed primitive communist thought, matriarchal society, the origin of religion, and mankind’s development of beliefs in “spirits” and “gods”, chapter 5 is solely dedicated to the research on the Nganasan. In chapter 6 the result of the empirical part of the study is confronted with the questions put in chapter 1, as well as the theoretical and methodological conclusions of chapter 2. It is concluded that there is no typical Marxist-Leninist terminology for “supernatural beings”, but that certain developments regarding terminology and classifications in Soviet ethnography on the Samoyeds can be detected. These developments consists of (1) a growing awareness among ethnographers of the distinction between indigenous, emic and etic terminology – an awareness which makes their descriptions become more detailed and closer to the Samoyedic sources. (2) From the 1960s one can trace an ever deepening reliance on Marxist-Leninist theory in Soviet Samoyedology. In accordance with Marxist ideas about primeval society as matriarchal and non-religious, ethnographers focused more and more on (and discovered more) female beings in Samoyedic world views. They also interpreted the “beings” under study as remnants of a primeval materialistic world view and proposed explanations of their development from “natural” to “supernatural beings”. It is also concluded that there are no general rules for scientific terminology. Technical terms are chosen in accordance with the varying aims and theoretical standpoints of different scholars. Whether the terms are appropriate or not, depends on their transparency.

While the challenge of improving young North Americans’ civic engagement seems to lie in the hands of schools, studying alternative ways of teaching citizenship education could benefit the current educational system. In this context, free schools (i.e., schools run democratically by students and teachers), guided by a philosophy that aims at engaging students civically through the democratic activities that they support, offer a relatively unexplored ground for research. The present inquiry is a case study using tools of ethnography and drawing upon some principles of complexity thinking. It aims at understanding students’ citizenship education experiences during democratic activities in a Canadian free school. It describes many experiences that can arise from these activities. They occurred within a school that operated democratically based on a consensus-model. More precisely, they took place during two kinds of democratic activities: class meetings, which regulated the social life of the school, and judicial committees, whose function was to solve conflicts at the school. During these activities, students mostly experienced a combination of feelings of appreciation, concernment and empowerment. While experiencing these feelings, they predominantly engaged in decision-making and conflict resolution processes. During these processes, students modified their conflict resolutions skills, various conceptions, and their participation in democratic activities and in the school. Based on these findings, the study concludes that students can develop certain skills and attitude associated to citizenship education during these activities and become active from a citizenship perspective. Hence, these democratic activities represent alternative strategies that can assist educators in teaching about citizenship.