The purpose of this thesis was to explore a collaborative project between Sweden and India, a project that is working with improving maternal health care in India. I focused on investigating how the project worked in practice, how they worked for improving the situation for Indian midwives and for pregnant women. This investigation was performed during a two month fieldwork in India where I got the opportunity to meet and interview several people connected to the project. The focus has been primarily on the “Master Trainers”, i.e. Indian midwives who have taken part in a training program in Sweden and in India, and who will function as teachers to other Indian midwives, regarding their perceptions about the project and its achievements. / Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka ett samarbetsprojekt mellan Sverige och Indien, ett projekt som arbetar med att förbättra mödrahälsovården i Indien. Jag fokuserade på att undersöka hur projektet fungerat i praktiken, hur de arbetar för att förbättra situationen för indiska barnmorskor och för gravida kvinnor. Denna undersökning utfördes under ett två månaders fältarbete i Indien där jag fick tillfället att träffa och intervjua flera personer knutna till projektet. Fokus har främst varit på "Master Trainers”, dvs indiska barnmorskor som har deltagit i ett utbildningsprogram i Sverige och i Indien och som kommer att fungera som lärare till andra indiska barnmorskor, om deras uppfattningar kring projektet och dess insatser.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att utifrån kvalitativ data synliggöra perspektiv på genus och könsstereotyper, i kombination med organisation. Empirin utgår från fyra informanters perspektiv på dessa frågor, med utgångspunkt från deras egen arbetssituation. Grunden i intervjuerna har varit hur informanterna ställer sig till det faktum att de befinner sig i minoritet könsmässigt på arbetsplatsen och hur detta påverkar arbetssituationen, samt vad som gjort att de valt att bryta könsmönstret i ett annars segregerat arbetsliv. Teorin tar sin utgångspunkt i skapandet av kön och genus i kombination med organisation. Samt lyfts en diskussion kring avvikelse som utgår från Erving Goffmans begrepp stigma. Resultaten visar att informanterna varit medvetna om sin minoritetssituation, både i positiv och också i negativ bemärkelse. Mestadels anser de dock att de kunnat ingå som en del av gruppgemenskapen. De har dock alla vid olika tillfällen tvingats ta ställning till den könsstruktur som finns på arbetsplatsen. / The purpose of this paper, which is based on qualitative data, is to highlight the perspectives of gender and gender stereotypes, in combination to organization. The empirical data is based on four individuals’ perspectives on these issues, based on their work situation. The basis of the interviews has been to understand the informants' attitudes, to the fact that they are in gender minority at the workplace, and how this affects the work situation. And also what made them chose to break the gender pattern in an otherwise segregated working life. The theory is based on the creation of sex and gender in combination to organization. And also a discussion on difference is raised, based on Erving Goffman's definition of stigma. The results show that the informants have been aware of their gender minority position, both in positive and also in a negative sense. They have all at various times been forced to consider the gender structure at the workplace. Though, mostly they believe that they can be a part of the group, despite their minority situation.

This dissertation deals with people with mental illness that currently live in their own accommodation in the community. Common to all mentally ill people is their serious difficulties in carrying out activities and meeting needs in important areas of life. Terms such as "normalisation" and "integration" into the community of this group were important words full of promise at the time the psychiatric reform was carried out. However, there is some strong evidence that the psychiatric reform has not been completely successful. Despite the knowledge that loneliness and social isolation commonly occur among people with mental illness, there is little research that describes how mentally ill people themselves experience their life situation. The overall aim of the dissertation was to gain deeper understanding of the life situation of peop with mental illness via their own narratives on how their day-to-day life appears to them, ar through this gain knowledge of the type of support needed for them to live a satisfactory life. Various data acquisition methods were applied. Study I involved in-depth interview of two men and two women on their daily life. Data acquisition in Study II was via participant observations, an activity unit for people with mental illness. Photographs were used for Studies III and IV Eight informants were issued with disposable cameras and asked to take approximately 10 pictures of objects, situations and/or individuals. These photographs were then used as a basis for follow-up interviews. Results from Study I showed that informants were aware both of their illness and their psychosocial disadvantages, and that they had insight into what was required of them to influence their situation, while simultaneously having insight into their poor ability to tak initiatives. Informants in Study II experienced themselves as unwelcome, vulnerable and marginalised individuals with little hope of a change in existence, resulting in anxiety over the future. They felt trust was lacking in relation to other people and experienced themselves as not accepted in the company of others or by society. Study III provided description of informants occupied with themselves and their existence. The informants tell of a form of spirituality giving them a sense of peace and tranquillity, but which only exists for them at the beginning and end ol life.  Animals are more loyal than people and make no demands, but are however, according to the informants, in a position of dependence on humans. Possessions are of significance to the informants, meaning they see their possessions as part of themselves. In Study IV informants related how they would like their future to appear. They also told what having an identity meant to them, how identity is formed in individuals, what having a mental illness and feeling good means. The informants showed a longing to be seen, but at the same time not wanting to be seen. Finding a meaning with life was important since it could end at any moment. In summary, the findings point to an existential loneliness that consists of a life pattern consisting of an interaction between the impact of the mental illness and the identity as a mentally ill person feelings of marginalisation and abandonment. Experiencing that life has a meaning, possibility o social exchange and a sense of control seem to be important for the persons with mental illness in this study. Consequently, it can be inferred that if the care of people with mental illness pays attention to the dimensions of existential loneliness persons with mental illness may be helped to experience that life has a meaning despite their disability.

Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to, through an ethnographic case study, understand 20-25 year olds‘ multitasking habits when watching TV and to create a framework of the distractions identified for media consumption. Background: The changes in technology and the new possibilities of consuming media creates a need to understand how people in the ages of 20-25 consume media. Advertising on TV is, in Swe-den, the marketing channel that companies spend the largest amount of money on. Most of the statistics regarding viewing rates are collected in a way that might not give totally accu-rate picture of the actual TV viewing of the consumers. Therefore, it is necessary to do an in-depth study of the media consumption habits of this group. Method: The study will be conducted, through an ethnographic case study where the researchers ob-serve a sample of four people in the target group during 10 sessions. Each session will be two hours long, and during, the researchers will observe the group‘s media consumption habits when watching TV. The observers will also look at the multitasking habits of the group, what media and distractions are combined while watching TV. Conclusions: The researchers conclude that multitasking is a common occurrence in the target groups media consumption. The authors have identified four categories that distracts the viewer‘s focus from TV commercials. The first three are distractions being, social, media and non-media distractions. The fourth category is technical avoidance, where people tend to switch channels or mute the sound in order to avoid commercials. Further, an important factor af-fecting the level of multitasking was whether the TV viewing was planned or unplanned. It was observed that this had an effect on the level of commercial avoidance when watching TV. Finally, four different models have been created as a framework to help marketers un-derstand the consumers behavior. / Syfte: Syftet med avhandlingen är att, genom en etnografisk fallstudie, förstå 20-25 åringars multi-tasking vanor när de tittar på TV och att modeller för distraktioner som identifierats för mediekonsumtion. Bakgrund: De tekniska förändringarna och de nya möjligheterna för på vilka sätt media kan konsume-ras skapar ett behov av att förstå hur människor i åldrarna 20-25 konsumerar media. Re-klam på TV är i Sverige den marknadsföringskanal som företagen spenderar mest pengar på. De mesta av statistiken om tittarsiffror samlas på ett sätt som inte kan ge helt korrekt bild av det faktiska TV-tittande för konsumenterna, och därför är det nödvändigt att göra en fördjupad studie av mediekonsumtion vanorna för denna grupp. Metod: Studien kommer att genomföras genom en etnografisk fallstudie, där forskarna observerar ett urval av fyra personer i målgruppen under 10 separata tillfällen i objektets hem. Detta för att skapa en så naturlig miljö som möjligt. Varje observation kommer att vara i två timmar och under dessa observationer kommer forskarna studera objektens mediekonsum-tion vanor när de tittar på TV. Författarna kommer även att observera gruppens multita-sking vanor under TV tittandet, tillsammans med vilka media och distraktioner som kom-bineras i detta sammanhang. Slutsats: Författarna drar slutsatsen att multitasking är en vanlig företeelse i målgruppens mediekon-sumtion. Fyra kategorier är identifierade som distraherar tittarens fokus från TV reklam. De tre första kategorierna distraktioner nämligen social, media och övriga distraktioner. Den fjärde kategorin är tekniska åtgärder för att undvika reklam. En viktig faktor som på-verkar nivån av multitasking var om TV-tittandet var planerat eller oplanerat, och det kon-staterades att detta hade inverkan på nivån av kommersiell undvikelse när de tittade på TV. Författarna har skapat fyra modeller som kan användas för att underlätta för marknadsföra-re att förstå och nå denna målgrupp.

This visual ethnography is an interactive, online, multimedia project that explores female funeral celebrant perspectives on communicating with members of the general public who are immersed in liminal states of consciousness during the process of bereavement. Non-representational theory is incorporated to afford better understanding of female funeral celebrant communication practices. The multimedia project is made up of select video and audio clips taken from in-depth interviews completed with four female funeral celebrants in British Columbia, Canada about their specialized communication work. Favourite poetry and quotes from celebrants are included. Three main themes emerge as central to funeral celebrant work: witnessing, following and engaging with the process; the limen as creative source --- companioning mourners at the threshold; and the art of (irretrievable) performance through facilitating affective, participatory ritual. These same themes are reflected in the interactive, multimedia visual ethnography, which may be engaged with here: http://prezi.com/w85_hps4acf1/between-worlds-communication-perspectives-of-female-funeral-celebrants-in-british-columbia/?auth_key=7536c83649629fcf0547168f04462c8f089a6179

As contemporary health care organizations struggle to control costs, yet deliver quality patient-centred care, the concept of care becomes socially transformed through the use of quality improvement models (i.e., Lean methodology) and quality assurance documentation. This research investigates how nurses’ care work is socially organized in a system that defines care through quality management practices. I use Dorothy E. Smith’s Institutional Ethnography as a feminist mode of inquiry and as a guiding framework for my interviews with nurse participants as I explore the complex social relations within the health care system from the vantage point of nurses undertaking care work. I argue that the social reorganization of care work has affected the emotional lives of nurses as they try to balance actual patient-centred care with their reporting obligations under quality management.

The institution of schooling is one of the most formative spaces in which young people learn about gender norms and expectations. Rather than being a biological given, gender identity is achieved through gender practices and gender achievements (Butler, 1990/1999; Nayak & Kehily, 2008). This study was a year-long ethnography during which I observed an all girls’ after-school club. The club included 15 girls who were in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. The majority of the club’s participants were African American girls. This ethnography utilized participant observation and interviews. Club documents were also analyzed during data analysis. My primary research question was: How was girlness conceptualized, perpetuated, and performed in an after-school club for middle school girls? Using critical theory and feminist poststructuralism, I investigated the work that goes into creating and maintaining current binary gender formations, and how this is related to race, class, and sexuality.

Promoting Mathematical Understanding Through Open-Ended Tasks; Experiences of an Eighth-Grade Gifted Geometry Class by Carol H. Taylor Gifted students of mathematics served through acceleration often lack the opportunities to engage in challenging, complex investigations involving higher-level thinking. This purpose of this study was to examine the ways mathematically gifted students think about and do mathematics creatively as indicators of deep understanding through collaborative work on four open-ended tasks with high-level cognitive demand. The study focused on the mathematical thinking involved in students’ construction of mathematical understanding through the social interaction of group problem solving. This case study used ethnographic methodology within a social constructivist frame with gifted education and sociocultural contextual influences. Participants were 15 gifted students in an 8th-grade gifted geometry class. Data collection included field notes, student artifacts, student journal entries, audio recordings, and reflections. Transcribed audio recordings were segmented (Tesch, 1990) into phases of interaction, coded by function, then coded by levels of exhibited mathematical thinking from observable cognitive actions (Dreyfus, Hershkowitz, & Schwarz, 2001; Williams, 2000; Wood, Williams, & McNeal, 2006), and analyzed for maintenance or decline of high-level cognitive demand (Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2000). Interpretive data analysis was connected to data analysis of transcribed recordings. Results indicated social interaction among students enabled them to talk through the mathematics to understand mathematical concepts and relationships, to construct more complex meaning, and exhibit mathematical creativity, inventiveness, flexibility, and originality. Students consistently exhibited these characteristics indicating mathematical thinking at the levels of building-with analyzing, building-with synthetic-analyzing, building-with evaluative-analyzing, constructing synthesizing, and occasionally constructing evaluating (Dreyfus et al., 2001; Williams, 2000; Wood et al., 2006). The results of the study support the claim of a relationship between mathematical giftedness and the ability to abstract and generalize (Sriraman, 2003), provide evidence that given the opportunity, students can construct deep mathematical understanding, and indicate the importance of social interaction in the construction of knowledge. This study adds to the body of knowledge needed in research on gifted education, problem solving, small-group interaction, mathematical thinking, and mathematical understanding, through empirically assessed classroom practice (Friedman-Nima et al., 2005; Good, Mulryan, & McCaslin, 1992; Hiebert & Carpenter, 1992; Lester & Kehle, 2003; Phillipson, 2007; Wood, Williams, & McNeal, 2006).

This dissertation seeks to demonstrate Lucan's profound engagement and conflict with two ancient intellectual and literary traditions that can both be regarded as escapist, that is, as promising or postulating a sanctuary (whether physical or spiritual) from the world's troubles, and that were both active in Lucan's own day: utopian writing about science, exemplified in Latin by Lucan's uncle Seneca the Younger, as well as by the astronomical poet Manilius, and utopian Egyptology, as reflected in a wide variety of texts ranging from Herodotus, through Diodorus Siculus, to Lucan's contemporary, the Alexandrian polymath Chaeremon. To this end, I have examined two closely related sequences in the De Bello Civili that have received little attention from scholars of Lucan, namely Pompey's journey to Egypt in Book Eight and Caesar's Egyptian sojourn in Book Ten, during which Lucan's two main characters are each shown attempting to take refuge from the poem's ubiquitous violence through the double avenue of travel to Egypt (to which the defeated Pompey flees, and where his pursuer Caesar hopes to leave the civil war behind) and the practice of natural science (with Pompey's astronomical inquiry and Caesar's investigation of the Nile). In this context, I have also considered Cato's Libyan adventures, from the intervening Book Nine. Both Pompey and Caesar discover that escape through either method is impossible, for the fabled Egyptian Shangri-La is now embroiled in the political, social, and economic crisis of the outside world, while not only the natural universe but even the very act of inquiry into nature are alike contaminated by the ethos of civil war. The virtuous Cato, on the other hand, does not even make the attempt, maintaining a single-minded focus on his civic duties. By revealing such escape to be both immoral (through Cato's example) and impossible (through the examples of Pompey and Caesar), Lucan signals his decisive rejection of the escapist predilections of many of his contemporaries (including his uncle Seneca and his own father Annaeus Mela), who tried to distance themselves from the vicissitudes of political life under the later Julio-Claudians through retirement into a state of philosophical otium.

This dissertation seeks to demonstrate Lucan's profound engagement and conflict with two ancient intellectual and literary traditions that can both be regarded as escapist, that is, as promising or postulating a sanctuary (whether physical or spiritual) from the world's troubles, and that were both active in Lucan's own day: utopian writing about science, exemplified in Latin by Lucan's uncle Seneca the Younger, as well as by the astronomical poet Manilius, and utopian Egyptology, as reflected in a wide variety of texts ranging from Herodotus, through Diodorus Siculus, to Lucan's contemporary, the Alexandrian polymath Chaeremon. To this end, I have examined two closely related sequences in the De Bello Civili that have received little attention from scholars of Lucan, namely Pompey's journey to Egypt in Book Eight and Caesar's Egyptian sojourn in Book Ten, during which Lucan's two main characters are each shown attempting to take refuge from the poem's ubiquitous violence through the double avenue of travel to Egypt (to which the defeated Pompey flees, and where his pursuer Caesar hopes to leave the civil war behind) and the practice of natural science (with Pompey's astronomical inquiry and Caesar's investigation of the Nile). In this context, I have also considered Cato's Libyan adventures, from the intervening Book Nine. Both Pompey and Caesar discover that escape through either method is impossible, for the fabled Egyptian Shangri-La is now embroiled in the political, social, and economic crisis of the outside world, while not only the natural universe but even the very act of inquiry into nature are alike contaminated by the ethos of civil war. The virtuous Cato, on the other hand, does not even make the attempt, maintaining a single-minded focus on his civic duties. By revealing such escape to be both immoral (through Cato's example) and impossible (through the examples of Pompey and Caesar), Lucan signals his decisive rejection of the escapist predilections of many of his contemporaries (including his uncle Seneca and his own father Annaeus Mela), who tried to distance themselves from the vicissitudes of political life under the later Julio-Claudians through retirement into a state of philosophical otium.