The aim of the study has been to provide a further understanding to the underlying mechanisms and principles that has shaped the Swedish governmental measures towards the pandemic of Covid-19 in Sweden. Throughout the pandemic of Covid-19, Sweden has been considered as deviating in its national and domestic approach towards the pandemic where Sweden has been pointed out as controversial in its measures that heavily has relied upon trust and common sense of the citizens. Through a qualitative document analysis, the thesis has analyzed the domestic measures taken by the Swedish government between the period of January 2020 and June 2021. The study has used the theoretical lens of constructivism and the empirical departure of the Swedish model as explanatory tools for how the self-image of Sweden derives from a conceptualization of identity provided by the Swedish model. Hence, the study has related to the Swedish model as a tool that shapes the Swedish identity which during the pandemic thus has shaped the identity politics of Sweden by domestic measures as a national response. By using the fundamental pillars of the Swedish model comprising labor market, economic policy and welfare policy, the thesis concluded that the Swedish identity that has shaped the executed identity politics during the pandemic derives from a Swedish self-image of being a welfare state originated from the values of the Swedish model permeating the governing of Sweden. Hence, the mechanisms and principles that have shaped the Swedish behavior through domestic measures during the pandemic of Covid-19 has been the Swedish model along with a Swedish identity and self-image deriving from a self interpretated definition of the Swedish governmental self.

My research explores what laws, such as laws surrounding immigration, child custody, and divorce, negatively affect polyamorous individuals in the U.S. and how people's perceptions of barriers differ along lines of gender-sexual-racial-class identities. My applied research is conducted for my client, a CNM-friendly attorney in D.C. I investigate the experience of polyamorous people that use lawyers they perceive as consensually non-monogamous (CNM)-friendly. I probe what it means to be "CNM-friendly," how one promotes oneself as a CNM-friendly lawyer to potential clients and the world at large, and the relationship between being a CNM-friendly lawyer and activism.

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This dissertation investigates the figure of “the Texan” during the 1970s across local, regional, and national contexts to unpack how the “national” discourse of Texanness by turns furthered and foreclosed visions of a more inclusive American polity in the late twentieth century. The project began in oral history work surrounding the cultural politics of Austin’s progressive country music scene in the decade, but quickly expanded to encompass the larger transformations roiling the state and the nation in the 1970s. As civil rights and feminist movements redefined hegemonic notions of the representative Texan, icons of Anglo-Texan masculinity—the cowboy, the oilman, the wheeler-dealer—came in for a dizzying round of celebration and critique, satire and ritual performance. Such Seventies performances of “the Texan” as took place in Austin’s “cosmic cowboy” subculture provided an imaginative space to refigure Anglo-Texan identity in ways that responded to and internalized the decade’s identity politics. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson’s picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of longstanding American myths and symbols at a historical moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested. This dissertation maps the messy ground of the 1970s in Texas along several paths. It begins some years prior with the Centennial Exposition of 1936 and the regionalism of J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek before proceeding to the challenges to their vision of “the Texan” on the part of the African American civil rights, Chicano, and women’s movements. The dissertation’s central chapters then address the melding of countercultural forms and the state’s traditional Anglo-Texan iconography and music in spaces like Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters. Popular music, art, film, journalism, and literature evoke this attempted revisioning of Anglo-Texan masculinity in dialogue with the decade’s identity politics. / text

The focus of this research has been on how the county of Hertfordshire negotiated the economic, social and political changes of the late nineteenth century. A rural county sitting within just twenty miles of the nation’s capital, Hertfordshire experienced agricultural depression and a falling rural population, whilst at the same time seeing the arrival of growing numbers of wealthy, professional people whose economic focus was on London but who sought their own little patch of the rural experience. The question of just what constituted that rural experience was played out in the local newspapers and these give a valuable insight into how the farmers of the county sought to establish their own claim to be at the heart of the rural, in the face of an alternative interpretation which was grounded in urban assumptions of the social value of the countryside as the stable heart of the nation. The widening of the franchise, increased levels of food imports and fears over the depopulation of the villages reduced the influence of farmers in directing the debate over the future of the countryside. This study is unusual in that it builds a comprehensive picture of how agricultural depression was experienced in one farming community, before considering how farmers’ attempts to claim ownership of the ‘special’ place of the rural were unsuccessful economically, socially and politically. Hertfordshire had a long tradition of attracting the newly wealthy looking to own a country estate. Historians have suggested that in the late nineteenth century there was a shift in how such men understood ownership of these estates, showing little enthusiasm for the traditional paternalistic responsibilities; in the face of a declining political and social premium attached to landownership, their interest lay purely in the leisure and sporting opportunities of the rural. However, as this research will show, the newly wealthy were not immune to that wider concern with social stability, and they engaged with their local environment in meaningful ways, using their energies and wealth to fund a range of social improvements. This research extends our understanding of just how the rhetoric of the rural was experienced by the residents of a county which so many saw as incorporating the best of the ‘south country’. In so doing, it makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of how this period of agricultural depression was interpreted by the wider nation, and the impact on social and cultural understanding of the place of the countryside within the national identity.