This artistic, practice-based thesis has been developed based on the idea that design creates social and ideological change. From this perspective, Body Acts Queer — Clothing as a performative challenge to heteronormativity introduces an artistic way of working with and exploring the performative and ideological functions of clothing with regard to gender, feminism, and queer. The thesis presents this program for experimental fashion design—exemplified through a series of artistic projects—while also discussing the foundations of such an approach and the different perspectives that have affected the program and its artistic examples. Working with clothing and fashion design through artistic projects using text and bodies, this thesis transforms queer and feminist theory into a creative process and, by looking into bodily experiences of clothing, Body Acts Queer investigates its performative and ideological functions, with a focus on cultural, social, and heteronormative structures. Body Acts Queer suggests a change in the ways in which bodies act, are perceived, and are produced within the fashion field, giving examples of—and alternatives to—how queer design practice can be performed. In this thesis, queer design is explored as an inclusive term, containing ideas about clothing and language, the meeting point between fiction and reality, and the ability to perform interpretation and bodily transformations—where pleasure, bodily experiences, and interaction create a change.

Feelings of disgust may have effects on one’s moral judgment; specifically that experience of disgust has linked to increased severity of moral judgments. Additionally, one’s political beliefs may also affect one’s moral judgment, such as conservatives tend to make harsher judgment toward moral situations and behaviors. A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial quasi-experiment has been proposed to study 420 participants, legal adults from both conservative and liberal neighborhoods, randomly assigned to one of two conditions, disgust-eliciting versus neutral. Participants will view either four disgust-eliciting photographs or four neutral photographs, and then complete survey questions on disgust rating, moral judgment, disgust sensitivity, and political self-identification. It is hypothesized that, participants who identify as liberals, will feel less disgusted by the photos than conservative participants, and have more lenient moral judgment, whereas participants who identify as conservatives, will feel more disgusted by the photos than liberals, and have much harsher moral judgment.

Climate change denial has been found to correlate with sociopolitical ideology. The general aim of the present thesis was to investigate this relation, and more specifically to 1) test the unique effects of intercorrelated ideological variables on denial, and 2) investigate the psychological underpinnings of the ideology-denial relation. This approach helps estimating what component of right-wing ideology better explains climate change denial; resistance to change (indexed by left-right/liberal-conservative political orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, and system justification), or acceptance of inequality (indexed by social dominance orientation [SDO]). In Paper I, SDO outperformed the effects of right-wing authoritarianism and political left-right orientation on denial (Study 1 and 2). Further, the SDO-denial relation was stable when denial scores were experimentally lowered by a newscast that communicated supportive evidence for climate change (Study 2). Thus, the following studies focused specifically on the SDO-denial relation by testing path models that also included other ideological variables (political conservatism, system justification, and endorsement of nature dominance), as well as personality variables (dominance, empathy, openness to experience, and anxiety avoidance) and/or gender. In Paper II, SDO and endorsement of nature dominance explained unique parts of climate change denial, and both of these variables mediated the effects of system justification and (low) empathy on denial. SDO mediated also the effect of dominance. In Paper III, focusing specifically on denial of human-induced climate change, SDO either partially or fully mediated the effects of political conservatism and gender across two cultural contexts (Brazil and Sweden). Additional analyses extended these results, by building on the model presented in Paper II. These analyses showed that SDO (and in some cases also political conservatism and endorsement of nature dominance) fully mediated the effects of gender and personality variables on denial, with one exception: Predisposition to avoid experiencing anxiety predicted denial directly, as well as through a link via general conservative ideology (system justification or political conservatism). In sum, the results indicate that denial is more strongly and consistently predicted by SDO than by the other included variables. Thus, endorsement of group-based inequality/hierarchies offers an important explanation for climate change denial.

This thesis examines technological framings for communication and identity issues, with a particular focus on Swedish mainstream schools where children with cochlear implants are pupils. Based on a sociocultural perspective on learning, the thesis focuses on how pupils and teachers interact with (and thus learn from) each other in classroom settings. The study comprises a) a sociohistorical analysis of three Swedish non-governmental organizations’ periodicals from 1891 to 2010, and b) an ethnographic study including micro-analyses of interaction in two mainstream classrooms where there are children with cochlear implants. The sociohistorical analysis illustrates how different technologies, in a range of ways, have shaped (i) how people with hearing loss communicate and interact with others and (ii) their identity positions. The analysis also demonstrates the presence of language ideologies in settings where children with hearing loss are taught. Here the main preference is for spoken communication, even though different types of visual communication emerge during the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, the issue of integration has been a matter of debate since the 1970s and provides a backdrop for the current situation, where an increasing number of children with cochlear implants receive their schooling in mainstream public rather than segregated regional deaf schools. Against this background, micro-analyses have been carried out of classroom interaction and recurring patterns and activities have been identified. The results illustrate that audiologically-oriented and communicative-link technologies play major roles in the classrooms and these both facilitate and limit the pupils’ participation. Based on postcolonial theory, the results can be understood in terms of participation and non-participation of the pupil with cochlear implants, who acquire peripheral identity positions in these classroom settings. The analysis also illuminates unequal power relations regarding technologies in use, and expressions of language ideologies in the classrooms, where spoken communication is preferred. Overall, the everyday life of children with cochlear implants in mainstream schools appears to be complex, and it is technologies in use that frame the conditions for their participation in interaction and communication.

Diese Masterarbeit setzt sich mit der Problematik der Übersetzung von ideologisch geprägten Texten auseinander. Dies geschieht anhand eines Vergleiches zweier englischer Übersetzung von Adolf Hitlers \"Mein Kampf\", die im Abstand von 70 Jahren verfasst wurden. Gesellschaftliche Umstände, die Einstellungen der Übersetzer zur Thematik sowie textuelle Beispiele bilden den Kern der Arbeit. Unterstützt wird dies durch übersetzungswissenschaftliche Aspekte.

There is an ongoing debate among psychologists regarding the psychological factors underlying moral judgments. Rationalists argue that informational assumptions (i.e. ideological beliefs about how the world works) play a causal role in shaping moral judgments whereas intuitionists argue that informational assumptions are post hoc justifications for judgments made automatically by innate intuitions. In order to compare these two perspectives, the author conducted two studies in which informational assumptions related to ingroups and outgroups varied across conditions. In Study 1, political conservatives and liberals completed the moral relevance questionnaire while imagining they were in the US, Iran, or no specific country. Keeping in line with the predictions of the intuitionist perspective, the results showed that the judgments of conservatives and liberals did not significantly differ across conditions. Study 2 used a more in depth manipulation in which participants read a vignette about a government (US, Iran, or the fictional country of Kasbara) violating the rights of a minority group. As in Study 1, the results support the intuitionist perspective--the judgments of conservatives and liberals did not significantly differ across conditions. These findings play a small part in clarifying the role of informational assumptions in moral judgments.

Based on four separate studies, this thesis deals with Swedish academia and its dwellers, with an eye toward accounting for matters of languages and linguistic exchanges. The perspectives and thinking-tools of Pierre Bourdieu form the basis of the main leitmotif, albeit extended with insights from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. Methods employed include historical analysis as well as ethnographic approaches. Study 1 analyzes the historical events and language ideological labor through which English has come to be seen as a sociolinguistic problem in Swedish language planning and policy (LPP). At the focus is the notion of ‘domain loss,’ which is interpreted as a resource in the struggle to safeguard the Swedish language. Study 2 deals with the increasing importance of English in academic publishing in two disciplinary fields of Swedish academia: history and psychology. In history, in particular, English and the transnational publishing markets it bargains currently seem to offer new ways of advancing in the competition of the field, which is encouraged by the will and ensuing managerial techniques of contemporary research policy. Study 3, however, shows that this fact does not entail that Swedish is not being used as a scientific language. In the research practices preceding finalized texts in English, Swedish-speaking researchers in physics and computer science use technical and discipline-specific Swedish both orally and in writing. The principle that upholds the logic of ‘Swedish among Swedish-speakers’ is crucial also with respect to the ability of Swedish researchers to write up scientific texts in Swedish. Exploring the writing practices of a computer scientist and his successful first-time performance of two scientific texts in Swedish, study 4 shows that texts in Swedish can be produced by assembling experiences from previous discursive encounters throughout a researcher’s biographically specific discursive history. In summary, the thesis argues that while English increasingly prevails in publishing, much knowledge previously produced and reproduced on these matters within the field of LPP has tended to overstate the dominance of English, and with that, the sociolinguistic implications of the current state of affairs. The thesis proposes that Bourdieu’s work offers some purchase in attempts to engender in-depth knowledge on the position of English vis-à-vis Swedish in the globalizing markets of Swedish academia, and that epistemic reflexivity, in particular, is a pivotal driver in such an agenda. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript.</p>

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Étude de certains mots du vocabulaire typiquement nazi (« Art » (espèce), « Blut » (sang) et « Rasse » (race) ainsi que leurs composés) dans les dictionnaires de langue allemande (spécialement le Meyers Konversations-Lexikon) et les dictionnaires bilingues allemand/français (Larousse) pour la période 1925-1971 (apparition de nouveaux mots, redéfinitions de mots déjà existants dans les dictionnaires sous l’ère nazie et leur disparition et/ou redéfinition après 1945) / A study of certain words in the typically Nazi vocabulary ("Art" (species), "Blut" (blood), "Rasse" (race) and their compound nouns) in German-speaking dictionaries (Meyers Konversations-Lexikon) as well as in bilingual French-German dictionaries (Larousse) for the time period, 1925-1971 (apparition of new words, redefinitions of pre-existing words during the Nazi era as well as their disappearance and/or redefinition after 1945).