Health is an organising principle of contemporary neoliberal citizenship, particularly evident in the political rhetoric of individual responsibility articulated around the privatisation of public health and welfare systems. The popular culture of these political technologies is expressed via the discourses of self-help and self-care, exemplified by the commercial success of consumer health magazines, and the responsibilising strategies of public health interventions. This thesis investigates the contemporary function of health magazines by examining both the content and the context of reader letters published between 1997 and 2000 in six Sydney-based 'commercial' and 'community' publications, and incorporating interviews with magazine editors. The three commercial magazines address the health media 'publics' of women (Good Medicine), men (Men's Health) and alternative health consumers (Nature & Health), whereas the three community publications address the 'counterpublics' of people living with HIV/AIDS (Talkabout), sex workers (The Professional) and illicit drug users (User's News). Despite their different social contexts, these six magazines are all exemplary of the advanced liberal health imperatives of Australian popular culture, although the community magazines also empower audiences to facilitate social change. Reader letters are approached via the interpretive lens of cultural studies, in which the specific local characteristics of each text is seen to have wider global implications. Each magazine's letters are positioned within a complex cultural, political and economic context that includes the rise of consumer culture, the social function of narrative disclosures, the increased validation of exhibitionism and the gendered politics of health and medicine. This research advocates for interdisciplinary dialogue between media/cultural studies, health/medical sociology and political theory, suggesting that health magazine reader letters can help to identify the role of popular and alternative media in constructing ideals of 'citizenships' within advanced liberalism.

Unlimited demands of development and non-stopped destruction of surrounding environments cause many environmental problems. In this paper, Climate Change as one important issue has been studied against an Asian background. For the purpose of showing a clear trend of communicated corporate awareness in global Climate Change issues, in this report, seventy Asian companies have been studied. The results show a relatively low-level growth curve of communicated corporate Climate Change awareness by dissecting companies’ CEO Letters during years 2000 to 2009, followed by a comparison study with European results and five possible explanations in the discussion part. As the conclusion of this paper, an increased interest among Asian governments and companies during year 2000-2009 has been observed. However, there is still lack of knowledge on a general level compared with the European results. According to the five possible explanations, several possible future studies have also been recommended in the paper: 1) Comparison study under the same scope within Asia or other continents; 2) Case-study on specific interested companies; 3) On-going study on the future curve trend with the same target group.

This study was motivated by a variety of democratic experience in the world that interchangeably perplexes and inspires students of politics. To understand the processes by which democracies emerge, this study was launched to examine new democracies from a discursive perspective. Four main questions guided the inquiry: (1) Is there a rhetorical/discursive counterpart to the process of democratization? (2) If so, what are the rhetorical features and markers of democratic changes? (3) What specific discursive practices correlate with growth and/or decline of democracy? and (4) What practical value might there be to having a more sensitive measure of democratic growth and/or decline? To answer these questions, a critical discourse analysis was conducted on two genres of Russian public discourse juxtaposing lay (letters to the editor) and elite (editorials) voices in three national periodicals during four election seasons between 1996 and 2008. The analysis of lay discourse revealed (a) that ordinary Russians enjoy expressing their opinions, (b) that they are argumentative, (c) that their repertoire of political voices is rather small, and (d) that their discussions are gradually sliding toward trivial matters. These findings portrayed a public that is attentive to public affairs and speaks out in a forum. Elite voices, on the other hand, were found (e) to be mesmerized by politics, (f) to think of the political world as detached from ordinary life, and (g) to envision the audience of ironic bystanders. Together, these findings pointed to a conclusion that ordinary Russians are rarely summoned either to renew democracy or to improve upon it. Consequently, they rarely identify themselves as true democrats, although many of their discursive practices resemble those that are thought of as a staple of the democratic public sphere. / text

My dissertation argues that national tropes are continually in a state of flux as they are employed to respond to historical, socio-political and cultural events and trends, and demonstrates that their state at a specific moment encapsulates struggles between various concepts of national identity. I trace shifts in the configuration of Anglo-Scottish relations by undertaking a microanalysis of two specific recurring tropological categories - familial and homosocial tropes — in a number of key moments in cross-border relations between 1707 and 1830. The first chapter, directed at the years surrounding the Union of Parliaments, traces the suppression of cross-border dissonance in homosocial egalitarian tropes which define Anglo-Scottish relations in the work of pro-union pamphleteers, and contrasts this strategy of containment with the disruptive presence of familial tropes in the pamphlets of anti-union writers. The second chapter traces the reappearance of this conflict in the decade following Culloden. Roderick Random, written from the margins by Tobias Smollett, reveals a discomfort with unifying tropes, although it ends with a cursory gesture towards a national marital union. James Ramble, in contrast, written by the English Edward Kimber, deflects dissonance onto Jacobitism, suggesting through tropes of friendship that all aspects of Anglo-Scottish relations are seamlessly integrated into British unity. Chapters three and four foreground the 1760s, a decade in which Scottish agency, in the person of Lord Bute, the Lord Treasurer, seems to reach new heights. Yet it is also a decade of rampant Scotophobia, incited by the Wilkites to undermine Bute's authority. Tropological warfare is an important element of this rhetorical conflict. In chapters five and six, I uncover two competing concepts of Britishness, primarily created by English and Irish writers, which emerge in the 1790s. The first engages with homosocial tropes to foreground Scottish agency in nation-building and empire-building projects, but does so at the expense of a distinct Scottish culture. The second, also produced by English and Irish writers, reifies and celebrates Scottish culture through tropes of cross-border courtship, but tends to represent the emergent concept as endangered, lacking national agency. Chapter six analyzes the Scottish response to this tropological binary.

呈現足球的公共形象在19世紀中晚期英格蘭地區的演進，以及此形象的演進如何促成現代足球(特別是協會足球)成形與流行，就是本論文的主要目的。 　　目前學界對於現代足球起源與成形有兩種主要看法：出身社會中上層的公學、大學師生，在19世紀中葉透過制定成文規則，「馴化」並保存此前社會上原有的民俗足球，最後促成統一足球規則的努力──此為其一；修正派學者則認為，早在公學、大學師生投入前，19世紀中葉以前的英格蘭社會中早已存在有組織、有規則的足球，而早期學者過分誇大了社會中上層對於現代足球帶來的影響。然而，現有史料尚不足以證明上述足球活動實際如何進行、組織，也無法顯示各種以「足球」為名的運動間是否有因果關係。 　　人們呈現過去的方式，足以暗示了他們希望別人，甚至是自己應該如何看待目前的現實。足球的規則，以及人們希望足球所能承載的價值、作用，都會隨著時間改變。除了用規則的出現與演變來追溯現代足球的起源，由制定規則的群體來判斷現代足球受到哪一階級影響較深以外，從時人對於足球的「印象」、「觀感」，也就是他們所相信的東西著手，或許更能推演出「現代足球」的「概念」源起於何時。 　　《英格蘭19世紀中晚期足球形象的演進》即以此為目標，利用19世紀《倫敦時報》的讀者投書，以及其他運動報紙和嚴肅期刊文章，試圖重建足球在19世紀中晚期英格蘭輿論中的公共形象，繼而回應、調和學界已有的兩種不同觀點。第一章〈斷裂或延續：現代足球起源問題〉呈現公學觀點與修正派學者的主張與其優劣擅場，並提出以足球的當代「形象」做為解決起源問題的可能方式。第二章〈公學地位競爭與足球議題上升的能見度(1858-63)〉直接回到上述學術論爭所指向的關鍵時代，透過當時媒體上有關「統一足球規則」的爭論來證明當時公學、大學師生與社會中上層人士對提高現代足球運動地位的影響。第三章〈從惡名昭彰到男子氣概：19世紀末輿論中足球形象的演進〉，則綜觀整個19世紀，在長時段中呈現足球形象在英格蘭輿論中的轉折，進一步突顯現代足球概念成形的時間。 　　透過足球形象的轉變與形塑，以及時人對於足球發展歷程的看法，我們得以了解19世紀中晚期的英格蘭人為何投身一種新興的運動，從而接近他們所追求的價值，並希望別人如何看待他們的所作所為。 關鍵詞：現代足球　協會足球　《倫敦時報》讀者投書

Cultural and historical accounts of self-help literature typically describe its development and focus in terms of the autonomous, public male subject of the nineteenth century. This literary study recognizes that as masculine self-help discourse became widely accessible in the mid nineteenth century, mid-Victorian feminist novels, periodicals, and tracts developed versions of self-help that disrupted the dominant cultural view that the single female was helpless and “redundant” if she did not become a wife and mother. I argue that the dual focus of Victorian self-help discourse on the ability to help oneself and others was attractive for Victorian feminist writers who needed to manipulate the terms of the domestic ideal of woman as influential helpmeet, if women’s independence and civic duty were to be made culturally palatable. Chapter One focuses on how Dinah Mulock Craik drew on self-help values popularized in mid-century articles and collective biographies by Samuel Smiles, while rejecting the genre of biography for its invasiveness into female lives. By imagining a deformed single artist heroine in the context of her 1851 bildungsroman, Olive, Craik highlighted and contested the objectification of women within Victorian culture while reproducing other forms of female difference based on dominant constructions of class, sexuality, and race. Chapter Two extends formal and thematic considerations of self-help discourse to a comparison of masculine colonial accounts of class-climbing and the projection of a self-reliant, yet deeply unstable, domestic female by Maria Rye and the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society. Chapter Three exerts critical pressure on the tension between individual and mutual help by charting the debate that raged between liberal individualism and collectivism in the labour movement, particularly in The Women’s Union Journal. Returning to a focus on the binary of female aberrance and normalcy within Victorian culture, Chapter Four analyzes late-century case studies of nervous illnesses alongside Ella Hepworth Dixon’s 1894 New Woman novel that promoted self-help for women as desirable yet unattainable in a society still largely structured around the domestic ideal. At its broadest, this dissertation explores points of convergence and departure between Victorian masculine and feminine self-help texts, and touches on reverberations of this Victorian discourse in today’s self-help works directed at women in Western culture.

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Vilka ekonomiska frågor ligger närmast de svenska brevskrivarnas hjärtan? Två svenska professorer, Becker och Jonung undersökte detta 1998. Denna studie undersöker i ett världsunikt data set innehållande 536 brev adresserade till statsminister Fredrik Reinfeldt under hans mandatperiod 2006-2014. Genom undersökningen ges en övergripande bild av brevskrivarnas mest centrala frågor rörande ekonomi. Utgångspunkten ligger i att undersöka skillnader i fördelningen av brev mellan denna och tidigare studie. Med hypotestest påvisas skillnader och där dess eventuella bakomliggande faktorer undersöks vidare. Detta görs genom en granskning av media och arbetslöshetens påverkan på brevskrivarna. Svaren blev tvetydliga, media har visserligen en påverkan, men i princip negligerbar. För arbetslösheten återfanns inget samband. Detta kopplas samman med den bedömning författarna gjorde angående att de flesta av brevskrivarna är pensionärer. / What economic issues are closest to the Swedish correspondents´ hearts? In 1998 two Swedish professors, Becker and Jonung, examined what these issues could conceivably be. This study examines a unique data set consisting of 536 letters addressed to the Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt during his length in office, 2006-2014. By doing so, a general view of correspondents´ most central economic issues appears. The aim of this study is to compare these two, to see if changes in correspondents´ opinions has emerged. Differences between the studies have been shown through hypothesis testing, and it´s underlying factors are examined further. This is done through an examination of media and employment. Results indicate that media has a slightly positive effect on correspondents´ opinions, something that could not be concluded by the rate of unemployment due to the fact that most incoming letters probably are written by senior citizens.

This study of the establishment of heritage preservation in Sweden during the first half of the 20th century focuses upon Sigurd Curman (1879-1966), art historian, restoration architect and Director of Antiquities. Its purpose is to show how an older, more research-oriented form of heritage work grew to become a more socially-conscious vari­ant of cultural preservation. The period of establishment embraces organizational inquiries, government legisla­tion and institutionalization, and as Director of Antiquities between 1923 and 1946, Curman was a main actor. He had already become a key figure in debates on the official organization of preservation activities in Sweden well before this, whose early career dealt chiefly with the restoration of churches. Curman advocated the accentuation of aspects of cultural history. An opinion had been formed among cultural historians and museum curators against what they perceived as the obsolete manner of pursuing heritage efforts conducted by the Royal Swedish Acad­emy of Letters, History and Antiquities and its secretary, the Director of Antiquities, who was also head of Swe­den's main official museum, the Museum of History. Criticism was aimed at all aspects of official heritage preservation efforts, including legislation, restoration policy, the care of ancient ruins and treatment of finds, as well as the lack of understanding on the behalf of the central authority for local and regional interests. The latter referred to the emotive aspects of heritage preservation, which in contemporary verbiage was summarized by the term "piety". The central authority was accussed of not understanding "popular" heritage preservation outside the context of the museum and of displaying a lack of piety toward "the cultural memory of the Fatherland". These feelings were based primarily on two prerequisites: an established perception of a homogeneous national culture with ancient roots in the past, and an apprehension that it was in the interests of society that the government become responsible for the administration of this material cultural heritage. This ambition can be summarized by the term "preservation of cultural heritage" and its foremost exponent was Sigurd Curman. The dissertation fol­lows Curman from his childhood in a wealthy Stockholm family, to his early career in restoration and as lecturer in architectural history at the College of Art. In 1912, Curman was appointed to the first chair in these fields estab­lished at the College, which he held until 1918 when he became advisor in the cultural history of architecture at the new Royal Swedish Board of Public Building. When appointed Director of Antiquities he began concretizing the official organization of heritage preservation. During the 1910s he participated in a comprehensive, dual inquiry into the organization and legislation of the government's heritage preservation policy. When its final report was presented in 1922 it was tabled, but still acted as the basis for Curman's continued efforts. He created a modem bureaucracy out of the council of the Department of Antiquities and contributed to moving the central authority from the ground floor of the National Museum to its own premises in midtown Stockholm. Curman would also work to improve legislation to protect cultural monuments and developed museum activities by creat­ing a countrywide organization of county antiquarians and regional museums. When Sweden's new antiquities law was passed by parliament in 1942, Curman had not only led the inquiry leading up to it, but had formulated the draft of the legislation himself. By the time of his retirement in 1946 he was a legend in antiquarian circles, the very personification of Swedish cultural heritage preservation. The present dissertation shows how Curman achieved this status, though it also details the efforts of numerous other actors participating in the process and sees Curman as a bureaucrat who realized demands for a renewal of heritage preservation in the country. / digitalisering@umu

Thesis--Vanderbilt University, 1970. / On cover: The familiar letter of recommendation. Bibliography: p. 239-244.