Through qualitative interviewing and narrative analysis, this study sought to illuminate and examine the life story of a formerly incarcerated Trinidadian woman. To gain insight into her experiences across the life course, criminal and conventional, I conducted two semi-structured interviews with the same woman in the context of Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on experiences of motherhood, interpersonal relationships, employment, and those of incarceration. The aim was to uncover the events and relationships that the study participant presented as the most significant and determinative in her life story. Through narrative analysis, I also sought to understand how they could be further interpreted through four tenets of life course theory: agency, interpersonal relationship effects, events’ timing and sequence, and the historical context. Narrative analysis identified victimisation, the subsequent undermining of personal agency, motivated advocacy and motherhood’s responsibilities as the narratives that were most central to the participant’s presentation of her life story’s trajectories. Identifying both events and personal interpretations of those events, I have posited that qualitative narrative analysis paired with a life course approach can identify experiences crucial to the development and motivation of criminal behaviour. I have also put forward that a greater focus on qualitative research into female offenders’ life histories in the Caribbean region would serve to deepen both the global and regional knowledge bases, and to better inform public policy with offender-oriented insight.

The aim of this essay is to present and analyse six calling narratives that has been collected from six different priests. Three of them belong to the Roman Catholic Church and three of them belong to the Church of Sweden. I have chosen to have priests from two different churches because I also want to investigate if their calling narratives can be connected to the church they belong to. To be ordained in any of these two churches one´s calling must be acknowledged by the Church involved. In the Church of Sweden, they look at the calling (or vocation) as something with two dimensions, the inner calling and the outer calling. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Church looks at the calling as one dimensional.  The calling narratives has been collected by interviews with each priest. The interviews have been semi-structured, with the intention that the priests should have been able to talk freely about what they have found important. The main questions, that all the priests got, was “Why did you choose to become a priest?”, “How did you assure yourself that the calling was from God?” and lastly “What has the calling meant in your role as a priest?”.  The essays questions are what the priests think has been crucial for their journeys to become priests, and also if there is possible to see any difference between how the priests from the Roman Catholic Church assured themselves that the calling was from God compared to how the priests from the Church of Sweden assured themselves that the calling was from God. The answer to the first question is that I noticed two different kinds of narratives, one where the calling narrative was described as a process and one where it was affected by one specific experience. The answer to the second question is that I saw a pattern where all the priests from the Church of Sweden described that confirmation from other people, about their adequacy for the priest role, had been crucial to them, while none of the priests from the Roman Catholic Church brought that up.

Student motivation is investigated in this study as a means of abrogating apathy within a public high school Jewelry course. The study is an attempt to answer a personal question of whether students could be internally motivated to a level of excitement that they would take ownership for their personal learning and the learning of their classmates. The study also addresses four main points that cause apathy, or are caused by apathy, they are: zero sum competition, compassion and support for classmates,ownership of the physical facilities, and the development of a conscientious public. Through a desire to test data on autonomy, high school students in a Jewelry 2 course were given freedom to choose what projects they made, what materials and processes they used, and what grade they received at the end of the semester. The study was a classroom action research project. Narrative analysis was used as a reflective tool to organize the data into thematic events that tracked the strengths and weaknesses of the study. Key teaching strategies were introduced in this study, including the following: personal goal setting by students to formulate an individualized curriculum; self-grading; and process diaries that the students wrote in daily to track their progress on their goals, and for use as a tool of accountability. The teaching strategies were designed to increase students' intrinsic motivation, creativity, sense of ownership for their personal learning and the learning of their fellow students, to develop a caring environment, and to develop ownership of the physical facilities of the school.

This research aims to explore the lived experiences of young British Muslims in higher education at the University of Bradford and the implications this has for the construction of their identities. The increased participation of Muslims in higher education has been hailed a major success story and is said to have enabled the forging of new, alternative, more empowering identities in comparison to previous generations. This thesis provides a new approach in exploring young British Muslims identity by focusing on the dynamics underling identity construction through the use of a pluralistic method to present an array of informants’ accounts of their experiences (Frost et al., 2011). Phase one of the research included qualitative ethnographic observations which were carried out at the University of Bradford City Campus and was chosen in order to capture the use of the various social settings by informants and to understand actions, practices and meanings people gave to issues relevant to the research. Moreover, phase one was used to identify diversity of experience and select participants for phase two, the more focused aspect of the study which involved narrative interviews. A generative narrative interview was conducted with five young Muslims and aimed to understand how students negotiated their identity as Muslims in Britain within the higher educational contexts. The research revealed that rather than Muslims utilising university as a place whereby they are able to forge new identities, as depicted in previous literature, higher education is a context which demands the negotiation of identities that both enabled and constrained.

This paper aims to analyze how the Bible stories are transformed for children to understand the stories in the Children ́s Bibles. Moreover, I have analyzed how the narrator is telling the story in the Children ́s Bibles with focus on focalization. The Bible stories that will be analyzed is “The Creation”, “Cain and Abel” and “Birth of Jesus”. This paper will also address which child vision who is represented in Barnens bästa bibel, Barnens bibel and Bibel för barn. The theory of child vision is taken from Bonnie J Miller-McLemores book Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective. Previous research on this aim shows that there has not been a lot of research written down. Therefore, this paper can contribute material for further studies. Martin Luther was the first person to create a bible for children and for people who couldn ́t read. In Sweden, there are only a few people who have done research in this field, and the bishop Sören Dalevi is one of them. In one of his articles, he concludes that certain characters in the children ́s Bibles are reflected differently from what they do in the Bible. To obtain answers to the aim of this paper, a structuralist narrative text analytical method and a comparative method have been used. It shows that Bible texts have received small changes. The authors of the Children ́s Bibles have adapted the Biblical text, so that it is easier for children to understand. In all stories in the Children ́s Bibles, one or more focalizations are included. Also, the three different child vision, premodern, modern, and postmodern, are also represented in any of Barnens bästa bibel, Bibel för barn and Barnens bibel.

In organized sports, Buffers play a bigger role within crisis communications than other industries. These buffers can relieve or intensify a crisis depending on the welfare of the organization's reputation. This paper looks at Manchester United's recent crisis regarding their player Mason Greenwood to identify usage of buffers in their crisis communication. With the help of Coombs, Koerber & Zabaras definitions of buffers paired with Sellnows proposal of dominant narratives the paper's theoretical framework was established. The organization's statements regarding the crisis, as well as their Twitter and Facebook pages were processed with the help of narrative analysis. Through the processing of the material implicit usage of buffers was identified both in their statements and social media. This paper will explore the implicit nature of buffer usage which hopefully will lead to a greater understanding of the topic for academics and organizations.

In recent years, more research has been conducted to explain state behavior in relation to crises. Poland has taken a conservative turn since 2015, distancing itself from mainstream European strategies. This is explained by self-identity needs stemming from historical experiences and envisioned futures. The escalation of the war in Ukraine at the beginning of 2022 has impacted Polish ontological security, aligning Polish political goals with those of the European Union and Ukraine, while also confirming negative perceptions of Russia as an imperialist power. By conducting a case study on Poland using narrative analysis, three biographical narratives are identified. The war in Ukraine has deepened stories of Polish heroism, victimhood, and Poland as a progressive force or leader, implying that crisis does impact ontological security in this case. The theory of ontological security can therefore be argued to highlight mechanisms that traditional security perspectives overlook, providing a more complete picture of what shapes and motivates self-identity needs and state action.

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