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This study takes its point of departure in the tradition of Christian women covering their hair for religious and cultural reasons, hereafter called veiling. The aim has been to investigate what ideas were projected onto the veil in Sweden during the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as when and how the tradition of veiling disappeared among most Christian Swedes. My definition of what constitutes a veil has little to do with the form of the head covering. If an item is used in the mean of covering women’s hair for religious or cultural, rather than practical reasons, then it is considered to be a veil.In his first letter to the assembly of Corinth (1 Cor. 11), the Apostle Paul advocates a veil as a sign of women’s subordination. He also states that women’s hair is a sign of honour and to have it cut would be a disgrace. In 19th century Sweden, it was tradition among the rural populations for women to have long hair, covered indoors as well as outdoors. The sources show that people were aware of the words in 1 Cor. 11 about female subordination and the veil as a sign thereof. Women’s hair became the means for an individual’s inner body to show its virtues via the outer, physical body.In the mid-1920s it became popular for young women to cut their hair short. By accentuating how the world had changed, short hair became a symbol of modernity. Within a decade short hair for young women became the norm all over the country. There were no significant protests of this from the Swedish Church, though free-churches with a more fundamentalist understanding of the Bible remained disapproving. As the century progressed women gradually appeared bare-headed in church. Paul’s words about subordination became considered as an Oriental influence rather than a divine command. By projecting the inequalities of the sexes as an ancient Oriental idea, the western society’s identity as modern and democratic could be asserted. Essentially, everyone agreed that Swedish Christian women were not veiled, nor ever had been, nor should be. Hence the tradition of veiling disappeared in the Swedish Church without much notice.In the more fundamentalist Swedish Pentecostal movement the hair itself began to carry the religious symbolism otherwise given to the veil. In this manner, the hair had indeed become like a veil, as Paul had written. Renouncing long hair was in the end a renunciation of Paul’s words and the hierarchical system assigned by God. Nevertheless, short hair for women eventually became accepted within the Swedish Pentecostal movement as well.

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The use of encyclopedias has since their entry in Sweden, played a central role in communicating and defining knowledge to society. This essay examines the representation of peoples (race) in Africa, Asia and the Orient in encyclopedias between 1845-2020. The essay aims to explain and show how several selected concepts have changed in the encyclopedias’ descriptions over time in Sweden. The results show that the encyclopedias were highly influenced by racial biology and scientific racism the further back in time the encyclopedias were issued. People from Africa, Asia and the Orient were described with external characteristics and at times associated with different psychic characteristics. Through the representation of appearance, at times presented as different and foreign, one can see a construction between “we” and “the others”. The encyclopedias also made descriptions of people with generalizing derogatory concepts that were imbued by racism and dogmatic views on the different. Descriptions of peoples appearance and character traits were something that gradually disappeared over time.

This study aims to survey and compare Swedish newspaper coverage relating to convicted terrorists Anders Behring Breivik and Rakhmat Akilov. The pivotal question of the study is whether this coverage differs depending on factors such as each perpetrator’s ethnicity and political beliefs. The source material has been gathered from Swedish national newspapers Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet. This study has utilised a mixed research methodology consisting of a quantitative digital text analysis combined with a qualitative frame analysis. The theoretical framework of this study mainly consists of media theories such as framing (as defined by Goffman 1974, Van Gorp 2010, Shehata 2012 and more), construction of crime news and crime waves (Jewkes 2004, Fishman 1978) and news values (Häger 2014). Additionally, theories about orientalism, stereotyping, and ethnicity are applied (Dyer 1997:2006, Said 1978). Other research on the aforementioned topics is also touched upon.The quantitative part of this study has been conducted through the use of text analysis tool Textometrica. A total of 460 newspaper articles mentioning either perpetrator have been analysed. This has highlighted the framing, wording, and phraseology of said articles. The qualitative part of the study consists of an in-depth survey of frames found in a select number of these articles. It draws inspiration from frame research conducted by, among others, journalism professor Baldwin Van Gorp (2010).The results of this study show a noticeable difference in the portrayals of both perpetrators. While Aftonbladet tends to simplify stories, Svenska Dagbladet leans towards a more comprehensive coverage. In general, a certain degree of attention is given to elaborations on Behring Breivik’s personal life and youth to explain his wrongdoings. Akilov, on the other hand, is mostly just described through his foreign appearance and is more clearly conceptualised as a terrorist and as part of a larger network (the Islamic State). / Syftet med denna studie är att jämföra svensk nyhetsrapportering om de dömda terroristerna Anders Behring Breivik och Rakhmat Akilov. Studiens centrala frågeställning är huruvida denna rapportering skiljer sig på grundval av faktorer såsom respektive gärningsmans etnicitet och politiska tillhörighet. Källmaterialet har samlats in från de svenska nationella dagstidningarna Aftonbladet och Svenska Dagbladet. Det metodologiska ramverket består av en kvantitativ digital textanalys i kombination med en kvalitativ framinganalys. Studiens teoretiska ramverk består främst av medieteorier, däribland gestaltningsteorin (definierad av Goffman 1974, Van Gorp 2010, Shehata 2012 med flera) och konstruktionen av brottsnyheter och brottsvågor (Jewkes 2004, Fishman 1978). Dessutom appliceras teorier om orientalism, stereotypisering och etnicitet (Dyer 1997:2006, Said 1978). Tidigare forskning om ovan nämnda teorier inkluderas också.Den kvantitativa delen av studien genomfördes med hjälp av textanalysverktyget Textometrica. Totalt 460 nyhetsartiklar som nämner endera av gärningsmännen har analyserats. Detta har tydliggjort artiklarnas inramning, formuleringar och språkbruk. Den kvalitativa delen av studien består av en mer djupgående analys av gestaltningar identifierade i ett antal av artiklarna. Denna kvalitativa analys hämtar inspiration från gestaltningsforskning genomförd av, bland andra, journalistikprofessor Baldwin Van Gorp (2010).Studien visar en anmärkningsvärd skillnad i porträtteringarna av respektive gärningsman. Aftonbladet tenderar att förenkla skeenden medan Svenska Dagbladets rapportering är mer omfattande. Båda tidningarna uppmärksammar Behring Breiviks privatliv och uppväxt för att förklara hans ogärningar. Akilov å andra sidan beskrivs främst genom sitt utländska utseende och framställs tydligare som terrorist och del av ett större nätverk (den islamiska staten).

Denna uppsats avser att analysera representationen av barnet och barndomen i konsten under den europeiska kolonialiseringen och imperialismen genom historieskrivningen ur ett feministiskt postkolonialt perspektiv med en historiografisk metod. Syftet är att reflektera över hur kolonialismen har påverkat den visuella konsten föreställande barn och skapat föreställningarna om ras, klass och kön. Som en bakgrund presenteras först konceptet av barnet och barndomens framväxt fram från medeltiden till slutet av 1700-talet. Sedan sammanflätas det med studiens två huvuddelar som tar avstamp i slutet av 1700-talet fram till början av 1900-talet. Den första huvuddelen analyserar barnmotiven i relation med kolonialismen ur nyklassicistisk-, romantisk- och realistisk konst, medan den andra huvuddelen centrerar kring orientalismen. Barnmotiven kommer genomgående att analyseras med en kritisk syn på historieskrivningen och samhällsnormer ur en intersektionell lens. / This paper aims to analyze the representation of children and childhood in art during the European colonization and imperialization through history from a postcolonial feminist perspective historiographical method. The aim is to reflect on how colonialism has affected the visual representation of children and generated the concepts of race, class, and gender. As a background, the paper will first present the historical concept of the child and the emergence of childhood from the Middle ages to the end of the 18th century. This will then be intertwined with the two main parts of the study, which will analyze childhood from the late 18th until the beginning of the 20th century. The first main part analyzes pictures of children in relation to colonialism in the Neoclassical-, Romantic- and Realistic artforms, while the second main part will center around Orientalist art. Throughout the paper, the pictures will be analyzed with a critical perspective of history and societal norms from an intersectional viewpoint.

This project examines the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons during the Syrian civil war in 2013 and places the disarmament process in the context of the international nonproliferation regime and the history of United States weapons of mass destruction (WMD) policy. Additionally, I argue that U.S. policy on WMDs does not operate by a fixed set of standards; rather, cultural assumptions about a state and its weapons (such as the USSR, Iraq, Israel and their WMDs) are used to justify nonproliferation action. I present weapons as a mode of Othering that the U.S. and the nonproliferation regime employ to justify the designation of an enemy state. This analysis also examines the “myth of neutrality” of humanitarian intervention and applies these concepts to nonproliferation intervention.

This thesis investigates Emily Dickinson's spatial imagination. It examines how her poetic landscape responds to the conditions of modernity in an age of modernization, expansionism, colonialism and science. In particular, I look at how the social and cultural representations of nature and heaven are revised and appropriated in her poems to challenge the hierarchical structure of visual dominance embedded in the public discourses of her time. Although she seldom travelled, her writing oscillates between experiential empiricism, sensationalistic reportage, and ecological imagination to account for the social and geographical transition of a rapidly industrialized and commercialized society. The notion of transcendence, progress and ascension in Enlightenment and Transcendentalist writings, based upon technological advancement and geographical expansion, characterized the social and cultural imagination of her time. Alternatively, an increasingly cosmopolitan New England registers a poetic contact zones as well as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space, in which colonial relations can be subverted, western constructions of orientalism challenged, and capitalist modernity inflected. Dickinson voiced in her poems her critical reception of such a phantasmagoric site of a modern world. I explore how her cartographic projection registers the conflicting nature of modernity, while resists the process of empowerment pursued by her contemporary writers, presenting a more dynamic poetic vision of the world. In the first chapter, I explore her use of empirical mapping as a poetic approach to challenge the Enlightenment notion of progress and modernity. I look at her poems of social transitions, especially her poems of the Bible, the train, the pastoral, and the graveyard, to show how she addresses the issue of modernization. Her visit to Mount Auburn and the rural landscape movement are explored to show her complex poetic response toward modernity. In the second chapter, I focus on her poems of emigration and exploration to see how she appropriates frontier metaphors and exploratory narratives that dominated the discourses of national and cultural projects of her time. The colonial expeditions and national expansionism of her time are examined to show her revision and deconstruction of quest narratives. In the third chapter, I examine her commercial metaphors in relation to cosmopolitanism. I discuss her metaphors of tourism to see how her poems are based upon the notion of consumption as a poetic mode that is closely related to the violence of global displacement and imperial contestation. Her tourist experiences and reading of travel writings will be examined to show her critical response towards the dominant visual representations of her time. In the last chapter, I explore her poems of visitation and reception to show her elastic spatial imagination through her notion of neighbouring and compound vision. In particular, I discuss her poetic reception and appropriation of the theories of Edward Hitchcock and Thomas De Quincey. I conclude suggesting that her spatial imagination reveals her poetic attempt to account for the conditions of modernity.

The discourse on Norrland (literally ‘North land’ in English) as essentially ‘different’ has been(re)produced in literature, politics and science for as long as the idea of ‘Norrland’ has existed. Thus,when investigating the discourse that constructs the identity of Norrland in opposition to a Swedishnational identity, it is important to connect these representations to their contemporary (andchanging) political-economic contexts. The aim of this thesis is to analyze contemporaryrepresentations in news, film, advertising and interviews to show how representations constructstereotypes informed by neoliberal ideals and internationally familiar stereotypes of a traditionalintransigent population positioned in Norrland and a modern and progressive population in theurban South. The findings in this thesis can be summarized as follows. First, Norrland has beenconsistently reproduced, resisted and reworked through various discursive networks and practicesover centuries, as simultaneously authentic and obsolete. Drawing on these discourses makes therepresentations of Norrland in the news become part of a wider discursive network that representsNorrland as an ‘internal other’ within Sweden. Secondly, discourses on Swedish modernity and onneoliberal growth and competition reproduce Norrland and its people as inferior to the rest ofSweden. These representations are reworked and resisted and result in ‘real’ material effects in, forinstance, the news media, place marketing and film. Thirdly, in order to resist these representationsand become part of the ‘modern’, progressive world, places and people need to adjust to neoliberalideals of competitiveness and growth. And, finally, people’s identities are affected by theseneoliberal ideals as they have to relate and react to the representations of different places andpeople and the discourse on the urban as progress. This results in different strategies in theconstruction of narrative identities. I conclude by arguing that these representations serve not onlyas contrasts but also as strategies in the quest to scapegoat certain groups for problems that initiallyoriginated in unequal opportunities and structures of power related to, for instance, ethnicity, class,gender and disabilities – something that is exacerbated by neoliberalist policies and ideologies. Themore pressure is put on individuals and places to produce constant growth, the more certain peopleand places are viewed as ‘unproductive’ and problematic. The problems of depopulation anddiminishing job opportunities in the inland areas of Norrland are thus blamed on the population through the representations of Norrland as an internal ‘other.’ / Away from the periphery – migration, livelihood strategies and place discourse in the periphery of Norrland

Columnists and social media users commonly stated that terrorist attacks resonate differently in the world and they speculated on some potential reasons such as familiarity, number of victims, and the difference in expectations of a country to be a stage for a terrorist attack to explain this difference. An academic perspective, more specifically a sociological one, is needed to bring light to this debate. In this study, I aimed to understand the discourse after terrorist attacks and to find out if there is a difference between reactions to terrorist attack based on where they happened. This paper embraces a text mining approach to uncover what topics are discussed after four cases of terrorist attacks and to reveal if there is a discrepancy in reactions towards terrorist attacks based on the country they happened. The study consists of two parts. In the first part, the determinants of the public interest and support and how public interest differentiates between different cases of terror attacks is explored. In the second part, topic sentiment analysis is conducted to reveal the nature of the discourse on terrorism. Using the insights from social identity theory, realistic conflict theory and integrated threat theory, I argued that social group categorization in the context of terrorism takes place in a dichotomous manner as Western and Non-Western. This argument, social self-identities being based on ‘West vs. the Rest' mentality in the context of terrorism, is supported by the statistical evidence and the topic model. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.