The Swedish people’s attitude towards multiculturalism is generally positive and has been so for a long period of time. In recent years attitudes have become increasingly polarized between those who are positive and negative. The multicultural project is subject to an increasingly sharp criticism. The purpose of this study is to investigate attitudes and life practices within a specific group, a group which some consider to be an elite of knowledge in this context, university lecturers. The study examines whether the attitudes and life practices are in agreement or whether there is a discrepancy between the two. The theoretical outset for the study has been Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social space, habitus, capital forms and social positions. The result shows that all informants have a positive attitude towards multiculturalism. At the same time, their life practice is strongly characterized by a culturally homogeneous way of life and the encounter with other cultures in the Swedish context is very marginal, which is generally also forwarded to their children. In other words, there is a distinct discrepancy between attitude and life practice. Thus, there is a risk that the position of agents with a different cultural heritage, on the basis of lack of symbolic capital, will be entrenched far down in the social space.

While large performance spaces fulfill important cultural, civic, architectural and artistic needs, few performing artists begin their careers playing in large halls. As in professional sports, the “minor leagues” play a critical role for professional performing artists by allowing them to both reach out to new audiences and hone their performance skills. Niche and emerging performing artists, therefore, rely on small performance spaces as their principal means exercising their craft. In addition to size, one important difference between large and small performance spaces is the criticality of the social experience. Small performance spaces are often informal, with entertainment being secondary to social functions - as in the case of the neighborhood coffee house, bar or restaurant that offers periodic performances in addition to their standard fare. The hybridization of social and performance functions offers a “ready-made” audience for niche and emerging performing artists, engendering the new and random audience-performer connections that are so critical to nurturing performing artists and the performing arts in general. The disparate social and attentive programmatic functions of these hybrid spaces offer a challenge to architects and designers. Providing a hybrid social/performance space that is optimized for niche and emerging performing artists is the central design problem that this thesis seeks to address.

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The aim of this paper was to investigate how adult second language learners of Swedish have perceived their social space with their classmates during courses that they have studied online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The research questions that fulfilled this aim looked at (1) the students’ perceptions of three qualities connected to a positive social space: availability, support and trust; and (2) their perceived learning outcomes from the interaction that has taken place within this perceived social space. This study used a mixed method where a quantitative method that consisted of questionnaires was interrelated with a qualitative method that consisted of voluntary comments in the questionnaire as well as follow-up interviews. Thirteen students answered the questionnaire, and three of them were interviewed. The results showed that the most positive impact on their social space is connected to their trust for one another and the most negative impact is connected to the availability of their classmates as well as the use of the functions in th communication platform. The results also showed that the most positive effect on their perceived learning outcomes is connected to the opportunity to discuss and use the language in various ways and the most negative effect can be connected to differences in proficiency levels.

Contemporary media research highlights the importance of empirically analysing the relationships between media and age, changing user patterns over the life course, and generational experiences within media discourse beyond the widely hyped buzz terms such as the ‘digital natives’, ‘Google generation’, and other digitally and technologically capable generation groups. This doctoral thesis seeks to define the ‘repertoires’ of news media that different generations use to obtain topical information and create their ‘media space’. It contributes to the development of a framework within which to analyse generational features in news audiences by putting the main focus on the cultural view of generations. This perspective was first introduced by Karl Mannheim in 1928. Departing from his legacy, generations can be better conceived as social formations that are built on self-identification, rather than equally distributed cohorts. With the purpose of discussing the emergence of various ‘audiencing’ patterns from the perspectives of age, life course and generational identity, the thesis presents Estonia – a post-Soviet Baltic state – as an empirical example of a transforming society with a dynamic media landscape which is witnessing the expanding impact of new media and a shift to digitisation.The thesis is based on data from two nationally representative cross-section surveys on media use and media attitudes (conducted during the 2002-2012 period) and focus group discussions, that are used to map similarities and differences among five generation cohorts born between 1932 and 1997 with regard to the access and use of the established news media, thematic preferences and spatial orientations of media use, and discursive approach to news formats. The findings demonstrate remarkable differences between the cohorts, suggesting that they could be merged into three main groups that represent the prevailing types of relations with the news media. Yet, the study also reveals that attitudes and behaviour (including media behaviour), are not necessarily divided by year of birth, but are more and more dispersed along individualised interests and preferences. / Audiences in the Age of media Convergence: Media Generations in Estonia and Sweden