The studys purpose has been to investigate similarities and differences in access to digital tools in Swedish municipal primary school dependent if the scools geographic place is in a bigger town or on the countryside. One of the studys research questions has been to investigate if it´s possible to discover any differences current the teachers attitudes and the pupils use of them in education dependent the schools geograpich place. Our geographical location where we grow up influences and prepare us for a future life in different ways. Different economic, social, political and cultural conditions of places are factors that contribute to children and young being given different conditions in their growing up enviroment accordning to earlier research. The school as an institution has an important role in preparing the future generation with the ICT- skills they will need to live in a digital world. The essay has an interdisciplinary approach where the interdisciplinary discipline child and youth studies form the basis, which is supplemented by the addition of cultural geographical perspectives. My presentation of research overwiew includes previous research from both scienticif disciplines. The methods used for collecting and analysing data is a mixed- method where quantitative data in the form of existing statistics and conducted qualitative semi- structured interviews has been used. The result of the study shows that there is a difference between the town and the countryside in access to broadband which affect the use of digital tools in education in the schools I´ve investigated. They also indicate that it´s a difference in what kind of digital tools the schools placed in different geographic areas have access to. It´s also possible to discover some differences in the pupils use of the digital tools in education, depending on the schools geographic place. Accordning to my results there is a development area int he work with ICT in primary municipal school´s education, that includes the knowledge of the pupil´s socioeconomic backgrounds and geographical conditions to be able to strive for equal conditions for students to become digitally competent citizens in the future.

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Syftet är att undersöka 62 stycken vårdnadshavares beskrivning av hur de motiverar val av förskola med religiös profil utifrån ett fenomenologiskt perspektiv. Vår frågeställning är: Hur beskriver vårdnadshavarna sitt val av förskola? Hur beskriver vårdnadshavarna sina upplevelser av en förskola med religiös profil? Tillsammans med fenomenologi och begreppen fenomen, förförståelse och livsvärld så kom vi till resultatet att det var väldigt individbaserat men att det fanns flera sammanhängande teman. De beskrev valet av förskolan utifrån rekommendationer, personligt besök av förskolan och dess närhet till hemmet. Flera tog upp den religiösa profilen som anledning för val av förskola samt att flera valde förskolan utöver den religiösa profilen. Vi har funnit att vårdnadshavare ser förskolor med specifik profil som ett komplement till barnens utveckling och att det beror mera på deras egen syn på vad förskolan kan bidra till deras barn.

In this thesis I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I argue that popular images of the empowered young users of a new digital democracy need to be complicated by asking questions about the politics of digital participation: about whose voices are heard, about where attention is centred, about how interactivity is defined, about who is rewarded for creative labour. The opening chapter introduces key issues within a critical examination of digital participation, including commodification, user agency and intellectual property. It also outlines my methodologies and my choice of research site – namely internet television, and the proliferation of corporate and youth practices around digitized television texts. The next two chapters provide case studies that identify and evaluate not only the interactions between corporate producers and young users, but also the power relations between the two. First, I analyze young women‘s video remixes of the program Gossip Girl. I consider the remixes as gendered texts that contribute new aesthetics and concerns, even as they reproduce dominant interpretations of contemporary girlhood. I also consider the distribution of the videos on YouTube, noting how their circulation simultaneously challenges corporate ownership and creates profit and promotion for those same corporate owners. Next, I examine interactions around the The Colbert Report. Focusing on the program‘s official discussion boards, I demonstrate how young fans have taken up Stephen Colbert‘s invitation to join in the parody by creating a vibrant, dialogic and rowdy community that has frequently come into conflict with Comedy Central producers. In their attempts to address these conflicts and create alternative spaces of their own, these young people gesture towards larger tensions over the control of public digital dialogue. The final chapter draws on my research and experience as a teacher to consider how these case studies might help us to frame our own educational projects. I call for a digital literacy curriculum that provides both a place for students to reflect on their daily activities within mediated environments and the opportunity to experiment with digital production.

In this thesis I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I argue that popular images of the empowered young users of a new digital democracy need to be complicated by asking questions about the politics of digital participation: about whose voices are heard, about where attention is centred, about how interactivity is defined, about who is rewarded for creative labour. The opening chapter introduces key issues within a critical examination of digital participation, including commodification, user agency and intellectual property. It also outlines my methodologies and my choice of research site – namely internet television, and the proliferation of corporate and youth practices around digitized television texts. The next two chapters provide case studies that identify and evaluate not only the interactions between corporate producers and young users, but also the power relations between the two. First, I analyze young women‘s video remixes of the program Gossip Girl. I consider the remixes as gendered texts that contribute new aesthetics and concerns, even as they reproduce dominant interpretations of contemporary girlhood. I also consider the distribution of the videos on YouTube, noting how their circulation simultaneously challenges corporate ownership and creates profit and promotion for those same corporate owners. Next, I examine interactions around the The Colbert Report. Focusing on the program‘s official discussion boards, I demonstrate how young fans have taken up Stephen Colbert‘s invitation to join in the parody by creating a vibrant, dialogic and rowdy community that has frequently come into conflict with Comedy Central producers. In their attempts to address these conflicts and create alternative spaces of their own, these young people gesture towards larger tensions over the control of public digital dialogue. The final chapter draws on my research and experience as a teacher to consider how these case studies might help us to frame our own educational projects. I call for a digital literacy curriculum that provides both a place for students to reflect on their daily activities within mediated environments and the opportunity to experiment with digital production.

Unaccompanied youth are migrant children who travel by themselves to the United States, mostly from Central America and Mexico. Since 2014, more than 200,000 unaccompanied youth have entered the United States, with approximately 28,000 residing in Los Angeles, California (U.S. Customs and Border Protection [CBP], CBP 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021a, 2021b). Hundreds of these young migrants have enrolled in public schools (Pierce, 2016). Schools seek adequate and effective ways to support these students’ complex needs and aspirations. Within the body of research about this sub-group of immigrants there is a significant absence of the voices of unaccompanied youth themselves, which results in limited knowledge and uninformed school policy responses. This study employed Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a methodology to foreground youth agency in capturing counter-narratives that accurately depict the school experiences of unaccompanied youth who find themselves at the intersection of race, gender, immigration status, migration, and class. The questions guiding this study were: How do unaccompanied youth, in the role of youth co-researchers describe, experience, and make meaning of educación at a justice-focused high school in Los Angeles? and (b) How can the epistemology of unaccompanied youth inform practices and policies, to ensure a socially-just education, against the backdrop of an anti-immigrant climate? YPAR is built on the idea that young people have the capacity to conduct research, generate new knowledge, and create transformational social change. This research study built on the epistemology of unaccompanied youth to inform and generate affirming and emancipatory educational practices with youth as agents of knowledge creation. This study provides the field with first-hand information that can be shared in the educational community. Abstract (Spanish) Los jóvenes no acompañados son niños migrantes que viajan solos a los Estados Unidos, principalmente desde Centroamérica y México. Desde 2014, más de 200,000 jóvenes no acompañados han ingresado a los Estados Unidos, y aproximadamente 28,000 residen en Los Ángeles, California (U.S. Customs and Border Protection [CBP], CBP 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021a, 2021b). Cientos de estos jóvenes migrantes se han matriculado en escuelas públicas (Pierce, 2016). Las escuelas buscan formas adecuadas y efectivas de apoyar las complejas necesidades y aspiraciones de estos estudiantes. Dentro del cuerpo de investigación sobre este sub-grupo de inmigrantes hay una ausencia significativa de las voces de los propios jóvenes no acompañados, lo que da como resultado un conocimiento limitado y respuestas políticas escolares desinformadas. Este estudio empleó la Teoría Crítica de la Raza (CRT) como marco teórico y la Investigación de Acción Participativa Juvenil (YPAR) como una metodología para poner en primer plano la agencia juvenil en la captura de contra-narrativas que representan con precisión las experiencias escolares de los jóvenes no acompañados que se encuentran en la intersección de la raza, género, estatus migratorio, migración y clase. Las preguntas que guiaron este estudio fueron: ¿Cómo los jóvenes no acompañados, en el papel de co-investigadores jóvenes, describen, experimentan y dan sentido a la educación en una escuela secundaria centrada en la justicia social en Los Ángeles? y (b) ¿Cómo puede la epistemología de los jóvenes no acompañados informar prácticas y políticas para garantizar una educación socialmente justa, en el contexto de un clima anti-inmigrante? YPAR se basa en la idea de que los jóvenes tienen la capacidad de realizar investigaciones, generar nuevos conocimientos y generar un cambio social transformador. Esta investigación se basó en la epistemología de los jóvenes no acompañados para informar y generar prácticas educativas afirmativas y emancipadoras con los jóvenes como agentes de creación de conocimiento. Este estudio proporciona al campo información de primera mano que se puede compartir en la comunidad educativa.

This thesis is concerned with creativity as an object of educational governance and a category of subjective identification. It studies a ‘creativity explosion’ in higher education in New Zealand, focusing on how fashion design students are being mobilized as subjects of creativity through ‘joined up’ modes of governance and technologies of educational choice. Using a poststructural ethnographic ‘methodology’ I explain how, from the late 1990s, models of educational governance began to appear dysfunctional and unable to deliver the attributes and capacities expected of citizens in a knowledge economy. I argue that creativity gained significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’. Neoliberal rhetorics representing creativity as flexible human capital and a generic, transferable skill needed by workers in the new economy, were articulated with liberal humanist notions about creativity, which are commonly understood and performed through the social categories of art. All kinds of individual and institutional actors took advantage of these shifting opportunity structures to position themselves with ‘creative’ identities. Within various cultural organisations, including universities, moves to strengthen a liberal agenda and retain creativity as a form of ‘arts knowledge’ with high cultural capital, rubbed up against counter-hegemonic strategies to enlist and develop more universal concepts about creativity as a collaborative endeavour, vital to new forms of capitalist enterprise. By historicising the context in which a new ‘normative doctrine’ of creativity has emerged, and by treating its theorisation as culturally performative, I develop the position that fashion design graduates, as ‘creative girls’, are highly productive performers in the new categories of cultural economy. However I argue that the creative girl occupies a subject position fitted to after-neoliberalised social and economic arrangements, not because she is shaped by neoliberal ideologies, but because she is made up by techniques and tactics of an ‘after-neoliberal’ governmentality. This demonstrates the mutual constitution of ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative persons’ and underlines the fact that despite after-neoliberal ambitions for managing education, there can be no simple cause and effect relation between higher education and economic performance.

With the ultimate goal of illustrating the ways that queer youth employ change and act as agents of self-representation, this project examines the relationship between the It Gets Better Project, a queer adult project focused upon ‘bettering‘ the lives of their younger generation, and the Make it Better Project created in response by queer youth. This thesis addresses the following questions: How do adult conceptualizations of queer youth as vulnerable victims operate within discourses that employ queer youth as agents of change? In what ways do queer youth grapple with such conceptualizations? Furthermore, how might queer youth actively resist adult narratives of risk, vulnerability, and surveillance? Seeking to not only examine the ways in which queer youth negotiate adult narratives of adolescent risk and vulnerability, this project is organized to highlight the ways in which queer youth understand and experience their own representational and performative narratives, particularly when performed in response to adult narratives. In examination of the “It Gets Better: Dan and Terry” (2010a) and “It Gets Better: President Barack Obama” (2010c) vlogs of the It Gets Better Project, this thesis seeks to uncover the ways that assimilationist goals of inclusion, tolerance, and equality impact the intelligibility of queer youth. As a means for which to explore the possible resistance employed to counter such silencing mechanisms, the examination turns to three youth-produced vlogs of the Make it Better Project. An additional intent of the focus on the “LGBTQ Youth Speak Out”, “Make it Better Project” and “Make it Better Project - You Can Make it Better Now!” vlogs is to construct a space to analyze the complex and fluid dynamics of queer youth communities. With focus given to the various mechanisms employed by the adult and youth performers of these particular vlog-narratives, this project constructs an interdisciplinary framework of new social movement theory, new online media studies, queer theory, quare (queer of color) studies, feminist sociolinguistics, and critical youth studies as a means to position queer youth voices at the forefront of discussion. With the goal of continuing research that represents queer youth as agents of their own experiences, bodies, lives, and identities, it is my hope that the framework provided by this examination will inspire future work that highlights and centers the voices of queer youth. / text

This thesis is concerned with creativity as an object of educational governance and a category of subjective identification. It studies a ‘creativity explosion’ in higher education in New Zealand, focusing on how fashion design students are being mobilized as subjects of creativity through ‘joined up’ modes of governance and technologies of educational choice. Using a poststructural ethnographic ‘methodology’ I explain how, from the late 1990s, models of educational governance began to appear dysfunctional and unable to deliver the attributes and capacities expected of citizens in a knowledge economy. I argue that creativity gained significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’. Neoliberal rhetorics representing creativity as flexible human capital and a generic, transferable skill needed by workers in the new economy, were articulated with liberal humanist notions about creativity, which are commonly understood and performed through the social categories of art. All kinds of individual and institutional actors took advantage of these shifting opportunity structures to position themselves with ‘creative’ identities. Within various cultural organisations, including universities, moves to strengthen a liberal agenda and retain creativity as a form of ‘arts knowledge’ with high cultural capital, rubbed up against counter-hegemonic strategies to enlist and develop more universal concepts about creativity as a collaborative endeavour, vital to new forms of capitalist enterprise. By historicising the context in which a new ‘normative doctrine’ of creativity has emerged, and by treating its theorisation as culturally performative, I develop the position that fashion design graduates, as ‘creative girls’, are highly productive performers in the new categories of cultural economy. However I argue that the creative girl occupies a subject position fitted to after-neoliberalised social and economic arrangements, not because she is shaped by neoliberal ideologies, but because she is made up by techniques and tactics of an ‘after-neoliberal’ governmentality. This demonstrates the mutual constitution of ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative persons’ and underlines the fact that despite after-neoliberal ambitions for managing education, there can be no simple cause and effect relation between higher education and economic performance.

This thesis is concerned with creativity as an object of educational governance and a category of subjective identification. It studies a ‘creativity explosion’ in higher education in New Zealand, focusing on how fashion design students are being mobilized as subjects of creativity through ‘joined up’ modes of governance and technologies of educational choice. Using a poststructural ethnographic ‘methodology’ I explain how, from the late 1990s, models of educational governance began to appear dysfunctional and unable to deliver the attributes and capacities expected of citizens in a knowledge economy. I argue that creativity gained significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’. Neoliberal rhetorics representing creativity as flexible human capital and a generic, transferable skill needed by workers in the new economy, were articulated with liberal humanist notions about creativity, which are commonly understood and performed through the social categories of art. All kinds of individual and institutional actors took advantage of these shifting opportunity structures to position themselves with ‘creative’ identities. Within various cultural organisations, including universities, moves to strengthen a liberal agenda and retain creativity as a form of ‘arts knowledge’ with high cultural capital, rubbed up against counter-hegemonic strategies to enlist and develop more universal concepts about creativity as a collaborative endeavour, vital to new forms of capitalist enterprise. By historicising the context in which a new ‘normative doctrine’ of creativity has emerged, and by treating its theorisation as culturally performative, I develop the position that fashion design graduates, as ‘creative girls’, are highly productive performers in the new categories of cultural economy. However I argue that the creative girl occupies a subject position fitted to after-neoliberalised social and economic arrangements, not because she is shaped by neoliberal ideologies, but because she is made up by techniques and tactics of an ‘after-neoliberal’ governmentality. This demonstrates the mutual constitution of ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative persons’ and underlines the fact that despite after-neoliberal ambitions for managing education, there can be no simple cause and effect relation between higher education and economic performance.