This thesis aimed to answer how the European Union performed as a 'global actor' in the Russia and Ukraine war from 2014 until 2022 using theoretical approaches of international relations theories. Furthermore, realist scholars define the concept of actorness as an entity capable of military decisions. At the same time, the constructivist believes that actorness is defined by other capabilities that impact the global arena. The thesis discusses the realist thinking that the European Union is not a global actor yet due to its lack of military powers. Whereas constructivism states that the European Union is a global actor, placing other means of power forward such as normative, civilian, and economic capabilities through examples. The European Union's performance as a global actor in the Russia and Ukraine conflict has not effectively stopped the war, as it has escalated despite the gradual economic sanctions imposed in 2014. The sanctions imposed by the European Union have not been effective in the past as Russia managed to blow the economic pressures over due to each other's economic interdependence. Therefore, the European Union launched its sixth package of economic sanctions in 2022 and might see success as it decided a total ban Russia's natural resources in the upcoming year. However, that remains a matter of speculation as the European Union is a global actor in progress, and the practical growth of its foreign policy is under exercise and will be discussed better in the future.

The licentiate dissertation “Safety and Sustainability in the Community Planning Process – Actors’ Interests, Roles and Influence” has in three case studies over detailed development planning processes examined how issues related to safety and sustainability are handled in Swedish municipal planning. The research project has focused on three municipal actors; the Planning Office, the Environmental Agency and the Fire and Rescue Services. The complete planning process has been assessed, starting with comprehensive planning, to detailed development planning and on to building permit assessment. The project’s aim has been to investigate how actors’ roles, interests, responsibilities and position influence the planning process. A handling procedure of preventing accidents instead of treating damages caused by accidents is increasingly stressed in society, with the effect that emphasis of handling these matters is given to community planning. This shift in turn has the effect that safety and sustainability become central in community planning, at the same time as new actors’ active participation is requested. One outcome is that municipal authorities such as the Environmental Agency and the Fire and Rescue Services are increasingly invited to actively participate in the plan work. Both actors have important roles in guarding safety and sustainability issues. Their approaches to these issues however differ, which influences how the matters are handled. The Planning Office has the role of balancing and transforming other planning participants’ contribution to the planning process. They also have responsibility of directing the process ahead. Actors participate in planning based on their knowledge, competence, interests and perspectives, but have to relate to conditions in-built in the planning context. The study has provided a view of actors work with safety and sustainability in community planning. Especially regarding collaboration between actors, actors’ access to planning as well as their possibilities for influence. A number of key issues have been extracted, which adjusted to the local planning context can favour the development of a safe and sustainable urban environment. / QC 20101109

Nanotechnology has captured the attention of governments and corporations around the globe. It has become the subject and context for numerous conferences, media articles, websites and scientific research papers. Nano enthusiasts and government officials claim that it is an area that promises new understandings of nature, and use of that understanding to build technologies that might change our lives. Despite the growing hype surrounding this new science, what appears to be lacking is scholarly literature that examines its growth and expansion from a social science perspective. This study addressed this limitation through a sociological analysis of the network of actors, events, rhetorical strategies, practices and instrumentation that went into the construction and growth of nanotechnology. Relying heavily on actor-network theory (ANT), this study focused on a small part of the total network referred to as the knowledge education production process, which involved the enrollment of high school teachers into the nanotechnology network through a series of collaborative workshops -- the Nanotechnology Curriculum Development Project (NCDP) -- with Virginia Polytechnic and State University (Virginia Tech) scientists over a period of two years. By investigating how the nanotechnology network was constructed and maintained, this case study examined the relevance of ANT as nanotechnology moved beyond the laboratory into the public domain of high school education. It looked at the intermediary role of high school science and math teachers and revealed the function of conflict, power, authority, hierarchy, interests, motivations, gender and race in the construction and expansion of scientific networks. / Ph. D.

The aim of the study is to broaden the existing research that touches how power expresses itself and distributes in childrens relationship building. The purpose is to study childrens relationship building and how power and gender affects one another. The reason is to locate possible patterns that excel during an ongoing construction and development of a relationship. To understand what has been observed a sociological perspective has been used. The chosen method is a qualitative study. Observations of groups of children at two different preschools have been done. Semi-structured interviews with educators from the different preschools have also been conducted. The result of the study is that children constantly are trying to get control over their surroundings. In this process when children try to regain control, power may become a big part. Further results of the study is that the preschool and everyone who operates within it holds a major role when it comes to guiding the children and showing appropriate actions individually as well as together with other social human beings. Next the results of the study will be connected to previous research, the preschool’s curriculum and the Convention on the Rights of the Child will be presented. Lastly the conclusions of the study are put in relation to the professional role as a preschool-teacher which will be embraced in a few months.

The actor and artist Gladys del Pilar takes us on a journey through her different personas. We follow her into the four different stages of life from childhood into adulthood. What she has been facing as adopted and non-white and how she has navigated within the norm of whiteness. How the white privileged society has affected her life and how the structural racism has created obstacles in everyday life and in the profession as an actor and artist.

This essay studies how male and female perpetrators are constructed in the discussion forum Flashback Forum. Gender-theoretic media research has mainly studied differences in traditional media, such as TV, radio and press. Yet, due to the rise of social media, there has recently been an increased research interest in this type of medium. However, an absence has been identified in terms of gender-theoretical media research on social and digital media like Flashback. Flashback Forum is a Swedish discussion forum, which has no equivalent due to its unique and remissive climate of debate. Therefore, this essay studies the comparison of how the posts of Flashback users construct male and female in the context of crime. The study is based on gender theory and the material is analyzed through critical discourse analysis. The results indicate that there are differences regarding the actor construction of the male and female perpetrators, which leads us to the conclusion that these can be explained by social constructions of gender. This essay mainly aims to contribute to the identified absence of such research and also encourage scholars to study gender constructions on social and digital media.

No description available.

No description available.

Although all Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) interact with non-state actors (NSAs) in some capacity, the extent to which NSAs are granted participatory roles in the governance of IGOs varies substantially. Why do some intergovernmental organizations - intergovernmental clubs of sovereign states - extend access, participatory opportunity or even participatory rights, to non-state actors? The goal of this project is to address the question of variation. I investigate the interests of the actors with power to determine the rules regarding engagement with NSAs - member states and IGO secretariats - and identify specific incentives for each actor to establish rules or practice of engagement with NSAs in each type of engagement. I find that the member states and secretariats that determine these engagement practices benefit from the inclusion or participation of NSAs in specific and predictable ways. By identifying the interests and incentives of the relevant actors, it is possible to predict the creation of particular sorts of engagement and explain variation in those engagement mechanisms across different intergovernmental organizations. I test the proposed relationship between IGO interests and participatory rules through examination of the United Nations system and three UN organizations: The UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). I find that the historical evidence supports an interest-based theory for the granting of participation rights to NSAs within IGOS. Secretariats frequently support selective partnerships with NSAs for the purpose of advancing their mission, and assemblies generally prefer to establish informal consultation mechanisms rather than formal rights of participation for NSAs. Formal participation rights linked to the member-state venue of an IGO assembly are advanced only when in the shadow of strong support from states, or where the assembly recognizes that NSA participation provides benefits that cannot be gained through informal consultation alone. / Political Science

The key goal in this work is to enable a flexible ground station that is not constrained to a particular mission or set of hardware. In addition, with the concepts and software produced in this thesis, it will play a significant role in educating engineers and students by providing critical infrastructure and a sandbox for ground station operations. Key pieces of software were developed in this work to create a flexible and robust software-defined ground station. Several digital transmission modes were developed in order to allow communication between the ground station and common amateur radio CubeSats and SmallSats. In order to handle distributed tasks and process at a ground station with multiple servers and controllers, a specialized actor framework was written in Python for ease of use. Actors have the ability to send messages to one another over a network, and they maintain their own memory in order to avoid synchronization problems that come with sharing memory. In addition to the software developed in this work, a novel Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocol for a network of ground stations is proposed in order to increase coverage and access to spacecraft without requiring centralized server infrastructure. This protocol provides the method to scale the developed software architecture beyond a single ground station. Since the Virginia Tech Ground Station (VTGS) will have many concurrent processes running across multiple servers, it was necessary to apply the actor model in order to simplify the design of the system. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the developed software for the VTGS as well as the P2P protocol for a larger network of ground stations. There are three primary repositories: planck-dsp, gr-vtgs, and pystation. The planck-dsp library and gr-vtgs Out-of-tree (OOT) make up the primary digital signal processing and communications toolboxes, where GNU Radio serves as the scheduler for signal processing blocks used in flow graphs. The pystation module is the extensible software actor framework that connects various systems both locally and remotely. It is also responsible for scheduling and handling ground station requests. While the software was primarily created for the VTGS, it is general enough to apply to other ground station implementations. / Master of Science