In this study I have examined how Swedish artists are portrayed in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. I have been using a critical discourse analysis to analyze twelve articles, whereof six interviews with female performing artists and six with male performing artists. The main findings show that the journalist mostly describes the artists in ways that can be seen as normative for the female and male gender. The female artists are described  as strong and caring about relationships, while the majority of the male artists are described as brave and tough. Both the female and male performing artists are described as outreach and people who are not affraid to express themselves.

This essay presents a case study regarding how some preschool teachers describe the diagnosis of AD/HD, and how they express their perception of children who show the symptoms associated with that diagnosis. We also wanted to study how the preschool teachers described their work with these children, and how the teachers responded to the children’s specific needs. The study draws on a qualitative study based on interviews with six preschool teachers in two municipalities in the Southern Stockholm region. All of the teachers had experience of children with an AD/HD diagnosis. Interviews were recorded and transcribed before analysis. The theoretical framework chosen for this essay is discourse analysis. We applied different parts of Fairclough’s and Foucault's methods of discourse analysis to clarify how language was used to describe children with AD/HD. The framework also allowed us to analyse how language may contribute to construct and maintain discourses about children with that diagnosis.  We could discern from the interviews with the preschool teachers that children with AD/HD were mainly described as problematic. Another conclusion is that although the teachers showed an awareness of gender issues when speaking of children generally, their choice of words when talking about children with AD/HD implied old stereotypical gender-based expectations. Finally, the preschool teachers described both advantages and disadvantages of diagnosing children, however, most of them emphasised a need for a diagnostic categorization to facilitate their work with these children.

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Stress and depression are popular and powerful terms within the mental health field. Although the relation between the two terms has been discussed and investigated in lay and scientific discourse, less is known about how this relation is constructed online. Individuals wanting to learn more about these topics are increasingly turning online using a search engine as an initial quick method of obtaining mental health information. The present research examines the stress and depression discourse found on self-help websites using a social constructionist epistemological framework and the methodological approach of discourse analysis. In the first manuscript, I specifically examined how stress was constructed in the causal ontology of depression in six different websites. The analysis demonstrated that many possible relations between the two terms were included. This finding suggests that, in the online context, ensuring that website users find themselves represented in the text is of maximal importance. In the second manuscript, I examined how the stress and depression terms themselves were constructed. This analysis suggests that the stress discourse often borrowed from depression discourse, constructing the two terms in similar ways. This parallel construction involved defining both terms as mental illnesses, with corresponding symptoms and clinical presentations that required treatment. The degree of overlap between the two terms suggests that engaging the website user was more important than the specific label used to label the distress in the online context. I examine the contrast between the general, fluid, and elastic constructions of the mental health terms found online with the ever-evolving need for increased precision and demarcation of mental health conditions within the fields of psychiatry and psychology.

This thesis analyzes the relationship between Joan Jonas’s 1976 videotape Good Night Good Morning and the existing historiographical discourse on video art from the 1970s. I begin with a careful analysis and historical contextualization of Rosalind Krauss’s seminal 1976 essay on video art, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” I then compare her essay with a number of present-day interpretations of video art that are in part motivated by a departure from Krauss and identify a range of presuppositions that have persisted through the art historical discourse on video art from the mid-1970s forward. Finally, I demonstrate that the terms of this essentially medium-specific discourse are too limited to offer a satisfying analysis of Good Night Good Morning and argue that understanding Jonas’s work requires an intermedial analysis. / text

The phenomenon of laughter has intrigued many philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and – most recently – linguists. While laughter is conventionally thought of as a component of the phenomenon of humor, this paper seeks to empirically illustrate how laughter may be used in unconventional ways, i.e. in response to nonhumorous (and in fact discordant) sequences in conversation. The term coping laughter refers to laughter that attempts to remedy, correct, reframe, or distract from something that is undesirable in a conversation. This paper proposes that there are two types of coping laughter (IN-laughter and RE-laughter) that accomplish different functions based on who initiates the laughter. Eight data samples are analyzed within the analytical frameworks of politeness and conversational framing with special treatments of the evolution of laughter and the structure of conflict. / text