At the center of this study are three Indian novels with an urban setting and dealing with political and social issues of the 1990s: Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege (2003), Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) and Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song (1998). The Delhi of In Times of Siege is portrayed as a city infused with power but haunted by a troubled past that is brought to the present by a dissenting professor of history. The Bombay of Love and Longing in Bombay is also a haunted city, but is primarily imagined as a narrative locality in which storytelling is central to both the narrative and the city. The Calcutta of Freedom Song is explored through a resident family, blurring the distinctions between the home and the city. The three novels all negotiate an increasingly sectarian environment. The three cities of the novels are explored through the framework of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the production of locality, which sees place as a value and a dimension of social life. By approaching the cities in the novels through locality, it is possible to discern how the authors construct place as meaningful. This study thus extends the anthropological concept of locality into literature, addressing the specific strategies through which the authors portray and create their respective cities. Key concepts explored in the novels include agency, haunting, storytelling, and memory. / Baksidestext At the center of this study are three Indian novels with an urban setting and dealing with political and social issues of the 1990s: Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege (2003), Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) and Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song (1998). The Delhi of In Times of Siege is portrayed as a city infused with power but also haunted by a troubled past. The Bombay of Love and Longing in Bombay is primarily imagined as a narrative locality in which storytelling is central. The Calcutta of Freedom Song is explored through a resident family, blurring the distinctions between the home and the city. The three novels all negotiate an increasingly sectarian environment. The three cities of the novels are explored through the framework of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the production of locality, which sees place as a value and a dimension of social life. By approaching the cities through locality, it is possible to discern how the authors construct place as meaningful. This study thus extends the anthropological concept of locality into literature, addressing the specific strategies through which the authors portray and create their respective cities. Key concepts explored in the novels include agency, haunting, storytelling, and memory. / Denna avhandling behandlar tre indiska romaner vilka utspelar sig i städer och fokuserar på de politiska och sociala konflikterna under 1990-talet: Githa Hariharans In Times of Siege (2003), Vikram Chandras Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) och Amit Chaudhuris Freedom Song (1998). Delhi i In Times of Siege porträtteras som en politisk stad hemsökt av det förflutna vilket påverkar nutiden. Bombay i Love and Longing in Bombay är också delvis hemsökt, men framförallt framställt som en stad i vilken berättandet är centralt. I Freedom Song blir gränsen mellan hem och stad diffus genom det sätt på vilket en familj gestaltar Calcutta. De tre romanerna behandlar alla en alltmer sekteristisk tid. Avhandlingens analys bygger på antropologen Arjun Appadurais begrepp the production of locality, dvs. hur känslan av plats skapas. ”Locality” är ett begrepp som täcker in en plats kapacitet att också ha ett värde och vara en social konstruktion. Genom att använda the production of locality är det möjligt att utforska hur författarna konstruerar plats som något meningsbärande. Denna avhandling vidgar det antropologiska begreppets användningsområde till att innefatta litteratur och används för att identifiera de strategier genom vilka författarna porträtterar och skapar sina respektive städer. Dessa strategier bygger på nyckelbegreppen agens, hemsökelse, berättande och minne.

The aim of this research was to investigate the way in which ADHD is understood and constructed within Romania and Scotland, comparing and contrasting the discourses that constitute ADHD within different cultural contexts.Overall, this study employed a mixed method design based on a concurrent nested approach which was undertaken in 2 phases. In phase 1, 50 parents, 72 primary school teachers and 48 support staff from Scotland, and 50 parents, 86 primary school teachers and 57 support staff from Romania, completed a self-report questionnaire that measured their knowledge and attitudes towards ADHD. The statistical results showed that, for the knowledge of ADHD test, both sample of parents, teachers and support staff scored the highest at symptoms/diagnosis subscale. Parents,teachers and support staff from the Romanian sample scored the lowest at the treatment subscale whereas the Scottish respondents had difficulties in answering questions about the nature, causes and prognosis of ADHD. In terms of their self-reported attitudes, both samples of Scottish and Romanian parents, teachers and support staff scored the highest on the affective attitude subscale. Scottish teachers and support staff scored the lowest on the behavioural attitude subscale whereas Romanian teachers and support staff scored the lowest on the cognitive attitude subscale. On the other hand, both samples of Scottish and Romanian parents scored the lowest on the behavioural attitude subscale. These patterns were further explored in phase 2 of the study, where 5 Scottish and Romanian mothers, 3 Scottish and Romanian primary-school teachers and 3 Scottish and Romanian support staff were selected to take part in a semi-structured interview. Parents, teachers and support staff from both countries responded within a medical model of disability employing themes such as ADHD as a medical condition, the medicalisation of behaviour, behaviour as out of control or the specialness of ADHD. However, participants also adopted a social conceptualisation of ADHD, referring to ADHD as a social phenomenon, resisting medicalisation and describing the educational and medical "wrongs". Reflecting the uncertainty in the field, participants’ conceptualisation of ADHD expanded, modified or even shifted from one perspective to another. The cross-cultural comparisons used the Appadurai's theoretical framework of "scapes" to explain the global nature of ADHD as well as the differences between Scottish and Romanian parents, teachers and support staff in relation to the three most important results of this study: treatment of ADHD, inclusion of children diagnosed with ADHD in mainstream education and parents’ and teachers’ willingness to get involved. The findings have been used to develop a multidisciplinary framework for support, empowering teachers and parents with knowledge of ADHD and improving cross-professional relationships. The fundamental idea of this framework is that it moves beyond the deficit paradigm, helping teachers, parents and stakeholders to be alert and responsive to the various conceptualisations of ADHD and to understand how these schemata have come into existence in specific periods of time and in different cultural contexts.

Global capital is transforming the spaces in which we live, thereby transforming culture: this thesis challenges a set of liberal assumptions about culture and cultural transformation by elaborating upon this very hypothesis. Specifically, it argues that cultural identities are being formed in global cities, where disjunctive global flows of cultural, financial, technological, ideological, and human capital intersect. These global flows are creating cultural contexts of choice that can be as central to individual and group identities as national institutions or inherited or native cultural norms. And as these modern contexts of choice emancipate the imagination from the influence of national institutions, they enable peculiar new forms of agency. I use Arjun Appadurai’s notion of imagination and his model of “scapes”—cultural landscapes formed by intersecting flows of capital—to explain how the global is becoming the decisive framework for social life. In contrast, I use Will Kymlicka’s model of multicultural citizenship and Jeremy Waldron’s model of cosmopolitanism primarily to demonstrate the limits of a class of liberal theories of cultural accommodation that oversimplify the relationship of the individual to culture, and of culture to modernity, and which ignore the role of “scapes” in constituting cultural identities. To conclude, I propose an alternative, three- dimensional and ultimately non-comparative treatment of culture inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city. / Graduate

In the past decades a lot of research has been dedicated to widening the understanding of different media audiences, as well as to determining the motivations behind both, creation of user-generated content (UGC) as well as audience behavior. This thesis seeks to broaden this knowledge by studying vloggers and their interaction with their audiences. Instead of asking the audience members: In what ways are the vloggers an influence on you, this thesis asks: “Can the audience be a source of inspiration and influence for vloggers? The thesis aims also at recognizing typicality’s in vloggers audio-visual content as well as strategical approaches for audience engagement. Approach in order to find answers to the set questions is critical yet humanistic. Empirical research is divided in two parts, of which the first is done by qualitative content analysis and the second part by semi-structured interviews. The aim of this multimethod approach is to get a broad yet deep view on this commercial, and contemporary storytelling form. Appadurai’s five scape- theory is used as the theoretical framework, and the research findings as well as conclusions are also viewed through other recent studies from media and communications field.