By “taking a knee” during the performance of the U.S. national anthem, National Football League (NFL) players have been protesting “the oppression of people of colour and ongoing issues with police brutality” in America (Colin Kaepernick, the movement’s founder, quoted in Coombs et. al., 2017). Despite this clarity of intention, the meaning of these protests (whether they are necessary and patriotic or counterproductive and ‘un-American’, for example) has been hotly contested in the public sphere, indicating the presence of a deeply seated counter-hegemonic struggle that is both expressed and contributed to by the anthem protest discourse. This project explores this struggle through the lens of narrative assembly, or the individual and intertextual construction of meaning through the selection and arrangement of narrative objects. Special attention is paid to the treatment of social, symbolic, and normative boundaries by storytellers responding to the anthem protest and by the anthem protesters themselves, especially those related to political expression in professional sports, American national and racial identity, and racial exclusion and marginalization. The project utilizes a structural approach to narrative analysis called the Qualitative Narrative Policy Framework (QNPF) supplemented by insights from Arthur Frank’s (2010) method of Dialogical Narrative Analysis (DNA). These methods are applied in a sociological study of a segment of the NFL anthem protest discourse published in newspaper articles during the first 16 months following the start of the controversy. This sample captures narrative responses to three significant moments—Kaepernick’s initiation of the protest, U.S. president Donald Trump’s verbal attack on protesting players in speeches and over social media (which also resulted in mass-displays of unified resistance from NFL players), and Kaepernick’s failure to obtain an NFL contract the year following his protest. Findings indicate that by transgressing several normative boundaries related to work, sports, protest, and signalling patriotism, NFL anthem protest subverts a hegemonic tale of national unity and exposes the systemic discrimination and symbolic/social exclusion that continue to produce experiences of oppression for people of colour and others in the United States. By attending to their assembly of settings, characters, plotlines, memories, solutions, and moral lessons, authors that support the protests are shown forming an intertextual or collective narrative around a central demand for justice that challenges the American status quo and projects a preferred future of enhanced racial equality yet to be achieved by the nation. Alternately, authors who oppose the protests are observed assembling a collective narrative around a demand for respect that defends boundaries essential to the maintenance of the status quo and expresses a desire to return to a past America of uninterrupted white dominance. In addition to providing a detailed case study that focuses on processes of narrative assembly in relation to counter-hegemony and social, symbolic, and normative boundaries, the project serves as an example of how the emergent methodology of the QNPF can be applied to the study of dynamic instances of everyday cultural-political struggle that may fall outside the sphere of policy research in which it has typically been employed. / Graduate / 2021-01-06

This doctoral thesis deals with the border as a geographical phenomenon in medieval Central Europe. It seeks to answer questions about what is a border, why and how it was created and how its understanding has developed. It deals with ways of delineating an area, boundary signs and rituals. It also explores the course and the concept of borders especially in Central Europe in the Middle Ages but also takes into account the situation of the both earlier and younger periods. It pays attention to the land border of Bohemia and Moravia but also to the borders within the Czech Lands in comparison with similar examples from Central Europe. The work is based on an evaluation of written and material sources concerning the border and combines methods and practices of multiple disciplines: it is based on the results of studies in archaeology, legal history, settlement history, historical geography, general history and auxiliary historical sciences.

This thesis deals with syllable boundaries in Czech and the issue of their determination. The theoretical part discusses the concept of the syllable in terms of both phonetics and phonology, introduces several approaches to syllabification (i.e. division of words into syllables) along with factors that are relevant in syllabification, and it also presents a survey of methods used in syllable boundary investigation. The following chapters describe a series of experiments that are to be a basis for formulating a syllabification model of Czech. The first group of experiments examines the phonetic correlates of syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants (using electropalatography and temporal parameters). A phonotactic analysis of a spoken and a written corpus follows, in which we computed type and token frequencies of occurrence of word-initial and word-final clusters. The subsequent chapter introduces three behavioural experiments, in which the participants work with words and syllables without explicitly focusing on syllable boundaries (synchronization of syllables with a metronome pulse; syllable permutation; inserting silence into words). The first two experiments examined what phonetic and phonological factors are relevant in the syllabification of Czech words. The aim of the third...

För att lösa hållbarhetsproblem krävs fokus på mer självförsörjande samhällen som kräver ett lägre behov av konsumtion, energi och transporter då människans nuvarande livsstil och samhällsmål inte går att kombinera med hållbart, klimatvänligt och rättvist. Vår livsstil är dock inte bara orsaken utan även lösningen på hållbarhetsutmaningar. Forskare och medlemmar av gemenskaper menar på att den miljömässigt fördelaktiga livsstil som förknippas med ekobyar och kollektivboenden kan bidra till att uppnå hållbarhetsmål, samt att gemenskaps-baserade initiativ har potential att utgöra en mer hållbar livsstil i jämförelse med konventionella samhällen. En litteraturöversikt och tre intervjuer genomfördes med syftet att undersöka hur ekobyar, som en avsiktlig gemenskap, kan hjälpa oss att leva innanför planetens gränser och vilka sociala utmaningar som ekobyar möter. Resultaten analyserades med hjälp av planetära gränser, donut-ekonomi och nerväxt som en del av emergent normteorin. Studien visar att ekobyar som en avsiktlig gemenskap kan hjälpa oss att leva innanför planetens gränser och bidra till en miljömässigt hållbar utveckling inom sex kategorier: ekologiska system, ekologisk arkitektur, energisystem, transportsystem, matsystem och miljövänligt beteende Sociala utmaningar som upptäcktes i ekobyar är otydliga normer och regler, brist på deltagande och egenemang, ledarskap, beslutsfattande, kommunikation, odelade visioner och mål, ojämn maktbalans, etiska frågor, arbetslöshet, organisering och olika bakgrunder. / To solve sustainability problems we need to pay more attention to self sustainable societies with demand for less consumption, energy and transport as our lifestyle can not be combined with sustainability, climate-friendly and fair. Researchers and members of communities believe that the environmentally beneficial lifestyle that is associated with ecovillages and collective housing can contribute to reaching sustainable development goals and a sustainable lifestyle. A literature review and interviews were carried out with the purpose to investigate how ecovillages can help us live within the planetary boundaries and which social challenges ecovillages face. The results showed that ecovillages can help us to live within the planetary boundaries within six categories: ecological systems, ecological architecture, energy systems, transport systems, food systems and environmental friendly behaviour. Social challenges in ecovillages were leadership, decision making, undivided visions and goals, uneven balance of power, ethical questions, unemployment, organisation and different backgrounds.

The biosphere integrity boundary of the Planetary Boundaries Framework seeks to highlight biodiversity loss and its effect on humanity's 'safe operating space'. Biodiversity plays a critical role in sustaining ecosystem function and by extension, the ecosystem services on which human wellbeing depends. As currently conceptualized, biodiversity and the provisioning and regulating ecosystem services with which it is associated, is not adequately captured in the boundary. Literature searches for data-synthesis were carried out to identify and assess the balance of evidence for the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services. The change in global ecosystem service trends over time were assessed along with the interactions between ecosystem services. Twelve provisioning and 9 regulating ecosystem services associated with biodiversity were identified in the literature. Biocontrol and carbon sequestration were the most studied services. The Fischer exact test showed that there was a significant difference between the extent to which provisioning versus regulating ecosystem services are studied. Mann-Whitney U tests showed non-significant relationships between provisioning services and regulating services for trend and effect size data. All provisioning services showed increasing trends over time. The results for regulating services were mixed. Of the 115 ecosystem service interactions assessed, 66 were trade-offs and 49 were synergies. Crop yield and climate-related ESS (carbon sequestration and carbon storage) represented almost one-third of these interactions (n = 22) while crop yield and erosion control represented over a quarter (n = 19). These interactions alone accounted for 36% of the total interactions. This paper provides an initial database which could be refined and expanded. It also demonstrates a comprehensive approach to assessing biodiversity ecosystem service relationships, providing a tangible approach to assessing a safe operating space for humanity. Further, it provides a platform for future research on biodiversity-ecosystem services human well-being links, which will provide better insights to policymakers, managers and practitioners. / <p>The presentation was done via Zoom during Covid 19 when Stockholm University was closed. </p>

This thesis is written from the perspective of cultural sociology and focuses on middle-class parents and justification of their child-rearing decisions. It describes how parents choose and evaluate the institutions their children spend time at, how they "other" parents with different values and how they relate to concerted cultivation - a type of parenting style which currently dominates the middle-class context. This parenting style (or ideal) puts a great deal of pressure on middle-class parents and it causes a symbolic war among them: a war for acknowledgment and a certain position in the cultural space. This thesis describes who the participants "other", which child-rearing strategies participants approve of, what values are crucial for them and what problems they deal with. Furthermore, four main differences between the participants' approach and the concerted cultivation approach were identified: emphasis on friendship, emphasis on balance between activities and rest, emphasis on fitting in with the majority and emphasis on approval of certain authoritarian methods such as imposing punishments, applying restrictions and issuing directives.

Planetary Boundaries (PB) and Circular Economy (CE) are becoming the paradigm for sustainability. There is an increasing interest to operationalise PB into a framework for businesses to maximise profitability within environmental limits. The context of the cotton textile industry makes a good setting for understanding the casual chain of connections between the socio-economic system expressed by extensive global supply chain of cotton, and its ecological interconnection with the Earth’s system that is put under pressure. For this study, life cycle assessment (LCA) is recognised as a suitable approach for measuring the linkages between those two systems. Results show that among all phases of the life cycle of a cotton t-shirt, the usage phase is the most impacting for most of environmental indicators, followed by the manufacturing and farming phase. Production or extraction of raw material as elements considered upstream in the supply chain are the predominant cause of impacts in this case study. Increasing circularity of the system yields to an improvement in environmental performance. However, the system remains largely unsustainable when taking into account the state of the Earth’s system, through the PB. When assessing sustainability through LCA, ecological references like PB, must be considered to understand absolute environmental sustainability a product system. This will reveal whether less impacting options in the system, are still deteriorating a state of the environment as a part of the Earth’s system, which needs to be the area of protection. In conclusion, linking planetary boundaries to life cycle assessment can help assess the absolute environmental sustainability, as opposed to relative sustainability, of a production system. Combining an assessment of the state of the environment (safe, critical/uncertain, at risk), and the assessment of environmental hotspots of the system under scrutiny, will determine where priority for goals and actions of improvements for environmental sustainability needs most attention.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of ethnic consciousness in the territories of the Balkans and of Great Britain by focusing on the tendencies towards ethnical inclusion (crossing of ethnical boundaries) and ethnical exclusion (strengthening of the above mentioned). Inspired by B. Anderson's definition of nation (nation = imagined community), the author has chosen the languages of the investigated areas as the actual subject of his research. In three chapters he has studied first the structural and lexicological aspect of the language, then the terminological one (study of ethnonyms) and finally the textual one (study of national myths and the language used to their description). The conclusion of the research described above clearly shows, that whereas English is being perceived as a highly inclusive language (also due to its grammatical straightforwardness and lexicological richness) by speakers of other native languages in Britain (be it the autochthon minorities or migrants), in the Balkans, on the other hand, languages are being perceived as an exclusive propriety of the given ethnic group, which may even lead to artificial differences being introduced in them. The approach prevailing in Great Britain is clearly the one fostering better inter-ethnic cohabitation....

The thesis deals with choices made by women on maternity leave living in Prague, predominantly in the area of work and family life. Women's choices do not always represent their preferences and are strongly influenced by the institutional conditions and family interests. Women's preferences are also determined by the idea of maternity preferred by them- Another focus of the thesis is the construction of symbolic boundaries between mothers and childless women. Mothers differentiate themselves from childless women based on moral criteria and from each other based on the understanding of motherhood. Mothers tend to describe maternity leave as a happy period and do not think of it as of a loss of freedom or a sacrifice. However, they admit that long-term maternity leave is stereotypical and can induce feelings of isolation. For that reason, a part of women try to break free, at least partially, from the childcare and return into the realm of adults.

Matěj Kubíček - Symbolic boundaries constructed by a group of stgehands Abstract The author analyzes the way a group of stagehands (manual workers in the preparation of cultural events) construct symbolic and social boundaries within and especially outside group, ie to other participants in the preparation and conduct of these events. Theoretical background of the thesis is the concept of symbolic and social boundaries by Michele Lamont and Virag Molnar and the theory of moral boundaries by Andrew Sayer. Sayer's theory says that the moral boundaries of groups or societies are formed on the basis of the values shared by these groups and the moral condemnation of other groups or companies due to non-recognition of these values. Author's field work confirms that this strategy of the creation of borders is present and shows the specific values it is based on. He finds that stagehands construct symbolic boundaries that are parallel to the formal boundaries, only with opposite direction of superiority.