For a long time, playing games was considered as the opposite of being productive. However, in the digital age, millions of players produce economic value in the game worlds. This new phenomenon challenges the previous dichotomy of labor and play. To understand this new phenomenon, theoretical innovations are required.   This thesis aims to give a better understanding of in-game productive activities from a theoretical perspective. Based on previous academic studies, I develop a new theoretical framework upon the concept “playbor.” This framework is an attempt of combining two theoretical traditions, namely the Ludology tradition and the Marxism tradition. It is a framework from a ludological starting point toward a critical direction.   In this framework, I firstly analyze how play has been transformed to playbor. This process is shown as a transition model by the shifts of characteristics. Based on the transition model, a taxonomy of playbor is introduced. In the taxonomy, I identify three types of playbors: unintentional playbor, autonomous playbor and obligational playbor. Thereafter, problems related to playbors are examined. Problems from which traditional labor suffers, such as division of labor, alienation and exploitation, can also be observed in the game worlds. Apart from these problems, I identify a new problem which threatens all forms of playbors, namely the vulnerability of data.   This thesis is based on my theoretical research from January to May 2015. The main research method is literature review. Data from news reports and participant observations have also been used to support arguments.

In this field study, female social workers perspectives have been collected, on interventions regarding sexual and reproductive health in the public sector in Argentina. The purpose was primary empirical and secondary to analyze empirical data using critical theory. The methodology was qualitative and the theoretical framework was created using an abductive approach. Thirteen female social workers were interviewed in the municipality of general Pueyrredón, in the province of Buenos Aires. Empirical data was categorized using the hermeneutic approach; described and analyzed using critical theory. Results presented challenges regarding lack of accessibility, continuity and accountability, from the nation, the province and the municipality. Moreover, results show challenges on how to target vulnerable groups, adolescents, people with low intellectual disability, people from neighboring countries, and from the north of Argentina. In addition, there were challenges on how to increase correct use and use of contraceptives. Suggestions were to make interventions more adaptable and creative. Stressed challenges were regarding male involvement in sexual and reproductive health decisions, gender violence, the patriarchal society, and the macho culture. Critical theory highlighted challenges created by Argentina’s societal structures, structures that contribute to oppression of service users, making them powerless and marginalized. By increasing the knowledge of critical social work theory in social work education, there would be more tools for social workers to use it in practice. When using critical social work theory all levels in a society shall be included. Specific policies and interventions are requested to battle female discrimination.

There is an on-going discussion in public relation scholarship surrounding the implication of critical theory on the study of activists’ utilization of public relations tools. One side believes that the mainstream theoretical models are sufficient for explaining the situation in which conflicts and negotiations between activists and corporations are happening, the other believes that critical theory needs to be applied. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an example that sheds light on this type of situation. It will study the 2014 conflict between Greenpeace and LEGO to see if orthodox theories are applicable, or if not, how and why critical theory should get more attention from public relations scholars.   The aim of the thesis is to solve the conflict through studying a case. To solve the dispute two research questions are aiming to scrutinize the negotiation situation between LEGO and Greenpeace. The questions are asking what images of the Greenpeace campaign was most frequently used by the media, and how these frame LEGO. A method triangulation was applied to answer these questions. First, a quantitative study identified what images that were most frequently used by the media to cover the story. Later a qualitative text analysis in the form of semiotics was used to analyse how these images framed LEGO. The result shows that almost 90% of the images used by mass media was directly illustrating Greenpeace’s campaign. The messages in these images framed LEGO on one hand, as a passive player that would stand by and watch as their business partner polluted both the earth and kids’ imaginations.  On the other hand the company was portrayed as an almighty institution that would not take stakeholders wishes and opinions into consideration.   The study serves as an example on the negotiation situation between activists and corporations. The conclusion relates the thesis back to the problem definition. The public relation communication utilized by Greenpeace, and studied in this thesis, is evidence that the scholarship needs broaden the intellectual domain by incorporating activism and critical theory into the academic field.

Rather than offering a traditional interpretation of what constitutes a spatial queer politics, which Brown and Knopp (2006) describe as "claiming space," this dissertation seeks instead to explore a Foucauldian politics of disappearing, of incoherency, and illegibility. I call this the politics of invisibility, describing a queer politics that questions visibility at every avenue and that is extremely critical of the ways that queer bodies are often made less complex, indeed less visible, when "gays and lesbians" are incorporated more and more into the mainstream. The work does this through three different papers. First, it lays down the theory of the politics of invisibility through a Foucauldian analysis of the changing nature of heteronormativity since queer theory's origin in the early 1990's. Second, it asks whether new directions in mapping gays and lesbians based on problematic census data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses should be reconsidered in light of this changing heteronormativity. Third, it explores the radical potential of a gay male subculture that is striving to become more visible and by doing so ruptures the taken-for-granted no-tions of how traditional forms of masculinity should be interpreted in a queer theoretical framework.

Note: / This thesis explores the ways that Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Critical Theory and the ethics of Christian liberation theology mutually inform each other. Horkheimer and Adorno' s theories of the "dialectic of enlightenment" and “negative dialectics" provide a self-critical social analysis that interconnects the domination of humanity by humanity and the domination of nature in a way that strengthens the critique of Christian ethics. Further, Horkheimer and Adorno's "longing for the wholly other" resonates profoundly with Christians who believe in a God of Justice. By the same token, Christian reflection on critical Theory leads to a critique ofHorkheimer and Adorno's excessive distance from political practice and their narrow understanding of radical praxis. In this “new dialogue" the project of Christian ethics develops a more substantial critique of domination, while the Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Adorno is critiqued and renewed. / Cette thèse examine les différentes manieres avec lesquelles la Théorie Critique et l'éthique de la théologie de la libération chrétienne s'entrecroisent et s'informent mutuellement. Les théories d'Horkheimer et d'Adorno sur la "dialectique de la raison" et "dialectique négative" apportent une analyse altocritique de la société et associent la domination de l'humanité par l'humanité et la domination de la nature de manière à renforcer la critique de l'éthique chrétienne. De plus, le concept du "désir pour le tout Autre" qui ont Horkeimer et Adorno résonne profondément chez les chrétiens qui fondent leurs foi dans un Dieu de Justice. Dans ce sens, la réflection chrétienne sur la Théorie Critique amène une critique d'Horkheimer et Adorno qui veut noter leur distance excessive envers les pratiques poli tiques et leurs mécompréhension du praxis radical. Dans ce "nouveau dialogue ll le projet chrétien de l'éthique, amène une critique plus substantiel de ce qui est la domination et de ce fait renouvelle et illumine la Théorie Critique d'Horkheimer et D'Adorno.

This thesis explores the question of what it means to be a critical being, and how we can cultivate and enact a critical orientation through the ancient Aristotelian notion of phronesis. I begin by defending the claim that the familiar traditions and methods of rhetoric and hermeneutics have their practical, experiential and critical origins in a fundamental and constitutive human desire to express and understand ourselves and others through the most primary of human capabilities: listening, speaking, interpreting and understanding. This way of describing hermeneutics and rhetoric gives us a sense of their origins in lived experience. It also reminds us that rhetorical expression and hermeneutic understanding are not to be thought of as merely ‘systematized disciplines’, ‘instruments’ or ‘methods’ that we can be indifferent to, but part of our participatory linguistic experience. I argue that once the interpenetrating relation of rhetorical expression and hermeneutic understanding is made apparent, an implicit critical-thinking dimension in experience also becomes visible. This ‘critical dimension’ is not discovered in static theory, procedure or method, but, rather, something that is enacted over time with and among others. It is Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, and his understanding of insight and practical reasoning that best captures the emergence and enactment of critical thinking-being. Phronesis is a mode of practical reasoning that is always in motion, always challenging and interrogating the relation between the particular circumstances we find ourselves in, and the historical traditions, general rules, laws or procedures that form our normative background. I allow this argument for a critical hermeneutics through phronesis to be challenged by Jürgen Habermas’s critical sociological approach. I conclude, firstly, that Habermas’s critical theory relies for its critical thrust on a hermeneutical reflective tradition of immanent critique and insights about communication that can be grasped through phronetic reasoning, tradition and concrete embodied linguistic practices. Secondly, I argue that critical hermeneutics enacted through practical reasoning and phronesis describes a way of thinking-acting-desiring being that is more congruent with our actual experience, and therefore capable of meeting the personal, occupational, moral and political exigencies of a complex and diverse contemporary world.

The psychedelic field has generated a vast body of work in terms of psychology, art, spirituality and understandings of the mind and consciousness. Having engaged with the field for the last ten years, I have been curious as to why issues of race, gender and class are not included in the analysis and theories that are generated from the field. My background in feminism, queer studies, anti-racism, critical theory and social justice, as well as my interest in consciousness and psychedelics, led me to conduct a literature review and analyze it with a critical framework. The literature showed an overwhelming gap in the field in regards to inclusion and analysis of issues pertaining to race, gender and class. This gap needs to be addressed and I look forward to conducting fieldwork in the future such as interviewing people about their experiences of race, class and gender and its intersection with psychedelics. I hope to contribute to the field in terms of creatively and productively including an analysis of race, class and gender to the psychedelics field.

The psychedelic field has generated a vast body of work in terms of psychology, art, spirituality and understandings of the mind and consciousness. Having engaged with the field for the last ten years, I have been curious as to why issues of race, gender and class are not included in the analysis and theories that are generated from the field. My background in feminism, queer studies, anti-racism, critical theory and social justice, as well as my interest in consciousness and psychedelics, led me to conduct a literature review and analyze it with a critical framework. The literature showed an overwhelming gap in the field in regards to inclusion and analysis of issues pertaining to race, gender and class. This gap needs to be addressed and I look forward to conducting fieldwork in the future such as interviewing people about their experiences of race, class and gender and its intersection with psychedelics. I hope to contribute to the field in terms of creatively and productively including an analysis of race, class and gender to the psychedelics field.

The environmental challenges the Arctic region faces in the climate change context have prompted an abundant literature on what is to be done to protect the Arctic environment. The thesis addresses the question of what is international law’s role in promoting Arctic environmental protection, but taking a different perspective than previous research on the issue. It develops a new critical approach to analyze how international law adopted to protect the environment is in fact part of the problem. The theoretical framework bridges Martti Koskenniemi’s critical approach and the interactional account of international law developed by Jutta Brunnée and Stephen Toope. These two approaches provide conceptual and methodological tools to understand the mutual influence of international actors and structures on legal discourse. This framework is applied to four main Arctic environmental challenges in the context of climate change: increased oil and gas activities, increased shipping, adverse effects on indigenous peoples’ environment and culture and biodiversity depletion. For each case study, the thesis provide a three-stage analysis to understand the development of international law to address these issues, the influence of political considerations on such law and the normative potential of each of the different rules, standards, principles and rights to create a sense of legal obligation. This analysis sheds light on when international has enabled practices of legality, where international actors support the rule, right or standard at issue, fell bound by it and follow it in practice. The analysis also reveals the influence of the bias in favour of neoliberal development in legal discourse. This bias has favoured the development, interpretation and application of international law to promote the assertion of sovereignty over natural resources, industry deregulation, the promotion of trade, little consideration for indigenous peoples’ human rights and the consideration of biological resources in economic terms.

The central argument advanced in this dissertation is that the production of totalitarian space relies on the systematic destruction of spatial aura. I begin by critically studying the term “totalitarian” with references to Hannah Arendt and Robert Conquest, and re-appropriating it based on relevant insights from Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukács, and Slavoj Žižek. In the meantime, I introduce the Baath state in Syria and Iraq as an example of totalitarianism, and present a concise account of its ideological history. Here I also shed light on important aspects of Critical Theory, which will have a recurring role throughout the project. I then discuss spatial production by critically explicating Henri Lefebvre’s dialectical theory of the production of space, which claims that space is produced according to the dominant modes of production. However, despite its critical significance to my project, Lefebvre’s theory alone cannot account for totalitarian space. Therefore, after pausing on Lefebvre’s concepts of appropriated versus dominated spaces, I move to Michel Foucault’s work on the Panopticon as a major spatial technology of power and a generalizable formula in societies of control and discipline. I also introduce Foucault’s heterotopia and Gaston Bachelard’s poetic space as counter examples to totalitarian space. Indeed, I argue that Lefebvre’s appropriated space, Foucault’s heterotopia, and Bachelard’s poetic space all have something in common. Aura, with its inherent negativity, is precisely the concept to indicate such spatial uniqueness, the systematic elimination of which is definitive of totalitarian space. In addition to critically exploring Walter Benjamin’s definitions of aura and developing his secularized notion of it, I also focus on his claim that mechanically reproduced works of art lack aura. This then brings me to the last stage of my project where I argue that mechanically reproduced images are not just auraless; they also destroy the aura of space. Finally, by way of illustration, I turn back to the example of the Baath state and analyze the use of mechanically reproduced images of the leader as destroyers of spatial aura and thus crucial components of the production of totalitarian space.