The research focus of this study is to investigate the ways in which the so-called European refugee crisis has been socially constructed as number one urgent matter for the European community in the years between 2015-2017. Noting the unprecedented rise of the public support for far-right parties in the European polls, the goal of this study is to understand and conceptualize the ways in which the refugee crisis has been presented as an existential threat by the right-wing political leaders in the Netherlands, France and Germany, three core European members, which held elections in 2017. This has been done by utilizing the theoretical framework, composed of the Copenhagen School, as well as the categorization framework which builds upon the results from previous literature on the topic of the securitization of migration. In addition, by utilizing critical discourse analysis this study probes the hypothesis that regardless of the magnitude of the crisis, the securitizing discourses are largely revolving around four overarching realms: the identity, criminological, political and economic realm. The findings infer that the securitizing discourses of the right-wing leaders in the Netherlands, France and Germany in relation to migration are identical and are revolving around the aforementioned domains, regardless of the countries’ political landscape.

The dictator ruled North Korea is not a country many North Koreans chose to live in voluntarily. Thousands of North Koreans must endure starvation, public executions, prison camps, rape, and numerous other human rights abuses daily. As a result, many choose to flee the country, hoping for a better and safer life in South Korea. This paper investigates how North Korean refugees are represented in the current North Korean Refugees Protection and Settlement Support Act and its Enforcement Decree Act. This study aims to examine the changes made to the Acts that are relevant to the representation of North Korean refugees in South Korea. I examine the Acts with Critical Discourse Analysis and Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model of Discourse. The results suggest that the Acts contribute to the negative perception of North Korean refugees by some South Korean nationals. Unstable inter-Korean relations enhance these negative attitudes.

Kiva is an international non-governmental organization that competes for funds with others in the field. As a consequence, some special relationships and dependencies are formed. This paper argues that among the most significant ones are the representations of borrowers on Kiva’s online lending platform. The work hypothesizes that while Kiva has the potential to create a friendly environment where both participatory and problem-solving style of communication is encouraged, the organization turns out to be a development factor with international importance which inevitably influences the stereotyping of individuals from the Global South. In that sense, the representations of people from the Global South on Kiva’s online platform seem to continue a well-established tradition of Western-centrism, thus admitting further stereotyping also of the audience from the Global North.Through the lens of postcolonial theory and critical discourse analysis as research methods, the research questions and the hypotheses of the paper aim at contributing to the current debates on the existing power relations between the Global South and North by providing information on: how are people in need represented through profiles of single parents as borrowers on Kiva’s website; do representations of single parents contribute to the process of creating stereotypes; what is the role of microfinance in development.By using the most recent data from Kiva's online lending platform, the work aims to present evidence on the stereotypization of representations of a specific sample group of borrowers – individual single parents. While taking into consideration Kiva's ambition towards creating cooperation based on reciprocal dignity, the paper provides some possible interpretations of the way individuals in need are portrayed. It aims to come to the aid of individuals who have interests in the development field, who may want to rethink fundraising strategies involving both visual and textual representations of people, especially in the field of online lending.

The Parkland School Shooting in February 2018 caused a flood of empathy, grief, and anger on Twitter. Having gained popularity and a reputation for her political commentary on US American events on the social media platform, the British author J. K. Rowling published a variety of intriguing tweets following and regarding the Shooting. The pur-pose of this study is to characterise Rowling’s tweets, to relate them to the discursive Twitter practice, and to look for correspondences with the concept of celebrity advocacy. To do so, this thesis offers an adaption of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the structures, meanings, and stances behind Rowling’s tweets following and regarding the Shooting. To grasp the underlying ideologies and motives, theory of discourse, repre-sentation, celebrity advocacy, spectatorship of suffering, and othering is consulted. The study brings to light that Rowling’s tweets are characterized by dialogue, exploitation of voices, othering, and discursive constructions of distance and proximity. Moreover, the findings stress Rowling’s tweets in the light of self-presentation and performance of altru-ism. Ultimately, the study reveals that Rowling’s tweets exhibit a highly mediated form of celebrity advocacy empowered by the practical circumstances of Twitter as social media platform.

The United Nations (UN) has implemented a policy of gender mainstreaming in their agendas forboth sustainable development and urban development with the aim of improving gender equity in member statesthrough all of the organization’s work. However, many scholars have criticized the UN’s incorporation ofgender in these agendas for lacking systemic and coordinated policy schemes that are capable of ensuringgender equity. The majority of these analyses were performed shortly after the agendas’ introductions. In thisthesis, I return to these agendas a few years after their implementation to examine the discourses of gender inurban sustainability that they contain and consider whether these discourses are or are not reflected in thenational and local sustainable urban development agendas of one member state, Sweden, and its largest city,Stockholm. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to identify such gendered discourses and determinewhether the ideologies they reflect are or are not contributing to the agendas’ stated aim to achieve genderequity. Findings show that there are both significant similarities and differences between discourses at all levels,with different degrees of both reinforcement of and opposition to status quo gender hierarchy at each level.Agendas at the national and local levels showed more evidence of anti-hierarchical ideology than theinternational level, suggesting that the gender equity work of member states need not be constrained by theshortcomings of the UN approach.

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) emerged in 2009 as a platform through which Afghan women could express their lived experiences and perspectives on a range of culturally relevant issues while retaining their anonymity. The purpose of this research was to understand poetry as a conflict resolution tool that Afghan women are using to be active participants in the social, political and cultural dialogue that is determining their rights. This research focused on three questions: 1) How do Afghan women describe the state of womanhood in Afghanistan? 2) How do Afghan women describe the conflict they experience in their everyday lives? 3) How might poetry and narrative be used to manage the conflict that Afghan women are facing? This research presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of one hundred published poems from the AWWP poetry database. Data analysis included open coding, thematic analysis, and the use of van Dijk’s six-step CDA model to evaluate the semantic macrostructures, local meanings, linguistic markers, global and local discourse forms, linguistic realizations, analysis of context, and the researcher’s own interpretive analysis. The findings identify and explain the major themes derived from the study as well as describe how Afghan women feel about womanhood and conflict. The major themes included: child brides/forced marriage, hijab/burqa/niqab, women’s resistance, parents as protectors and/or perpetrators, the power of writing and stress as a result of conflict. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of implications for sustainable norm change using poetry, directions for future research, and recommendations for policy and programming.

On March 25th 2020 George Floyd, a black man, was killed on the streets of Minneapolis,Minnesota by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer. This sparked new life into the BlackLives Matter movement (BLM), which had been around since 2013. This new found interestin the movement had a remarkable spread on social media, permeating the discoursethroughout most parts of society. The purpose of the essay is to study how the use ofInstagram has contributed to the spread of the BLM movement as well as the socialconsequences the movement had on society. To study this the essay uses Faircloughsperspective on critical discourse analysis to analyze three dimensions of the empiricalmaterial, these being: text, discursive practice and social practice. Interaction, intertextuality,interdiscourse and themes are going to be used as tools to provide the necessary frameworkfor analysis. This in combination with postcolonialism, structural racism and mediatizationfor the theoretical framework. The analysis proved that educational and informative textswere important in conveying messages linked to racism, antiblackness, racial profiling andstructural racism. Aswell as reoccuring themes, such as police violence, antiblackness,slavery, racism, demonstrations. The platform was used to highlight social injustices andsocietal problems. Instagram proved an important medium for spreading the movement'smessage, having voices that are typically repressed in society forming and controlling thediscourse. Due to an increasingly mediated society, the use of Instagram made it possible foreveryone to take part of the discourse.

Despite the increasing numbers of criminalized women in Canada, the use of the Institutional Mother-Child Program (MCP) remains low (Brennan, 2014). It is well known in fields of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Indigenous Studies, that Indigenous Peoples are overrepresented in Canadian prisons; they represent about five percent of the overall Canadian population, however Indigenous women make up forty percent of all incarcerated women (Miller, 2017). Incarcerated Indigenous women are often mothers of young children, come from poor backgrounds, have little education, and suffered abuse at some point during their lives (Monchalin, 2016). In this thesis, using Indigenous Feminisms (IF) (Suzack, 2010, 2015) and Penal Moderation (Loader, 2010; Snacken, 2015), I address the following research questions: How has the MCP policy evolved over time? How have the policy changes represented a (de)colonial approach to criminal justice policy? To answer these questions, I conducted a feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) of all the final versions of the Correctional Service of Canada’s MCP policy (CD 768).

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