The thesis deals with a friendship between heterosexual woman and homosexual man, the way it is created, the way it is maintained and the threats it has to face. The thesis defines the meaning of essential theoretical concepts such as gender, sexuality, friendship or intimacy and trust. It is based on ten semi-structured interview with women who define the relationship with their gay friends as a close one. It reflects ways, how gender and sexual identities are negotiated in the friendship, puts friendship with a gay man into a broader context of friendly relationships in a heteronormative society and traditional binary oppositions of feminine and masculine. The thesis also looks into strategies of how the informants construct their own identity, identity of their gay friend ad where they place the boundaries of this relationship.

The dissertation "Vojvodovo Sketches" thesis consists of an introduction and further of published texts related to Vojvodovo. Vojvodovo, a Czech village in north-western Bulgaria founded in 1900 by about twenty Czech evangelical families from the village of Svatá Helena in what is today the Romanian part of Banat, which they left because of religious disputes and a shortage of land. Although Bulgaria engaged in several armed conflicts in the first decades of the twentieth century, the village flourished economically and the population rose steadily during that period. Eventually, however, its economic prosperity, based almost exclusively on agriculture, was curtailed by a land shortage. As a result, some villagers emigrated to Argentina in 1928. By 1934/5 the village was again overcrowded and suffering serious land shortage. This time some of its inhabitants moved to the Turkish village of Belinci in north-eastern Bulgaria (Isperich region). The history of Czech settlement in Vojvodovo, as well as Belinci, effectively ends in 1949-1950, when the overwhelming majority of their Czech inhabitants left as a part of post-war migratory processes organized under inter-state agreements and resettled in several villages in the South Moravia region of the Czechoslovak Republic. Vojvodovans were renowned for their...

The dissertation thesis deals with urban historical monographs that were published in 1860-1900 in Czech, German, and Polish language, and covered towns in Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia. Adopting a broadly comparative perspective, the study focuses on the social dimension of the books through the lens of local and national identities. It presupposes that the urban histories essentially created local identities but at the same time makes a hypothesis that nationalization of society in the 19th century had significant impact on local urban history. The first chapter shows that the urban historiography in each of the regional-language spheres developed unevenly. One of the reasons was the different significance of towns and urban past in national thoughts. The following chapter analyses urban monographs as books. It poses questions about who wrote urban histories, with what intentions, and for what readership. It reveals that the books had essentially two roles: they served local purposes and at the same time they were integrated in the national programme The two remaining chapters deal with the analysis of historical representations. The fourth chapter compares urban histories with regard to periodization of urban past. It confirms that the national historical frame significantly influenced the ways...

Diploma thesis "National identity in France and its role in the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy" deals with national identity as a political instrument used by the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy during his five-year term (2007-2012). The main objective of this work is to prove that the national identity in his discourse served to increase his popularity or to obtain far-right voters and that Nicolas Sarkozy used this policy instrument throughout his mandate despite the fact that he officially turned away from it after a failed public debate on the subject in 2010. As methodological basis for research on the topic and achievement of the objectives "critical discourse analysis" was selected and also "analysis of metaphors" was used as its complement. In the theoretical part of the thesis some of the basic scientific findings that deal with the "nation", "identity" and the development and construction of "national identity" are presented and discussed . The research consists of three main chapters devoted to the analysis of Nicolas Sarkozys' speeches during the given period. Chapters are divided according to the changing role of national identity in Sarkozy's political discourse - from the campaign tool in 2007, through the recovery of this instrument in 2009 and 2010 to its insertion in the...

The diploma thesis "Adolescent in Foster Care" deals with an adolescent growing up in foster care, with regard to the development of one's identity. The theoretical part includes preview on adolescent, foster care, identity and also the issues of deprivation. The research part is focused on opinion and attitudes of adolescents to issues like children's biological family, foster family and identity, as well as attitudes of foster parents to identical topics. Keywords Adolescent, foster care, deprivation, identity,

Diploma thesis Fashion - tool of the presentation of respect and recognition deals with fashion clothing as a mediator in presenting respect and recognition in my respondents jobs. It attempts to show the level of importance that to fashion and clothes attributes thematically selected group of people living in today's society of consumerism - hence what role play these phenomenons in theirs lives and to what extent they attach importance to them. Diploma thesis assumes that their clothes communicate respect and recognition, which their job requires. For the research part of my thesis, I chose qualitative type of research. This method allows to obtain individual opinions and insides of respondents and leads to clarifying the nature of the matter of investigation. It has been used an interview with the instruction and interviews have been shot in October-November the 2012th.

This thesis aims to attempt to clarify whether the principle of TV reality shows in general and also specific gender reality show Wife Swap could be a variation of the modern technologies of discipline or a special case of media confession which influences the audience through a TV reality show while presenting the positive norms. Furthermore, based on discourse analysis of interviews with various actors and actress of selected TV Part of Wife Swap it aims to understand and uncover their motivation to participate in this gender reality show, as well as to analyze strong attitude of the audience towards the controversial name of this reality show. The theoretical basis of the work are based on the idea of Foucault new technologies of discipline (the Panopticon principle), internalization of norms and the concept of pastoral power, and Judith Butler's concept of formation of repetitive body. In the end, the thesis considers not only the identified discourses that constitute the motivation of participants of this television gender show, but also a discussion of the research possibilities and limits in an environment that is defined by dominant discursive dichotomies.

In reference to Hans-Herbert Kögler's critical-hermeneutical approach, presented paper identifies the act of interpretation as an underlying assumption for realization of intercultural dialogue. The paper is divided in two parts. First part is a discussion of key concepts such as dialogue, identity, communication and recognition. It can also be read as an attempt to capture the development of the idea of intercultural dialogue in a historical perspective. The interulturality is defined here as an ethos. Second part presents particular hermeneutically oriented conceptions of intercultural dialogue, namely the conceptions of Raimon Panikkar, Ram Adhar Mall, Vincent Shen, Franz Martin Wimmer and Hans-Herbert Kögler. The recent shift in methodology of intercultural dialogue is characterized by merger of the paradigms of communication and recognition and is identified in Hans-Herbert Kögler's integrative approach.

The thesis deals with two images of the key "Others" in the Czech Republic in the second decade of its existence: communists and Romanies. It shows the characteristics that have been attributed to them, points out the attributes that were constructed as a threat, and informs about power relations into which they have been placed against the rest of society. The aim of the thesis is to show on what values society is constructed in discourses which create various forms of exclusion of these "Others". The introductory chapter summarizes the Czech relationship to the "Others": Germans, Russians, and Slovaks in the form of interpretative looks into key authors (especially Palacký, Kundera, and Pithart) Next chapter focuses on methodology and introduces the starting points of the analysis in the critical discourse analysis (especially Van Dijk, Wodak and Jäger) and in the foucaultian discourse analysis (especially Hansen). These starting points are combined with the concept of moral panic which is introduced in the third chapter which also discusses its problematic places. Analytical chapters are devoted to the election of president Václav Klaus and they also discuss the role of communists (February - June 2003) and society's reactions to ethnically contextualized violence in Šluknov Hook. They...

The thesis, entitled Russian Identity: Minority Schools in Contemporary Estonia, analyses Russian upper-secondary schooling in Estonia from the dissolution of the Soviet Union until 2012. It focuses on two issues, which are considered to be important for national-identity building of Russian students living in Estonia: language of instruction and history teaching. In terms of the first issue, the thesis aims to show how is the Estonian government implementing the reform introducing mandatory 60% of curricula in Estonian and how is it perceived by Russian students and their teachers. In terms of the second issue, the thesis examines perception of the Soviet period by the Russian students comparing to the "official" Estonian interpretation advocated by the Ministry of Education. First part of the work focuses on the integration process of Russians into Estonian society stressing its difficulties and implications concerning the national identity of Russians living in Estonia. Second part finally examines the two particular issues (language-of-instruction reform and history teaching) from the point of view of the available written sources, while the final and the key part of the thesis analyses the same issues based on a field research at Russian schools in Estonia.