This dissertation examines how young people with Kurdish backgrounds form their identity in Sweden with regards to processes of inclusion and exclusion. It also sheds light on the ways these young people deal with ethnic discrimination and racism. Further, the study outlines the importance of these social processes for the discipline of social work and the ways social workers can work with disadvantaged and marginalized groups and endorse their struggle for social justice and full equal citizenship beyond racist and discriminatory practices. The empirical analysis is built on interviews with 28 young men and women with Kurdish backgrounds in Sweden. Postcolonial theory, belonging and identity formation constitute the central conceptual framework of this study. The young people referred to different sites in which they experienced ethnic discrimination and stigmatization. These experiences involved the labor market, mass media, housing segregation, legal system and school system. The interviewees also referred to the roles of ‘ordinary’ Swedes in obstructing their participation in the Swedish society through exclusionary discourses relating to Swedish identity. The interviewees’ life situation in Sweden, sense of ethnic discrimination as well as disputes over identity making with other young people with Middle-Eastern background are among the most important reasons for fostering strong Kurdish nationalist sentiments, issues that are related to the ways they can exercise their citizenship rights in Sweden and how they deal with exclusionary practices in their everyday life. The study shows that the interviewees respond to and resist ethnic discrimination in a variety of ways including interpersonal debates and discussions, changing their names to Swedish names, strengthening differences between the self and the other, violence, silence and deliberately ignoring racism. They also challenged and spoke out against the gendered racism that they were subjected to in their daily lives due to the paternalist discourse of ”honor-killing”. The research participants had been denied an equal place within the boundary of Swedishness partly due to a racist postcolonial discourse that valued whiteness highly. Paradoxically, some interviewees reproduced the same discourse through choosing to use it against black people, Africans, newly-arrived Kurdish immigrants (”imports”), ”Gypsies” and Islam in order to claim a modern Kurdish identity as near to whiteness as possible. This indicates the multiple dimensions of racism. Those who are subjected to racism and ethnic discrimination can be discriminatory and reproduce the racist discourse. Despite unequal power relations, both dominant and minoritized subjects are all marked by the postcolonial condition in structuring subjectivities, belonging and identification.

Denna studie syftar till att fördjupa förståelsen för skolsituationen hos elever i behov utav särskilt stöd, de elever som utgör diskussion i elevhälsoteam samt de elever som har någon form av diagnos. Studien antar en kvalitativ forskningsansats. Skolsituationen hos elever i behov utav särskilt stöd undersöks utifrån ett lärarperspektiv. Resultaten visar att elevernas identitetsskapande kännetecknas av individualitet. Centrala aspekter av elevernas identitetsskapande är vilken typ av svårigheter som eleven har och vilket stöd eleven får. En eventuell diagnos har stor inverkan på elevens identitetsskapande och påverkar även lärares förväntningar och krav. I mötet med elever i behov utav särskilt stöd är det viktigt att lärare är medvetna om sin roll och hur deras bemötande påverkar eleven. / The purpose of this study is to deepen the understanding of the school situation for students with special needs, students who are talked about in prereferral teams and students who have some form of diagnosis. The study uses a qualitative research approach and the school situation for students with special needs is examined through a teacher’s perspective. The study shows that the students’ identity formation is characterized by individuality. Key aspects of the students’ identity formation are the specific difficulties that the student has and what type of support the student receives. If the student has a diagnosis, this has a major impact on the student’s identity formation and also affects teachers’ expectations and demands. It is important for teachers’ to be aware of their role and their perceptions of students with special needs and how this affects the students.

This thesis explores the relationship between the Swedish autonomous left and the terrace culture of European football. It has its geographic starting point in Stockholm, Sweden and follows the three larges tStock­holm football clubs, AIK, Djurgården and Hammarby, and its supporters. The author has followed the football club Hammarby from the terrace for the entire 2011 football season, and has interviewed six political activists who visit, or used to visit, the terrace. The research context this study is incorporated into centres around the history of, and relationship between, the terrace cultures of AIK, Djurgården and Hammarby. Previous research has also focused on the radical potential of Ultras terrace culture (which is derived from Italian supporter culture) and the terrace culture from an intersectional perspective. Part of the aim of the thesis is to explore anarchist theory within an academic framework, something which has rarely been done before. The other main theoretical approach is largely based on the ideas of political theorist Chantal Mouffe and her exploration of the political identity formation of the subject in opposition to the deindividuating effect the mass can have on the individual. The method of the thesis is based on anarchist theories of participatory methods and on walking interviews developed by, among others, geographer Jon Anderson. What the research shows is that the presence of fascist values is much stronger on the terraces ofStockholmthan expected, and that the terrace culture as a whole has adopted a seemingly “apolitical” stance to try and submerge these. The participants’ stories centre on the inability to “loose oneself” in the mass of the terrace, and the feelings this inability awakens. This is the first thesis about the Ultras culture written in a Nordic context.

The study examines the recent transformations of integration policies and citizenship laws in Germany with a special focus on the experience of the children of Turkish immigrants in Goslar, a small town. By following

This dissertation considers how the party-state of the People’s Republic of China has been mobilizing various forms of interpellation in an attempt to sustain a continuous imagination of a particular community defined on the terms of a shared “Chinese” national identity. As well, the research considers how these forms of interpellation have been challenged by a range of complex diasporic viewer responses. Taking media productions of the Mainland China television industry as my point of reference, I have studied in detail, multiple productions of the widely popular, complex program, the Spring Festival Gala (SFG) produced by China Central Television. Though not without its contradictions, this show has employed various interpellative strategies, persistently and continuously hailing viewers into the subject position of loyal members of an enduring “Chinese Nationality.” However, interpellation is one thing, subjectification within it is another. To better grapple with the cultural citizenship of transnationalized Chinese, this dissertation also considers observations regarding the receptions of the SFG by diasporic “Chinese subjects” who now live in Canada. While their continuous imagining of the “Chinese Nationality” helps to better understand the complex mechanisms which contribute to the retaining power of interpellation, their moments of “de-imagining” also shed light on the problems and difficulties of such interpellation. These moments are considered as possible openings to the formation of fluid, multiple Chinese subjectivities that lay the groundwork for a “flexible citizenship” (Ong, 1993; 1999) for all “Chinese,” furthering the endeavor to go beyond certain nationalist and/or statist visions of identity, subjectivity, and citizenship.

This thesis investigates small-scale mappae mundi, world maps, created in the thirteenth-century, which record the historical, mythical, social, and religious reality of the world for wealthy English patrons. My research focuses on two maps found in a Psalm book (British Library Add. MS 28681, f. 9 and f. 9v) on either side of a single page. One depicts the world in typical mappae mundi fashion, with Jerusalem at the centre of a network of cities, topographic features and monstrous creatures while the other lists place names and geographic descriptions. The maps depict the world in very different manners, one textually and the other visually, but their placement on the same leaf emphasizes their connection. This work explores the iconography, socio-historic context and literary precedence of mappae mundi in order to comprehend the distinct need for mixed-media to represent and understand a complex worldly existence in thirteenth-century England.

This dissertation considers how the party-state of the People’s Republic of China has been mobilizing various forms of interpellation in an attempt to sustain a continuous imagination of a particular community defined on the terms of a shared “Chinese” national identity. As well, the research considers how these forms of interpellation have been challenged by a range of complex diasporic viewer responses. Taking media productions of the Mainland China television industry as my point of reference, I have studied in detail, multiple productions of the widely popular, complex program, the Spring Festival Gala (SFG) produced by China Central Television. Though not without its contradictions, this show has employed various interpellative strategies, persistently and continuously hailing viewers into the subject position of loyal members of an enduring “Chinese Nationality.” However, interpellation is one thing, subjectification within it is another. To better grapple with the cultural citizenship of transnationalized Chinese, this dissertation also considers observations regarding the receptions of the SFG by diasporic “Chinese subjects” who now live in Canada. While their continuous imagining of the “Chinese Nationality” helps to better understand the complex mechanisms which contribute to the retaining power of interpellation, their moments of “de-imagining” also shed light on the problems and difficulties of such interpellation. These moments are considered as possible openings to the formation of fluid, multiple Chinese subjectivities that lay the groundwork for a “flexible citizenship” (Ong, 1993; 1999) for all “Chinese,” furthering the endeavor to go beyond certain nationalist and/or statist visions of identity, subjectivity, and citizenship.

The aim of this study is to explorehow the Alevi BektaSi identity is constructed through the memorial ceremonies of Haci BektaS veli on collective and individual level by different actors from the state agents to the Alevi BektaSis who participate in the ceremonies.

This thesis examines how women perform as leaders within male-dominated professions, including law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. In studying women's performances in terms of the corporeal and spectacular, the investigation seeks to understand how particular women enact leadership through their materiality within specific times and places. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1988) theorising of the processes of 'becoming', woman-as-leader is studied as an entity that passes from one incomplete and multiple assemblage to another, rather than as a singular 'developing' identity. The research is located within and between the paradoxes that complicate the performances of leadership for women. One key paradox serving as a rationale for this investigation is that, while 'equity' has become a truism of contemporary leadership, it is clear from formal reports (for example, the 2002 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) report), that many women continue to be marginalised and under-represented as leaders and senior managers. Moreover, those few women who have achieved success often acknowledge themselves as both legitimately and differently - and sometimes awkwardly, located as leaders in the everyday enactments of their work. The investigation of leadership within and between such paradoxes is problematic for a neo-liberal order of thinking, and even for socially critical theory, because of the assumptions that modernist literature makes about women's struggle for political legitimacy (ie, a narrative of progress, emancipation, and/or linear cumulative historical development). It is for this reason that the conceptual tools used in this study are drawn from post-feminist and post-structuralist theory. Such theorising refuses literal categories in favour of 'ironic categories' (Rorty, 1989) where two apparently oppositional ideas are understood to be both necessary and true. To explore women 'becoming' leaders (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), 'woman-as-leader' is interrogated using Jean François Lyotard's (1984) notion of 'performativity,' Mary Russo's (1994) theorising of the embodied spectacle of 'the female grotesque', and Richard Rorty (1989) and Donna Haraway's (1991) insistence on partiality, doubt, and the importance of 'undoing' the fixity of modernist categories - in this instance, for women. One ironic category of importance to the study is Haraway's theorising of a 'cyborgian identity', a technological assemblage that is part-human/part-machine. This allows acknowledgement that women leaders inhabit realms beyond the boundaries imposed by the same/difference, human/machine, present/past, and real/virtue binaries. Using these tools, the performances of a number of women leaders is examined in an empirical study that focuses on a few individual women located in male-defined and male dominated settings. The empirical work has two key components. First, it provides a reading of three moments in time where a female individual dys-appears (Leder, 1990) in the public gaze, erupting as a unique spectacle in spaces that are both enabling and constraining. It foregrounds the unique complexities of three public performances in which women made a spectacle of themselves, while the analysis refuses to either celebrate the individuals involved, or to bemoan the conditions under which they did so. The analysis demonstrates the value of re-thinking leadership in terms of its complexity for the female as embodied public 'performer'. It then moves on to focus specifically on the (embodied, spectacular) tactics being deployed by women leaders in contemporary professional work. This analysis is located in the professions of law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. The data-as-evidence emerging from the analysis show women leaders to be both and neither enacting and troubling 'proper' (ie, traditional and/or known) leadership conventions. The analysis provides a reading of how, through certain tactical shifts, women work to 'de-territorialise' both the 'forms of content' and 'forms of expression' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) constituting leadership performances. It makes visible the tactical assemblages these women deploy, and the ways in which such tactics separate, combine, and compound the same/difference, equality/inequality, either/or binaries. The specific tactical manoeuvres for achieving legitimacy in the public gaze cluster around four identifiable ironic categories: (i) legitimate cross-dressing (ii) assertive defence (iii) proper blasphemy, and (iv) humanly-machinic. When taken together, the two components of the empirical study compel a re-theorising of 'woman-as-leader' as both insider and outsider, an entity engaging in the on-going work of diss-assembling and re-assembling a leaderly self. Woman is shown 'to be not one, not multiple, but multiplicities', simultaneously (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). This re-theorising provides a more nuanced account of women leaders working to maintain legitimacy, credibility, and propriety as leaders than mainstream theorising of leadership and management currently allows.

In this thesis, I explore if Latvia has experienced, during the last ten years, a change in identity and threat perception that could allow for the building of a “cooperative security community” in Northern Europe. Recent constructivist researches contend that such change is in progress in neighboring Estonia. This research, performed through a discourse analysis of political elite’s speeches, reveals the presence – explained by the concept of interim inconsequentiality - of two opposite identity/security discourses. I link the first, inclusive, discourse to Latvia’s Western socialization, but not to a change in identity, as I contend that both threat images and identity have been instrumentalized for the sake of the accession strategy. As for the second, exclusionary, discourse that shows a persistent distrust of both Russia and the ethnic Russian minorities, and is the more prevalent in terms of political behavior, I link it to Latvia’s identity as a small ethnic nation vulnerable to external pressures - an identity strengthened during the period by Russia’s behavior. I verify this thesis by exposing the exclusionary discourse’s salience on the EU integration issue. I conclude that the period of reference, far from resolving the security dilemma, has, on the contrary, reinforced it.