In the last decade, we have witnessed a new stage in the mainstreaming and normalization pro­cess of populist radical right policies and ideas in the Western world. This has resulted in in­creasing politicization of issues related to immigration. In Sweden, this politicization took off when the radical right-wing populist (RRP) party the Sweden Democrats (SD) was voted into the parliament in 2010. Even though the party was isolated by the mainstream parties, its presence in the parliament still contributed to the politi­cization for a long time. Additionally, increased “gang”-related shootings have pushed the po­liticization even further since the shootings in the public and political discourse have often been connected to immigration. Apart from this, certain mainstream right-wing parties, especially the Moderates (M) and the Christian Democrats (KD), have questioned the isolation of SD lately, which led to the presentation of a collaboration between the three parties in the fall of 2021. With this collaboration as a background, the aim of this study is to show the particular roles M and KD play in the process of mainstreaming and normalization of the RRP discourse, espe­cially related to immigration and its alleged connection to criminality. The study draws on crit­ical discourse analysis of political and public discourse in the context of RRP to analyze how M, KD, and SD construct themes and arguments around immigration, immigrants, and crimi­nality on their official Facebook pages. The study argues that there is an ongoing process of normalization of RRP policy and ideas in Swedish public and political discourse. Largely, SD is the strategical enacting actor in this pro­cess. How­ever, both M and KD take part in the process by contributing to gradually changing the existing discourse on immigration towards new forms and new norms. This is conducted by employing strategies, concepts, and rhetoric well-known from RRP discourse.

This Bachelor thesis is about international students, who travelled to Uppsala to study abroad during the autumn exchange term, which took place between September 2021 to January 2022. Four students from different countries were interviewed about their cultural and social experiences when the students studied abroad and how they oriented themselves in a foreign environment. This thesis focuses on sensory anthropology, which is a subfield. The sensorial aspects are about the international student's experiences and the primary ones are light and darkness, space, flavors, and memories. When it comes to local belonging and imagined communities, the sensory aspects are about the value of individual experiences as well as the collective aspect of establishing a new community. In the period where international students learned, they clarified whether they felt a local belonging to Uppsala.  When it comes to whether the students feel a sense of local belonging in Uppsala, the student's own educational experiences, local belonging, and communities in their home countries are compared to the Swedish students' existing communities at Uppsala. Foreign students also describe their native languages and their encounters with the Swedish language, and how the contrast resulted in feelings of exclusion from the Swedish society.

Dans un monde où l'image d'archive fusionne avec la « ville-hashtag », cette thèse relate la récente métamorphose d'une place de Lisbonne nommée Intendente. Parcelle urbaine historiquement traversée par une longue artère commerçante, une population cosmopolite s'y retrouve depuis toujours. Cumulant bars interlopes et activités clandestines, la place d'Intendente est ensuite devenue l'arène du stigma du centre de la ville. Jusqu'à ce que la mairie y impulse, entre 2011 et 2014, un vaste projet urbain visant à en faire un quartier attractif de la capitale. Dès le début, les habitants ont été alertés : le Maire disait vouloir « changer l'image du quartier ». Et de fait, de l'avant à l'après chantier, le paysage d'Intendente bascule manifestement d'un état d'invisibilité à un espace d'hypervisibilité. Reconnaissant l'importance croissante de la dimension visuelle du « faire ville », nous restituons la complexité de ce processus à l'aune d'une question centrale : quel sont les rôles des images dans la transformation urbaine contemporaine ? Des images de la ville aux imaginaires urbains, notre récit suit ainsi au présent de narration le fil de l'histoire d'Intendente. Composant le portrait d'un lieu dans le temps, cette thèse se présente dès lors sous la forme d'une chronotopie, dont la ligne chronologique restitue le cumul et l'anachronisme de multiples évènements. Au sein d'une trame qui entrecroise tout du long images et textes, cette thèse figure ainsi la réflexion anthropologique d'une culture visuelle de la transformation urbaine. / In a world where archive footage melts with the “hashtag-city”, this thesis reports on the recent metamorphosis of a Lisbon square named Intendente. This urban plot historically crossed by a long commercial thoroughfare has always sheltered a cosmopolitan population. Adding interlope bars to clandestine activities, the Intendente square has become the stigma arena of the town center. Until the Mayor launched, between 2011 and 2014, a wide scale urban project aiming to its transformation into an attractive neighborhood of the capital city. The locals were warned from the beginning: the Mayor said he wanted to “change the neighborhood’s image” and, indeed, from the start to the end of the project, Intendente’s landscape undoubtedly toggles from a state of invisibility to hypervisibility. Recognizing the growing importance of the faire ville visual dimension, we restore the complexity of this process to a central question: which roles do images play in modern urban transformation ? From city images to urban imaginaries, our narrative thus follows, in a narrative present, the time line of Intendente’s history. Composing the portrait of a place in time, this thesis appears under the form of a “chronotopy”, whose chronological path comprehends the sum and the anachronysm of multiple events. Within a frame that continuously overlaps images and texts, this thesis displays the anthropological reflection of a visual culture in urban transformation.

This study addresses the issue of how discourses around Artificial Intelligence have been presentedin national media. To explore this topic, I analyze news articles to identify narratives and imaginariesthat contribute to building the concept of AI from a North-South perspective. To attempt toanswer these questions, I have selected two different countries to gather the data from, one in theGlobal North (Sweden) and one in the Global South (Chile). However, both are located in thesame “Large/Medium” cluster when combining land area and population.Drawing on data collected from 103 news articles, I found that in both cases, AI is presented asa positive tool for the development of local and global economies. Furthermore, AI is seen asdriving the creation of exciting and disruptive businesses. However, my analysis shows that thereis uncertainty about the future of the current status quo, both regarding the labor market and thecurrent geopolitical power balance if China were to win the so-called ‘AI race.’The data was coded and analyzed using a combination of critical discourse analysis and a dataextractivism and the approach introduced by Sheila Jasanoff, the sociotechnical imaginaries. Theseperspectives can help to understand the relations between scientific and technological projects,and political institutions and power. Throughout the sample, the hegemonic (dominant) voice prevailedthrough discussions of the economy having a particular North-centric representation.This is important to explore as it can shed light on whether this new technology is to providereal opportunities or if it is replicating the power relations of the globalized world. In this sense,the study also criticizes the sociotechnological imaginaries since, despite the fact that they proposea local view of power relations, they confirm that technological developments are often subject toglobal, political and corporate planning, regardless of the particular reality of each country.

The emergence of energy communities entails the development of alternative energy systems, where consumers become active participants in the complex networks of material and semiotic actors. This paper looks at how local sociotechnical imaginaries are performed on island of Gotland, in Sweden. Grounded in Science, technology and society studies and co-production theory, this study provides a framework analysis of a set of documents and an interview, through the identification of conflicting visions, or sociotechnical imaginaries, of energy transition locally. The Swedish energy system is adapting slowly to the changing environment, and conflicts have emerged between national and local imaginaries. Here, the literature fails to provide satisfying arguments around political processes leading to the creation of alternative visions of energy futures. This study shows how normative orientations shape and are shaped by each other, and how alternative visions of progress often fail to be actualized and performed as long as they exist in combination with dominant visions. The two imaginaries, on one side the dominant, on the other the radical, fail to come to terms with each other because of the structural inadequacy of a system dominated by a political rationality which is unaware of itself.

This thesis is about how space technology is experienced in the social domain and how its purpose is recast from different viewpoints. The author is an artist and the approach taken foregrounds qualities of experience and viewpoint in which artists have a particular investment. This approach opens up the ways that affect, agency and authorship cross social domains that are directly and indirectly associated with the production of space technologies. A key focus is a group project led by the author that was initiated in response to the launch in October 2008 of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The project took place in Bengaluru, India where the spacecraft was built. Taking the ambivalence that surrounds the uses and purposes of space technologies as a starting point, a description of the spacecraft is developed from a number of viewpoints, including the mission scientists, public media and the participants of the artist-led project. The interventionist strategies of the project shed light on the ways that technologies can be accessed through their imaginaries and this has significance for large-scale technologies, such as spacecraft, for which physical access is delimited and much of the infrastructure is invisible or hidden from public view. The thesis proposes ways of reinstating missed qualities of viewpoint and experience within the affective spaces of space technology through the imperative to articulate first-person engagements with the world that is bound into artistic interpretation. What is further proposed is that by picturing the interrelations and flows of space technology in social domains through the lenses of experience and viewpoint, a 'technographic picture' is created that then becomes available as a tool with which to re-imagine spacefaring. This is a crucial addition to discussions about the interplay between science, technology and society that recognises the intimate spaces at the core of such large-scale concepts. It offers a new transdisciplinary modality that incorporates an artistic approach with which to make sense of the structurally ambivalent pursuits of spacefaring.

本文旨在探討加拿大哲學家泰勒(Charles Taylor)的政治思想。泰勒政治思想深受個人身為英裔魁北克人、英加兩地學術薰陶、以及參與加拿大新民主黨活動等因素所影響，並與其亟欲建構哲學人類學之鴻圖，有著緊密的關係。泰勒反對笛卡兒式與洛克式的心靈理論，卻採取梅洛龐蒂的觀點，主張感知性知識乃是一種行動者知識的樣態，感知的內容從不是偶然地與世界連結，感知的主體是世界的化身，其身處的困境無法置外於其行動者的結構。泰勒更進一步抨擊當代自然主義假設背景祇不過是我們認知的因果性前提的看法，他主張背景乃是知識之先驗性、超越性的條件，但它不能完全地客體化，因為任何客觀的知識宣稱要被理解，其本身必需具備背景預設，這種反思之先驗性、超越性的層次充份顯示出客體化、表徵化世界的限制。泰勒遂借用加達瑪的視域融合概念來說明社會科學的詮釋邏輯，與自然科學的邏輯大異其趣。他更抨擊行為主義過度簡化人類的行為，竟將價值和實踐分離，導致價值和行動在具體生活經驗中的關聯性遭受排拒。泰勒更明確地批評原子式個人主義者的信念，也拒斥工具理性。泰勒因此提倡善的客觀性，強調人們與其道德經驗，從而建構其道德實在論。泰勒的政治理論則係挑戰現代以普遍主義為基礎的憲政民主制度之合理性，其批駁當代程序式的自由主義者對個人自主性之錯誤理解，並提出本真肯認之理論。從宗教、經濟、政治與道德等多元角度，泰勒爬梳西方現代性的源流，就中探討宗教在俗世政治中所扮演的角色，它竟成為政治認同的關鍵。他也追尋現代社會想像如何崛起，預視多元現代性的到臨。面對俗世時代人類處境，泰勒則導正孤傲人文主義之偏頗，企圖拯救大眾虛空無聊的生活。最後，本文對泰勒的理論在道德視域、政治哲學及現代性加以檢討，並以臺灣經驗的反省作結，期收他山之石，可以攻錯之效。

Cities, regions, nations and other places have in recent decades become active participants in the global competitive economy, and now operate in a global marketplace, competing with other places all over the world for investors, tourists, residents and workforce. As a result, places use marketing and branding strategies and practices to gain reputation and competitive advantage. Chinese cities have, over the past decades, increasingly engaged in branding activities, and even taken the role of spearheads for China in its positioning in the global economy, seen for example in the organization of mega-events. The branding of Chinese cities nevertheless exhibits some differences compared with city branding in the West. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to our knowledge of the internal-political aspects of place branding, using field studies of the imagery used in city branding practices in five Chinese mega-cities, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Chongqing. The focus is on the images and language used in the cities’ branding, and on key political aspects involved in the branding of Chinese mega-cities. The theoretical lens incorporates concepts tied to images, language, imaginaries, ideology and power, and the study relies on an ethnographic, multiple case study approach, including longitudinal fieldwork in China. The findings consist of rich illustrations of the branding of the five Chinese mega-cities, and include an analysis of similar imagery found in all five cities, grouped into economic, international, cultural, social and environmental imaginaries. This shows that city branding in Chinese mega-cities is focused on creating international and competitive cities, while also paying attention to the environment, culture and internal target groups such as residents. A central contribution of this dissertation is the development of the concept ‘imagineering’, used in this study to conceptualize key political aspects of city branding in Chinese mega-cities. Imagineering contains three main elements, namely local adaptations of national directives, policies, plans and concepts; a strong future orientation while also accentuating selected elements from the past; and a focus on local populations with the creation of stability and harmony as a central goal. Imagineering is also conceptualized as a policy instrument exercised by a powerful élite, closely intertwined with urban governance, and used to influence people, values, places and, ultimately, city futures.

Esta pesquisa revisita a obra do escritor António de Alcântara Machado, tomando como eixo da análise as diversas dimensões da cidade de São Paulo que ela traz à tona. Lembrado na história da literatura brasileira sobretudo pela autoria de Brás, Bexiga e Barra Funda (1927), livro de contos em que trata principalmente da presença italiana e ítalo-brasileira na cidade, o autor é figura ativa nos círculos culturais de São Paulo nas primeiras décadas do século XX, notadamente por sua participação junto aos grupos modernistas. A partir da gama de perspectivas fornecida pela literatura, pelo jornalismo, pela história e pela crítica de espetáculos, sigo suas reflexões acerca de uma série de temas, tais como o lugar de São Paulo na modernização do teatro brasileiro; a renovação da literatura; a criação das identidades brasileira e paulistana; a presença de repertórios estrangeiros na vida cultural e na estética da cidade; e os debates sobre raça, classe e segregação socioespacial. Confiro especial atenção às relações entre cidade e cultura, temas que nos direcionam à convivência tensa entre os diversos tipos que ocupam os espaços da cidade, aos debates sobre a nação e o nacionalismo, à nova composição social e às transformações em curso em São Paulo. Na primeira parte do trabalho, acompanho a maneira como Alcântara Machado, fazendo as vezes de crítico teatral e urbano, observa e participa da produção da cidade, sugerindo intervenções seja no espaço urbano, seja no teatro brasileiro, orientado pela busca de uma modernização pautada por um veio nacionalista bastante específico, que propõe um mergulho nas raízes nacionais enquanto coloca São Paulo na condição de protagonista da história do país. Na Parte II, investigo as aparições de seis tipos sociais da cidade observados e descritos pelo escritor caipiras, bacharéis e funcionários públicos, mulheres, crianças, italianos (e ítalo-brasileiros) e negros , que compõe uma galeria de personagens eloquente em relação à maneira desigual com que a narrativa do progresso é apropriada e vivenciada por diferentes grupos. Concluo o trabalho sugerindo uma visão matizada da obra e de Alcântara Machado, atenta à importância do teatro e dos tipos sociais marginais no conjunto de sua reflexão, à complexidade do quadro da cidade que ele levanta e às articulações entre os diferentes gêneros em que ele escreveu. / This research aims to analyze António de Alcântara Machados work, focusing on many dimensions of São Paulo city treated by him. Recognized on Brazilian literature mostly by Brás, Bexiga e Barra Funda, his short story book about Italian and Italian-Brazilian presence in the city, the writer is an active character in the cultural worlds of São Paulo in the beginning of the 20th century, specially by his participation in the modernists groups. From the range of perspectives provided by literature, journalism, history and theater criticism, I follow his reflections on a series of themes, including the role of São Paulo on the modernization of the Brazilian theater; the creation of Brazilian and paulista identities, the presence of foreign ideas on the cultural life and aesthetics of the city; and debates on race, class and spatial segregation. I draw special attention to the relations between city and culture, themes that bring us back to the tense coexistence between characters living in the spaces of the city; to the debates about nation and nationalism; to the new social composition and transformations in progress in São Paulo. In the first part of the work, I pursue the way in which Alcântara Machado, acting as a theatrical and urban critic, observes and contributes to the production of the city, suggesting interventions either in the urban space or in the Brazilian theater, guided by a very specific nationalist conception, which proposes a dip in the national roots, while placing São Paulo as the protagonist of the history of the country. In Part II, I investigate the apparitions of six characters of the city observed by the writer caipiras, bachelors and civil servants, women, children, Italians (and Italian-Brazilians) and blacks who compose an eloquent gallery in relation to the unequal way in which the speech of progress is appropriated and experienced by different groups. I conclude by suggesting a more qualified view of the work and of the writer, more attentive to the importance of theater and marginal social types in the whole of his thoughts, a view that is more committed to the complexity of the picture of the city he raises and to the articulations between the different genres in which he wrote.

Nos objets de recherche sont des paroles. De l'acte linguistique à la parole narrative, ce travail explore les patrimoines narratifs d'expérience de milieux alpins, depuis les Alpes francophones jusqu'aux territoires himalayens du Népal. Les documents narratifs de la collecte de Charles Joisten et les enquêtes que nous avons conduites dans les Alpes valdôtaines et chez les groupes Bahun-Chhetri et Newar du Népal nous ont emmené sur les traces des ontologies fantastiques qui hantent les imaginaires narratifs de ces populations alpines. A partir de ces documents, nous avons développé une analyse transculturelle d'anthropologie neurocognitive comparée, basée sur une approche qui permet de faire le pont entre le domaine de l'ethnographie de la narration (la folkloristique) et les neurosciences cognitives. Par une prise en compte des liens entre les systèmes neurocognitifs des êtres humains producteurs d'imaginaire et leurs inspirations émanant du milieu culturel, nous sommes parvenu à pouvoir dire quelque chose du sensorium cérébral, de ses sources spécifiques (a priori contre-intuitives), auxquelles puise la création de telles ontologies imaginaires. Nous avons inséré notre travail dans le cadre du modèle transculturel d'anthropologie neuro-cognitive BRAINCUBUS (depuis Cathiard et al., 2011). Ajoutée à notre intention, une modalité autre que l'intuition de psychologie intuitive et la contre-intuition scientifique : une sur-intuition limitée aux expériences contre-intuitives non-délusionnelles.En tant qu'interface entre le folklore du surnaturel et les récentes avancées de la neurophysiologie du sommeil, ce modèle nous a permis de construire notre recherche à partir des ontologies imaginaires repérées par la folkloristique internationale, pour la plupart générées dans l'état dissocié du cerveau qu'est la paralysie du sommeil. A partir de ce quatrième état du cerveau, il est possible de dégager l'origine des différentes phénoménologies donnant naissance à l'anthropodiversité des ontologies surnaturelles. Ces corps dits « fantômes » étant neuralement bien réels, notre objectif visait l'unification de tels corps-fantômes de l'imaginaire narratif humain avec les corps physiques par leurs cartographies corticales. Nous avons focalisé notre attention sur les deux types principaux de corps-fantômes issus des deux composantes fondamentales de la paralysie du sommeil : OBE (Out-of-Body Experience) et AP3S (Alien Presence Sensed from Self Shadowing). En partant de la matrice sémantique de cette paralysie, nous avons différencié les fondements corticaux des deux phénoménologies universelles de l'âme-partie-visiter et du dormeur-visité, celles-ci se produisant, latéralisées respectivement à droite (OBE) et à gauche (AP3S), dans la jonction temporo-pariétale (TPJ).En examinant les déplacements hors-du-corps, nous avons pu mettre en évidence le rôle nodal d'une inquiétude partagée transculturellement. Il s'agit de la précaution de ne pas remuer le corps inanimé du sujet en paralysie, pour que le corps-animé s'y réintroduise. Cette sur-intuition physiologique – mémorisée et transmissible en motif narratif – devient un savoir-faire vital : l'action de retourner sur la bouche une personne en paralysie du sommeil reviendrait à la mettre en danger de mourir par suffocation, car elle ne peut reprendre le contrôle de sa respiration volontaire à cause de la paralysie des muscles intercostaux externes. La paralysie du sommeil, dont la prévalence est plutôt importante, nous a permis d'ancrer les récits dans des expériences neuralement indéniables de corps-fantômes. En intégrant ces données dans une forme neurocompatible, nous avons pu unifier les matrices narratives universelles en partant des corps-fantômes fondamentaux OBE et AP3S, dans un modèle de création neurale pour ces ontologies fantastiques, lesquelles, présentes depuis plus de 50.000 ans au moins, vont continuer à hanter nos imaginaires enrichissant le m/patrimoine narratif de l'Humanité. / Dedicated to spoken memories, this work explore experience-centered narrative heritage in faraway alpine environments: from French-speaking Alps to the Himalayan Nepal. Starting from the largest French collection of belief narratives by Charles Joisten, we focussed on Valdostan reports, and the same during several consecutive field investigations in Nepal, inside Bahun-Chhetri and Newar groups. Hence we strolled on the trails of fantastic ontologies, the ones that haunt the narrative imaginary of such distant alpine communities. On processing these documents, we developed a cross-cultural analysis in comparative neurocognitive anthropology, elaborating a framework that allowed to bridge field folkloristics and cognitive neuroscience. By taking into account the relationships between the neurocognitive systems of human brains as ontology engines, be they physical or imaginary ontologies, and their inspirations from the cultural environments, we were enabled to tell something about the cerebral sensorium, with its specific sources (a priori counterintuitive), from which the creation of such imaginary ontologies has drawn. For this purpose, we evaluated more explicitly our working hypotheses in the frame of the cross-cultural neurocognitive anthropological model BRAINCUBUS (since 2011 by Cathiard et al.). Notably we had the opportunity to benefit from the last significant improvements concerning psychological modalities of intuition within this framework.As an interface between folklore studies of the supernatural and the latest advances in the neurophysiology of sleep, this model has allowed us to build our research on imaginary ontologies (as landmarked long ago by international folkloristics), by considering that virtually all of which originated in the dissociated brain state called sleep paralysis. Starting from this 4th state of the brain, it was possible to identify the origin of different phenomenologies which spawn the anthropodiversity we meet for supernatural ontologies. Establishing that these so-called “phantom” bodies are clearly neurally real, our purpose was to achieve the unification of main phantom-bodies with physical bodies from their cortical mapping. We focussed mainly on the two main types of phantom-bodies generated by the two fundamental components of sleep paralysis: OBE (Out-of-Body Experience) and AP3S (Alien Sensed Presence from Self Shadowing). In the narrative documents we elicited the semantic matrix of paralysis and we became able to differentiate the cortical sources of the two universal narratives of the “soul leaving the body for visiting” and of “sleeper visited”, both generated in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and lateralized respectively to the right (OBE) and to the left (AP3S).An examination of OBE journeys allowed us to highlight the nodal role played by a cross-culturally shared anxiety. This is an injonctive precaution: do not move the inanimate body of a person in sleep paralysis, to allow the animate body to re-enter. This physiological over-intuition – stored and shared in narrative motifs – became an anti-lethal sapiential care. Actually rolling face down a sleep paralyzed person is at high risk of suffocating to death because s/he can not recover control of voluntary breathing, since external intercostal muscles are paralyzed. This sleep paralysis phenomenology is widespread enough to fuel transmissibility of narratives grounded in neurally undeniable experiences of phantom bodies. When framing these explicanda in a neurocompatible format, we were able to unify narrative matrices, elaborated from universally experienced OBE or AP3S phantom bodies within BRAINCUBUS as a model capable of neural creativity for such fantastic ontologies. Formulated by human wisdom along more than 50,000 years at least, they will continue to haunt our imaginary and enrich the narrative heritage of Humanity.