The purpose of this thesis is to analyze and discuss negative stereotypes of Muslims and supposed Muslims in fictive images and theorize what impact such images have on Muslims’ concept of the self. The purpose is also to discuss what consequences this can have for the multi-cultural classroom. To fulfill this purpose, five questions were created. The first one was to examine what ethnicities and nationalities appeared amongst the perpetrators in two Swedish series of criminal fiction and if some appeared more frequently than others. The second question was to see how Muslim perpetrators was portrayed and the third question was to examine how other Muslim characters was portrayed. The fourth question was to see if there were any differences in the portrayal of Muslim characters over time. The answers of the initiating four question acted as the ground for the fifth and final question: How can the conceptualization of the self be affected by the images of Muslims and what didactical relevance might it have for the multi-cultural classroom? The studied material consisted of 85 movies from two Swedish criminal series, Wallander and Beck, which were produced during the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.The reached conclusion is that the tendency for the filmmakers to portray Muslims as perpetrators is strengthened after 2001 and that Muslim characters often is portrayed as refugees, Islamic fundamentalists, criminals, and oppressed women. The study also shows that the film producers seem to be aware of the established negative stereotypes of Muslims and chooses to use them maybe to mislead the audience in order to amaze the viewer when the true perpetrators are revealed and/or to question the fairness of the stereotypes. The empirical material indicated that Muslim student’s self-image is affected by the conflict between the perceived reality and the negative image that prevails in Swedish society and the Muslim students experience a vulnerability in Swedish multicultural classrooms.

This study aims to investigate how the main characters of Law & Order: SpecialVictims Unit are portrayed by using a list of gender-coded attributes. By using aquantitative content analysis the authors of this study examined the behaviour of 14different characters over 19 seasons to find similarities and differences in how thefemale and male characters were portrayed. The findings showed that both thefemale and male characters had a higher amount of male coded attributes thanfemale coded attributes, and that the highest showing attributes varied very littlebetween both the individual characters and the gender groups as a whole. This kindof study has scarcely been done regardless of genre, and so it serves as a solidfoundation for future research.