The Tea Party’s influence in the recent 2010 elections suggests that the group is making an impact within American politics. This project seeks to identify the cultural forces at work and ground them within Antonio Gramsci’s framework of hegemony. Taking a cue from Michael Bérubé’s recent book The Left at War, I perform a close analysis of the Tea Party’s project for hegemony. I focus on the media discourses of the Tea Party movement, performing a close reading of two key Tea Party websites and unpacking two important televised moments relating to the Tea Party’s rise as a grassroots movement. I argue that the Tea Party uses the practice of articulation to persuade the American public that Tea Party members are the rightful heirs to the project of “America” that the Founding Fathers began centuries ago by using the theories of Bérubé, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as reference points. Finally, I use my analysis of the Tea Party’s articulatory practices to begin exploring a way forward for the American Left, building on the groundbreaking cultural work of Bérubé, Hall, and Laclau and Mouffe. / text

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A respeito do Direito contemporâneo, é possível dizer que ele esgota a referência a antigas figuras de linguagem que o caracterizavam, ou eram fundamentais à concretização do imaginário que lhe dava suporte: a catacrese (o juiz é a boca da lei) e a prosopopeia (a lei diz que...). No entanto, do vazio que emana dessa transformação, defendo aqui que outras figuras de linguagem são capazes de emergir da teoria social de forma a cumprir satisfatoriamente a função que se espera desse tipo de teoria, isto é, contribuir para a inteligibilidade dos fenômenos sociais. Nesse caso, especificamente, contribuir com a inteligibilidade do Direito. Refiro-me à metonímia (metáfora baseada na contiguidade) e à sinédoque (substituição do todo pela parte) que irrompem da teoria do discurso de Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe, quando tratam de caracterizar a categoria Hegemonia, herdada de Antonio Gramsci. O plano sobre o qual pretendo desenrolar essa substituição de figuras de linguagem chaves na compreensão do Direito é exatamente um romance: a caracterização dada por Ronald Dworkin ao exercício da jurisdição, a que rotula de um Romance em Cadeia. E claro, como não poderia deixar de ser, a referência empírica que subjaz o experimento é esse exercício jurisdicional na democracia brasileira. / About contemporary Law, it is possible to say that it exhausts references to figures of speech that characterized it or that have been essential for its understanding. I am talking about catachresis ("the judge is the mouth of Law") and prosopopoeia ("the law says that..."). However, from the emptiness that remains from this changing, I argue here that other figures of speech are able to emerge from social theory in order to perform the function expected of such a theory, that is, to contribute to understand social phenomena. In this case, specifically, it would contribute to understand Law. I refer to metonymy (a metaphor based on contiguity) and synecdoche (the substitution of the whole by the part) that arise from the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, when they are characterizing the category Hegemony, inherited from Antonio Gramsci. The background on which I intend to conduct the replacement of those figures of speech to understand Law is exactly a novel: the characterization given by Ronald Dworkin to the exercise of jurisdiction, that he calls a Chain Novel. And, of course, the empirical reference that underlies that experiment is the exercise of jurisdiction in Brazilian democracy.

Title: How masculine is Donald Trump? – A comparative discourse analysis of how Donald Trumps masculinities are portrayed on The New York Times, The Guardian & Aftonbladets webpages The aim of this essay is to compare how Donald Trumps masculinities are portrayed in the news reporting by The New York Times, The Guardian and Aftonbladets webpages. The time period of the study capture Donald Trump before he was elected as president, after the election and then as the position as incumbent president to grasp one more dimension of his masculine identity throw different time periods and capture his subject position in the news reporting. The method that is used to examine this issue is Laclau and Mouffes discourse theory that work as a combination of discourse analysis as a method of analyzing the news text and locate different discourses. As well as in combination with theories about masculinities and previous studies about former presidents, macho culture and hegemonic masculinities. The result show Donald Trump with different masculine identities through both time and media channel. Donald Trump has first been seen as a masculine joke, a stunt like one of the Jackass-gang would pull in the TV-series. A man that is not afraid to take the challenge and run for president even if the odds are well against him, he represent a masculine crisis. Later on he take the form of a business man that hopefully will ”not” run USA like his worldwide affairs, fast and unpredictable. The latest chapter portray Donald Trump as a fearless president that do whatever he want in policy making and the media is afraid of what will happen to the world order. From a former identity of a ”business rockstar” that does what he wants with females and worldwide affairs to become one of the most fearsome manly leader of the western civilication. Alongside with the theory of masculinities Donald Trump try to defend the hegemonic masculinity of politics and business leders by playing on a possible ”mancard” like Ronald Reagan back in the 80 ́s, by reaching out to the industry workers that mostly are men and defending there chances of labour – when the society evolved form industrial to a more service economic society with women competing alongside men about workplace. The slogan ”America First” would rather be ”Masculinity First”, ”Make America Masculine Again” would be the text on the caps

Lärare, pedagoger, författare, forskare och myndigheter – i stort sett alla som har en yrkesmässig koppling till fritidshem – har olika tankar, idéer och tal om som formar och omformar diskurser gällande fritidshemmets didaktik. Fritidshemmet har numera ett skolnära uppdrag och ska komplettera skolan. Fritidshemmets pedagogiska verksamhet är dock något annat än skolans vilket även motiverar behovet av denna studie. En pedagogisk verksamhet som bidrar till att stimulera elevers lärande och utveckling av förmågor genom att ha fokus på deras intressen, behov, nyfikenhet och erfarenhet. Fritidshemmets unika verksamhet kan möjliggöra en större självständighet i såväl val av innehåll samt med andra medel och metoder än skolans generellt mer inrutade verksamhet. Syftet med studien är att ur ett diskursteoretiskt perspektiv undersöka hur diskursen gällande didaktik i fritidshem framställs i tolv lärosätens självvärderingar och Universitetskanslersämbetets tolv yttrande vid bedömning av kvaliteten på grundlärarutbildningar med inriktning mot arbete i fritidshem. Utifrån ett diskursteoretiskt perspektiv och en diskursanalytisk ansats studeras de diskursiva bilder som de olika institutionerna och myndigheten tilldelar begreppet didaktik i relation till undervisning i fritidshemmet och studenters blivande yrkesroll.Resultatet visar att det finns hegemoniska intentioner som riktas mot att förtydliga såväl didaktiken som den ämnesspecifika didaktiken i relation till fritidshemmets pedagogik. Examensmålet som uttalar att studenter specifikt ska visa förmåga att tillämpa sådan didaktik och ämnesdidaktik inklusive metodik som krävs för undervisning och lärande inom det fritidspedagogiska området och inom det eller de ämnen som utbildningen avser och för yrkesutövningen i övrigt blir en hegemonisk ekvivalenskedja i sig själv. Resultatet visar att begreppet didaktik beskrivs ur flera olika aspekter men vad som är fritidshemmets didaktik eller ämnesdidaktik redogörs inte mer än i ett fåtal antagonistiska exempel. Utifrån de analyserade texterna ger resultat ett den hegemoniska intentionen i att precisera didaktiken inte innebär att definiera begreppet utan snarare att beskriva på vilka sätt studenterna tillägnar sig denna didaktiska kompetens. / Teachers, educators, authors, researchers and authorities - virtually everyone who has a professional connection to School-Age Educare - have different thoughts, ideas and speeches that shape and reshape discourses regarding the didactics of the School-Age Educare. The School-Age Educare now has a school-based mission and will complement the school. The pedagogical activities are, however, something other than the school's needs, which also justifies the need for this study. An educational activity that helps to stimulate students' learning and development of abilities by focusing on their interests, needs, curiosity and experience. I believe that the School Age-Educare´s unique activities thus give children greater independence in both the choice of content and with other means and methods than the school's generally more structured activities do. The purpose of this study is to, from a discourse theoretical perspective, examine how the discourse regarding didactics in School-Age Educare is presented in twelve higher education institutions' self-evaluations and the University Chancellor's Office's twelve opinions when assessing the quality of primary teacher education with a focus on work in School-Age Educare. With a discourse theoretical approach, the discursive image that the various institutions and the authority give the concept of didactics in relation to teaching in School-Age Educare and students' future professional role is studied.The results show that there are hegemonic intentions aimed to clarify both the didactics and the subject-specific didactics in relation to the School-Age Educare pedagogy. The degree objective, which states that students must specifically demonstrate the ability to apply such didactics and subject didactics, including methodology required for teaching and learning in the School-Age Educare area and in the subject or subjects to which the education relates and for professional practice in general, becomes in itself a hegemonic chain of equivalence. The results show that the concept of didactics is described from several different aspects, but what the didactics of the School-Age Educare or subject didactics are, is not reported more than in a few antagonistic examples. The hegemonic intention of the University Chancellor's Office as an authority in specifying didactics does not mean defining the concept but rather describing the ways in which students acquire this didactic competence.

In this study I search for the real understanding of the Lauclanian concept of ”populism” from both the viewpoint of William Connollys essentially contested concepts and the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck. My starting point for the analysis takes its inspiration from the more contemporary notion of ”constructing the social” but tries to focus on a result that can be free from the highly abstract discourse theory put forward by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The result is a peculiar paradox in which the concept of populism reconstructed by Laclau not only is contested but contested in such way that even the meaning of the word could lose its contextual use in place of another – the political. At the same time, the concepts favorability through a more common usage (or in Koselleckian terminology, its more democratized meaning) must be acknowledged, and in relation to the leftist political parties that uses this theoretic, strategic and analytical conceptual category it instead becomes much clearer why its usage is applied but also favoured by Laclau. It could be said that it is the most effective concept in determining the strategic discursive landscape and to shape it in favour of a future left-wing populist movement. At the same time, the concepts claim of being more democratic is not entirely as convincing in regard to the signifier that must be as empty as possible to fulfill the populistic demands of its political subjects. This means that its value entirely comes from the political subjects meaningful projection, and in one way only can be said to engage with these subjects through the channeling of the already expected dissent and disaffection of the people behind the discursive and overdetermined identities.

Title: What is a refugee, crisis & disaster? A comparative discourse analyses of SVT:s and Avpixlats reporting about refugees. The war in Syria, refugees and ISIS have been on the news agenda for a while. The perspective have been shifting throw different happenings about refugees, crisis, disaster and terrorism on one side. On the other side is what kind of newsagent that is reporting and there standing in society. Public service like SVT have there place on how to inform the public about different events around the world and then you have smaller news-agents thats growing in readers like Avpixlat who call themselves alternative journalism. They have less rules and regulations to follow in there news reporting and can therefor frame and angle information in a more free way. The purpose in this study is to compare how the image of refugees are created by reports from SVT and Avpixlat and how it relates to xenophobia of different kinds. The method that is used is discourse analysis and more precise Chantal Laclau och Ernesto Mouffes discourse theory. The specifik theories for the framework are ”orientalism", ”whiteness”, ”islamofobia”, ”myths”, earlier studies whit the theory of ”communitarian figures” and statistik misrepresentation of muslims as terrorists in news channels. Two different discourses where found in the material, ”refugee-crises” and refugee-crieses whiteout situation marks. The first one origins från Avpixlat and build on that there are no crises alongside the war in Syria, ISIS and refugees that flee from these factors. Refugees are fake, they are immigrants that come whit economic and potential terrorist purpose to other parts around the globe, with Europe in mind and especially Sweden. Refugees where seen as ”the other” in negativ terms, high rates if islamofobia were found, Sweden represent ”the good moral” and Syria represent the ”worst moral” in terms on symbolic witness. Europe and mostly Sweden portrays as the victim rather than refugees, SVT portrays the other way around and a drowned boy symbols refugee disasters around Mediterranean.

Syftet med denna studie är att omformulera svenskämnets didaktiska utgångspunkt genom att utgå från filosofen Jacques Rancières radikala förståelse av vad demokrati innebär. Detta görs genom en "dekonstruktiv" läsning av ämnets styrdokument där ett alternativt sätt att förstå ämnets didaktiska beståndsdelar formuleras (vilket i sin tur görs med utgångspunkt i Laclau & Mouffes "hegemoniska strategi"). Studien kommer fram till att en oreflekterad läsning av ämnets styrdokument riskerar att leda oss lärare till en odemokratisk förståelse av ämnet. Den belyser också (1) att skolan behöver ses som en arena som rymmer olika motstridiga förståelser av verkligheten, (2) att lärare behöver problematisera demokratibegreppet så att begreppet inte reduceras till att vara intetsägande och godtyckligt, och (3) att lärare bör sträva mot att skapa en didaktik som har större demokratisk potential snarare än att sträva mot illusionen om en ideal och slutgiltig demokratisk didaktik. Slutligen visar studien på en potential i att jobba ämnes- och yrkesöverskridande med skolans demokratiuppdrag utifrån det valda teoretiska perspektivet.

This study builds on the idea that discourses have the power to show that national identity did influence the puzzling foreign policy behaviour of India in March 2014 during the Crimean crisis. When analysing the material and illustrating the identified discourses, discourse- theorists Laclau and Mouffe’s framework is used both as theory and method. Discourse analysis has its starting point in the idea that the reality is accessed by the means of language. The use of Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive framework is motivated by the fact that it aims to create an understanding of the social phenomena in question (e.g. the Indian puzzling foreign policy behaviour) by applying discourse analytical tools on texts. Moreover, discourse analysis claims that identities are the result of discursive processes and that political articulation, e.g. foreign policy behaviour, creates the society; ideas that goes well with this paper. Since language is “structured discourses” and because it creates the world which we live in, it is possible to turn to the use of language when conducting a discourse analysis. To decipher which discourses that evolved around the Crimean crisis in March 2014, and to make the connection between national identity and foreign policy behaviour, articles from the three most read Indian newspapers in English are used as material. These articles are triangulated with statements published during 2014 on the homepage of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. This paper tells a rather alternative story compared to that of interest- and power based explanations with roots in realism, since it emphasises that national identity influences foreign policy behaviour. The analysis concludes that two discourses can be deciphered in the material, namely Democracy and Multipolarity, which thus can be seen as elements of Indian national identity. These two discourses imply that the Indian national identity can explain its puzzling foreign policy behaviour in the Crimean crisis in March 2014.

Förevarande studie tar avstamp i den så kallade hedersdebatt som år 2002 blossade upp till följd av mordet på Fadime, en ung kvinna som i hederns namn mördades av sin pappa. Debatten behandlade främst orsaken till heder, och två huvudsakliga argumentationslinjer kom att utstakas: den kulturorienterade förklaringsmodellen och den feministiska förklaringsmodellen. Den förstnämnda, vilken innebar att kultur lades till grund för handlingar i hederns namn, var tongivande i den allmänna debatten. Den feministiska förklaringsmodellen, vilken förklarade heder som ett uttryck för patriarkala strukturer överlag, framhålls dock som mest legitim av forskare på ämnet. Förevarande studie ämnar undersöka vilka diskurser som kommer till uttryck kring fenomenet heder i media idag samt om diskursernas förhållningssätt till varandra förändrats sedan år 2002 och vad det i så fall skulle kunna bero på. Genom en diskursanalys, såsom den förklaras av Laclau & Mouffe, undersöks texter publicerade i Sveriges fyra största tidningar under en sexmånadersperiod 15 år efter mordet på Fadime. Vidare använder vi Bacchis redskap för att navigera oss i vad som visar sig vara en splittrad diskurs: kulturlinjen ter sig ha fortsatt tongivande roll i debatten men med klara inslag av patriarkala förklaringar. Frågan om orsaken till heder visar sig också vara tätt förknippad med definitionen av svenskhet och bilden av Sverige som ett jämställt land. Dessa resultat gav upphov till en diskussion kring värdet av en fortsatt uppdelning mellan feministiska och kulturella förklaringsmodeller, då de till synes används parallellt. Emellertid kan studien också påvisa en förhållandevis etablerad uppfattning om ett samband mellan feministiska förklaringsmodeller och vänsterorienterad partipolitik. Detta framhålls som en möjlig förklaring dels till att kulturorienterade texter inte explicit använder sig av feministiska förklaringsmodeller, men väl implicit, samt till att den feministiska linjens framkomst i förevarande studie är förhållandevis låg. Vidare hade studien inledningsvis fokus på vad som framhålls som orsaker till heder, för att sedan se till vad som presenteras som lösningar på fenomenet. Med hjälp av våra diskursanalytiska verktyg kunde vi identifiera vad som antas vara orsaken till heder genom att studera de åtgärder som lanseras. Detta uteblivande av tydliga ställningstaganden för vad orsaken till heder är finner vi bero på att 2002 års hårda debattklimat medfört ett ambivalent förhållningssätt i och med en medvetenhet om ämnets omtvistade karaktär. Att tala om lösningar är således lättare än att sätta fingret på problematiken.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T20:20:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Jaime de Oliveira Soares.pdf: 443262 bytes, checksum: 328172ed74888e67570fd3f3bb4d7473 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-10-13 / This research has as discusses the role that the people exercise in the formation of political identities and the construction of political speeches by political movements in Latin America: who are the people in contemporary mass society? What is the weight of its role in social and political events of national social formations in recent history? This study therefore aims to partially reconstruct the main path along the "theory of populism" in the work of academic researcher and teacher, born in Argentina and settled in England, Ernesto Laclau, with the aim of studying its core elements, besides presenting its ruptures and continuities front of historical events. Another objective, also sought, is to present part of the debate of ideas involving currently such a theory within the social sciences, presenting some of his interlocutors. We believe that these objectives are critical to the future that we can produce policy analysis about the political movements in countries (national social formations) in Latin America / Esta pesquisa tem como problemática o papel que o povo exerce no processo de formação das identidades políticas e na construção de discursos políticos por movimentos políticos na América Latina: quem é o povo na sociedade de massas contemporânea? Qual é o peso de seu papel nos acontecimentos sociais e políticos das formações sociais nacionais na história recente? O presente trabalho, portanto, tem por objetivo principal reconstruir parcialmente o longo trajeto da teoria do populismo na obra acadêmica do pesquisador e professor, nascido na Argentina e radicado na Inglaterra, Ernesto Laclau, com o intuito de estudar alguns seus elementos centrais, além de apresentar suas rupturas e continuidades frente aos acontecimentos históricos. Como objetivo específico, também almejado, pretende apresentar parte do debate de ideias que envolve, atualmente, tal teoria dentro das nas ciências sociais, apresentando alguns de seus interlocutores. Pensa-se que tais objetivos são fundamentais para que se consiga futuramente produzir análises políticas acerca das movimentações políticas nos países (as formações sociais nacionais) da America Latina