Synen på invandring i Sverige har länge varit omdiskuterad, inte minst i media men även i politiska debatter. Invandringsnegativa partier får allt större stöd särskilt sett till det senaste decenniet. I den här uppsatsen undersöks ungdomars attityder till invandring, i Sverige, jämfört med den äldre befolkningen och skillnader i attityder till invandring inom gruppen ungdomar med hänsyn till bostadsregion, kön, föräldrars utbildningsnivå samt föräldrars invandrarbakgrund. Uppsatsen baseras på data från European Social Survey, 2002. Chi² -test används för att testa skillnaderna i attityder mellan grupperna. De slutsatser som dras utifrån analyserna är att ungdomar är mer positiva till invandring än äldre. Resultaten tyder även på att unga kvinnor är mer positiva till invandring än vad unga män är. Även föräldrarnas utbildningsnivå visade sig ha ett samband med ungdomarnas attityder till invandring. Ungdomar med högutbildade föräldrar är mer positiva än ungdomar med lågutbildade föräldrar. Ingen statistiskt signifikant skillnad fanns i attityden till invandring mellan ungdomar vars föräldrar är födda i Sverige och ungdomar vars föräldrar är födda i ett annat land. Detsamma gäller för skillnader i attityder mellan ungdomar från olika regioner i Sverige.

My aim with this thesis is to use a combination of posthumanist and feminist materialist perspectives in analysing the anime film Spirited Away (2001). The analysis is organised as follows: the first chapter of the analysis deals with the notions of agency and magic. Magic is an omnipresent force in the bathhouse depicted in the film; a force that creates connections between different bodies and that also bridges the language-matter divide. By making inanimate matter come alive, magic points to a conception of life as relations rather than as possession. However, magic also reveals the hierarchies at work, as not all animate(d) beings have the capacity or the right to use it. The first chapter is followed by three chapters focused on eating, understood as a kind of intra-action between different kinds of matter. Food is, as I will show, important in the negotiations of boundaries and agency. The question of who is eating who also reveals some of the power relationships that govern the posthuman world depicted in the film. In the two last chapters of the analysis I will, so to speak, push the food plate aside in favour of other matters. The fifth chapter will focus on the physical transformations taking place in the film and how these can be interpreted from a posthumanist and materialist perspective. I will look at embodiments, using a narratologically influenced perspective that allows for corporeal ambiguities and shuns notions of bodies as fixed and clearly separate from other bodies. The discussion will continue in the final chapter where I use 'monster theory' to further examine the leakages between categories. The monstrous corresponds not necessarily to widely-spread images of monsters (known from various cultural masterplots) or to bodies that distinctly disobey the norms. The morphological diversity exhibited by the characters in the film reveals the impossibility of clearly demarcating categories and boundaries between Self and Other.

Living in harmony with nature is a pervasive ideology, or cultural blueprint, of how a "sustainable future,” a "good society,” and a "fulfilled life" would look like. However, this notion of harmony with nature is highly paradoxical, as consumers often want and even must dominate and control nature. The current thesis explores consumers’ desires of living in harmony with nature through a post-human analysis of how backcountry hikers negotiate tensions between utilitarian and romantic discourses of nature vis-à-vis their experience of material forces of nature. Through conceptualizing nature as an active actor in a symmetric assemblage of material and cultural entities (i.e., nature agency), this thesis contributes to our understanding of the human/nature relationship, materialism, and sustainable consumption. Findings are presenting through three interrelated themes. The first theme highlights how hikers appropriate romantic discourses by seeking harmony in a nature that is perceived as external to civilization. Noting the contradiction that hikers’ quest for being in harmony with a “romantic nature” oftentimes exposes them to higher physical dangers in material nature, the subsequent themes explore how harmony can arise when hikers have to struggle with physical dangers of nature. Focusing on physical dangers that are experienced in material nature, theme 2 finds that hikers’ relationship with nature is highly ambivalent: They strive to experience “more nature and less civilization”, but also “more civilization and less nature.” The third theme explores how meanings of nature and technology emerge from fluidly shifting assemblages, finding that the same technological resources can both distract from and enable feelings of harmony with nature. These findings contribute to consumer research by broadening our understanding of the human/nature relationship and by challenging previous notions (Canniford and Shankar 2013) that technology and civilization must always betray consumers’ experiences of “romantic nature.” Furthermore, the notions of nature agency and that no single actor can unilaterally shape the assemblage of heterogeneous entities contribute to the emerging material turn in consumer research. Finally, this post-human analysis of consumers’ relationships with nature offers theoretical and practical implications for sustainable consumption and sustainable marketing. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2014-01-31 14:58:31.326

This thesis deals with professionalism in early childhood education in relation to «race» and whiteness in primarily a Norwegian landscape. The overall aim of the study is to investigate how sociomaterial «race»-events can be understood as constitutive of preschool teachers’ subjectivity. The thesis is a theoretical experimentation with strong ties to a real social landscape. One of the main problems that the study evolves around is how «race» is silenced in the dominant discourse contributing to how preschool teachers can create socially just and indiscriminating pedagogical practices in a current «multicultural society». Hence, there seem to be a lack of tools for preschool teachers to think through how «race» might be part of their pedagogical practice in preschools, and how «race» is an important issue to address when working with how to perform pedagogy ethically and politically. More specifically and in a philosophical-theoretical manner, the study explores «white» preschool teachers’ relation to «race». The philosophical-theoretical-methodological conceptual toolbox for the study is mainly constructed from the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977, 1987). E.g. machinic assemblage, stratification, Body without Organs, nomadic subject, affect, individuation, micropolitics, becoming, actual/virtual and event. The methodological approach is highly inspired by decolonizing-, feminist poststructural- and critical methodologies. However, immersed with Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of desire, what started out as a poststructural autoethnography transformed into a cartography of «my own» racial becomings in/with an early childhood landscape. The study shows how subjectivity, when understood as produced through sociomaterial «race»-events, offers another understanding of doing professionalism. Further, it offers an alternative understanding of how to create more socially just pedagogical practices in early childhood education.

The present essay concerns Walter Benjamin’s thought regarding history and temporality as he articulated it in his last work that was only published posthumously: ”Über den Begriff der Geschichte”. The purpose is to analyze Benjamin’s construction of historical materialism and to suggest a reading of it as directed towards an opening of history. For Walter Benjamin, every moment presents itself as a possibility of radical otherness: a possibility for things to be different. In this essay, I therefore want to concentrate on key concepts constituting such possibility, namely, remembrance [Eingedenken] and redemption [Erlösung]. I will further examine their relation to the specific experience of the past. Following Benjamin, in this essay I am constructing a critique of positivist concepts of linear time and Marxist teleology in regard to history and temporality. Another purpose is to establish an alternative concept of history and temporality as it is to be found in Benjamin’s own thought. Furthermore, the essay seeks to engage in a dialog with Benjamin’s historical reflection in an attempt of capturing the Benjaminian concepts of dialectical image and now-time [Jetztzeit] and by doing this to envisage a genuine break from the notion of historical progress. In presenting such a break as a possibility of opening up history, I seek to raise the question of political action [Aktion]. As demonstrated in the essay, the notion of action, its ethics and politics, is to be found, both implicitly and explicitly, in the way Benjamin develops the persona of the historical materialist and in his concept of redemption, but the analysis must start with a thorough investigation of the concept of remembrance [Eingedenken], without which Benjamin’s meaning cannot be understood.

Eliminative materialism is a view that has been sparsely acknowledged and often overlooked when it comes to providing us with a criterion of what it takes for you and me to persist over time. This owes much to its counterintuitive belief in the non-existence of folk-psychological notions, such as persons. Against a backdrop of philosophical and scientific inquiry, this paper amounts to providing such a criterion in the form of f-organisms, taking a different route based on emergent descriptions, instead of conventional reductive explanations. The temporal plasticity (change over time) of such f-organisms display stable persistence conditions despite their constant state of reconstruction. What informs the question of identity in such a paradigm is dealt with accordingly, and the notion of the self is put in a context in which it can no longer be said to be the self we are familiar with – a context in which the center fails to hold. The imperative question for any of such criteria will be to accommodate the concept of identity as unconstrained and far away from uncertainty as possible. The main theme will thus be to reassess the general notion of diachronic identity to include our identity over time, and make explicit the various implications for such a view.

This thesis examines the career of Jean Ricardou after 1982. The introduction indicates the obscurity in which he Ricardou’s reputation languishes currently. Chapter 1 sketches Ricardou’s career until 1982 and examines the denunciations of him by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon pronounced in that year, and how critics have subsequently portrayed him. Chapter 2 describes Ricardou’s involvement in writing workshops in France and the role he played in developing them and exercises to be used in such workshops, in particular the Bestiaire. Chapter 3 introduces the new discipline of textique which aims to provide a theoretical description of all phenomena associated with writing starting from the simplest mark. Chapter 4 suggests that textique, because of its militant materialism, might be susceptible to ultra-left tendencies. Chapters 5 and 6 examine textique as literary criticism, the former with reference to Une Maladie chronique, the latter to sonnets by Heredia and Mallarmé. Chapter 7 examines Ricardou’s later fiction, the concept of the “mixte” as developed in Le théâtre des métamorphoses and Hommage à Jean Paulhan and in these texts and La cathédrale de Sens, it explores the commonly held opinion that Ricardou’s work is “anti-referential”. The conclusion looks at factors that could influence the expansion of textique’s influence, its difficulty or reluctance to find an audience and its relation to those that Ricardou considers to be the great thinkers of the modern era, Mallarmé, Freud and Marx.

The disability movement drew attention to the struggle against the oppression of people of disability. The rise of disability activism contributed to increased awareness of the need for a social theory of disability, in order to account for the historical, social and economic basis of oppression. Emerging studies of disability issues by disability theorists, such as Sobsey (1994), highlighted the higher prevalence and nature of violence against people with a disability, in comparison to the general population. However, the limited research concerning women with a physical impairment experiencing domestic violence contributes to this social problem being underestimated in the community. Contemporary theoretical conceptualisations of both domestic violence and disability fail to explain the causal framework that leads to women who have a disability experiencing violent situations. Similarly, by explaining domestic violence as a solely socially constructed gender inequality and power differential, feminism provides insufficient recognition of the structural dimension of disability. As a preliminary inquiry, this study draws on the premises of historical materialism, and feminism to explain disability and investigates disabilism as a means to examine the experience of domestic violence by women with a physical impairment. The research design incorporated the use of qualitative methods for data collection and encapsulated critical social science and interpretivist epistemology. This study provided the basis for generating an understanding of the nature of domestic violence against women with a physical impairment within this sample group. From this investigation, causal hypotheses can be advanced for subsequent extended research. This study revealed that disabilism together with the interacting structural dimensions of disability, gender and class operated to marginalise and alienate these women with a physical impairment in a violent relationship. This tended to reinforce and entrench violence against women with a physical impairment. The study provides insight into the way social conditions and disabilism interrelate to maintain this group of women with an impairment in a violent relationship and contribute to the experience of poverty and lower social status upon leaving the relationship.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1991. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-127).

Thesis--Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-113).