The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to study why the concept of digital competence previously has been frequently addressed in Swedish politics, and to examine possible connections to the related concepts information literacy and media and information literacy (MIL). These inquiries have been studied using Carol Lee Bacchi’s methodological approach to policy analysis to, with basis in Foucaldian post-structuralist discourse analysis, study representations of the problem present in a public investigation, presented by the Digitization Committee regarding digital competence (SOU 2015:28). In order to perform a discourse analysis according to Bacchi’s methodology, elements from both Foucault’s archeology and genealogy have been used to examine the discursive formations of digital competence. Apart from the public investigation issued by the Digitization Committee, other relevant documents have been studied. The Media public investigation (SOU2015:94), the Government’s Digitization Strategy (N2017/03643/D) and the National IT Strategy for the Swedish School System (U2017/04119/S) have been examined, in search for competing discourses regarding digital competence. The results of the study show that digital competence has been frequently issued in Swedish politics in regard to its part of hegemony discourse and therefore to its prominent position in the economics and technology discourse. Connections to the related concepts information literacy and media and information literacy are identified in their part of a competing humanistic and sociological discourse, and their power and potential to rephrase hegemony discourse, regarding the concept of digital competence.

Mishima Yukio premiered the play Rokumeikan in 1956 and published it in 1957. For more than half a century, this play has been praised as one of the finest Japanese plays in the Post-War period. Rokumeikan is a multi-act tragic melodrama, set in 1886 (Meiji Period) in the Rokumeikan building. The play intertwines complex political cabals, intense loves and hatreds, and multiple deceptions embodying the conflict between political power and love. This essay explores the reasons why Rokumeikan has maintained its popularity over its fifty year long performance history and examines the critical reception of the play. My analysis of the Rokumeikan text is based on conflicting notions of truth and power. According to the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, socio-political power creates truth. This "power reality" is embodied in the play by Prime Minister Kageyama, and its authority is challenged by his wife, Asako, who has an entirely different conception of truth. This interplay of conflicting values has helped to maintain the popularity and stature of the play for half a century.

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This essay aims to analyze the main characters of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. The main characters embark on a metaphorical journey against a backdrop of turbulent socio-political changes in 1970s Britain, ending with the emergence of neoliberalism and the rise of Margaret Thatcher. While the previous research primarily focuses on the formation of identity and race, I primarily examine Kureishi’s dramatization of neoliberal tendencies in the main characters. The theoretical framework of this analysis is based on two contrastive perspectives on neoliberalism: Michel Foucault and his somewhat positive concept of the entrepreneur of the self on one side, and Fredric Jameson and concepts of pastiche and loss of historicity as negative effects of neoliberalism on the other. The main argument is that Kureishi’s dramatization of neoliberal tendencies in the main characters is complex and contrastive by simultaneously reflecting and denying Foucault and Jameson. Thus, it challenges these two theoretical perspectives, which suggests that literary works might have a significant theoretical potency.

The following study is a discourse analysis of the concept of critical thinking within pre-school teacher education. It considers the following questions: how does the concept of critical thinking appear in policy documents, central to the pre-school teacher education, and which possible conceptions of critical thinking are conveyed by students and teachers active within the education. Additionally, the study seeks to discuss, as well as suggest a possible relation, between the findings of those two questions. In reviewing the material (consisting of five semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and of a selection of policy documents central to the education), I argue the existence of a sort of project within the education, which presents critical thinking as a higher value. At the same time, I argue that the concept is not defined or concretized. This project, however, as I suggest while drawing upon Foucault’s ideas of discourse and government, involves a rather high degree of control. The project attempts to get the students to adjust their behaviour, by gaining the desired skill of critical thinking, making them believe that it is essential for their own as well as for the future of society’s sake; thus using both hope and fear, as the desire for participation and belonging, as strategies of government. At the same time, drawing upon Foucault’s concepts of genealogy and critique, I indicate a large dispersion in terms of the possible conceptions of critical thinking, as demonstrated in the material from the interviews. I conclude that the encounter between this dispersion of conceptions of critical thinking, and the concept’s considerable importance as regarded by the project, while left undefined, may cause confusion amongst students and teachers, not leaving them any alternative way of thinking or acting, and may therefore imply potential implications for contemporary Swedish higher education.

No description available.

No description available.

In 1953 Ray Bradbury wrote the novel Fahrenheit 451. The plot is set in a fictional, North American future. This essay aims to show that what is considered normal regarding fundamental values such as knowledge, love, and respect in this imaginary future society is different from what was considered normal in North America in the 1950s when Bradbury wrote the book. The norms differ to such an extent that it is possible to claim that Fahrenheit 451 is set in a new episteme. Episteme is a term used by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It designates a time in which society has an underlying understanding of what is considered normal. According to Michel Foucault, the year 1953 when Bradbury wrote the book, belonged to the episteme of Modernity. This essay aims to illustrate that in the future fictional society of Fahrenheit 451, the norm regarding some aspects of the culture has changed to the extent that there is reason to call the era a new episteme, and that a proper name would be the episteme of Ignorance. This name signals the lack of regard for knowledge in the society of Fahrenheit 451. This essay's analytical tools are Michel Foucault’s terms, theories, and concepts.  Keywords: Episteme, Michel Foucault, Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, knowledge, ignorance, norms, power.

Cette thèse enquête sur l’émergence d’espaces de soin à l’ère de la mondialisation numérique. Elle s’articule autour d’incursions au sein du Pan-African e Network Project (PAN), un réseau de cybersanté par l’entremise duquel des hôpitaux tertiaires situés en Inde offrent des services de téléconsultations et de formation médicale à des centres de santé africains. Des incursions sur la piste d’un projet en constante mutation, pour en saisir la polyvalence ontologique, la pertinence politique, la valeur thérapeutique. Le PAN, c’est une entreprise colossale, aux ramifications multiples. C’est le travail quotidien d’ingénieurs, médecins, gestionnaires. Ce sont des routines techniques, des équipements. À la fois emblème d’une résurgence de la coopération indo-africaine et expression d’une étonnante histoire cybermédicale indienne, le réseau incarne une Inde néolibérale, portée par l’ambition technique et commerciale de propulser la nation au centre de la marche du monde. Le PAN, c’est une ouverture numérique de la clinique, qui reconfigure la spatialité de la prise en charge de patients. C’est un réseau clé en main, une quête insatiable de maîtrise, une infrastructure largement sous-utilisée. C’est le projet d’une humanité à prendre en charge : une humanité prospère, en santé, connectée. De part en part, l’expérience du PAN problématise le telos cybermédical. Au romantisme d’une circulation fluide et désincarnée de l’information et de l’expertise, elle oppose la concrétude, la plasticité et la pure matérialité de pratiques situées. Qu’on parle de « dispositifs » (Foucault), de « réseaux » (Latour), ou de « sphères » (Sloterdijk), la prise en charge du vivant ne s’effectue pas sur des surfaces neutres et homogènes, mais relève plutôt de forces locales et immanentes. Le PAN pose la nécessité de penser la technique et le soin ensemble, et d’ainsi déprendre la question du devenir de la clinique autant du triomphalisme moderne de l’émancipation que du recueillement phénoménologique devant une expérience authentique du monde. Il s’agit, en somme, de réfléchir sur les pratiques, événements et formes de pouvoir qui composent ces « espaces intérieurs » que sont les réseaux cybermédicaux, dans tout leur vacarme, leur splendeur et leur insuffisance. / This thesis investigates the emergence of spaces of care in the era of digital globalization. It revolves around several lines of inquiry into the Pan-African e-Network Project (PAN), an eHealth network through which tertiary hospitals in India provide teleconsultation services and continuing medical education to health centres across the African continent. These lines of inquiry lead into a project in constant mutation in order to grasp its ontological versatility, outline its political relevance, assess its therapeutic value. PAN is a colossal, multifaceted enterprise. It involves the daily work of engineers, doctors, and managers who must tend to technical routines, hardware infrastructures, and patient treatments. At once the flagship of a resurgence in Indo-African cooperation and the consequence of India’s eHealth venture, the network is a poster child for neoliberal India, driven by technical and commercial ambitions that seek to position the nation at the heart of global developments. PAN also enacts a digital opening of the clinic, as it reconfigures the spatiality of healthcare access and delivery. A turnkey solution, it displays an insatiable quest for mastery; it is a massive yet largely underutilized infrastructure. PAN embodies an emergent object of political intervention: a prosperous, healthy, connected humanity. This examination of the Pan-African e-Network challenges teleological accounts of eHealth on several fronts. To the romantic conception of a fluid, seamless circulation of expertise and knowledge, it opposes the embeddedness, plasticity and sheer materiality of concrete practices. Whether one speaks of “apparatus” (Foucault), “networks” (Latour), or “spheres” (Sloterdijk), spaces of care have little to do with neutral, homogeneous surfaces, and rely on a multitude of local and immanent forces. PAN obliges us to consider technology and care together, untying the question of the “becoming of the clinic” from both the modern triumphalism of emancipation, and the phenomenological contemplation of an authentic experience of the world. The present challenge is to examine the practices, events, and forms of power that shape the “inner spaces” of eHealth networks, in all their turbulence, splendor, and inadequacies.

Cette thèse enquête sur l’émergence d’espaces de soin à l’ère de la mondialisation numérique. Elle s’articule autour d’incursions au sein du Pan-African e Network Project (PAN), un réseau de cybersanté par l’entremise duquel des hôpitaux tertiaires situés en Inde offrent des services de téléconsultations et de formation médicale à des centres de santé africains. Des incursions sur la piste d’un projet en constante mutation, pour en saisir la polyvalence ontologique, la pertinence politique, la valeur thérapeutique. Le PAN, c’est une entreprise colossale, aux ramifications multiples. C’est le travail quotidien d’ingénieurs, médecins, gestionnaires. Ce sont des routines techniques, des équipements. À la fois emblème d’une résurgence de la coopération indo-africaine et expression d’une étonnante histoire cybermédicale indienne, le réseau incarne une Inde néolibérale, portée par l’ambition technique et commerciale de propulser la nation au centre de la marche du monde. Le PAN, c’est une ouverture numérique de la clinique, qui reconfigure la spatialité de la prise en charge de patients. C’est un réseau clé en main, une quête insatiable de maîtrise, une infrastructure largement sous-utilisée. C’est le projet d’une humanité à prendre en charge : une humanité prospère, en santé, connectée. De part en part, l’expérience du PAN problématise le telos cybermédical. Au romantisme d’une circulation fluide et désincarnée de l’information et de l’expertise, elle oppose la concrétude, la plasticité et la pure matérialité de pratiques situées. Qu’on parle de « dispositifs » (Foucault), de « réseaux » (Latour), ou de « sphères » (Sloterdijk), la prise en charge du vivant ne s’effectue pas sur des surfaces neutres et homogènes, mais relève plutôt de forces locales et immanentes. Le PAN pose la nécessité de penser la technique et le soin ensemble, et d’ainsi déprendre la question du devenir de la clinique autant du triomphalisme moderne de l’émancipation que du recueillement phénoménologique devant une expérience authentique du monde. Il s’agit, en somme, de réfléchir sur les pratiques, événements et formes de pouvoir qui composent ces « espaces intérieurs » que sont les réseaux cybermédicaux, dans tout leur vacarme, leur splendeur et leur insuffisance. / This thesis investigates the emergence of spaces of care in the era of digital globalization. It revolves around several lines of inquiry into the Pan-African e-Network Project (PAN), an eHealth network through which tertiary hospitals in India provide teleconsultation services and continuing medical education to health centres across the African continent. These lines of inquiry lead into a project in constant mutation in order to grasp its ontological versatility, outline its political relevance, assess its therapeutic value. PAN is a colossal, multifaceted enterprise. It involves the daily work of engineers, doctors, and managers who must tend to technical routines, hardware infrastructures, and patient treatments. At once the flagship of a resurgence in Indo-African cooperation and the consequence of India’s eHealth venture, the network is a poster child for neoliberal India, driven by technical and commercial ambitions that seek to position the nation at the heart of global developments. PAN also enacts a digital opening of the clinic, as it reconfigures the spatiality of healthcare access and delivery. A turnkey solution, it displays an insatiable quest for mastery; it is a massive yet largely underutilized infrastructure. PAN embodies an emergent object of political intervention: a prosperous, healthy, connected humanity. This examination of the Pan-African e-Network challenges teleological accounts of eHealth on several fronts. To the romantic conception of a fluid, seamless circulation of expertise and knowledge, it opposes the embeddedness, plasticity and sheer materiality of concrete practices. Whether one speaks of “apparatus” (Foucault), “networks” (Latour), or “spheres” (Sloterdijk), spaces of care have little to do with neutral, homogeneous surfaces, and rely on a multitude of local and immanent forces. PAN obliges us to consider technology and care together, untying the question of the “becoming of the clinic” from both the modern triumphalism of emancipation, and the phenomenological contemplation of an authentic experience of the world. The present challenge is to examine the practices, events, and forms of power that shape the “inner spaces” of eHealth networks, in all their turbulence, splendor, and inadequacies.