The dissertation examines the significant yet neglected career of Yamei Kin, a Chinese woman whose transnational career influenced medicine and women’s rights in the United States and China. Although men dominated medicine, female doctors and nurses played an important role serving the poor and reaching women in China and Japan, where social norms restricted contact between the sexes. Thus, female medical professionals, represented by Yamei Kin, promoted the general welfare of the people, spread medical knowledge, and inspired more women to independence and excellence by their medical work. Yamei Kin is the first Chinese woman who obtained a medical degree in the United States (1885). A trailblazing physician, Kin broke the Chinese and Japanese prejudice against Western medicine and opened the medical profession to women in these two countries. She gave public lectures around America and England on women’s issues such as suffrage and prison reforms. She served as China correspondent of international women’s congress and shuttled among China, U.S. and Europe to improve women’s social status and promote the importance of women’s education. During World War I, she headed the research on soy food of the department of agriculture of the United States to study the potential of protein in soy and overcome a meat shortage during the war, enabling the public to maintain the same nutrition in their bodies even without meat.

Resettlement policies have been central to the Ethiopian development strategy in recent decades, and have resulted in contentious debates regarding their implications as a development practice based on expropriation. Researchers, politicians, and activists have provided varying perspectives which tend to either represent resettlement as a harmful detriment to local development, or a powerful tool to generate growth and economic opportunities. This thesis examines how resettlement policy has evolved as a development tool in Ethiopia during the 2000s, and to what extent it has been shaped by the developmental discourses of modernization and the developmental state. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis, the thesis tracks the interdiscursive shifts of resettlement policy across three periods to investigate how it has been continuously shaped by developmental discourses. Hence, the thesis provides insights regarding how national politics are influenced by global development discourse, and how expropriation functions as a development tool in the global political economy. The thesis concludes that resettlement has changed drastically, and become a more socially concerned and locally anchored development tool. The influence of modernization discourse has consistently been significant, but interdiscursive shifts have changed its implications, while the influence of developmental state discourse was initially significant but decreased over time. The thesis identifies decentralization and diversification as two transdiscursive movements that have shaped the evolution of the discourses, and how they have constituted of resettlement policy.

(anglicky) This thesis aims to analyze the primary goal and analyze the trends in the Saudi modern kingdom, which is perceived as a Puritan and traditionally writing country in which reforms are doomed to failure, while answering the research question "Can the theory be applied to modern The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? " The hypothesis of the thesis is the thesis that the above view is not only distorted, but to some extent erroneous. Since its founding in 1932, the kingdom has undergone and continues to undergo modernization, in many areas, most of which will be disabled in its dissertation. However, for a comprehensive understanding of the topic, it is necessary to describe in detail the concept of modernization, and also to describe the concept of modernization, what is the legitimacy of the ruling Saudi family, what aspects affect their governance and who makes up Saudi society. For this reason, this work has as its secondary goal to introduce readers to these areas.

This dissertation examines the powerful vortex of John Sung's revivals in China and Southeast Asia, which directly influenced ten percent of all Chinese Protestants by the end of the 1930s. It begins in 1926 with his decision to pursue theological education in the United States, and ends with his physical collapse in 1940. But the work is not focused on biographical details; it is primarily concerned with how Sung's ministry evolved. Contrary to the numerous biographies on Sung that circulate in multiple languages, he did not return to China as a newly born-again believer enthusiastic to call the nation to repentance. Instead, this work demonstrates that Sung first floundered in China, spending several years piecing together his conversion narrative, and he adopted the revivalism that made him famous only after joining the Shanghai Bethel Mission in 1931. Once those pieces fit together, however, Sung became the preeminent Chinese evangelist of the twentieth century. The dissertation uses archival material and unrestricted access to Sung's own diaries not only to reconstruct the transformations within Sung's ministry, but also to make new dimensions of his work accessible. Particular attention is given to class, women, and divine healing. Sung's revivals appealed to the xiaoshimin, or China's petty urbanites, who sought a modern spirituality that befit their urban lives, yet wanted a religious system that addressed their traditional concerns. Women appeared at Sung's revivals in disproportionate numbers, because in China and Southeast Asia revivalism and modernity fueled one another, and women could use that combustible mix to cast new places for themselves in local societies--even if it meant challenging Sung's own perception of women. Sung's practice of healing, derived from the holiness movement, temporarily challenged China's medical pluralism, before eventually becoming part of it. Analysis of Sung's ministry suggests that revivalism was a powerful tool for personal and social revitalization. Through it, Sung not only rebuilt his own life and ministry, but he also used revivalism to recreate a distinctively Chinese spirituality, though now Christianized and expressed in ways appropriate to China and Southeast Asia's modernizing cities.

Something is happening to our cultural heritage. The longer time gose by, the faster the clock of preservation of the future of cultural buildings is ticking. Just like any old building, there comes a time when renovation is a must. Renovation is seen as something positive, but what happens when you mix the concept of renovation with words like cultural heritage? For all lod buildings specifically, and even som for an historic, suddenly it can become unacceptable. In ths study, the renovation and modernization of cultural heritage will be put to the test. Is change together with modernization something negative or is it the new way to go, not only to preserve cultural heritage and its historical impact on society but also preservation ot for future generations? This study has its focus on Fredrikskyrkan in the city of Karlskrona. This church went through a dramatic renovation and modernization between 2016-2018 and is now a multifunctional church where not only chourch activities are held. The reason why this particular church has been used in this study is because the altar and pews were chosen to be removed and large dramatic changes made people in general disagree with the new look. Through the course of the study, we will delve into how the modernization was motivated and how it has affected Fredrikskyrkan as a cultural heritage object, based on interview, data material, submitted texts from newspapers together with previous research focusing on, modernization and church cultural heritage Together with theories such as collective memories and the meaning of authenticity, the study will try to answer the question: What the motives were for the renovation and whether modernization and restoration can be linked to notions of preservation and modernization. The conclution shows that a balance that must exist between cultural heritage and new thinking of modernization. In connection with the renovation of Fredrikskyrkan, the concept of authenticity and collective memories was put to the test.

Contributing a new dimension to the existing literature on China’s economic development which focuses on the how questions – i.e., questions about the process and conditions – this dissertation research addresses a fundamental why question. Specifically, it asks: why, after more than two millennia of subsistence-oriented economy, did Chinese leaders and/or common people become interested in and reorient toward sustained economic growth? It examines and compares three episodes of China’s economic modernization in the course of the past century, testing the hypothesis that this reorientation has been motivated by nationalism, specifically the desire to improve the international standing (power and prestige) of China, using as the chief means to this end the country’s enormous economic resources. The three chosen episodes for historical comparison are: the Nanjing Decade (1928-1937) under the rule of the Nationalist government, the years of early economic reform led by Deng Xiaoping (1978-1997), and the recent years, broadly identified as Chinese globalization, under Xi Jinping (2013- present). Drawing upon historical archives, biographies, contemporary official documents, media reports, economic statistics, and survey data, this dissertation empirically examines the major changes of China’s political economy in each of the three periods. In particular, it looks into the development and competition of different nationalist aspirations (i.e., nationalism prioritizing the economy versus other spheres such as ideology, culture, or the military) and analyzes the mechanisms through which the type of nationalism that came to be adopted by Chinese leaders and eventually the people made the economy its priority. On the basis of the comparative-historical analysis of the three core periods in Chinese political economy, the dissertation overall argues the following: First, the identification of the economic sphere as the basis of national greatness in China (in imitation of leading Western nations and, in particular, Japan) made economic success a way to social status and approbation. This led to nationalism, specifically nationalism prioritizing the economy, among those with economic opportunities, as people came to connect their success and increased dignity with China’s international standing, seeing themselves as directly contributing to it and becoming personally invested in and committed to the nation’s prosperity. Second, the sectors of the population to whom economic opportunities were open during the three periods of Chinese modernization differed. Thus, nationalism prioritizing the economy was only shared by a small number of individuals within the intellectual and business elite in Republican China, spreading to a much wider circle in the elite and those who got rich first under Deng’s “Reform and Opening-up” policy, and, in the recent decades eventually percolating to the population at large. Third, competition for international prestige is endless – when it is pursued through the economy, it creates commitment to sustained growth. China’s rising international status based on its rapid economic growth since 1978, signaled by its astonishing display at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and its resilience during the 2008/09 international financial crisis, converted many more Chinese into nationalists, which, in turn, reinforced their economic motivation, creating a snowball effect. Fourth, similarly to the earlier leaders in the economic competition (e.g., Britain, the US, and Japan), China’s growing economic power changed its attitude to free trade and globalization. Its economic policies have steadily turned away from protectionism that so many experts believe to be inseparable from the political ideology of the authoritarian Chinese state. China’s recent championship of globalization shows that economic globalization is ideologically-independent – i.e., it is simply in the interest of the economically most powerful nations, and thus, today, in China’s national interest.

Several theories have been used to capture the trend of a general decline in religiosity in Western Europe. The main assumption in most of these theories is that religiosity amongst the public has shifted towards a more private and individual form of belief that refrains from the traditional church-based belief. Contemporary Sweden is often singled out as a country where the secularization process has gone particularly far. The earliest results indicating a decline in church-oriented religiosity in Sweden goes back to 1955. The aim of this study is to investigate the Swedish public's religiosity and attitude towards the Church of Sweden's attempts at religious profiling in the early post-war period. The empirical data consists of a public opinion poll concerning the state-church and Christianity that was carried out in 1948. The result of the study indicates that only a minority of the Swedish public at the time subscribed to a church-based religiosity. Religion was increasingly seen as a private matter, a trend that becomes even clearer if one considers how the Swedes who participated in the opinion poll related to the Church of Sweden’s attempts to clarify its core beliefs.

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