This essay analyzes the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) from two theoretical perspectives: Freudian trauma theory and poststructuralist feminism, as formulated by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Both of these standpoints manages to explain one of the main issues in Malina, that is, how to give voice to that which escapes language. By arguing that the nameless narrator, Ich (I), has been traumatized by patriarchal structures, I show how these perspectives complement rather than exclude each other. Together they manage to give a new and more complete picture of the struggle for language depicted in the novel. / <p>Godkänt datum 2021-06-01</p>

The diploma thesis conceptualizes an experience of women with assisted reproduction and services offered in fertility clinics. The assisted reproduction is a medical method treating infertility. The scientific progress and the usage of new reproductive technologies bring up broad possibilities in reproduction. Regarding the biological explanation of human's life, the biomedicine discourse represents a dominant approach in reproduction and claims control over a conception of a new life. Women undergoing the assisted reproduction, which is offered in case of infertility, face new challenges related to social, economic, ethical, and legal issues. The major goal of this thesis is the analysis of an experience of women with assisted reproduction in state-funded and private fertility clinics while applying a feminist critical reading. Qualitative research is based on semi-structured interviews with women who have turned to medical experts for help and underwent the assisted reproduction or other reproductive methods to increase a chance of conception. Key words: assisted reproduction, reproduction, women's experience, reproductive medicine, fertility, gender, poststructuralism

This thesis aims at identifying and analysing the basic discourses constructed around Russian Islam by both the Kremlin and the three leading Muslim organisations. Starting out from the largely poststructuralist premise that identity and policy are ontologically co-constitutive, the link between the two is explored in relation to three basic discourses and their articulation into two specific policies. The Russian Muslim Self is revealed to be discursively embraced by the Kremlin as part of Russian identity by emphasising the multinational nature of the latter, the cooperation between state and Muslim organisations against the common threat of extremism and the need for religiously defined moral values to be conferred on the younger generations. The identity produced by these discourses both articulates and is legitimised by policy and points to a constant renegotiation of how Russian Islam fits into the broader identity of the Russian state.

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The aim of this master’s thesis in archival science is to understand how four individuals’ use or creation of archival records affects the experience of social, cultural, and ethnic belongingness in time and space. The questions investigated are: 1) How do the individuals conceptualize the records' origin and how do this affect their interpretations of past and present time? 2) Which stories about belongingness appear when the individuals tell about the records and how do these relate to themselves and their surrounding world? 3) How can activation of the records related to places, persons, and relationships become meaningful?  The study is a part of a poststructuralist tradition that focuses on microhistories, versatility, and changes. The data is collected through four in-depth interviews and the material is theorized and analyzed through a phenomenological perspective, postmodern archival theory, narrative analysis, deconstruction, and the archive’s semantic genealogy. This makes it possible to get an insight in the individuals' experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories, and how they orientate themselves in the world and relate to other people, records, places, and stories. Stories have the ability to create structure and meaning. Here it is being actualized in the stories of the records, but also in the stories the individuals tell about them and how they become a part of their own life histories. The analysis also makes it possible to understand the overall contexts, how they have affected the content in the records, and how the individuals do to look beyond the records. The results show how the individuals’ lives are integrated in a historical, spatial, cultural, relational, and existential context. Through the stories they have been told, the interpersonal relationships throughout their lives, the places they feel belongingness to, and the records they use, they create links through time and space. The stories of records contain tracks of the past that can be deconstructed in the sense of perspectives, power, and substance. All these parts have the ability to add new details and understandings of their life histories, their related ones, the personal and collective narratives, specific places, the world that has been, and the world that is now. By combining several sources, materials, records, and stories, it is possible to get a more profound and clearer understanding of where the individuals come from, where they are now, and what they extend into the future. This gives insights into how using archives can be understood as significant on different levels, and how the activity can become meaningful by adding new stories, relationships, and knowledge to individuals’ lives.  This is a two years master's thesis in Archival science.

Syftet med studien är att synliggöra hur normer om kön och genus gestaltas i aktuell barnlitteratur. Metoden som användes var en kvalitativ innehållsanalys av tio barnböcker. Barnböckerna som analyserades var de mest lånade barnböckerna bland förskolorna i ett och samma landskap. Analysen av barnlitteraturen bestod av att undersöka hur huvudkaraktärer, bikaraktärer och handling skildras utifrån studiens teoretiska ramverk feministisk poststrukturalism och Nikolajevas schema som användes som verktyg i analysen. Resultatet visade på exempel på performativt genus, normbrytande, könsneutralt och könspermutation. Slutsatsen var att både normbrytande och icke normbrytande gestaltningar av kön och genus syntes i barnböckerna. Barnböckerna visade på en variation där män framställdes med stereotypiska egenskaper men även i mer normbrytande roller. Kvinnor skildrades även med mer maskulina egenskaper och med feminina egenskaper. Det framkom dessutom att kvinnor var underrepresenterade i barnböckerna och hade färre huvudroller än männen. / The purpose of the study is to make visible how norms about sex and genderare portrayed in current children's literature. The method used was a qualitativecontent analysis of ten children's books. The children's books that wereanalyzed was the most borrowed children's books among preschools in thesame region. The analysis of children's literature consisted of looking at howmain characters, supporting characters and plot are portrayed based on thetheoretical framework of the study, feminist poststructuralism and Nikolajevasscheme, which was used as tools in the analysis. The results showed examplesof performative gender, norm-breaking, sex-neutral and sex permutation. Theconclusion was that both norm-breaking and non-norm-breaking depictions ofsex and gender appeared in the children's books. The children's books showeda variation where men were portrayed with stereotypical characteristics butalso in more norm-breaking roles. Women were also portrayed with moremasculine characteristics and with feminine characteristics. It also emergedthat women were underrepresented in children's books and had fewer leadingroles than men

Global alcohol- and drug consumption is a big health problem, despite the fact that the amount of usage has decreased throughout the years. Our interest for this study arose because earlier research showed that films, series and television can affect viewers' perceptions regarding alcohol- and drug use. Thus we were interested in examining how alcohol- and drug use is constructed in the teen dramas Skins UK and Euphoria, considering that these series manage subjects such as drugs, alcohol and addiction. The method this study conducted was multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) because this method is used to analyze audiovisual materials. The theoretical framework for this study consists of poststructuralism, socialsemiotics and filmsemiotics to analyze and identify discourses in our empirical material. Our empirical material was analyzed by looking at poses, facial expressions, lexical choices, distance, sound and music. The results showed that the construction of alcohol- and drug use in the respective series was more negative than positive. Four discourses were identified from the results: escapism, anxiety management, connection and self-destructiveness.

This thesis examines the study of images in International Relations (IR). Even though images play an important role in global politics, images have received little attention by IR scholars. In this thesis I aim to answer how images can be studied. I conduct two analyses, which I call ‘single image analysis’, and ‘multiple images analysis’ to answer the research question of ‘how did images of children in the Syrian war shape global political narratives and identities´. I argue that images of children in the Syrian war though their emotional value (re)produced as Syrian identity of ‘misery’, ‘chaos’, and ‘hopelessness’. And images (re)produced narratives of who is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Two analyses are conducted to discuss the different ways images can be analysed. I argue that single image analysis and the multiple images analysis have their own strengths and weaknesses and applicable in different cases. Also, I argue further theoretical and methodological discussions on how to study images would benefit IR as a whole.

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