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This dissertation is composed of a critical preface, "Reconciling Art and Account in the Creative Essay," and the essay collection Resurrection Attempts: Essays. The preface situates the following essay collection within the genre of contemporary creative nonfiction. Specifically, it argues that genre-bending or genre hybridity are inherent and unavoidable features of creative nonfiction writing and should be celebrated, rather than denied or lamented. It points to other writers who deliberately challenge the bounds of genre, and discusses some of the collection's innovations in form and other ways it offers experimentation, such as use of unusual or borrowed points of view, disruption of chronology, and adoption of elements from other genres of writing, including fiction, poetry, and academic. Ultimately, embracing the artistic side of creative nonfiction (as opposed to its "purely" journalistic side) allows for heightened intimacy with the reader, a much wider breadth of storytelling, and a more vulnerable—and therefore more truthful—interrogation of legacy and the human experience. Resurrection Attempts is a collection of essays exploring the writer's rural Texas childhood and the early and tragic losses of her parents, including the effect of those experiences on her adult life and performance of motherhood. The voices of the writer's sisters sometimes intertwine with hers, especially as she examines the converging and diverging lenses of their shared experience. She works throughout to "resurrect" her parents and even to resurrect earlier versions of other family members, including herself. The collection is particularly fascinated with dreams, drawing a parallel between the subconscious lives of the dreamer and their waking constructions of their memories and experiences.

This dissertation explores the life and works of eighteenth-century labouring-class poet Mary Leapor. Leapor’s ability to use everyday objects to write poetry that speaks to important social and cultural transformations of the period is one of the most remarkable and interesting aspects of her poetry, and it sets her apart from other labouring-class writers. Therefore, while this dissertation situates Leapor as a female laborer who writes poetry about the labour she performs, it is more interested in how she uses her poetry about the labour she performs—and particularly how she offers her own version of “thing theory”—in order to speak to a number of problems of which labour is just one. By spotlighting the complex role of objects in Leapor’s poetry, this dissertation shows how she uses those objects to articulate new conceptions of the labouring body’s relationship to authorship and authority, claim authorship as a form of useful labour, and legitimize her own gendered and class-inflected authority as a subject in literary and intellectual discourse. While acknowledging the context of material history, I focus on the ways Leapor uses particular things to rethink the possibilities of labouring-class life, identity, literary expression, and what it might have meant for her to imagine a new kind of human subjectivity that is itself inseparable from the concept of labour. Moreover, Leapor’s work shows that she identifies labouring individuals as part of a community whose experience is heavily organized socially around labour but argues that their lived experience has provided them with a particular identity and perspective. Ultimately, this dissertation works to decenter our own moment in the history of ideas by showing how Leapor was theorizing about forms of situated knowledge over two hundred years before it entered academic discourse in the 20th century through feminist theories of embodied ways of knowing. Leapor’s poetry is not just an object that should be studied through a theoretical lens; it should be understood as a theory of situated knowledge transmitting ideas from its own materially embedded position. Leapor’s poetry lives on as a labouring thing—changing, growing, and theorizing as living humans do—inviting its readers to contemplate the complex components of being an embodied thinker. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation focuses on the life and works of Mary Leapor (1722-1746) and builds upon recent interest in the cultural work of particular literary forms by examining the emergence of the labouring-class writer and the rise of a new poetic mode, the labour poem. Existing scholarship has begun to explore the many ways these texts represent class-based and gendered oppression, hardship, and work, and how these writers were able to combine several literary traditions to speak out against adverse conditions. By emphasising the material history of inanimate objects and nonhuman animals found within labouring-class writing, my project seeks to demonstrate how Leapor and other labouring-class writers used their poetry about the labours they performed in order to speak to something more than labour, such as what it means to be a subject in a world that is circumscribed by things like status, class and gender.

In this thesis, the public green space provision in Hamburg, Germany is critically examined and put into context by social indicators relating to social class and ethnic background.  Urban green spaces offer a variety of benefits for citizens, ranging from recreation, improving physical and mental health, contribution to urban cooling and climate adaptation as well as providing spaces for biodiversity. Yet, provision and access to public green space is not always equal. This is reflected in the concept of urban environmental justice, which acknowledges that not all societal groups equally benefit from environmental services nor are equally affected by the burdens of environmental pollution. Urban environmental justice is used in this thesis to holistically assess public green space provision, from a distributive, procedural and corrective justice dimension. These dimensions relate to how public green space is distributed in the city, how policies surrounding green space incorporate urban environmental justice concerns, and lastly what measures are in place for correcting potential injustices. The thesis employs a mixed method approach. Critical mapping through QGIS was applied to showcase the distribution and proximity to public green space in the various neighbourhoods in Hamburg. Following this, a policy analysis was performed to investigate the procedural justice dimension. Lastly, semi-structured interviews with five planners and two activists were conducted to illuminate measures for correcting urban environmental injustices related to green space provision. The findings suggest that public green space is not evenly distributed, and issues of access exist in Hamburg. Procedural justice is not fully achieved as a legal framework for urban environmental justice is lacking and the existing policies do not consider the concept adequately. Simultaneously, both supporting and hindering measures for correcting urban environmental injustices exist and corrective justice is not fully achieved either. Overall, the discourse surrounding urban environmental justice should be advanced in Germany and more awareness needs to be raised.

The current research project investigates the influence of gender, age, and social class on the use of intensifiers and extreme adjectives as instruments to intensify spoken language. Employing a corpus-based approach, the study has collected data from the Spoken BNC2014 regarding the use of the common intensifiers so, very, real, and really modifying an adjective, as well as the use of synonymous extreme adjectives. Frequent intensifier-adjective pairs were retrieved from the corpus and thereafter translated into synonymous extreme adjectives using an online thesaurus. Following the data collection process, comparative analyses of the collected data were conducted. The study presents results that are in some regards coherent with previous research as well as most of the study’s hypotheses. Although the results suggest some general differences in use depending on the speaker’s gender, age, and social class, they are not as distinct as expected. Of all the sociolinguistic variables, the language use of the different social classes proved least predictable. While correlations between an overuse of intensifiers/extreme adjectives and an underuse of extreme adjectives/intensifiers have been observed in the data, this opposite relationship is not present in all social constellations.

The aristocratic novel in the twentieth century depicts the successes and failures of the aristocracy's efforts to come to terms with the social realities brought about by contemporary egalitarianism. Although several of the novels discussed are written by aristocrats, the aristocratic novel as such refers to novels about the aristocracy as a social grouping. Seven authors are selected to represent fictional treatment of a class in crisis, struggling between decadence and resilience: V. Sackville-West, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, L.P. Hartley and Emma Tennant. Sackville-West faces and chronicles the inevitable decay of her class, yet cannot refrain from mourning its gracious past. To her, the manor house symbolizes an ancient idyllic symbiosis between aristocrat and worker. To Evelyn Waugh, the aristocracy embodies the finest achievements of inherited English culture. He regards its decline as the crumbling of Christian civilization itself. Resilience against the rising proletariate lies in faith and a chivalrous other-worldliness associated with the old Catholic aristocracy. Mitford uses comedy to defend the ideals of service and honour which she sees undermined by vulgarity and mercantilism. She resists her opponents with lethal swipes of raillery. Bowen and Keane deal with the decline of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. The heirs of the ascendancy have to cope with the paralysing bequest of a more vital past. Ironically, resilience lies in breaking with their heritage. Hartley appears to criticize the class structure, but his work reveals a fascination for the captivating myth of patrician life. Tennant, representing an aristocracy which has profited from the resurgence of wealth in Thatcherite Britain, is unsparingly caustic on the condition of her class. Her satiric writing presents an ethical resurgence that goes beyond the mere financial recovery of her society. The genre examined suggests a primal need among urbanized citizens for the myth of an heroic order. In the finest aristocratic novels, admiration for an imitable superior order is used to rally a consciousness of a venerable ethical establishment. What is threatened or lost is not merely wealth and privilege, but aristokratos - government by the best. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

I denna studie som förhåller sig till ett kvalitativt arbetssätt kommer vi att studera hur gärningsmän respektive offer gestaltas i olika kontroversiella våldtäktsfall i Sverige. Genom att använda oss av en kritisk diskursanalys på våra valda fall, ”Rissnevåldtäkten” och ”Stureplansvåldtäkten”, strävar vi efter att kunna analysera språket samt uppnå vårt syfte och besvara våra frågeställningar. Syftet med studien är att få en djupare förståelse för hur språket kan skapa olika föreställningar gällande hur gärningsmän och våldtäktsoffer framställs. För att uppnå detta kommer vi att använda oss av valda tidningsartiklar hämtade från Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Metro och Svenska Dagbladet. Vi finner det intressant att identifiera sociala kategorier som kön, klass och etnicitet för att avläsa hur dessa produceras och reproduceras i artiklarna. De frågeställningar vi använder avser således att förklara hur föreställningar om våldtäktsoffer och gärningsmän framställs samt om det förekommer några sociala kategorier som kan vara avgörande i hur tidningsartiklarna presenterar innehållet. Till en början har vi undersökt hur våldtäktsfallen framställs var för sig för att sedan kunna sätta dem i relation till varandra genom en jämförande analys. Vår övergripande teoretiska utgångspunkt är intersektionalitet, denna teori använder vi för att lyfta fram de sociala kategorierna kön, klass och etnicitet. Resultatet vi tagit fram grundar sig i de sociala kategorier vi belyst med hjälp av det intersektionella perspektivet som vi använt oss av. Gärningsmännen beskrivs med dominanta och aggressiva ordalag medan offren som i båda fallen var kvinnor, beskrivs som passiva och försvarslösa objekt. I båda våldtäktsfallen lades stor vikt vid gärningsmännens bakgrund som gav en stämplande effekt. I ”Stureplansvåldtäkten” var klass (med tillhörande status) en framträdande kategori i framställningen av gärningsmän och offer. De beskrevs bland annat som ”Stureplansprofiler”, ”krogägare” och ”stekiga och rika”, offret beskrevs som ”drinkhora”, ”gänghora”, ”barnskötare” och ”kraftigt berusad”. I ”Rissnevåldtäkten” var framförallt etnicitet framträdande vid beskrivning av gärningsmän och offer. Uttryck som bland annat ”invandrarkillar”, ”svartskallar”, ”gäng” och ”utomeuropeiska” beskrev männen. Offret i samma fall framställdes med uttryck såsom ”svennehora”, ”kraftigt berusad” och ”sönderknullad”. Offren framställs i båda fallen ur en underordnad position i förhållande till gärningsmännen som oftast framställdes som överordnade. Genom en användning av språkliga uttryck genomgående studien har vi kunnat belysa olika maktpositioner och hur dessa konstruerats. Oavsett social kategori bottnar alla uttryck och framställningar i konstruktioner som produceras och reproduceras. / In this study who relates to a qualitative approach we aim to highlight how perpetrators and victims are being portrayed in various articles regarding controversial rape cases in Sweden. Through the use of a critical discourse analysis of our selected cases, ”Rissnevåldtäkten” and ”Stureplansvåldtäkten”, we intend to analyze the language as well as achieve our purpose and answer our questions. The main purpose of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of how language can create different perceptions regarding how perpetrators and victims of rape are being portrayed. To achieve this we will use selected newspaper articles taken from Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Metro and Svenska Dagbladet. We find it interesting to identify social categories such as gender, class and ethnicity to determine how these are produced and reproduced in the articles. The questions we use are to explain how perceptions of rape victims and perpetrators are being portrayed and if there are social categories that can be crucial in how the newspaper articles present the content. At first we will examine how the two rape cases are portrayed separately and then be able to put them in relation to each other through a comparative analysis. Our overall theoretical perspective will be intersectionality where we focus on highlighting the social categories of gender, class and ethnicity.The result we have developed is based on the social categories we elucidated using the intersectional perspective. The perpetrators are described with dominant and aggressive terms, whereas the victims in both cases were women, described as passive and defenseless objects. In the ”Rissnevåldtäkten” ethnicity was particularly prominent in the descriptions of the perpetrators through expressions such as ”invandrarkillar” (immigrant boys), ”svartskallar” (insulting word referring to foreigners), ”gäng” (gang), ”utomeuropeiska” (referring to people from outside Europe). The victim in the same case was portrayed with expressions such as ”Svennehora” (insulting word for Swedish whore), ”kraftigt berusad” (strongly intoxicated) and ”Sönderknullad” (fucked to pieces). In the ”Stureplansvåldtäkten”, class with associated status, was a prominent category in the presentations of the perpetrators. They were described among other things as ”Stureplansprofiler” (Stureplan profiles), ”krogägare” (restaurant owners) and ”stekig och rik” (referring to a rich lifestyle) while the victim was described as ”gänghora” (in this case whore in a gang), ”barnskötare” (nanny) and ”kraftigt berusad” (strongly intoxicated). The victims are portrayed from a subordinate position in relation to the perpetrators who most often are presented as superior. Through the use of linguistic expressions throughout this study, we have been able to highlight various positions of power and how these are constructed. Irrespective of social category, all expressions and portrayals are based on compositions that are being produced and reproduced.

The thesis explores the role of social capital in shaping inequality among young adults. Social capital is defined as resources embedded in a social network and the thesis investigates differences in access to social capital, and the effects in the labor market and the housing market. The thesis consists of four empirical studies and an introductory chapter that develops the theoretical and empirical background. The four empirical studies use a Swedish survey titled “Social Capital and Labor Market Integration” that includes individuals born in 1990 living in Sweden. A gross sample based on three subsamples was selected based on the country of birth of the respondents’ parents (Sweden, former Yugoslavia, or Iran). The survey consists of two waves of panel data and most respondents were 19 years old at the time of the first survey and 22 at the time of the second. The four studies investigate: (1) the effect of social class and migration background on access to social capital through national and transnational ties, (2) the effect of socioeconomic segregation in schools and neighborhoods on access to social capital through occupational networks and close friendship ties, (3) the effect of social capital in the process of labor market entry, and (4) the effect of social capital on the likelihood to move away from parents. All four studies measure social capital with ego network measures and the main measurement is the position generator that asks the respondent about contacts in occupational positions spanning the socioeconomic structure. Results show that family background factors and socioeconomic segregation affects access to social capital, and that social capital affects labor market and housing market outcomes. The thesis concludes that social capital is an important factor to understand unequal outcomes among young adults. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Accepted. Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p> / LIFEINCON