This study highlights the experiences of minority individuals who have attended the Swedish primary and/or secondary school. The aim has been to describe their situated experiences with regards to intercultural sensitivity and solidarity. Previous research presents different findings that are related to the social and value-based aspect of schools. One study found that integration and respect among a diverse student group is achieved through intended strategies that seek to promote student interactions and collaborative inquiry across various types of boundaries. Another study found that children with minority backgrounds generally have poorer experiences of school climates. Through narrative interviewing, six women told stories of their school experiences. The stories were then analysed through Schütze’s methodology for narrative data analysis, explained by Jovchelovitch and Martin (2000). Theories of interculturality, transculturality and different conceptions of solidarity were used as frameworks for a thematic analysis. The results show that the majority of the interviewees experienced a general lack of intercultural sensitivity and solidarity in interaction with both peers and adults, and that their ethnic backgrounds made them targets for racial ostracism or prejudiced understanding. The interviewees also told stories of the individuals who made a difference in their lives because of the intercultural sensitivity and solidarity they had cultivated and the care they had for making the students feel respected as they are. This study shows that more awareness and understanding of intercultural sensitivity and solidarity in schools is needed and that the goals of inter- and transculturality are useful paradigms in multiple ways. One of them is that it can be used to create a deeper understanding of the unique ways that individuals interpret intercultural sensitivity and solidarity with regards to their intersectional experiences and perspectives in the world.

This study deals with the reception of world literature novels and authorships between 1997 and 2003. The study analyses the Swedish book publishers' presentations and the newspaper reviews of fifteen authors and novels from geographical areas that are seen to be peripheral to Swedish culture. Using Gerard Genette's concept of paratext and various evaluation categories, the study explores how presentation and reception situate so-called peripheral authorships. With a discourse analytical approach, the study identifies the themes and tropes used to situate these authorships and what kind of norms govern the peripheral literature. Taking a step from the focus on the worldling processes of world literature which usually occupies postcolonial oriented studies, this thesis rather highlights the valuing processes of world literature. The analysis consists of four parts. The first part demonstrates how the novels are introduced with almost exoticising statements. Thus, paradoxically, inclusion also means exclusion, as the authorships are presented as a cultural other. The second part highlights two different legitimisation strategies, either by attributing the authorship to a Eurocentric or Anglo-Saxon context or solely to the author's own literary continent. The third part focuses on how publishers and reviewers determine literary value through the knowledge that novels and authorships convey about other cultures and societies. The authorship can be attributed to social and emotional values in these first three parts. The statements rely on the particularities of authorship as truth-tellers for their own culture. The fourth part, focuses on statements that do not revolve around the author's geographical starting point, but instead on the author as standing between or across cultures. In these cases, values of authenticity, originality, style and form are attributed.