Multiculturalism is a current issue in our globalized society, which also the library field must relate to. In the Swedish Library Act from 2014 it is stressed that users with another linguistic background than Swedish shall be prioritized. However, an undifferentiated comprehension of what multicultural services at the library really means prevails, and the underlying values of the concept are rarely questioned. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to problematize the concept of multiculturalism in a library context, by the identification of ideological patterns in the research discourse. Nine Library- and Information Science research articles that discuss multiculturalism at the public library have been scrutinized, and we found that the articles are dominated by a palpable Western and colonial perspective. Four discourses were identified in the empirical material, which all can be linked to changes in the macro-sociological context. As a theoretical and methodological framework we have chosen Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA) in combination with Homi K. Bhabha's postcolonial theory. CDA focuses on linguistic text analysis, in order to uncover how discourses both influence and are influenced by the social context, while Bhabha's theory questions how Western scholars create an illusion of fixed cultural identities. By combining these theories we wished to problematize the Western knowledge production, and initiate new approaches regarding how to work practically with these issues. Our conclusion is that there are similarities in how Western scholars depict multiculturalism and ethnicity at the library, which might impact the library practice in a negative way.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-49695 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Bergqvist, Sandra, Wictorin, Nina |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper (KV), Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper (KV) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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