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Narratives about northern Sweden are often narratives about nature. This has been true throughout history and is still true today. Different ways of understanding nature have become intertwined with the place and the people who live there. The nature in northern Sweden can be magnificent and impressive, but it can also be desolate, threatening and dangerous. A dominant image of nature in northern Sweden - then as now - is the image of resources, assets.
The overall aim of the study is to shed light on the role of nature in linguistic place-making in northern Sweden with a particular focus on the settler colonization during the 18th and 19th centuries. Through a selection of text sources, nature's central place in the story of the colonization, of the place, its history, change and future is highlighted.
The texts that are analyzed are the two journals in which Petrus Læstadius described his work as a missionary in Lapland, as well as Olov Petter Pettersson's detailed description of the settler colonization in the work Gamla byar i Vilhelmina.
The settler colonization took place in areas with Sami presence and history and this study connects to the research field of Settler Colonial Studies in a critical discussion of the linguistic place-making in the texts.
One of the aims of the study is to also shed light on the connections that exist between the settler colonization depicted in the texts, and the linguistic place-making with nature at the center that is ongoing in northern Sweden today.

This article investigates the book series Svenska statsministrar under 100 ar (2010) from a literary point of view. In this box of biographies, the lives of all the Swedish prime ministers from the last hundred years are told in 22 stories. A literary analysis of these linguistic structures makes clear what kind of literature these lives in politics have become in the hands of the 21 authors. The visual and linguistic elements surrounding the stories are analysed, as are the introductory and conclusive texts that frame the biographical accounts. The ways in which the prime ministers' personal backgrounds and careers are told are studied in comparison with literary models. The story patterns structuring the separate volumes and the whole series are studied, as well as the different narrators in the biographies. The aim of the investigation is to shed light upon the literary techniques used to represent separate prime ministers' personal lives, political efforts and the historical periods in which they lived and worked, as well as what conceptions of life, politics and history these techniques create. Adapted from the source document.

This article presents a typology of discursive discrimination, discrimination earned out through the use of language. It is argued that there is a need for a typology that focuses more clearly on an understanding of what discrimination is than what is the case in existing research & that such a typology should fulfil certain criteria in order to he useful for empirical research. The typology proposed consists of four main concepts: exclusion from discourse, negative other presentation, objectification, & proposals pointing towards unfavorable non-linguistic treatment. The related concept of othering -- the creation of a psychological distance to people understood to belong to groups others than "us" -- is also presented. The manner in which the different forms of discursive discrimination & othering can be operationalised is demonstrated with the help of examples from empirical studies of discourses of people categorized as mentally deficient, as deaf, & as immigrants in Swedish public debate during the last 75 years. The importance of categorization of people is also discussed. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.

This thesis focuses on pro-kurdish activism in Turkey during 2005–2009. It is based on a large number of interviews conducted with activists within the Diyarbakır area. The form of activism that this study seeks to describe is civil and political activism conducted within the legal framework ofTurkey's judicial system and international law.The purpose of this thesis is to examine what kind of resistance strategies are used by pro-Kurdish political activists in Turkey, focusing on how these strategies are reflected in the language used by the respondents. The main question posed in the thesis is: What resistance strategies are used within the pro-Kurdish movement in Turkey? Two additional questions were also posed in order to make it possible to answer the main question. The first of these is: What external conditions influence pro-Kurdish mobilization in Turkey during the study's time frame? In order to answer this question a theoretical framework is used that includes theories about ethnopolitical mobilization and political opportunity structures. The second question is: What resistance strategies are reflected in the language used by the pro-Kurdish activists?An important resistance strategy used by the pro-Kurdish activists is to adapt the language used in public communication to the legal and political environment in which they find themselves. They make linguistic choices in order to convey political messages while minimizing the legal consequences of doing so. The resistance strategies reflected in the interviews with the activists also include efforts to build organizations and cooperations at different levels, ranging from the international to the local level. Resistance strategies also include choices regarding what medium and language to use in promoting pro-Kurdish politics.

Against a background of urban aestheticization, the following study addresses questions of urban formation and change. The aim of the thesis is to investigate how an activist urban configuration, in this case the so-called "Free Town of Christiania" in Copenhagen, may affect a more general urban planning and design discourse, as well as the aesthetic assumptions behind contemporary spatial practice. The working hypothesis of the study is that an actualization of expressive urban activist practices will lead to a different conception of spatial development and change than the one presently dominating the field of urban planning. It is also anticipated that the conceptual prerequisites for urban planning and design may be altered through a radical interrogation of aestheticization processes, as they have appeared through a controversial and in many respects illegitimate 'taking of place.' The objective of the thesis has therfore not been the assessment of the specific urban formation as an ideal solution to urban life. Instead the study should be seen as a problematizing interrogation through a concrete example of the complex relation between expressive aesthetic action, spatial reproduction, and the representational power of form. The study is undertaken in the conviction that urban formation is an intermediary and composite practice that cannot be understood in isolation from social, linguistic, material, and political realities of expressive actions. Methodologically, this means that the present work is articulated within the paradigm of performativity, theorizing urban locality production from three different perspectives: the formlessness of the subject, the formlessness of space and the formlessness of power, all of which constitute a tactical dissassembly of the privileged notion of urban form. As such, the thesis aims at introducing a more elaborate and critically resonant aesthetic discussion into urban discourse, actualizing the creative potential of re-conceptualizing urban planning and design as intermediary as-if spaces of social and political interaction.

Three tense events involving the US Army and the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache nations in Oklahoma in the decades after the end of the Great Plains Wars seemed destined to end in violence: The Ghost Dance in 1890−91, the death of three Kiowa boys in a blizzard in 1891 and the transfer of Geronimo and around three hundred Chiricahua Apache Indians to Oklahoma in 1895. In all of these events a US Cavalry officer, Hugh Lenox Scott, played a key role as a soldier-diplomat. Through his linguistic skills and inter-cultural competence, Scott, assisted by Iseeo, a Kiowa army scout and close friend of Scott's, managed to prevent the three situations from erupting in violence. These outcomes are in stark contrast to what happened around the same time in the Northern Plains, where violence erupted on several occasions, most conspicuously at Wounded Knee in December 1890, when US troops killed between 150 and 200 Lakota Indians. The purpose of this micro historical study is to highlight how the military, in concrete action, could promote peace and development in their dealings with American Indians and to explore the significance of personal relations, tolerance and trust for the maintenance of peace. These factors were crucial for the more peaceful development on the Southern Plains compared with in the north. In promoting peace, moreover, Scott not only acted as a diplomat in relation to the Indians; he also successfully advised his superior commanders not to send troops into the field in order to uphold order and quell any possible unrest. Such deployment of troops, Scott was convinced, was like putting a keg of gunpowder in front of an open fire and risked sparking uncontrolled and lethal violence between the soldiers and the Indians, to the detriment of the latter, as happened at Wounded Knee. Based on his long service as a soldier-diplomat, Scott later in life developed a general theory about the military as a peacemaking institution. According to Scott, it was politicians and the people who made war and the task of the military was to conquer the peace. His styling of the US soldier as the "harbinger of peace and mercy", however, depended on Scott ignoring the many instances when the US military had failed to maintain peace and order, both in relation to the American Indians and in colonies overseas. ; Förmedlare i imperialistisk expansion: Möten och kontakter i USA:s gränsland (1876−1916)

This dissertation analyzes the concept of democracy as it was used in the official rhetoric of the Swedish SocialDemocratic Party (SAP ) between 1919 and 1939. Theoretically, the dissertation relies on German Begriffsgeschichte, as put forward by Reinhart Koselleck, and Michael Freeden's theory of ideologies. Together, by supplementing each other, these theories offer a perspective in which concepts are thought of as structures that are under contestation and change due to socio-political circumstances. However, the formulation of this change takes place in relation to the linguistic praxis of each time-period, and renegotiates the relative constraints of established relations between concepts in language. The analysis shows that the profound changes in society provided impetus for a continuous renegotiation of meanings, allowing concepts to retain their explanatory power under changing circumstances, at the same time the SAP needed new ways to express what kind of society the party strived to realize. The SAP had been one of the leading forces in the struggle for universal suffrage, and when the bill, giving universal suffrage to men andwomen, was passed in the Parliament 1919 this meant a temporary cessation to a long and intensive political debate. However, the SAP did not consider the introduction of suffrage reform as the end of full societal democratization. Rather than seeing the reform as a terminal point, the SAP saw it as the starting point for the struggle for full democracy. The SAP did not limit itself to only one concept of democracy but instead used a number of composite concepts, such as political democracy and economic democracy. The use of composite concepts can be understood as a changing temporalization of democracy. Since parliamentarism and suffrage were seen as central components in democracy, the realization of these institutions meant that the concept of democracy lost its future dimension. Thus, the usage of composite concepts should be seen as a re-temporalization of democracy. The composite concepts pointed forward in time, toward political goals that the SAP envisaged realizing in the future. Concepts should not be thought of as having cores but rather, as suggested by Freeden, ineliminable features. An ineliminable feature is not of logical nature but has a strong cultural adjacency. By analyzing the ineliminable components of the concepts of democracy that the SAP used, it is possible to discuss whether the composite concepts should be understood as subsets of a whole or as separate concepts. The analysis shows that the composite concepts that the SAP used during the first half of the 1920s shared a number of ineliminable features, but that the commonality of these features started to disintegrate during the latter half of the decade, leading to a rather diversive concept of democracy. During the 1930s the disintegration ceased as the party was faced with new circumstances, for example the growing threat of international war and national clashes between different social groups. There has always been a close relation between language and society. However, the relationship does not follow a simple and clear-cut logic but a complex mixture of various factors at different levels, both within language itself and of society. When society develops, language also has to change if the ongoing process is to be understood. As this study shows, new circumstances require new argumentsand thus revised concepts.