Suchergebnisse

This thesis is an ethnographic study of craftsmanship among the Lulesámi in Northern Norway. The study, which is based on an apprentice-style methodology, focuses in particular on the role and significance of making and wearing the gáppte, a characteristic Sámi dress. While the gáppte is often employed to visually define and distinguish the Sámi in relation to other people, my aim is to move beyond such a common interpretation and unfold the garment's everyday aspects and explore how its production and use are interwoven with the Lulesámi's emphasis and ongoing creation of personal and social well-being. The chapters address, in their different ways, the three main themes of this study. The first is concerned with the various ways in which the gáppte and its use affect people's sense of self and relations to others, and the factors influencing such diverse experiences. The second theme focuses on how the learning to make the garment, rather than involving a fixed set of skills, is based on an ongoing practical and sensuous engagement with the world. I demonstrate that novices not only learn the technical skills of producing a garment to be worn, but that they are also encouraged to develop certain social skills and virtues for living a good life. The third theme is constituted by an examination of the productive activities within the domestic sphere, which often go unnoticed as they cannot easily be seen or measured through tangible evidence, but which affirm and strengthen the making of a convivial society. Through the analysis I draw and build on current anthropological debates on material culture by showing how craftsmanship is a self-transforming experience which encompasses a complete way of being, traversing and merging immaterial and material realms of life. I also wish to contribute to feminist debates by drawing attention to how the 'personal' and 'domestic' are intimately intertwined with larger historical, political and social processes.

This thesis discusses argumentative strategies for legitimation and delegitimation in political pamphlets published in 1769 and in 1809–1810, each period representing the onset of democracy and freedom of the press. The aim of the study is twofold. The empirical aim is to examine the political language in the early political debate in pamphlets, with a focus on how the discursive strategies of legitimation and delegitimation are realised linguistically in the emerging public sphere. The theoretical and methodological aim is to discuss the kind of understanding modern methods of text analysis, specifically such used in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), can provide in the analysis of texts as old as 250 years. The thesis uses a framework for analysing legitimation as put forward by van Leeuwen and Wodak and proposes a framework for the analysis of delegitimation strategies. Specific attention is given to irony as a delegitimation strategy. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are performed on the material (consisting of 232 pamphlets) and an extensive description of the context is given in order to provide a deeper understanding of the discursive practice of debate in pamphlets – which is necessary for the analysis of discursive strategies. The pamphlets in the two periods share many characteristics, but also exhibit many differences that can partly be explained by differences in context. The different contexts yield texts with seemingly different functions: while proposals and attacks seem to be prototypical text functions for political debate, the second period also has many texts that function as appeals for unity and mythopoetic narratives. Other differences between the periods concern the choice of authorisation strategies, the extent of moral evaluation and the use of mythopoesis. The most striking difference is that delegitmising strategies are much less frequent in the debate in the second period, 1809–1810, when the political situation was dramatic and delicate. The theoretical discussion in this thesis circles around the concept of rationalisation and proposes a concept of irrationalisation. Irony is then seen as the prototypical irrationalisation strategy.

Abstract
Children's right to involvement in practices that address their well-being is frequently highlighted, yet how children exercise involvement in face-to-face encounters has remained fairly unknown. To fulfil our aim of identifying, describing and defining children's involvement, we conducted an inductive microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue on audiovisual recordings of naturally occurring therapy sessions with children attending social services departments and mental health clinics. The resulting operationalisation generated six dimensions of children's involvement: participatory, directive, positional, emotional, agentive and narrative. By operationalising how children exercise involvement, we render the abstract concept more amenable to fine-grained analysis, systematic evaluation and criticism. The domains also offer tools to recognise children's involvement in practice. Lastly, the article discusses practical implications and presents a compass for orientation. Since many conversational elements in institutional talks are generic, the dimensions are potentially transferable to other settings, including school counselling, child protection investigation and clinical psychology. A high inter-analyst agreement, together with similar findings on utterance functions and interactional dominance in other types of dialogues, also enhance the dimensions' transferability.

In light of the limited action in many Member States to introduce or review gender pay transparency instruments as recommended, in November 2017 the European Commission announced the possible need for further targeted measures at EU level. This report reviews experiences in four Member States – Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Finland – based on their company-level gender pay reports and audits. Evaluations point to a 'bumpy ride' in terms of compliance – at least in the initial phase of rolling out the instruments in some countries – and highlight room for improvement in engaging employee representatives and in raising employees' awareness. The need to tackle knowledge gaps around the instruments right from the start is a lesson to be learnt from the experiences of the first movers. Soft measures to accompany enforceable mandatory requirements seem to be in demand and to be working well. Ultimately, the success of the instrument depends on the attitudes of the actors, the extent to which they acknowledge the existence of unjustified gender pay gaps and their willingness to engage in a meaningful dialogue and follow-up.

"This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between "the people", who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters' comments to serve as a voting motivation"--