The 3D online world Second Life provides ample opportunities for both role-play and social interaction. Moreover, the relative lack of explicit game-rules (at least initially) on the part of the creator, Linden Lab, provided the gamers with a carte blanche to be anyone they want and give them the freedom to do almost anything. It has become clear, however, that Linden Lab has found reasons for making alterations in their legislative framework. Additionally, local game rules are being developed in many places and there are huge differences in how these rules are maintained and enforced.

Using theories of the avant-garde (Greenberg, Poggioli, Bürger) as a stepping stone, as well as Manuel Castells' four-layered theory of Internet cultures (the techno-meritocratic, the hacker, the virtual communitarian and the entrepreneurial culture), my intention is to explore the actions of, and the attitudes towards, the type of digital avant-garde that is exemplified by gamers/hackers/griefers/deviants. I will look at this both on a "global level" and on a local level, where communities and sim owners use different strategies to control their land and gamers' behaviour on it. The global data will be taken from the "Incident Management Report" which is issued by the Second Life Governance Team on violation against Linden Lab rules. Additionally, I will carry out interviews with sim owners and community representatives, as well as with some of those who are labelled grievers. I will also look at blogs and articles that address the issue of grievers and disruptive behaviour in an online world.

Avatars in Second Life Creating a Persona in a Virtual World Researcher like Donna J. Haraway or Sherry Turkle have highlighted the possibility of fluid and flexible online identities, identities that provide opportunities to explore and expand the real world self-empowering, destabilizing and exhilarating. I intend to look at how the residents in Second Life present themselves, how they build their online persona to create an identity of their liking. I will look at their online presentations in order to investigate to what extent they use keywords or pictures to signal their online or offline preferences or perhaps their belonging to an online subculture. Additionally, I will interview a few of the residents in an attempt to find out their reasons for creating the character they have invented.

Drawing upon Gaston Bachelard´s The Poetics of Space and Henri Lefebvre´s The Production of Space, I read both private and public digital 3D spaces made available through SL and examine to what extent they are inscribed in or distanced from the underlying ideology of Second Life. I use textual sources - written codes of conduct, covenants written by the land owners, actual buildings and environments created in Second Life, an interview, as well as blogs and articles - to explore how three different categories of space are constructed and maintained: one where SL is primarily seen as a work tool for profit or teaching, another where the main goal is a detailed, homogenuous and highly visual space, and a third category where a homogenuous space is created in order to enable a more organized fantasy and facilitate game-play. Choice of Theme: Expressions of ideology in design and digital technologies.

Increasingly important information and communication technologies (ICT) play a significant role – sometimes as an image, sometimes as a tool –  for authors like Ellen Ullman, Melissa Scott, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Cadigan. In their novels they explore patterns of power, hierarchy and colonization through the destabilization of space and transgress boundaries in the space they create. By making connections between post-colonial/post-structural/post-modern theory and technology, I explore the authors’ reasons for making these transgressions.

Édouard Glissant explains how computers, and computer-mediated text, can generate a ‘‘space within the indeterminacy of axioms” and how this opens up possibilities to create a space where imaginative and ideological liberation is possible. Glissant’s idea of indeterminacy grows out of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion about space and how it is structured. The virtual, seemingly topographical, space of the Internet has been described, on the one hand, as an information highway (striated space) and, on the other, as a web, where it is possible to surf (smooth space). I connect these concepts to the novels and explore to what extent the authors use these strategies to de-colonize the fictional, digital space their characters inhabit.

Oavsett språk är diskursanalys som metod huvudsakligen densamma, men den kulturella kontexten och förförståelsen, och därmed förutsättningarna för att analysera, kan skilja sig från varandra. I detta kapitel kommer jag att utgä från en av de uppgifter jag ger till mina studenter: att analysera USA:s självständighetsförklaring från 1776 (National Archives, Wikisource) utifrån ett historiefokuserat diskursanalytiskt perspektiv. Med hjälp av diskursanalytikerna Ruth Wodak och Michael Meyer kommer jag även att gå igenom vad det historieanalytiska diskursperspektivet innebär och ge förslag på hur detta kan användas i undervisningen på olika nivåer. Att kontextualisera historiskt så väl som hierarkiskt, det vill säga att lära sig se och förstå sociala maktspel, är i det här fallet centralt för målet att studenterna ska utveckla sin förmåga att läsa mellan raderna och kunna argumentera för sina tolkningar med hjälp av relevanta exempel.

Traditionally technology has been a male area of interest; not many novels have been written about technology from a female perspective. It has largely been true that, as Barbara Page puts it, women often have an aversion ‘to computer technologies and programs thought to be products of masculinist habits of mind’ (112). However, with a broadening perspective and use of information and communication technologies (ICT), a growing number of women also take interest in, advantage of – sometimes even change – the technology to meet their own requirements. Reflecting this shift, Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook and Pat Cadigan’s children’s book Avatar are two examples of novels where ICT play a major role. That women often see the benefits of a less regulated space provided by the technology is explored in these two novels. Édouard Glissant explains how computers can generate a ‘‘space within the indeterminacy of axioms” (84, my italics). According to Glissant this indeterminacy opens up possibilities and “creates the opportunity for an infinite sort of conjunction, in which science and poetry are equivalent. […] The poetic axiom, like the mathematical axiom, is illuminating because it is fragile and inescapable, obscure and revealing. In both instances the prospective system accepts the accident and grasps that in the future it will be transcended” (85). The indeterminacy is destabilizing, and together science and literature create an imaginary space where imaginative (hence ideological) liberation is possible.

Traditionally technology has been a male area of interest; not many novels have been written about technology from a female perspective. It has largely been true that, as Barbara Page puts it, women often have an aversion ‘to computer technologies and programs thought to be products of masculinist habits of mind’ (112). However, with a broadening perspective and use of information and communication technologies (ICT), a growing number of women also take interest in, advantage of – sometimes even change – the technology to meet their own requirements. Reflecting this shift, Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook and Pat Cadigan’s children’s book Avatar are two examples of novels where ICT play a major role. That women often see the benefits of a less regulated space provided by the technology is explored in these two novels. Édouard Glissant explains how computers can generate a ‘‘space within the indeterminacy of axioms” (84, my italics). According to Glissant this indeterminacy opens up possibilities and “creates the opportunity for an infinite sort of conjunction, in which science and poetry are equivalent. […] The poetic axiom, like the mathematical axiom, is illuminating because it is fragile and inescapable, obscure and revealing. In both instances the prospective system accepts the accident and grasps that in the future it will be transcended” (85). The indeterminacy is destabilizing, and together science and literature create an imaginary space where imaginative (hence ideological) liberation is possible.

This study will examine whether residents in the 3D online world Second Life create their avatars and their online identity to correspond to the theme of the (role-playing group/s) in which they are a member. I will primarily look at one Star Wars group, one Gorean group, and one Victorian Steampunk group. All these three groups are closely linked to social, and highly visual, spaces in Second Life. I will primarily search for cues in the individual avatar profiles often consisting of both text and images created by the residents themselves and available in the SL search engine to find out if their online identities are in line with (or stand in opposition) to the main narrative of the group.

This feature article applies the concepts of 'make-believe' and 'make-belief' formulated by performance theorist, Richard Schechner, in a study of two role-play communities, Midian City and Gor in the online 3D environment Second Life. With make-believe fantasy role-play at their core, members of the two communities negotiate the social and political norms, the goals of the community and as well as the boundaries of the virtual role-play. The article explores the innovative forms of interaction at play in these negotiation processes, using (cyber)ethnographic methods and the analysis of various textual sources, Goffman's theories of social performance as well as various types of performance discussed by Schechner and Auslander. The innovative forms of interaction are analysed in the light of the new technology and as performances and make-belief strategies directed towards realizing performative utopias, towards influencing the direction in which leaders and residents of this digital context want the role-play to develop, and towards shaping the emergent social and cultural rules and the political framework of the role-play.

Ola Larsmo’s fictional Swede Hollow (2016) maps a time of Swedish late 19th century and early 20th century immigration into the United States. Extensively researched and based on authentic, contemporary sources, he highlights their toil and hardships in the new country, but he also shows their paths to becoming established U.S. citizens. With this as a backdrop, my aim for this paper is to draw parallels to more current literary images of immigration into Sweden as shown in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s One Eye Red (2003) and Golnaz Hashemzadeh’s She Is Not Me (2015), particularly with regard to agency, the acceptance or resistance to adaptation to the majority culture and the negotiation of power.

My study is a literary analysis of the three novels. The two latter are written by authors who themselves are well acquainted with contemporary migration and integration issues and processes in Sweden. Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s mother is Swedish and his father is Tunisian and in his novel he portrays immigrant life in a Swedish multi-ethnic suburb of Stockholm with a 15-year-old boy as its main character. Golnaz Hashemzadeh and her family’s country of origin is Iran and she arrived in Sweden at the age of three. Her semi-autobiographical novel She Is Not Me portrays her own journey growing up in Swedish almost exclusively white and middle-class Gustavsberg, a small city with roughly 40.000 inhabitants situated south of Stockholm, and her ambition as she was accepted at the most prestigious universities in Sweden as well as in the U.S. but also the costs for her personally.

The use of Gilles Deleuze’s and Felìx Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space will help me map the structures and shifts in power, agency and societal hierarchies. My paper addresses the costs as well as the benefits of  migration and adapting to the majority culture in fín de siècle United States and contemporary Sweden respectively, how the characters (attempts to) build a bridge between the old culture and the new and how they carve out new identities and create possibilities for themselves while navigating more or less visible new structures and social hierarchies.

This study investigates how the members of four different role-playing communities on the online platform Second Life perform social as well as dramatic roles within their community. The trajectories of power influencing these roles are my main focus. Theoretically I am relying primarily on performance scholar Richard Schechner, sociologist, Erving Goffman, and post-structuralists Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felìx Guattari. My methodological stance has its origin primarily within literature studies using text analysis as my preferred method, but I also draw on the (cyber)ethnographical works of T.L. Taylor, Celia Pearce, and Mikael Jakobsson. In this dissertation my focus is on the relationship of the role-player to their chosen role especially in terms of the boundary between being in character, and as such removed from "reality," and the popping out of character, which instead highlights the negotiations of the social, sometimes make-belief, roles. Destabilising and problematising the dichotomy between the notion of the online as virtual and the offline as real, as well as the idea that everything is "real" regardless of context, my aim is to understand role-play in a digital realm in a new way, in which two modes of performance, dramatic and social, take place in a digital context online.

In our digitised world, information and communication technologies (ICT s) are used everywhere. In schools all over the world the well-known, easy-to-use, and highly affordable Google Education is used, but is this a safe and sustainable solution? A number of services online are free in terms of users not having to pay any money for their usage, but many companies, of which Google is one, instead make their money from the exploitation of what is labelled non-personal user data, Big Data, which is harvested from the users of their free services. This type of data mining or data harvesting can be used for other purposes as well, such as for intelligence reasons, where a foreign power may capitalise on user data from another country, but it may also be to control a country’s own population. Asymmetrical power distribution is inevitable and, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of power and subversion, my aim is to increase the awareness of the non-monetary costs involved in the choice of ict s and highlight ways to shift the inherent hierarchic power. A text analysis, based on policy documents and articles focusing on online privacy, data harvesting and user commodification, studies how legislators, journalists, as well as governmental and other organisations negotiate and sometimes subvert the hierarchic power of the global tech companies in order to protect privacy, integrity and democracy as well as the profit margin of companies. The paper highlights the need for legislation and education, an enhanced ict literacy, in the field.

Linden Lab, the company behind the online world Second Life (SL), invites multiplic- ity with slogans like “Your World. Your Imagination.”1 Yet many SL residents’2 profiles give evidence of adjustment to group narratives or norms in various social spaces inside the world. They seem to favor already established social and cultural conventions when creating an online identity; hence they also adjust to already existing hierarchies. I argue that residents in SL recreate social orders and power structures similar to ones already existing outside SL, even though they are of course under no obligation to do so. In that sense social and cultural patterns are reproduced and in some cases even amplified. My aim here is to trace social dynamics evident in three groups within this digital space and my hypothesis is that the rules of these social spaces then function as a foundation and guideline for identity formation, and in fact almost seem to prescribe a certain way of acting or behaving. Two of the groups have a clear role-playing profile, based on books and movies, whereas role-playing is not required, although possible, in the third group. All of them are thus removed from the lifeworld by constituting either purely fictive or, conversely, historical constructs, but they can nevertheless provide clues to how the residents think in an environment that is not primarily “real life” based, and in which anything, even a utopia, can be possible. By reading group charters and profile descriptions found in the SL search engine, and studying articles and blogs functioning either as group information channels or journals for individuals in each community, I examine the motivations and power structures driving avatar and online identity construction in role-playing communities, with a focus on the interac- tion between the overarching “state” power, the Linden Lab, the three communities, their respective role-models, and the rules that govern them, as well as the individuals that are a part of them. 

For several years there has been a huge emphasis on higher education’s role in shaping future employees to fit the requirements of potential employers and adapting education to the recruitment needs of the same. This is not the only goal of higher education, however. At the very beginning, in section eight of the first chapter of the Swedish Higher Education Act, it is written that ”[f]irst-cycle courses and study programmes shall develop the ability of students to make independent and critical assessments.” In addition, ”students shall develop the ability to gather and interpret information at a scholarly level.” Both quotes highlight the aspect of critical analysis, which is mandatory for university studies regardless of field. To help develop critical thinking and further independent analysis among the students are thus two of the most important goals for Swedish educators in higher education.

Academic disciplines follow the Swedish Higher Education Act in various ways depending on the traditions and customs in their respective fields. Within the field of English literature, text analysis is at the forefront and a huge amount of research has been made delving into its method. Authors often encountered by students are Lois Tyson, M. Keith Booker, Terry Eagleton, and Jonathan Culler as they have written often used introductions to literary theory and critical perspectives. My aim in this paper is to focus on the teaching of literary text analysis as a method and a means to adhere to the independent and critical assessment requirement as well as to gather and interpret information — which I will focus on primarily — in the Swedish Higher Education Act. What are the strengths of text analysis as a method and to what extent does it contribute to fulfil the aims of higher education as expressed by Swedish law?

Over the centuries, the contact zones of transculturation moved from colonised land to Portuguese soil and again to that of the former colonised. Power structures are diffuse as Angola again becomes a site of 'co-presence, interaction understandings and practices within hierarchised systems of dominance', although Portugal no longer is a colonial power. Mapping transformed relationships by using a literary analysis and the sociocognitive approach within critical discourse analysis, this paper explores four literary works by Angolan authors José Eduardo Agualusa and Ondjaki as well as six related academic articles Through text analysis, this paper explores global south/north negotiations of power and hierarchy in the literary works of Agualusa and Ondjaki and in the academic scholarship, six articles, focusing on their work. It explores how both fictional and academic texts metaphorically, or quite literally, encourage the colonisers to leave their former colonies – the settlers ought to set sail – in effect turning these texts into acts of subversion aimed at a normative global north academic context and readership.

In the purportedly egalitarian society of Sweden, with a self-proclaimed feminist government stressing that any inequalities should be minimized, and democratic values taught, one of the roles of pre-service teachers is to teach the values of Swedish society entextualized in the national curriculum. This implies teaching democracy and equal/human rights – in theory as well as in practice. With Foucault’s work on power as well as Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notions of smooth and striated space as backdrops, this chapter discusses how pre-service teachers can discover patterns of power and subversion and learn how to manage their own power in a balanced manner. An increased awareness of the mechanisms of power, and respect for everyone else’s equal rights as well as one’s own, should also have the goal and possibility of creating a sustainable classroom environment. With Swedish policy as a foundation, and knowledge of cultural differences and power structures, pre-service teachers can become teachers who convey information, read and affect the power strategies in their environment in a balanced manner, while working for democracy and equal rights more easily and successfully. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

In this article, we point to how the making visible of diverse linguistic, digital, and cultural competences can contribute to more sustainable and inclusive classroom contexts and future societies. Western notions of universal knowledge reproduces a western way of viewing the world and, as a result, this usually discounts alternative knowledge systems, which perpetuates inequality and may cause tensions in today's diverse classrooms. Our 2022 pilot study, drawing on an online survey with more than 700 respondents and focus group interviews with 27 participants, indicates that for some multiethnic, multi-abled, and otherwise diverse upper secondary students underlying, often ethnocentric, norms of Swedish education create hurdles in educational contexts. Firstly, in the Swedish context, non-normative and often global experiences are not recognised at school. Secondly, topics addressed in the courses they take are primarily focused on aspects originating in a Swedish, Nordic, or Western tradition. Curricular policies and classroom practices must take lost opportunities, which we argue are not socially sustainable, into account as a more global and holistic approach when articulating what educational learning is supposed to be about, for, and for whom, and thus integrating learning, digitalisation, and social sustainability.

This study presents the ongoing development of the Social Sciences of Sustainability umbrella platform at Jönköping University, which currently brings together three separate international masters’ programmes, a decision made by the School of Education and Communication. Our primary focus is one of them, the in itself interdisciplinary Learning, Digitalization and Sustainability (LeaDS) programme, which has its foundation in the field of education, but branches out into communication, leadership, digitalization, culture, diversity, and social sustainability. We outline the process of remediation from when the programme was first conceived in 2019 as a joint international partnership between universities in Mumbai, India, and in Jönköping, Sweden, towards the still international, but also sustainability-oriented and interdisciplinary platform that currently is being built at Jönköping University. The process has involved taking two steps forward and one step back for a number of reasons and, through an autoethnographic lens (Adams, Holman Jones & Ellis, 2015), this presentation aims to discuss the process of intercultural, interdisciplinary and interpersonal professional/academic learning that have taken place over the last few years. Why have some aspects, constellations and collaborations worked well and continued to be a part of the developing programme whereas others turned out less sustainable?

In the autumn of 2019, the first pilot course, Digitalization and Implementation Processes in School (DIP1) was launched followed by DIP2 in the spring. In the autumn 2020, both DIP1 and DIP2 were remediated in terms of design, in terms of level (as doctoral equivalents/third cycle courses are now offered as well), and with regard to how they fit into the structure of the upcoming programme LeaDS. The initial programme specific group (LeaDS), already interdisciplinary, was extended to include the competences represented in the other two masters’ programmes, Sustainable Communication (Media and Communication studies) and GlobalS (Global Studies). All partners have taken part in a shared process of remediation to integrate the umbrella platform idea. Issues growing out of the creation of joint courses, elective courses, as well as programme specific courses, revealed challenges and structural constraints. Another decision, not yet taken due to the pandemic, concerns whether teaching should be online/offline or a hybrid/hyflex, but this is also a reflection of how we as programme designers have collaborated during the process.

In order to map the various voices involved in the process outlined above, we are drawing on Smyth, MacNeill and Hartley’s (2016) conceptual matrix, which “suggests four key constructs to identify the key dimensions of the Digital University.” The model highlights digital participation, information literacy, curriculum and course design, as well as learning environment aspects. In addition, we rely on Trowler and Cooper’s (2002) concept teaching and learning regimes as we explore the instantiations, selections, negotiations and contestations, and with this a focus on power and agency (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986), involved in the remediation of teaching and learning environments. With this presentation we revisit our design process taking the matrix, teaching and learning regimes as analytical points of departure to illustrate our autoethnographical navigation around unforeseen challenges and obstacles.

The articles included in these proceedings were presented at a text analysis symposium on 14 and 15 April 2014. The presenters represented a range of educational institutions: Belarusian State University, Belarus; Kristianstad University, Sweden; Linnaeus University, Sweden; Lund University, Sweden; Malmö Academy of Music, Sweden; Malmö Borgarskola, Sweden; Minsk Academy of Public Administration, Belarus; St Petersburg State University, Russia; University of Latvia, Latvia; and West University of Timișoara, Romania.

The six sessions covered a range of subjects related to text and discourse analysis. The first session, “Text Analysis and Literature”, included papers on Tomas Tranströmer, John Fowles and Alice Munro. The second session, “Discourse Analysis”, discussed topics as diverse as traditional culture as a discourse, categories of text and discourse and their role in collecting, organising and interpreting data, and analysing song lyrics. Session three, “Text Analysis in Teaching and Literature”, considered the appreciation of literature in second language reading, how to teach literary theory through detective stories, and stylistic devices in Somerset Maugham’s short story “Louise”. The fourth session, “Text Analysis in Teaching and Writing considered issues as diverse as text analysis and teaching writing, plagiarism detection systems in higher education, and teacher feedback and autonomy. The fifth session, “Text and Discourse Analysis for Change”, discussed a range of issues including a linguistic perspective on Swedish official documentation on children, linguistic interference and commonly occurring mistakes in Swedish secondary schools, and text analysis at university-level. The final session, “Text analysis and ICT” included papers on Filipino transnational identities in blogs, text analysis in the age of technology, and the contextualisation, organisation, and textualisation of IT operational documentation

The symposium also saw the launching of a new journal, Contemporary Society and its Discourse Representations. Further information may be obtained from Professor Irina Oukhvanova-Shmyrova, Belarusian State University, at ioukhvanova@gmail.com.

All articles have been peer reviewed and contributors have been invited to edit their papers in accordance with the reviewers’ instructions. The final version is the sole responsibility of the contributor.

Special thanks go to the participants and contributors to this volume; we hope that you will visit us again. Our grateful thanks also go to Kristianstad University for the use of the university premises and for subsidising the publication of the conference programme and the conference visit to Naturum Nature Centre, as well as for providing refreshments during the breaks. We also wish to thank Anders Håkansson for assisting with the publication of this volume.