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This project will deep into the motives and reasons behind cultural destruction. It will underline the will to entirely wipe off a distinctive group of population and its culture. Taking Syria as our main case given the events of the last decade; centring in the civil war where lives and art have been lost forever, together with the morale of its population, which fled to other countries in big numbers throughout the war. As for the perpetrators, ISIS will be the focus of our project, guilty of intentionally destroying many monuments, especially in Syria. Before explaining and answering to the questions of the project regarding culture, it is more than mandatory to analyse Syria’s history, tribes and regions. After reaching the core of our project and describing the possible reasons behind these actions, the third part of our project, which focuses on the emotional sphere of the victims. War brings with itself grief, loss, damage and destruction to a country and its material environment. To focus on the emotional attachment and emotional damage during this war shall be a matter of discussion nevertheless. We will not only analyse and discuss cultural destruction and the loss for humanity whenever perpetrators decide to damage forever something so important as our, as humans, common and singular past.

Abstract This project is about the Viking Age in Scandinavia and its relation to English history. During the project I attempt to define some of the main factors that the Viking Culture affected in early English society, and to what extent this impact had on the future of England. One of the most prevalent relations between these two cultures is the trade going on between them, and how this shaped new power relations, and thus also changed the development of English, and Scandinavian culture. Although the nation with which England at this time had most interaction was the newly formed Denmark, the definition of Viking Culture is made of the entire Scandinavian Viking culture, since this was more or less one culture at that time.

The main goal of the project will be to investigate to which extent ‘authentic’ culture isperformed. The main theories used, in order to obtain an understanding of culture andperception, will be Bourdieu’s Habitus, Butler’s Performativity and Goffman’s ImpressionManagement. The analysis will be structured around three different aspects: the object, thephenomenology and the discursive, connected by Brinkmann’s ontological triangle from TheEpistemology of Working with Everyday Life Materials. The theories will be applied in order toanalyze interactions made in Venice, by the group members, in order to determine to whichextent they had performed their culture, and how this can affect the ‘authenticity’ in culture.

This project deals with the perception of the exhibition Riverbed by Olafur Eliasson. We aim to find out, how the exhibition was encoded by the artist and decoded by students. In order to examine this topic, a focus group discussion has been conducted and a “quick and dirty” survey at Louisiana served as a supplement to get a deeper insight. The theoretical frame is given by Stuart Hall’s four step model of encoding and decoding. In order to examine the production stage of Riverbed, a monological interview with Eliasson was taken into account. The main finding of this research is that meaning-making of an abstract artwork as Riverbed cannot be regarded as a linear transmission process from sender to receiver, but must be approached in much more flexible and complex terms.

In this project we examine the role of history in peace education in the Israeli-Palestinian context through the lens of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. We claim that history is a non-redundant part of peace education in intractable regions, and that the contemporary interpretation of Koselleck gives us the opportunity to shed new light on history as peace education in the Israeli-Palestinian context. We present two positions which exemplifies history as peace education, namely the two ‘new historians’ Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe. We analyse the foundation of Morris and Pappe, and criticise them through a combination of the Koselleckian perspective and the critical tradition of the Israeli philosopher Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Lastly we discuss how the Lens of Koselleck argues for a re-evaluation of history in peace education in contemporary Israel-Palestine.

The field of subtitling is certainly one of the underrated and underexplored areas in the academic world. This project intends to outline the lengthy evolution of subtitles as it was being shaped throughout the last century by experimenting with its different forms and uses. The historical perspective sheds light on the field of subtitling and looks at its functions, technology, and usages, tracing its change from the origin to its present-day form. The intention of covering the historical side of the field is to familiarize the reader with the profession and its practices before stepping into a more detailed observation, covering linguistic and semiotic elements of subtitling. As a medium of communication, it is a field that can reach countless viewers. It can be used as a tool for educating the illiterate, deaf and the hard of hearing, students of second language, enriching vocabulary, maintaining language skills for the elderly, not to mention its capability of translating information to a non-native-speaker audience for the purpose of exchanging cultural wealth.

This paper is an historical sociolinguistic study of the English language primarily utilising the works of Meyerhoff (2006), Bergs (2005), and Fennell (2001) to investigate phonetic changes in English caused by the Great Vowel Shift. Our research explores the ‘Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part I’ as chronicled by Davis (1971) as a means of discovering to what extent the Great Vowel Shift had materialised in the 15th century. Prefacing our study is an historical overview spanning from the 11th century and leading up to the Late Middle English period of the 15th century, which is intended to provide the reader with a historical, linear plotting of the English language, mapping its rise to dominance in England.

This project examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and the historical, cultural, and societal periods surrounding, following its publication on April 10, 1925. Specifically, the Roaring Twenties (1920-29), the Great Depression (1929-39), and World War II (1939-45), in light of the wonder that it started out with lackluster reviews and only meager sales but later rose to international fame and popularity as the literary phenomenon we know today, all within the span of this specific generation. Applying a dualistic approach to the analysis, the project seeks to both study the literature and the culture, by introducing two different but complementing theoretical perspectives: The psychological perspective and the Marxist perspective. This is done to make sure that both the novel and its characters are analyzed from both an internal and an external perspective, to increase and to expand the understanding of Fitzgerald’s literary work and its impact on American culture and society. The project concludes that a reason the novel was not popular when it was first published is that the materialist and consumerist generation of the Roaring Twenties primarily identified with Daisy over Gatsby - and the way she chose her safety and esteem needs met with Tom Buchanan over her love needs and a life with Gatsby. Hence the perception and interpretation of a character like Jay Gatsby has changed radically through years of cultural and societal upheaval, which eventually caused the novel to finally be accepted and appreciated. In the 1920s, Gatsby was primarily seen as a critique of the lavishly spending and materialistic status quo, and people did not care much for that because of a bad social conscience, or they simply did not understand the critique. But later, in the 1940s, the American outlook had changed forever and so had their view of Gatsby, enthroning him instead as a hero, an icon and idol, and as a role model.

This project deals with addressing low interest in history outside of school, for the target group, male and female students from age 15 to 20. We created the campaign Daily Dose of History, which contains a print media element that leads to an (unmade) website and App. The aim of Daily Dose of History, is to provide the target group with easily digestible historical facts. The project at hand, has two principal aspects 1) testing assumptions regarding low interest in history and 2) getting actual feedback on the printed media product (posters). To analyze and expand on the feedback collected from focus group interviews, we chose the apply theories from Windahl, Rogers and Schrøder. This analysis has generated a greater understanding of our target group and their perception of the product.

: The historical and cultural relations between Iceland and Denmark date back to the Viking age. Today the connection between the two countries are less visible but can be tracked in the Icelandic Educational system where the Danish language is being taught from 7th-10th grade. We investigate the relevance of the Danish language within the Icelandic education system and the experience of the language by interviewing students, politicians, and experts within the field of education as subjects for the study. The findings emphasize how the subjects make meaning of the relevance of the language through their lived world. It can be concluded that it is not only the history between the two countries that dominates the importance of Danish being taught as a subject within the Icelandic education system, but moreover also the important part the language take in connecting Iceland to the rest of the Nordic community in regards to education, labor market, and politics.