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In my third semester as a master’s student in Global Studies + Communication Studies at Roskilde University, I did a professional internship at the United Nations Population Fund (herby UNFPA) at the UN City in Copenhagen, Denmark. For six months, I worked in the Partnership and Communications department of the Supply Chain Management Unit (herby UNFPA SCMU) as a digital communication intern.My ambition has always been to be part of an organization that fights for human rights, gender equality, and better sexual and reproductive health care for all. Therefore, this internship was the perfect opportunity for me to not only explore this passion of mine but also to finally put in place all the knowledge that I’ve learned during the past few years at the University.Keywords: United Nations, Communication, Social Media, Human Rights

This study carries out a systematic review of state-of-the-art critiques of the Sustainable Development Goals, by drawing on theoretical insights from class analysis, Social Reproduction Theory, and World Systems Theory. We found extensive literature on the shortcomings of the SDGs. We singled out a study that addresses the SDGs’ role in the perpetuation of class-related struggles in a global capitalist system and used it to guide us through the literature review. Following from this, this study scrutinizes the interplay between class dynamics and the SDGs in relation to their role in addressing or perpetuating class-related concerns in capitalism.The basis of the above-mentioned theoretical framework enabled us to carry out an extensive analysis that not only includes a descriptive explanation of the state-of-the-art critiques of the SDGs but also allows them to present their own analytical theses. In this study, the consistent application of this theory revealed research gaps that can be found especially in the area of class theory and missing explorations of the world-system. There is a neglect of class perspectives in both locally specific and globally general perspectives on the SDGs, which partly takes place within a so-called intersectional framework. Moreover, within the critiques we found the world-system perspective missing completely. Particularly the integral connection between capitalism and imperialism was neglected as both an observation as well as an analytical framework within the state-of-the-art critiques. Some critiques found that SDGs contributed to accumulation of dispossession, but this study identifies that the reviewed literature does not contextualize the SDGs within the polarized patterns of the world-system. We suggest further research integrating a similar theoretical framework to explore the effects and motives of the SDGs within the world-system, how they interact with class relations, and how they might even influence class relations.

This project aims to investigate the issue of statelessness in different circumstances and how UN Conventions apply. It is done by examining academic articles, UNHCR reports, and different legislations. The analysis has been conducted with the use of international law and the liberal theory of citizenship to discover the significance of citizenship in relation to human rights. The discussion is built around the complexity of the issue and the notions of statelessness and human rights.This study argues that there are parts of the world where improving the situation of statelessness is difficult to achieve due to local realities, yet international organisations can still provide some assistance to stateless people and serve as an intermediary. We conclude that when aiming to resolve an issue as complex as statelessness, it is crucial to be aware of its multidimensionality and the challenges of applying international conventions in the local context.

This project examines the experiences of neurodivergent students at Roskilde University, particularly how the encounter between the student and the university is experienced. In addition to this, the project also explores how Roskilde University offers support to neurodivergent students. The principles of the neurodiversity paradigm, intersectional theory as well as Neuroqueer Theory make up the theoretical framework. Two qualitative interviews are conducted an analyzed within this framework. The project concludes that a lack of visibility of neurodiversity and options for support influence the students’ experiences at the university, which can lead to feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and not fitting within the normative expectations of what it means to be a university student. The areas where the students have felt most included and free to embrace the neurodivergent parts of themselves lie within the social environment, not the institution. The interviews also indicate an ongoing negotiation of the concepts of disability and ADHD within the students’ reflections. Finally, the project discusses the ways in which Roskilde University can learn from these experiences and reflections to enhance future inclusion of minority students and encourage the creative potentials of diversity.

In my research about psychedelics in Czechia, I employ the constructivist philosophy to study how subjects understand them and discursively construct their meaning. To choose the subjects, I dialogically engaged with forty members of the Czech psychedelic culture through a survey to produce together a word cloud that defines for my research the key players in the culture. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory was used to analyze textual responses from six of the key players to the dislocatory event of Kauza Ayahuasca. I added few additional sources, including four texts that reacted to their responses, which helped set the discourses of the players within a wider social discourse around psychedelics. From the dataset of 13 texts, I identified health to be the shared nodal point which organized the discourses that infused psychedelics, as the floating signifier, with their particular meanings. I suggest that the various meanings of psychedelics were especially influenced by how was their relationship to health articulated to be. I then categorized three articulatory logics, which provide social actors the understandings of psychedelics as hazardous, safe and/or beneficial. The logics of hazard linked psychedelics with effects like going mad, psychosis, death, and hurting others, which demanded antagonistic opposition to the discourses of the key players. Those on the other hand used logics of safety, where hazard of psychedelics was negated and articulated to be safe, and logics of benefit that linked them with medical effects, (psycho)therapy in particular, and positive changes, such as in personality, self-development, and evolution of society. The discourses characterized by these two logics made shared demands of challenging, and eventually hegemonically intervening, the judicial discourse in the case of Kauza Ayahuasca.

This paper, research how the Strategic Sector Cooperation (SSC) collaborating with Indonesia on a launch of an organic cheese in and how that promotes sustainable development with green private solutions, and how that can amplify climate diplomacy with the assumption that it has nothing to do with promoting climate issues but more being about promoting commercial interests. Former literature has answered how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Denmark has evolved over the past 250 years and argues that diplomacy have become more commercialized. Other literature has presented how the domestic Indonesian market on dairy lack infrastructure, that makes it valuable for international companies to expand their markets to Indonesia. By using Economic sustainability, Social sustainability, Environmental sustainability, and Small State theory combined with process-tracing and document analysis, with documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Denmark on the Framework Programme on SSC and peer reviewed articles. The paper discovered that doing diplomacy in this day of time, will have to connect both climate issues and commercial interest to solve today’s affairs, and strengthen the bilateral relations between countries.

The following project aims to investigate how states facilitate human and minority rights action in relation to effective participation through the case of the Irish Travellers. This study was conducted through a single case study of the Irish government’s key initiatives aimed at the protection of the Irish Travellers and their engagement with the wider society. Each of these key initiatives has been examined with the aim of uncovering how the concept of effective participation is represented in relation to the facilitation of engagement in both political and social life, and how these initiatives comply with the international obligations of the Irish state. The project concludes that the Irish government shows clear attempts at facilitating effective participation in both political and social life for the Irish Travellers, and that these efforts overall align with their international obligations.

This master thesis addresses normative control mechanisms in Ugandan society that are affecting adolescents in their pursuit of sexual health (SH), and why these are causing a struggle for them in terms of mental health.This study uses anthropological methods in collecting empirical data; participant observational studies, interviews and focus group discussions with Ugandan adolescents, facilitated through the local NGO Reach A Hand Uganda. Furthermore, we have incorporated document analysis of the National Sexuality Education Framework (NSEF).The research design was built on the African concept of Ubuntu in order to decolonise our knowledge production and create space for Indigenous epistemologies, in respect of decentering African communal knowledge building. This was chosen from a methodological stance of Decolonial Feminist Ethnography. With a critical decolonial feminist angle, based on the work of Sylvia Tamale, the data was analysed with various Foucauldian theories; Governmentality, Biopolitics and Pastoral Power, supported by Stella Nyanzi’s theoretical and contextual understandings of these, to investigate macro- and meso-level normative control mechanisms. Together with Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory of Self-Regulation and Merrill Singer’s Syndemic Theory, we investigate dynamics and outcomes of this power on a micro-level.The analysis is structured within five thematic chapters, based on empirical findings. The first chapter explores normative control embedded in the NSEF rooted in religious morals, and depicts how the framing of national values and dangers are used to legitimise institutional control and power. The second chapter focuses on the emphasis on women in intervention strategies, disregarding the role of men, especially in relation to gender equality and equity, impacting gender dynamics. The third chapter further explores this phenomenon. Here we show how gender power dynamics shape interactions of e.g. sexual negotiation, affecting young women’s SH disproportionately leading to exploitation, gender-based violence and teenage pregnancies. The fourth chapter analyses how taboos, myths and misinformation, and the stigma of ‘being spoiled’ affects adolescents and controls adolescent behaviour on a meso-level. This leads to the final chapter which analyses the consequences to mental health, as fear and confusion propels distrust across communities.