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This project examines the influence of the myth of Danish design on the consumption of Danish furniture. Danish design has historically been associated with qualities such as timelessness, craftsmanship, tradition and beauty and has played a significant role in the development of Danish society and culture. The construction of the category of modernist Danish design and its narratives was shaped by a social network of individuals and organizations, linking Danish design to notions of good taste and healthy living. Today, Danish design is praised for the same understated and high-quality features which legitimize its contemporary success.By drawing on Roland Barthes' theory of myth and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, this study investigates both the way in which the myth of Danish design is created, and consumed. The analysis combines a semiotic examination of Danish design mythology with a conceptual content analysis of interviews conducted by a Danish furniture company, Fredericia, as part of their celebration of Børge Mogensen's Folkestolen’s 75th anniversary.The findings reveal that the myth of Danish design influences the consumption of Danish furniture by communicating symbolic valuations associated with positive attributes such as beauty, timelessness, and fine craftsmanship. Simultaneously, the myth perpetuates ideological narratives that serve the interests of dominant power groups in society, including the Danish nation state, the furniture industry and even certain groups of consumers. The furniture industry strategically exploits the myth to drive desirability and capitalize on the associations carried within Danish design.This research underscores the sociocultural function of myth, which constructs markers of social, national, and personal identity. Danish furniture transcends its functional and aesthetic aspects, becoming a symbol of economic and cultural wealth and social status. Simultaneously, the myth of Danish design distorts ideological narratives around class dominance and power and naturalizes the notions of nationalism and Danishness into signifieds of tradition, health, functionalism, sustainability, and social accessibility. The analysis situates consumption within the context of cultural capital, modern mythology, and late-stage capitalism, highlighting the transformation of furniture into tools for managing self-identity, and signifiers of social status and taste. The holders of cultural capital benefit from perpetuating the myth of Danish design, securing both material and symbolic profits from ownership of Danish furniture. Thus the class elite utilizes its cultural competence to maintain its capital and power dominance in society, as cultural capital reproduces social structures.This research investigates the complex interplay between the myth of Danish design, the consumption of Danish furniture, and their sociocultural implications. By critically examining the myth's influence, this study offers insights into the mechanisms by which design narratives and cultural capital shape consumption and perpetuate power dynamics in society.

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.

This project was set out to explore the role of the Turing Test in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with emphasis on the historical perspective. This report contains an introductory presentation of the Turing Test and Artificial Intelligence. Furthermore, it presents two methods for analysis. The first method is a quantitative search in extracting the number of results from Google Scholars for search range between 1950 and 2019. The searched terms are ‘Turing Test’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’. The second method is the one used for the analysis of two case studies, ELIZA and Google Duplex. In exploring the historical development, ELIZA is an early research topic from 1966 and Google Duplex is a contemporary project from 2018. This report concludes that the Turing Test appears to have played a role in the historical development of AI. Results from the quantitative search show that there is an exponential growth, followed by a short stabilisation, before it begins to decay towards the last decade. Both case studies failed when subjected to a strict Turing Test. Though when subjected to the Total Turing Test, Google Duplex seems to surpass it. Finally, this report also concludes that the Turing Test may no longer be relevant, as mediums for AI have evolved beyond text-based and most developments are no longer concerned with tricking humans.

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.

The goal of this thesis is to analyze in what way the Little Ice Age, a colder climatic period between around 1300-1850, affected the development of the modern Danish state. This is though too large a scope for a single thesis and the wars between 1550-1750 have been chosen as an area of focus. These wars changed the geopolitical position of Denmark in the Nordic area, from a strong nation to a minor player. The worst outcome came, as Denmark lost all processions east of the Sound Strait to its rival Sweden in 1658, of which Bornholm was the only land area to return. These wars correlate to the Maunder Minimum, a period from 1645-1715, which was the coldest part of the Little Ice Age. In order to understand if there is a causation following this correlation, the main focus of the thesis will be the structural integrity of the Danish economy in pre-war and wartime periods. Two different economic spheres will be analyzed, the first being the Sound Toll income and the second the agricultural output. The Sound Toll do not seem to have a strong correlation to the cooling climate, and it does not seem that the colder winters decreased the income from the Toll. However, the agricultural output does seem to have a moderate correlation to the harsher winters of the Maunder Minimum, with a lower total output, thereby decreasing the ability of the State to increase taxation during wartime. It is also possible that the harsher winters increased the susceptibility of the society to epidemics. This master’s thesis argues that there is a possible connection between the changing climate and warfare, especially in the period before 1660. After the change in government, from an aristocratic monarchy to an absolutist monarchy in 1660, the following wars were more manageable for the State, possibly due to better harvests.

The motivation for this project was based on the newly founded movement DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) and their manifesto. The movement’s ideas and visions are based on the critique of the European Union’s handling of the economic, refugee and migration crisis’, that has been debated throughout Europe in recent years. With their manifesto, DiEM25 has formulated an idealistic alternative vision for the future Europe. This assignment seeks to find answers to what kind of alternative this is. More specifically; which kind of cosmopolitanism is expressed in the manifesto, and which European concept historical traditions this cosmopolitanism builds upon. The analysis conducted in this project will be a comparative concept historian analysis of the cosmopolitan vision formulated in the DiEM25 Manifesto. The assignment concludes that the manifesto entails a potential utopian cosmopolitan vision of re-democratising Europe, and more specifically the EU in our present modern and globalised world. Furthermore, it concludes that the the cosmopolitanism in the DiEM25 Manifesto builds on a long tradition of cosmopolitan ideas, leading back to Immanuel Kant initial ideas of cosmopolitanism, through post world war and the thoughts of Ulrich Beck up until the 21st century and the notion of New Cosmopolitanism.

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.

Through this paper, we examine the redesign process that the building of Nikolaj Church has gone through from the 1960ies, to how it appears today, as Nikolaj Kunsthal. The traces and layers have visible signs of a random design process through time. Nowadays the art centre aims for a coherent atmosphere and sense of place in an upcoming design process. Our analysis of textual data gathered from relevant documents and interviews with key stakeholders, relies on the development of a sociotechnical perspective. This perspective allows us to recognise the various agencies and networks in connection to the design process that emerge from the technical and social aspects, which are analysed. The findings emphasize the building as an actant and a network, that plays a crucial part in the design process.

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 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.