This is a study on the changing practices of kinship in Northern India. The change in kinship arrangements, and particularly in intermarriage processes, is traced by analysing the reception of Hindi popular cinema. Films and their role and meaning in people´s lives in India was the object of my research. Films also provided me with a methodology for approaching my other subject-matters: family, marriage and love. Through my discussion of cultural change, the persistence of family as a core value and locus of identity, and the movie discourses depicting this dialogue, I have looked for a possibility of compromise and reconciliation in an Indian context. As the primary form of Indian public culture, cinema has the ability to take part in discourses about Indian identity and cultural change, and alleviate the conflicts that emerge within these discourses. Hindi popular films do this, I argue, by incorporating different familiar cultural narratives in a resourceful way, thus creating something new out of the old elements. The final word, however, is the one of the spectator. The 'new' must come from within the culture. The Indian modernity must be imaginable and distinctively Indian. The social imagination is not a 'Wild West' where new ideas enter the void and start living a life of their own. The way the young women in Dehra Dun interpreted family dramas and romantic movies highlights the importance of family and continuity in kinship arrangements. The institution of arranged marriage has changed its appearance and gained new alternative modes such as love cum arranged marriage. It nevertheless remains arranged by the parents. In my thesis I have offered a social description of a cultural reality in which movies act as a built-in part. Movies do not work as a distinct realm, but instead intertwine with the social realities of people as a part of a continuum. The social imagination is rooted in the everyday realities of people, as are the movies, in an ontological and categorical sense. According to my research, the links between imagination and social life were not so much what Arjun Appadurai would call global and deterritorialised, but instead local and conventional.

The system of governance of the national reception system in Finland can be described as a centralised state–led system with a top-down decision-making, where the municipalities and civil society are key partners in implementation processes, but they can only indirectly influence the governance of the reception system. Reception and integration are formally two different areas of practice, with the state as responsible for reception measures and the municipalities responsible for integration measures. The centralisation of the system has involved the strengthening of the role of the Finnish Immigration Service. The administrative reforms involve a long history of centralisation and Europeanisation of the administration, which predates the so-called migration crisis of 2015. A convergence of the functioning, accessibility and quality of reception services is an aim of the centralised national system. Yet, the system also involves structural conflicts of interest between local and national perspectives, which are strengthened by the legal and administrative division of reception and integration into two different areas of practice.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Ghanaians decode The Bold and the Beautiful. An essentially American cultural product. The study is based on the assumption that when people watch programmes like The Bold and the Beautiful, they enter a cultural terrain where they are apt to make meanings and interpretations of their involvements based as it were on their cultural dispositions. The focus is on the type of response The Bold and the Beautiful evokes in a cross-section of Ghanaian viewers and the repertoire with which they frame their watching experiences. The assumption therefore is that people's television consumption can be made sense of through an empirical study. This study begins with overviews of paradig a shift in audience reception and Katz and Liebes previous study of Dallas with ethnic groups in Israel. The impetus of such reviews for the current study is also discussed. Soap opera, the subject matter is defined alongside a brief description of the study area, the people, and some aspects of their cultural rules. Transformation in the communication infrastructure of Ghana and its impact on Ghanaians is also discussed. The study task involved Ghanaians based in Finland and the main homeland, Ghana. A qualitative instrument of individual in-depth interview was used in the study involving the Ghanaian respondents in Finland. Focus Group Discussions were also held in Accra, Nsawam and Kumasi to assess an episode of The Bold and the Beautiful programme. The data collected from the individual in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, before and after informal discussions as well as observations during the fieldwork are embodied in chapter 5. The findings did answer the main questions of the thesis: How do Ghanaians decode The Bold and the Beautiful? With what repertoire would they frame their involvements and interpretations? And why do they even watch the programme? The study conclusively found that, these Ghanaians appropriated norms and values from their culture to make sense of the programme. They made normative and moral judgemental statements that suggest a stance to defend their group norms and values against the programme. Such display of involvement also suggest that these Ghanaians are not passive or held captive by the programme, rather they enjoy to appropriate themes and issues from the programme as agenda setting for discussions. Such acts that elicit gratifications and release of catharsis can be therapeutically beneficial. Given the potentiality of the Ghanaian critical abilities, skills to enable Ghanaians use such discussions as consciousness raising devices be introduced in school curriculum using programmes like The Bold and the Beautiful as resource material.

Tässä empiiristä tutkimusotetta ja kirjallisuustieteellistä teoriaa yhdistävässä tutkielmassa tarkastellaan epäluotettavan kerronnan toteutumista Samantha Gormanin ja Danny Cannizzaron digitaalisessa iOS-kirjasovelluksessa Pry. Tutkielmassa argumentoidaan, että puhtaasti teoreettinen kirjallisuustiede tarvitsee välttämättä tuekseen empiiristä lukijatutkimusta, mikäli tavoitteena on tuottaa tietoa kerronnallisten rakenteiden todellisista toteutuvista toiminnan muodoista. Tutkielman kolme päätavoitetta ovat (1) kerronnallisen epäluotettavuuden tarkastelu teoksessa, (2) empiirisen lukijatutkimuksen merkittävyyden osoittaminen sekä (3) tutkielmassa käytettyjen menetelmien kriittinen arviointi ja kehittäminen. Tutkielman teoreettisena viitekehyksenä käytetään kertomusten rakenteiden systemaattiseen tarkasteluun perustuvaa narratologiaa. Tutkielmassa hyödynnetään erityisesti Wayne C. Boothin ja James Phelanin kerronnan epäluotettavuutta kuvaavia teorioita, joita kehitetään edelleen empiiriseen tarkasteluun sopiviksi. Lisäksi tutkielmassa tarkastellaan 64 kirjoittajan tuottamia analyyseja multimodaalisesta Prysta sekä laadullisin että määrällisin menetelmin. Suuri osa aineistosta koostuu yhdysvaltalaisten, kanadalaisten ja uusiseelantilaisten yliopisto-opiskelijoiden kurssisuorituksina julkaistuista blogiteksteistä, mutta aineistoon kuuluu myös ammattimaisten kirjoittajien sekä harrastajien tuottamia analyyseja. Lukijatulkintojen rinnalle tarjotaan tutkielman kirjoittajan oma luenta, jossa Pry tulkitaan kriittisenä, moniäänisyyden mahdollistavana tarkasteluna erinäisten kollektiivien suhteista erityisesti Persianlahden sodassa ja Irakin sodassa, joihin teos kerronnassaan viittaa. Kirjoittajan oman luennan ja muiden lukijatulkintojen väliin muodostuvan jännitteen kautta tutkielma pyrkii osoittamaan, että yksittäisen lukijan valitsema tulkintakehys voi muokata voimakkaasti luennan pohjalta kehitettävää analyysia ja siten kirjallisuustieteellistä teoretisointia. Tutkielmassa havaitaan, että Pryn kerronnalliset elementit voivat tuottaa toisistaan poikkeavia luentoja, minkä vuoksi kerronnan epäluotettavuus näyttäytyy eri lukijoille eri muodossa. Tulkinnat eivät kuitenkaan ole sattumanvaraisia, vaan ne vaikuttavat asettuvan tiettyjen raamien sisään. Tutkielman lopputulema on, että näihin tulkinnallisiin rajapisteisiin tulisi kiinnittää huomiota jatkotutkimuksessa sekä kerronnallisten rakenteiden tarkastelussa ylipäätään.