The legitimization of the use of sweat shops by H&M in the Swedish press

In the Swedish news-media we find sporadic critical, or reflective, reporting on the production conditions of Swedish ‘sweat-shop’ factories in the Global South, used to supply Transnational Corporations (TNCs). In this paper we carry out a critical discourse analysis, in particular using Van Leeuwen’s social actor and social action analysis, to look at examples from a larger corpus of 88 news reports and editorials from the Swedish press, between 2012–2017, which report and comment on activities of the Swedish company H&M in relation to its production chains. Analysis reveals how these recontextualize events, processes and motives, to represent Sweden and Swedish TNCs as characterized by a benevolent, democratic, humane, form of capitalism, drawing on discourses of a former social democratic Sweden of the 1960s before it became highly neo-liberalized. This nationalism converges with other discourses promoting the exploitation of the Global South.

,,Only darkness in the Goldeneh Medina?" Die Lower East Side in der US-amerikanischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur

The paper deals with the Lower East Side as a site of memory in children's literature in the United States. Contemporary children's books depict the Lower East Side in migration narratives about Eastern European Jews who came to America around the turn of the last century. They do so both verbally and visually by incorporating an often reproduced photograph that has come to symbolize the imaginary place. The Lower East Side is a Jewish site of immigrant poverty, crowded tenement houses, and sweat shops. In the examples given, it is used to dismantle the image of the Goldeneh Medina.

Rickets

Rickets is a disease of growing children. Historically, its winter prevalence and its occurrence among children confined to sunless sweat shops and smog-ridden cities during the industrial revolution implicated insufficient exposure to sunlight in its etiology.1-3 Despite the discovery of the anti-rachitic action of cod-liver oil more than 200 years ago, rickets remained a serious health problem until the early part of the 20th century when the identification, isolation, and finally almost ubiquitous addition of vitamin D to our food supply soon rendered conventional rickets a disorder of mere academic interest. Recently, however, a slow increase in the incidence of rickets in children with a variety of medical problems including renal tubular disorders, illness requiring chronic hemodialysis, cystic fibrosis, and as a complication of anticonvulsant therapy has been noted. Thus, the reappearance of rickets in new, more subtle forms, necessitates increased physician awareness of its incidence and its pathogenesis. CALCIUM AND PHOSPHORUS HOMEOSTASES Fundamental to the pathophysiology of rickets are calcium and phosphorus homeostases.4 Calcium plays a central role in many body functions and is an important cofactor in muscle contraction, neural transmission, enzyme activity, blood clotting, and other cellular processes. Calcium exists in a number of body pools of varying exchangeability or availability for immediate use. The nonexchangeable calcium pool includes the bones, which contain approximately 99% of the body's calcium, and certain body proteins to which it is tightly complexed. The rapidly exchangeable pool is made up of either ionized or loosely complexed calcium, present both in the body fluids and within individual cells.