Browsing by Subject "whiteness"

The objectives of this study was to investigate the cause of the local whiteness in AURAÒ blue cheese and to find the way which reduces the white cheeses. It was studied if white cheeses have a compact or open structure. White cheeses were classified as compact and open. Scanning electron microscopy was performed on compact, open and mouldy cheeses. Factors which cause compact cheese were also studied. At the beginning of blue cheese manufacturing, citrate was analysed at different time points in different vats. The aim was to make compact cheese in one of the trials. Cheese curd was broken before and after moulding. Alternative factors including the effect of addition of salt to the vat on reducing the amount of white cheeses was also studied. Other variables were the speed of the drying belt, heating of vat, the amount of vat whey and the different moulds were also studied. In addition it was studied how separation of whey affects to the amount of compact cheeses in the drying belt. Microbiological and chemical analyses as well as density and texture measurement were performed on the trials. Most of the white cheeses were compact and the small amount of white cheeses had an open structure. The compact cheeses had less mould and yeast than the mouldy cheeses. The pH was lower and the amount of free amino acids was less in the compact cheeses than the mouldy cheeses. The compact cheeses were more dense than the mouldy cheeses. Measurements from texture analyser showed that the hardness of compact cheese were greater and the fracturability of compact cheese was lower than the hardness or fracturability of mouldy cheese. There were no differences in the amount of citrates between days or vats. Broken cheese curd before moulding caused a more compact structure. The addition of salt in the vat did not affect the white cheeses. The compact cheeses decreased when the speed of the drying belt was reduced. With the use of the new mould, less compact cheeses were produced than with older mould. The removal of water from cheese curds is logarithmic the longer they are on an open drying belt. The compact cheese also decreased logarithmically when cheese curds were on drying belt from zero to ten seconds. There was a greater amount of compact cheeses after moulding in the vat.

Modern life is saturated with advertisements that use images. We see them on our phones, our TVs, on billboards and signs, though very few are memorable or meaningful to us once they have reached the end of their lifecycle. One campaign that challenged the notion of traditional advertisements was HSL’s “Faces of Public Transport” campaign, which ran in autumn of 2013 and winter of 2014 in Helsinki. The HSL campaign featured 526 portraits of people from the Helsinki area who utilize public transportation in a unique and notable campaign in celebration of HSL reaching an annual ridership of one million people in the Helsinki region. The HSL campaign brings up questions about representation, the intersection of identities, and the power of images and the creator of images. Dyer (1997) and Hall (2003), among others, inform the theoretical background of the research on identity and representation, though the main focus of this work is methodological development and practice, specifically in terms of visual research methods and the use of photography as an ethnographic research tool. As the results show, making meaning from images does not produce neat datasets, but instead prompts further interrogation of local, national and global power structures that affect how identities are represented.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how race and racism are understood in the policy documents called Equality Plans of the Finnish language-based Universities of Applied Sciences. The research questions are 1) what is said about racism and other related concepts in the Equality Plans, and 2) where and in relation to what are they acknowledged? Moreover, the study examines how whiteness and other values of Finnish society are reflected in the Equality Plans and what types of solutions higher educational institutions offer to racism. The analytical reading of the Equality Plans is informed by the theoretical framework that includes perspectives of critical whiteness, intersectional postcolonial feminism, Nordic exceptionalism to racism and colonialism, and feminist and education policy studies that discuss interpretations and practices of equality in educational institutions. The research material includes Equality Plans in eighteen Finnish language-based Universities of Applied Sciences in Finland. The analysis utilises the tools of the abductive content analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis in identifying the explicit and implicit meanings connected to race and racism. The results of the study indicate that the understanding of race in Finnish policy documents is vague, and the synonyms such as “ethnicity” are connected to ethnic and racialised minorities. The solutions for racism are abstract and appeal to the attitudes of the university community instead of challenging the structures that maintain and produce racism. According to this study, whiteness remains unrecognised and unquestioned in higher education institutions. Thus, resisting racism and promoting equality and justice requires a systematic and profound analysis of institutional whiteness in higher education structures and practices. The results align with the previous research on policy documents in Finnish education institutions, contributing to the discussion with Universities of Applied Sciences.