The media plays a key role in constructing identities and categories, as its messages influence the way we understand the world. In the debate on integration issues, categories such as ”Swede” and ”immigrant” are often treated as obvious and unproblematic. ”Swedish”, being the norm, is seldom defined and frequently appears with subtlety. This paper set out to study what characterizes Swedishness in newspaper articles on integration issues, and how it is represented in relations to immigrants. With a social constructivist outset, critical discourse analysis and postcolonial theory were the methodological and theoretical tools of the investigation. The results show that there are four main ways through which Swedishness is represented in the material: Swedishness defined as common values and norms, Swedes as integrated and immigrants as disintegrated, Swedishness as characterized by certain traditions, habits and a common history and finally descriptions of the Swedish society as racist and discriminating. These discourses appear relatively constant over the examined periods, with modest changes over time. The results further show that the representations of Swedes and immigrants can be related to unequal power structures in the Swedish society as a whole, where the native Swedish population holds a dominant role.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-28162 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Amsenius, Beatrice |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för socialt arbete - Socialhögskolan |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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