This paper examines the relationship between language, (in)visibility, and (im)mobility in racialized spaces, focusing on Finnish, Somali, and Arabic speakers in Sweden. Using a theoretical framework based on hegemonic whiteness and intersectionality, the study explores how multilingual practices and subjectivities intersect with race, religion, gender, and class to shape social visibility and mobility. The research draws on linguistic ethnographic data, including interviews, linguistic landscape documentation, and an analysis of the media discourse. The study finds that while Finnish speakers have become invisible due to assimilation policies, Somali and Arabic speakers are hypervisible in Swedish public spaces and discourse, although Arabic speakers are sometimes, and in relation to other migrants, nearing Swedish whiteness. However, all three languages and their speakers are constrained by a white normativity that reproduces inequality. The paper challenges simplistic notions of mobility/immobility and visibility/invisibility in the context of a changing racial order in Sweden, where whiteness serves as a binary sorting mechanism that perpetuates inequality. Overall, this research sheds light on the complex entanglement of language, visibility, and mobility in white spaces and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the intersectional dynamics of race and language. 

This study examines the discursive construction of ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’, ‘asylum seekers’ and other mobile humans in the Swedish press. Quantitative and qualitative methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies are combined to analyze a corpus of about 31 000 newspaper articles, published during 28 central months of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, 2015–2017. The analyses show that many different labelling strategies are used to categorize humans that flee to Sweden into several sub-groups. These sub-groups are framed in different ways.

Ensuring the conditions for an inclusive society in the face of human diversity places various demands on the built environment. Planning is essential for accommodating a wide range of individual preferences and abilities. This article examines the presence and absence of Universal Design (UD) in contemporary urban planning and construction in eight new or remodelled Swedish building and public space projects. The projects were studied in-situ and via documentation from the planning and building process. The findings show two ways in which UD is present. The first is a pattern where people are not separated from each other, whilst the second is a pattern of facilitating equal use by placing low demands on users’ abilities. It was revealed that UD was implemented more in remodelling projects than in new constructions, which instead created new inequalities through categorisations of users and high demands on users’ abilities. They were also linked to an imbalance between green and social sustainability. We argue that a change of mindset is pivotal for implementing UD. Human diversity must be a consideration throughout planning and building processes, and creating a sustainable society requires UD. This article contributes new knowledge regarding patterns characterising such a mindshift. 

This article deals with the concept of critique by discussing and tracing theoretical definitions and epistemological implications of critique within three influential fields of discourse studies: Critical Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies and Discourse Linguistics (Diskurslingvistik). The intention of the article stems from an observation regarding how discourse studies – at least in a Swedish context – tend to align with a critical perspective, yet without explicating it. Consequently, the article examines the following questions: What does it mean to conduct critical studies as a linguist? What traditions and theoretical contexts are the understandings of critique anchored in? What critical traditions have inspired discourse studies in Sweden? Drawing on the conceptual conflict between postmodern notions of knowledge on the one hand and populist and post-truth views on the other, the article concludes by arguing for the contemporary importance of linguistic critique. 

Hur kan kritik förstås i ett språkvetenskapligt sammanhang? Vad innebär det att inta en kritisk forskarposition som språkvetare? Vad kan man som text- och diskursanalytiker rikta sin kritik mot?

Denna antologi tar ett samlat och bredare grepp om konceptet kritik inom språkvetenskaplig text- och diskursanalys med ett särskilt fokus på en svenskspråkig kontext. Boken innehåller såväl teoretiska diskussioner av kritikbegreppet som kritiska empiriska analyser. De teoretiska diskussionerna tar sig an kritikbegreppets innebörd, dess historia och vetenskapliga implikationer. Här bidrar bokens artiklar också med teoretiska utvecklingar av kritikbegreppet i relation till exempelvis genre, motdiskurser, tystnad och frånvaro. I de empiriska bidragen analyseras sociala och samhällsrelevanta fenomen såsom feminism, nyliberalism, rasism och propaganda utifrån kritiska perspektiv. De empiriska analyserna bygger på vitt skilda skriftspråkliga såväl som multimodala material. Bland annat presenteras kritiska analyser av nationella prov för gymnasiet, reklam för banker, IKEA-kataloger, vårdprogram för ätstörningar och synen på samiska barns språkundervisning. Boken ger en samlad bild av aktuell kritisk text- och diskursanalytisk forskning och avser även att bidra till den teoretiska utvecklingen av fältet.

Målet med språkaktivism är att förändra samhället genom att förändra språket. Språkaktivism bedrivs ”underifrån” i syfte att utmana och på lång sikt upphäva diskriminerande samhällsstrukturer.

I den här avhandlingen undersöks diskussioner om feministisk språkaktivism som förts i Sverige från 1960-talet till 2015. Under denna period har kvinnorörelsen, homo- och bisexuella, trans*aktivister och queera personer skapat en mängd nya ord för att ifrågasätta och förändra rådande normer kring kön och sexualitet; ombudskvinna, hen, hoan, h@n, kvinniskor, intergender, cisperson och pansexuell är bara några av dem.

Aktivistiska språkförändringar ger upphov till re_aktioner av olika slag. Dessa är inte sällan uttryck för ett försvar av rådande sociala och samhälleliga könsnormer. När det till exempel gäller det omdiskuterade pronomenet hen så är det inte kombinationen av bokstäverna h, e och n i sig som upprör, utan det är de normkritiska intentionerna bakom bruket av ordet som skapar debatt. Att vissa grupper aktivt förändrar språket och att andra re_agerar så starkt på dessa förändringar visar att språket tillskrivs betydelse för upprätthållandet av samhälleliga normer och maktstrukturer.

I avhandlingen analyseras, utifrån en diskursanalytisk ansats, diskussioner om feministisk språkförändring som har förts i tre kontexter: inom aktivistiska grupper, i kommentarsfält på nätet och inom den institutionaliserade språkvården. Avhandlingens centrala forskningsintresse är inriktat på relationen mellan språk och kön och relationen mellan språkförändringar och förändringar i den utomspråkliga, sociala världen och hur dessa relationer förstås i de tre kontexterna.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze discussions on feminist language change focusing on the period 1960–2015. The data comprises discussions from three different contexts: feminist communities, public forums for discussion on the internet and official language organizations.

The analyzed data from the feminist communities consists of a range of different sources of text, for example newspapers, magazines, novels from the women’s movement, lesbian poetry, queer and trans*activist blogs, biographies, comics and plays, to name but a few. In addition to this two focus group discussions were conducted with five teenaged and five adult activists, each with a queer and/or trans*activist background. The data for the analyses of the discussions in public internet forums consists of 1 865 negative reactions to feminists’ language interventions. For the analyses of the reactions from the official language organizations, data was culled from 16 handbooks with language recommendations from the Language Council of Sweden and the Swedish Academy.

My central research interest is how the actors in these three contexts understand and describe the relation between language and gender, and between strategic language change and changes in the social, non-linguistic world. Furthermore I investigate in which forms of gender-related discrimination the language changes are supposed to intervene. I adopt a critical discourse analytic and interdisciplinary approach that combines linguistic theories and methods with those from Gender Studies.

The results show that Swedish language activists from the 1960s to the 1990s focused on linguistic interventions aimed at challenging patriarchal norms. In the 1980s homosexual activists, especially lesbian activists, began to intervene in heteronormative concepts. Until around the middle of the 1990s feminists acted from a binary concept of gender. From then on, queer and trans*activists have tried to challenge the idea of two, stable and natural gender categories. Language activists have seen language as performative and a tool for constructing reality. Even those who react negatively in forums on the internet to feminist language change assume that language has performative effects on the conceptualization of gender. The official language organizations, on the other hand, describe language in their recommendations mostly as something unpolitical that reflects rather than constructs society.