This article explores the relationship between discourse and experiences of ill health. Drawing on narratives, it shows how a mother who is experiencing difficulties with breastfeeding embodies ...sentiments of shame over what she perceives as a failure to perform motherhood. The notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body are employed to ground the individual's experience in discursive practices, and to propose that shame is a sentiment that arises in deviations from the biopolitical ideologies that are produced and reproduced through those practices. Expressing shame becomes a resource for assuming responsibility for failed motherhood; and, at the same time, it appears to obstruct recovery to smoothly functioning breastfeeding.
Den här artikeln utforskar förhållandet mellan diskurs och erfarenheter av ohälsa. Med hjälp av narrativa data visar artikeln hur en mor som har problem med amningen förkroppsligar skamkänslor över vad hon uppfattar som ett misslyckande att performera moderskap. Begreppen interdiskursivitet och historisk kropp används för att förstå hur individens erfarenheter relaterar till diskursiva praktiker, samt för att föra fram tesen att skam är en känsla som uppstår i disharmoni med biopolitiska ideologier som konstrueras i dessa praktiker. Att uttrycka skam blir en resurs för att ta på sig ansvaret för det misslyckade moderskapet, samtidigt som det förefaller förhindra återgången till en fungerande amning.
Language inevitably plays a key part in the infrastructure of transnational domestic work. Many who work and have worked in the domestic sector in Sweden have Swedish as their second language. The ...object of this study is to investigate the ways in which this fact is reflected in the marketing of domestic work historically as well as currently. Drawing on two datasets – personal advertisements by job seekers published in a Swedish daily during the twentieth century, and corporate marketing by contemporary cleaning agencies – the study discusses how references not only to language competence, but also to prospective language learning are used in the marketing of domestic work. While the phenomenon of domestic work, especially when performed by migrants, has been a resilient space of upset in the Swedish society for the last hundred years, the article argues that references to language are used to navigate tensions.
This article explores communicative aspects of preparing others, by studying prenatal education classes in which midwives prepare expectant parents for delivery. Data include documentation from ...classes and interviews with the presenters. This twofold dataset enables investigation into how ideologies of communication figure into the production of discourse. A dominant idea is that discourse can stand in for lived experience in the endeavor to decrease nervousness and fear in the expectant parents. The observation data are therefore analyzed by paying attention to how the expectant parents’ future deliveries are discursively represented. Drawing on the conceptual framework for analyzing anticipatory discourse, the study shows how the midwives largely frame this future as predictable and the mother as highly agentive. When addressing unexpected turbulence, however, the midwives use the opportunity to stress the agency of medical professionals to maintain a representation of the delivery event as generally predictable.
Ämnet för den här studien är språkliga erfarenheter av interskandinavisk kommunikation. Med hjälp av språkporträtt som metod kartläggs, mer specifikt, språkliga erfarenheter hos två individer som ...flyttat från Danmark till Sverige i vuxen ålder och i dag talar på ett sätt som i allmänhet uppfattas som svenska. Det som fokuseras i den här studien är emellertid inte individernas inlärning av det svenska språket, utan deras erfarenheter av slitningar mellan olika sätt att värdera interaktion i de två länderna. Flera av individernas narrerade erfarenheter illustrerar hur yttranden som i Danmark kan uppfattas som kvicka och fyndiga uppfattas som vulgära och aggressiva i Sverige. Individernas erfarenheter och de sociolingvistiska implikationerna av dem analyseras med begrepp och perspektiv från Pierre Bourdieu – särskilt används här begreppen språkligt habitusoch språkmarknad – tillsammans med Brigitta Buschs begrepp språklig erfarenhet. Studien synliggör att även om danskan och svenskan är närbesläktade språk finns betydande skillnader i den pragmatiska logik som råder på de två ländernas språkmarknader, och att dessa skillnader genererar avsevärda effekter för de rörliga individernas språkliga erfarenheter.
The theme of this study is the linguistic experiences of inter-Scandinavian communication. More specifically, using language portraits as a method, the study maps the linguistic experiences of two individuals who have moved from Denmark to Sweden as adults, and who now speak in a manner that generally passes as Swedish. The focus of the present study, however, is not these individuals’ acquisition of the Swedish language but their experiences of friction between differing ways of evaluating interaction in the two countries. Several of the individuals’ narrated experiences illustrate how utterances which in Denmark are perceived as witty and humorous are perceived as vulgar and aggressive in Sweden. The individuals’ experiences and the sociolinguistic implications of them are analyzed using notions and perspectives from Pierre Bourdieu – in particular, the notions of linguistic habitus and linguistic market are used – along with the notion of Spracherleben, developed by Brigitta Busch. The study illuminates that even though Danish and Swedish are closely related languages, there are significant differences in the pragmatic logic that prevail in the linguistic markets of the two countries, and that these differences generate critical effects on the linguistic experiences of these mobile individuals.
The failing body Hanell, Linnea
Journal of linguistic anthropology,
2017, Volume:
27, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article explores the relationship between discourse and experiences of ill health. Drawing on narratives, it shows how a mother experiencing difficulties breastfeeding embodies sentiments of ...shame over what she perceives as a failure to perform motherhood. The notions of interdiscursivity and historical bodies are employed to ground the individual’s experience in discursive practices and to argue that shame is a sentiment that arises in the rupture of biopolitical ideologies construed in those practices. Expressing shame becomes a resource for assuming responsibility over failed motherhood, at the same time that it appears to obstruct recovery to smoothly functioning breastfeeding.
Den här artikeln utforskar förhållandet mellan diskurs och erfarenheter av ohälsa. Med hjälp av narrativa data visar artikeln hur en mor som har problem med amningen förkroppsligar skamkänslor över vad hon uppfattar som ett misslyckande att performera moderskap. Begreppen interdiskursivitet och historisk kropp används för att förstå hur individens erfarenheter relaterar till diskursiva praktiker, samt för att föra fram tesen att skam är en känsla som uppstår i disharmoni med biopolitiska ideologier som konstrueras i dessa praktiker. Att uttrycka skam blir en resurs för att ta på sig ansvaret för det misslyckade moderskapet, samtidigt som det förefaller förhindra återgången till en fungerande amning.
In this chapter we examine the value held by national languages, here Swedish, in scholarly career trajectories in non-Anglophone countries. To this end, we analyse the language policies of Swedish ...higher education institutions and the narrated perceptions of two international recruits. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between scientific and academic capital, we argue that Swedish language skills constitute a vital asset in processes of accruing power in Sweden’s scientific world. Hence, as we maintain, English is not all that matters, despite internationalisation being high on the agenda.
•Swedish computer science practices are heteroglossic, not hegemonically regimented.•Unprecedented genres are performed by constructing interdiscursive connectivity.•As an outcome of human practice, ...genres are quintessentially interdiscursive.•But interdiscursivity is not restricted to features such as language, mode or genre.•The repertoire comprises potential semiotic resources that are largely transposable.
This paper investigates the sociolinguistic repertoire and writing practices of a Swedish computer science researcher and his first-time performance of unprecedented genres. Since the use of written computerese Swedish has no historical anchorage in the social practices of his discipline, texts-to-text relationships cannot be drawn from as models of action. Lacking this option, the researcher construes type and token interdiscursive connectivity from iconic Swedish and English texts and from prior discursive events of using academic Swedish orally. The resources comprising an individual’s repertoire are, thus, significantly transposable across languages, modes and genres, when they are enacted in new discursive events.
This thesis explores the communication of health knowledge among new parents in Sweden. Based on three separate studies, the thesis employs a selection of theoretical concepts and methodological ...approaches, mainly originating from mediated discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Study 1 takes a broad view on the object and asks how knowledge circulates and emerges in a particular arena for parental knowledge. Drawing on nine months of online fieldwork on a discussion forum thread for expectant parents, the study shows that communication of knowledge is engendered by entextualizations and recenterings of previous experiences, including encounters with discourse. This fact challenges categorical conceptions that construct some sources of health knowledge as trustworthy and others as unreliable, and thus, potentially harmful. Study 2 narrows the focus to professionals typically perceived as producers of parental health knowledge, namely, midwives who give prenatal education classes. Drawing on a dataset comprising observations of classes as well as interviews with midwives, the study throws analytical light on anticipatory discourse, that is, discourse designed to dictate and influence the future, and elucidates some of the ways in which midwives prepare the participants for their upcoming delivery by discursively constructing links to these future events. Study 3, finally, takes the perspective of a single individual in whose life several forms of communicated parental knowledge converge as she becomes a mother. The study focuses on a period during which this individual struggles with breastfeeding problems. A combination of the notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body is here employed to grasp this experience as shaped in relation to discourse regarding child care and health. Looking at narrative data through this lens, the study shows how this individual connects failure to follow official breastfeeding recommendations to failure to perform child care in an appropriate way. At heart, the study makes a case for the moral loading of health knowledge and cautions against the assumption that authoritative medical knowledge is the only means for taking action that a new mother might need. In conclusion, the present thesis utilizes a combination of theoretical and methodological tools from MDA and linguistic anthropology to enable a discourse analysis of health communication that privileges a view of language in use as accumulating vis-à-vis engendering meaning over time and in relation to social action. Invoking the notion of ideologies of communication, it demonstrates that parents’ knowledge about their children’s health is a non-neutral issue, and that instrumental aspects of parental health knowledge can never be isolated from moral ideas regarding how particular parenting practices are to be carried out. At the same time, the thesis points out that while representatives of institutions of the welfare state may produce messages to communicate health knowledge, the knowledge obtained by individuals is the product of myriad discursive encounters and other experiences, of which the discourse produced by representatives of state institutions constitutes only one share.
At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 3: Accepted.
Despite its proven societal value, humanities knowledge tends to be marginalized in research policy; this has been a topic of debate for some time. In this chapter, we focus on the valorization of ...humanities knowledge, with the aim of comprehending the way this process engenders societal impact. We argue that historical impact stories offer an effective methodological approach for a deeper understanding of such valorization and its subsequent impact. Drawing on three humanities research cases from Sweden, we propose that valorization and impacts of humanities knowledge should be seen as processual and as influenced by societal actors who determine the premises and condition the somewhat unpredictable nature of such impacts. We introduce two concepts: (i) acting space, which involves access to collaborators, audiences, and channels that enable knowledge valorization, and (ii) meandering knowledge flows, which provides insight into the uneven and hard-to-predict nature of valorization. Through these concepts, we wish to provide a better and more nuanced understanding of how knowledge valorization in the humanities unfolds. By doing so, we hope to support humanities scholars to find ways of articulating their own modes of mattering.
