Framställningar av svenskhet i media : - En diskursanalys av tidningsartiklar om invandring och integration

Sammanfattning: 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.