Antologin bygger på föreläsningar, presentationer och samtal under Centrum för barnkulturforsknings barnkultursymposium våren 2023. 

Kapitel 9, Självhjälpsgrupper som erfarenhetsutbyte och testa-dig-själv, är skrivet av Fanny Edenroth Cato, Mats Börjesson och Eva Palmblad. I kapitlet beskrivs hur individer samlar sig på internet kring diagnoser och andra problematiska livsomständigheter. Kapitlet fokuserar på hur självtester integreras i dessa sammanhang: hur de är uppbyggda och hur de är tänkta att användas. Oavsett om den enskilda gruppen strävar efter diagnosstatus (som i fallet ADHD), eller inte (Highly Sensitive Persons) eller uppvisar ambivalens i diagnosfrågan (medberoende), så menar författarna att det finns gemensamma nämnare i de logiker som testa-dig-själv-manualer innebär. Teoretiskt intressant är även det faktum att tester i vår tid alltmer formuleras av företrädare för den egna gruppen, att jämföras med en tidigare historia där detta primärt sköttes av vetenskapligt skolade professioner och institutioner.

When discussing children’s leisure-time centers in Sweden, talk about their activities is often couched in terms of meaningfulness. This appeal to «meaningfulness» can be seen as a useful but also a troublesome rhetorical resource. When educational authorities formulate institutional assignments, they must accommodate opposing views and yet meet certain political recommendations. An analytical perspective both informed by Michel Foucault’s writings on ‘governmentality’ as well as Michael Billig’s notion of ideological dilemmas will in this study be harnessed. Principally, this study investigates the ideological tension between democracy and authority, which the governmental authority, ‘The Swedish Schools Inspectorate’, must take care of in its linguistic work. This paper argues that the concept of meaningfulness is used in order to bridge various contradictions surrounding the democracy-authority dilemma.

This article analyzes talent selection within Swedish Sports. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which this process of legitimacy is produced in the case of children and adolescents. The article involves a discourse analytical approach where organizational policy documents, annuals for operation, educational coach literature constitute the corpus of data. The aim is to document how problems of legitimizing talent selection are handled within the organization through the use of different discursive repertoires. The purpose is to deconstruct explicit statements and underlying suppositions through with the current process of selection is legitimized.

The research material allows us access into how the process for talent selection constitutes a significant part of a discursive apparatus of selection. In order to make the process of selection appear neutral, discursive work is played out in order to make the process appear fair and unbiased. Furthermore, this article shows how the production of the legitimate selection works in two directions, both individually and politically. The process of selection is being rhetorically displayed as legitimate to those within the system, as well as a Swedish egalitarian welfare politic at large.

Northern children have been increasingly referred to as competent, participative and influential, called on to protect and produce certain life at times of climate risks. Child–adult relations and the required transition to adulthood are thus transformed by a re-configured ‘biopolitics’. We trace how various collaborative actors invite children to foster life at an aggregate level and illustrate how different age categories are governed at a distance. The results show that pedagogic expertise, in conjunction with sustainability, is mobilized in and by ‘juvenocratic spaces’, where youths are obliged to foster sustainable consumption and ways of living beyond territorial borders.

Depicted as someone without agency, with no free will and completely in the hands of the trafficker, the ideal trafficking victim can be seen as diametrically different from the guilty prostitute. By analysing how responsibility and victimhood are negotiated in forensic interviews with alleged adolescent trafficking victims, this article scrutinises this image by asking how victim-status is handled when questions turn to sex and prostitution and which interactive and narrative conditions, related to agency, stake and interest, apply for talk in this specific institutional setting. Our findings suggest that in order to sort out the "real" victims, the interviewer need to pull apart the two categories victim and prostitute even if there may be substantive problems with this clear-cut distinction since the categories tend to blend together. Further, talk about sex can be problematic for the interactants as it may undermine the victim narrative instead creating a subject with interests.

In this cross-case study we focus on school-based teacher education in Sweden and Finland. Through the use of focus-group interviews with mathematics teacher educators in Finland and Sweden, the study shows that there are substantial differences in how school-based teacher education is introduced and portrayed in the discourse about teacher education and prospective teachers' learning. The school-based teacher education among the Finnish groups is made relevant in relation to several aspects of prospective teachers' learning. In the Swedish groups, school-based teacher education is portrayed as an organizational problem and few aspects of prospective teachers' learning are brought into the discourse. The results cannot be generalized to the two countries but show interesting conceptualizations of school-based education potentially useful for teacher educators and scholars.

Språkvetenskapliga och samhällsvetenskapliga analyser förenas i bokens tre bärande teman: medberoendebegreppets bakgrund och framväxt, begreppets innebörd samt dess anknytning till samhälle, kultur och moral och till diskurser om beroende. I flera olika kapitel analyseras hur ”medberoende” används, tolkas och vad det associeras med i populärkultur, självhjälpslitteratur, och i forum och bloggar på internet.