In recent years, Swedish child health services have begun to target fathers by inviting them to individual parental interviews. This study explores the didactic dimension of these interviews as nurses use standardised documents to approach fathers on the ‘tricky’ topic of violence. Using examples from current video-ethnographic research, the paper examines how documents are enacted as ‘didactic objects’ in a care setting, as nurses establish the relevance of education in relation to challenging questions about violence. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s empirical ontology and the concept of enactment, this study contributes to the literature on didactic objects by further exploring the materiality of education in a care setting.

The topic for this chapter is youth agency in research on language diversity and language policy in education. The aim of the chapter is to contribute to an ongoing dialog within sociolinguistic research on how to portray youth as active sociolinguistic agents with the capability to impact their social context and the language political processes unfolding in their everyday life. Drawing on theorizing on youth agency within critical youth studies the chapter highlights key issues like the erasure or fetishizing of youth agency in research on language diversity and language policy in education. Further, it considers how researchers own political commitment affect which young subjects are portrayed as agentic, or not. The main argument in the chapter is that the long-standing debate on youth agency within critical youth studies can provide a more theoretically grounded conceptualization of youth as a social category in sociolinguistic research on language diversity and language policy in educational contexts.

This paper explores youths’ language activism at a Swedish senior high school. Following Cameron (Verbal hygiene, Routledge, Florence, 1995), this paper investigates language activism as ‘verbal hygiene’, with a focus on the social dimension of students’ attempts to change how language is used at the school. To capture how the politically motivated language activism came to produce political subjectivities and delineation between social groups, and also to impact the distribution of agency and voice in the local discursive regime, I combine Cameron’s (Verbal hygiene, Routledge, Florence, 1995) notion of verbal hygiene with recent theorizing on affect (Ahmed in The cultural politics of emotion, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2004; Sedgwick in Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003; Wetherell in Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding, Sage, London, 2012). Inspired by studies of semiotic landscapes (Jaworski and Thurlow in Semiotic landscapes: language, image, space, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2011), the data includes posters and other signage in the high school, as well as recordings of naturally occurring interaction and interviews. The analysis shows how shame is pivotal in the processes of language activism at the school and how this activism, being an emancipatory project, both produces political subjectivities as well as new linguistic normativities and hierarchies.

'Where are all the queers at the school?! I want to hug you'. Thus begins a conversation scrawled on the door to a Swedish high school's student bathroom that will spark a debate among students on whether the word 'queer' should be considered a slur. In dialogue with work on linguistic citizenship and graffiti as a semiotic mode, this article analyses different stages of the unfolding debate. The analytical lens of turbulence captures the interplay of ordering and disordering in the students' efforts to define 'queer'. Youths' linguistic agency works as a struggle for meaning across different indexical orders, illustrating the difficulty of sustaining mastery of identity labels as they travel through discourse.

This thesis is concerned with senior high school students’ language activism and their efforts to navigate linguistic norms and language ideological geographies in contemporary Sweden. Guided by the traditions of child and youth studies (e.g., James & Prout, 1990) and linguistic anthropology (e.g., Bauman, 2003; Duranti, 1997), and inspired by the field of linguistic landscape (e.g., Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011), this thesis explores language regimentation as it plays out in the everyday lives of youth. 

Study I addresses the affective dimensions of language activism and language socialization. Applying affective theory (Ahmed, 2004; Sedgwick, 2003; Wetherell, 2012) enables an analysis of the workings of shame/pride in practices of verbal hygiene (Cameron, 1995) at the high school. Study I shows that shame is pivotal in the processes of language activism at the school, and explores how this activism, being an emancipatory project, produces both political subjectivities and new linguistic normativities and hierarchies. 

Study II draws on work on linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2001, 2018) and graffiti as a semiotic mode (e.g., Cover, 2002; Karlander, 2019) in an analysis of bathroom graffiti. ‘Where are all the queers at the school?! I want to hug you’ was scribbled on the door of one of the school toilets, and the scrawl sparked a discussion, unfolding on the door, on whether ‘queer’ should be regarded as an offensive slur or not. The study of the unfolding debate illustrates Butler’s (1991) point about the difficulty of fixing the meaning of identity labels as they travel through discourse. Furthermore, the analytical lens of turbulence (Cresswell and Martin, 2012) captures the interplay and entanglements of ordering and disordering in students’ efforts to assert power over the terms that in turn define them.

Study III focuses on youths’ negotiations of who counts as an authentic speaker of the contemporary urban vernacular (Rampton, 2015) ‘förortsslang’. The paper explores students’ resemiotizations (Iedema, 2003) and recontexualizations (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) of US political activist discourse as they insert the notion of ‘cultural appropriation’ into the linguistic landscape of their senior high school. This semiotic work is part of the production of a social space and a local discursive regime that structures and polices behavior at the school, including linguistic practices. Drawing on the circulating discourses on cultural appropriation, students articulate criticism of the way middle class youths at the school appropriate the urban vernacular. 

Taken together, these studies contribute to a body of research on youth’s lived experiences by investigating the social workings of language policing and language regimentation among youth. In particular, this thesis contributes to the study of youth activism by underscoring the interplay of a political socialization of youth (Yates & Youniss, 2006) and language socialization (Aronsson, 2011; Jonsson, 2018; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986b). Furthermore, the thesis adds to the long-standing discussion within youth studies on young subjects’ potential to act and assert power over issues that they themselves find important in their everyday lives. The studies show the complexities of situated language activism and offer a more nuanced picture of youth as agentive participants in language policy processes, but also as actors situated in a nexus of forces that condition their subjectivities and thus their ability to act. The studies show that the activism under study is entangled with processes of subjectification and that the youths’ language activism entails a struggle for an authentic voice and the right to define how a progressive ideology should be materialized in everyday language. Thereby, the studies demonstrate the key role that politics of language and language ideology play in the lives of youth. 

This paper explores how national socialist aesthetics and semiotics are regimented within the Swedish Nazi milieu today. In order to treat fascism as contemporary ideology, the article applies intertextuality and provenance as analytical concepts in the analysis of how Nazism is re-emerging discursively. The analysis contributes unique insights, as the dataset consists of extremist discourse aimed at providing members of the most prominent Swedish Nazi movement with guidance on how to embody and express national socialism in their everyday lives. The analysis reveals that common-sense notions about 'a natural life' and mainstream aesthetics concerning an outdoor lifestyle emerge as central expressions of a 'natural' and 'healthy' embodiment of national socialism. This aesthetic finds its ideological motive in opposition to a 'sick', 'Jewish' and 'parasitical' way of living. Mainstream notions are thus turned into vehicles for political extremism.

This chapter addresses research on youth language in linguistic ethnography. It explains the value of researching young people’s language for understanding language variation and language change, focussing specifically on work on urban youth styles in multilingual settings in contexts of migration. The chapter starts by defining the term ‘contemporary urban vernacular’ and arguing for its value in referring to youth language practices. It provides a historical overview of work on youth styles, identifying a shift from a more structuralist approach to the more practice-oriented perspective which has now become the dominant paradigm. It identifies critical issues and debates in the field, including problems associated with the labels used for youth language varieties, and the role of sociolinguistic researchers themselves in enregistering youth styles as indexical of Otherness particularly with relation to ethnicity and gender. Three current research areas are then discussed: the study of language ideology and the enregisterment of contemporary urban vernaculars; research which aims to move beyond bounded conceptualisations of language, developing the concept of everyday languaging; and research which locates youth styles in relation to global flows. Future directions identified include the potential for more work focussing on humour, and developing attention to space and mobilities.

This article analyses youths' commentary on the contemporary urban vernacular Forortssvenska in an inner-city senior high school in Sweden. Combining a linguistic landscape approach with analytical tools from linguistic anthropology, this paper explores how political discourse are articulated in imagery and texts in the high school and refracted in meta-linguistic commentary among the students. The analysis show how the students draw on US-activist discourse as they insert the notion of 'cultural appropriation' into discussions on the use, and policing, of Forortssvenska at the high school. This everyday regimentation of urban vernacular is entangled with negotiations of identity, multiculturalism and space.