Race in Sweden is an introduction to, and a critical investigation of, the Swedish relationship to race in the post-war and contemporary eras. This relationship is fundamentally shaped by an ideology of colourblindness, with any kind of race talk being taboo in public discourse and everyday language use, and in practice forbidden in official and institutional language. A study of a country which was until recently strikingly white but has become extremely diverse, yet where the legacy of Swedish whiteness co-exists with a radical, colourblind, antiracist ideology, Race in Sweden will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race and ethnicity, whiteness and Nordic studies.

This study concerns discursive mobilisations of race and racism in the Swedish debate on equality data, in the case of a controversial statement made by a Swedish Green Party MP. In March 2019, female Muslim MP Leila Ali Elmi argued publicly for introducing equality data in Sweden, in opposition to prevailing colour‐blind and antiracialist norms. Her statement was controversially formulated in terms of ‘registering’ people ‘by race’, leading to forceful criticism in the mainstream press and on social media, particularly on Twitter. In a material representing this criticism, we analyse discourse participants’ argumentative strategies, focusing on mobilisations of race and racism as acts of subject positioning, performative of a moral identity. Participants positioned themselves as morally righteous, liberal antiracists by virtue of their own antiracialism (Goldberg, 2009, The threat of race . Wiley‐Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ) and colour‐blindness (Bonilla‐Silva, 2010, Racism without racists . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MA), while constructing equality data as a racist practice, and as a threat to a liberal order. They also constructed advocates of equality data, and specifically Ali Elmi herself, as being irrational race ideologues, to be morally condemned for espousing a return to racial thinking comparable to that of German Nazism or scientific racism. The findings point to the exceptional status and character of what we call a colour‐blind antiracialism in Sweden, and further show how far ‘liberal arguments for illiberal ends’ can go in reinforcing a moral status quo and counteracting antiracist reform.

This study addresses normative orientations to smartphone use in Swedish upper-secondary classrooms. We present a Nexus Analysis from a policy enactment perspective of a material comprising ethnographic interviews, classroom video observations, and smartphone screen capture, investigating how a cultural conception of the smartphone as a source of disturbance is negotiated in discursive and embodied social action. Three groups of policy actors – head teachers, teachers, and students – balance competing agendas such as digitalization strategies, popular media narratives, and student autonomy and peer relationship maintenance. There is a tension between orientations to the smartphone as a legitimate resource for socialization and learning in the digitalized classroom, but also as an exception to desired digitalization – a potential threat to the social and disciplinary order of the classroom. Notably, the students display considerable awareness of such tensions, in reflective comments made in interviews and in displayed strategies for managing their smartphones in class.

This study investigates use of the contested term politically correct (PC) in written conversational exchanges on Twitter. PC is sometimes assumed to be entirely a fabrication by conservatives or the far right, not a label that anyone would voluntarily attach to themselves. This study focuses on discursive instantiations of PC that challenge this assumption by construing PC favorably. To this end, a small set of conversations featuring more-or-less clearly positive construals of PC, selected from an initial material of 184 Twitter conversations containing the target phrase “politically correct,” are analyzed in detail. The aim is to see how such construals appear and function in everyday discourse.

Quotativebelikeis a construction associated with informal spoken contexts and, especially, with various forms of embodied enactments. This study examines instances of quotativebelikein a corpus of Twitter data (1,000,000 tweets; 1,113 quotative instances). Special attention is paid to how users of Twitter employ the platform’s affordances toanimatetheir speech reports – i.e. to represent voices, enact body language, or otherwise ‘dramatize’ the speech reports. The aim is to investigate how a linguistic format which is richly embodied in face-to-face interaction gets ‘re-embodied’ on Twitter. The study finds that animation of reported speech on Twitter is visually, and predominantly typographically, afforded. In the material, oral practices are more frequently reconfigured andremediatedrather than directly reproduced. That is to say, even when users are not reproducing spoken utterances, they often employ graphical strategies that are mainly understandable by analogy to spoken and embodied face-to-face interaction. However, users also draw on emergent online repertoires with no face-to-face analogues, such as ‘pure’ typographical play and the recruitment of established online memes. Thus, the findings suggest that orality lingers as a trace, but is not a necessary component, in bringing reported speech to life in a text-based computer-mediated setting.