Interactive Racism in Swedish Online Media, Press and Politics: Discourses on Immigration and Refugees at Times of Crisis

The overall aim of this research project is to analyse how contemporary racism and xenophobia are moulded in public, including online, discourses on immigration and refugees. As its central object of research, the project will look into how and why racist views become particularly widespread in Sweden at times of socio-political “crises” and how online racism interacts thereby with migration-related opinion journalism and discourses of political actors. Adopting a critical approach, the project establishes how “interactive racism” is shaped in dialogic interaction between citizens, press /opinion leaders and politicians, and how it contributes to a social climate in which elements of racist discourses are becoming increasingly visible. As such, the project breaks new ground as it sets the focus on how racist discourses are shaped in an ongoing interaction across various social fields, and how this interaction facilitates the spread and recontextualisation of racist views as well as 'discursive shifts' related to topics of immigration, immigrants and refugees.

Publications 

Ekman, M. (2020). Anti-Immigrant Sentiments and Mobilization on the Internet. I: Kevin Smets, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn and Radhika Gajjala, The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration (ss. 551-562). London: Sage Publications.

Ekman, M. (2019). Anti-immigration and racist discourse in social media. European Journal of Communication, 34 (6), 606-618. 

Ekman, M. (2018). Anti-refugee Mobilization in Social Media: The Case of Soldiers of Odin. Social Media + Society, January-March, 1–11.

Krzyżanowski, M. (2017). “We Are a Small Country That Has Done Enormously Lot”: The ‘Refugee Crisis’ and the Hybrid Discourse of Politicizing Immigration in Sweden. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 1–21.

Krzyżanowski, M., & Ledin, P. (2017). Uncivility on the web. Journal of Language and Politics, 16(4), 566–581.