Peter WikströmKarlstads Universitet · Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies
Peter Wikström
PhD in English Linguistics
About
32
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243
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Peter Wikström specializes in computer-mediated discourse analysis, and is interested in language and culture studies generally. He currently works at the Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. He is currently working on a project concerning the reception of public apologies in the #MeToo context and a project on discourses of race and racism in contemporary Swedish mediated publics.
Additional affiliations
April 2020 - present
May 2019 - March 2020
February 2018 - March 2019
Publications
Publications (32)
The aim of the present study is to examine the relation between out-of-school digital gameplay and in-school L2 English vocabulary measures and grading outcomes. Data were originally collected from a sample of 80 teenage Swedish L2 English learners and comprise a questionnaire, language diaries, vocabulary tests, assessed essays, and grades. Using...
This study investigates various communicative functions served by hashtags in written communication on Twitter from a linguistic pragmatic perspective. A tweet containing a hashtag links to, and is integrated into, a timeline of other tweets containing the same hashtag. Thus, hashtags are by default categorizing or organizing; a user of Twitter may...
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 a...
The focus of this study is on how Twitter users construe talk-like tweeting in metalinguistic utterances. In a material of tweets containing or responding to explicit comparisons of tweeting to talking (N=520), a broad range of construals are identified, showing Twitter users associating talk-likeness with, e.g., notions of the textual representati...
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. H...
The deracialization of Sweden is a research anthology that examines issues of race, racism, anti-racism and whiteness in a Swedish post-war and contemporary context.
The anthology consists of 13 studies written by authors from different fields that collectively explore how the concept of race was gradually dismantled and eventually became taboo i...
The deracialization of Sweden is a research anthology that examines issues of race, racism, anti-racism and whiteness in a Swedish post-war and contemporary context. The anthology consists of 13 studies written by authors from different fields that collectively explore how the concept of race was gradually dismantled and eventually became taboo in...
The deracialization of Sweden is a research anthology that examines issues of race, racism, anti-racism and whiteness in a Swedish post-war and contemporary context. The anthology consists of 13 studies written by authors from different fields that collectively explore how the concept of race was gradually dismantled and eventually became taboo in...
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 d...
This is a study of the Swedish debate on statues and monuments to the world-famous Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus that took place during the Black Lives Matter movement breakthrough in the summer of 2020. The purpose is to examine how understandings of race, racism, identity, and history were articulated in the debate. The empirical materi...
Just as everyday social life increasingly plays out in, around, and surrounded by digital and online technologies, so too does language learning. Learning in the digital wilds has emerged as an important area of study in its own right, yet at the same time, the increasing ubiquity of connected personal mobile devices means that learners bring the w...
In this article, we focus on smartphone use initiated by students during lessons, with the aim of deepening the knowledge of when and why this use happens. Our methodological approach is video-ethnographic. The empirical data consists of 20 focus students in 9 upper secondary school classes, comprising 70 h of video material. The results show that...
This paper presents findings from a video-ethnographic project on uses of digital resources in Swedish upper-secondary classrooms, based on video recordings, smartphone screen-capture, and interviews. The paper restricts focus to the use of Snapchat, the most popular social application among Swedish youth, which was found to be extensively used for...
This paper presents findings from a project on Swedish upper-secondary students’ in-class use of the application Snapchat. The focus is on how messages (snaps) are composed, in terms of the multimodal semiotic elements of the snap itself and the socially-embedded action of doing composition. Mobile screen-capture shows the participants communicate...
After a prominent role in public debate in the 1990s (cf. Suhr & Johnson, 2003), the concept Political Correctness (PC) arguably has a new salience today in debates on all levels concerning digitally mediated social justice activism, the entrenchment of nationalist, populist and “Alt-Right” movements, and related developments across the Western wor...
The public apology is a discursive genre that has received much folk linguistic attention in public debate (e.g., Ancarno, 2015), especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement of 2017–2018. Several prominent examples of such public apologies have been characterized as empty apologies, pseudo apologies, or, simply, "non-apologies" (cf. Kampf, 2009)....
The aim of this paper is to investigate how local negotiations of linguistic normativity form part of a structure of civic engagement or political participation in today's socially mediated publics. The public apology is a discursive genre that has received much folk linguistic attention in public debate (e.g., Ancarno, 2015), especially in the wak...
Quotative belike is a construction associated with informal spoken contexts and, especially, with various forms of embodied enactments. This study examines instances of quotative belike in 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 to an...
Late 2017 saw the emergence of #MeToo, a social media-based campaign concerning sexual assault and harassment. #MeToo has resulted in several public statements from high-profile figures accused of transgressions ranging from inappropriate comments to outright assault. Such statements have frequently been treated in journalistic and social media as...
This oral paper investigated aspects of visual expression in Cloud Rap, a particular sub-genre of hip-hop music. Through its foundation in digital media and distribution, Cloud Rap breaks with a norm of authenticity central to most previous forms of hip-hop which have tended to privilege presence, immediacy, and origins. Cloud Rap, on the other han...
This paper presents a pilot study of how social media interactants construct a notion of nonpologies. Nonpology is a neologism sometimes found in social media discussions of what research has called, e.g., “non-apologies” or “quasi-apologies” (Kampf, 2009). Such concepts often relate to a socially recognized genre of “public apologies” (An- carno,...
[This document comprises the introductory chapters and overarching conclusions of my compilation dissertation project, I tweet like I talk: Aspects of speech and writing on Twitter.]
This dissertation investigates linguistic and metalinguistic practices in everyday Twitter discourse in relation to aspects of speech and writing. The overarching aim...
Frequently derided for its banality and superficiality, the everyday writing produced on commercial social media platforms such as Twitter is easy – perhaps too easy – to dismiss. Thought is telegraphic, opinion replaces argument, and prefabricated emoji replace well-wrought expressions of authentic emotion. Far from literary prose, one may sometim...
Presentation on the discursive construction of "political correctness" in a Swedish right-wing populist Facebook group for the language and politics network meeting "Språk och Politik".
The present paper looks at the issue of standardization in L2 oral testing. Whereas external examiners are frequently used globally, some countries opt for test-takers’ own teachers as examiners instead. In the present study, Sweden is used as a case in point, with a focus on the mandatory, high-stakes, summative, ninth-grade national test in Engli...
This study investigates the discursive construction of political correctness (PC) in everyday written interaction on social media. The notion of PC has emerged as a contentious emblem of polarized political discourse in the Left–Right and progressive–conservative interfaces, recently perhaps especially in the light of social media campaigns for soc...
This study relates discourse-pragmatic aspects of the use of the quotatives SAY, BE like, BE all, and GO to the question of the supposed or actual spoken-likeness of written computermediated communication (CMC). 1,800 tokens of reported speech, collected from Twitter, were analyzed in a "constructed dialogue" framework (Tannen, 2007). The results s...
Den här artikeln rapporterar resultat från en pilotstudie inom ramen för projektet Testing Talk (http://www.kau.se/testing-talk). Ett av projektets övergripande syften är att belysa komplexiteten i att bedöma muntlig engelska, ett annat att undersöka hur lärare går till väga när de förbereder och genomför muntliga prov. Fokus ligger specifikt på de...
Projects
Projects (6)
The purpose of this critical race theoretical, sociolinguistic and discourse analytical project is to investigate how the terms race [ras], racism [rasism], and racist [rasist/rasistisk/-t] are put to use and metalinguistically defined, contested, and negotiated in informal contexts of mediated interactions. The project poses questions concerning what discursive contexts the terms race and racism appear in, how they are articulated in terms of denotation and connotation, and how they are received by other interactants in terms of interactional consequences. Furthermore, another aim is to relate these ‘everyday’ meanings of the Swedish r-word to official and institutionalized conceptualizations.
The goal of this project is to explore use of the social application Snapchat by students in the Swedish upper-secondary classroom. It is a social semiotic and video ethnographic project based on classroom camera recordings and smartphone screen capture.
This project is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (reg no P19-0213:1).
The purpose of this project is to identify and analyze discursive practices of rejecting public apologies in the wake of the #MeToo movement, in journalistic mediated interaction and informal social media interaction. These practices are analyzed in terms of how the discourse participants practice a form of folk linguistics , negotiating notions of what constitutes a real apology. Further, the practices are analyzed as a way of doing everyday political participation in the social media context. Surrounding #MeToo, multiple prominent public figures were accused of sexual harassment or assault, and in response made public
statements. These statements were often received by a lay public as inadequate plays at apologizing – as non-apologies. Through case studies employing methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) and digital discourse analysis (DDA), the project will examine, firstly, how the original public statements are designed and delivered, and, secondly, how the reception of these statements as non-apologies is articulated in traditional journalistic
discourse as well as lay social media discourse. The findings are expected to shed new light on the intersection of language and politics at a moment in time when both discursive and political norms are being renegotiated in mediated settings.
