Emma Axinder’s scientific contributions

You must know what you want. Children and the issue of consent in a Swedish educational television series. In this article, constructions of consent are analysed within a Swedish educational television series aimed at primary school pupils. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, two discourses within the program series are identified and examined: a juridical and a neoliberal discourse. Additionally, the study analyses how discourses are expressed and reinforced through e.g. different modalities. Among the study’s most significant findings is that consent is presented as something relatively simple. In relation to consent, responsibility is portrayed as a complex practice where the child is constructed in multiple ways. Thus, the child is portrayed as both a competent and responsible subject, and a subject in need of the adult’s assistance and protection.

In this article, we analyse how gendered subject positions during the Middle Ages are talked about in the history education classroom in primary school. Discourses about gender norms in the past were followed by discourses about how to interpret these differences and injustices, where we see that: i) the interpretations are constructed as being linked to biology, ii) teacher and pupils construct a present ‘us’ who understand better than a past ‘they’, an us who have greater freedom of action to choose for ourselves how to live our lives, and where iii) this is explained by the view that mediaeval people did not understand very well. It is between these discourses that the negotiation of how to interpret gender norms and gendered positions takes place. Negotiations result in a discourse that stresses today’s society as one of equality and equity. These discourses also enable various counter-discourses in which pupils challenged the constructions of women in the past offered by the teacher and textbook in the classroom.