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Linnea Hanell

About me

I work part-time at The Language Council of Sweden, and part-time with a postdoctoral project connected to SU.

Teaching

When I teach, it is mainly in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and writing. I have supervised and examined BA and MA theses on subjects such as sociolinguistics, learning, discourse analysis, and civic communication. I have also supervised one PhD candidate: Ida Melander at Örebro University (finished 2022). 

Research

My main research interest concerns normative civic information, understood as discourse aimed at shaping behavioral patterns in the population.

Since October 2020, I am working half-time with a six-year postdoctoral project on climate communication. The project, Civic Communication in the Time of Climate Crisis, is funded by the Åke Wiberg foundation. 

My doctoral thesis The Knowledgeable Parent (2017) is concerned with the communication of health knowledge among new parents in Sweden.

In my research I draw on concepts and methods from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. My research is fundamentally inspired by the conceptual framework Mediated Discourse Analysis. 

Recent publications

Blåsjö, M., Christensson, J. & Hanell, L.. 2024. Medierad diskursanalys: Att studera nexus mellan språkbruk och handling [Mediated discourse analysis: Studying the Nexus between Language and Action]. Studentlitteratur.

Perez Vico, E., Sörlin, S., Hanell, L. & Salö, L. 2024. Valorizing the humanities: Impact stories, acting spaces, and meandering knowledge flows. I: Mattson, P., Perez Vico, E. & Salö, L. (Eds.) Making Universities Matter: Collaboration, Engagement, Impact. Springer. (pp. 211–232)

Clarén, A. & Hanell, L. 2023. Det gröna språket på den blågula språkmarknaden: Språkliga erfarenheter av respekt, trevlighet och artighet för danskar i Sverige [The green language in the blue and yellow linguistic market: Linguistic experiences of respect, pleasantness and politeness among Danes in Sweden]. Nordand 18 (1), 1–16.

Hanell, L. 2023. Förändringens ord: Samtidshistoriska nyord om miljö, klimat och omställning [Words of change: New words about environment, climate and transformation]. In: Nelson, M., Michanek, M., Rydell, M., Sayehli, S., Skogmyr Marian, K. & Sundberg, G. (Eds.), Språk i praktiken – i en föränderlig värld. Rapport från ASLA-symposiet, Stockholms universitet, 7–8 april 2022. (pp. 202–222)

Rydell, M. & Hanell, L. 2022. Language for work and work for language: Linguistic aspirations in the marketing of domestic work. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 275, special issue: ”Spaces of upset in the Nordic region: Sociolinguistics beyond cohesion and consensus in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden”, 89–109.

Salö, L., Holmes, L., & Hanell, L. 2021. Language assets, scientific prestige, and academic power: The efficacy of national linguistic capital in internationalizing career trajectories. In: Apelgren, B.M., Eriksson, A.M. & Strömberg Jämsvi, S. (Eds.), Language Matters in Higher Education Contexts: Policy and Practice. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. (pp. 112–129)

Hanell, L. 2021. Klarspråk som kommunikationsideologi. En länk mellan nordistik och statsbyråkrati [Plain language as an ideology of communication]. In: Salö, L. (Ed.), Humanvetenskapernas verkningar. Kunskap, samverkan, genomslag. Stockholm: Dialogos. (pp. 92–119)

Research projects

Civic communication in the time of climate crisis

The project aims to deepen our understanding of the complex tasks that civic communication has in the transformation to a more sustainable society. The studies included utilize tools from sociolinguistics and discourse analysis to explore the role of language in societal change, and, more specifically, the role of linguistic messages in human action.

Research

Publications

The list is automatically generated and is not complete after 2019. Please see list of recent publications under Research.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Language for work and work for language: linguistic aspirations in the marketing of domestic work

    2022. Maria Rydell, Linnea Hanell. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2022 (275), 89-109

    Article

    Language inevitably plays a key part in the infrastructure of transnational domestic work. Many who work and have worked in the domestic sector in Sweden have Swedish as their second language. The object of this study is to investigate the ways in which this fact is reflected in the marketing of domestic work historically as well as currently. Drawing on two datasets – personal advertisements by job seekers published in a Swedish daily during the twentieth century, and corporate marketing by contemporary cleaning agencies – the study discusses how references not only to language competence, but also to prospective language learning are used in the marketing of domestic work. While the phenomenon of domestic work, especially when performed by migrants, has been a resilient space of upset in the Swedish society for the last hundred years, the article argues that references to language are used to navigate tensions.

    Read more about Language for work and work for language

  • Anticipatory discourse in prenatal education

    2018. Linnea Hanell. Discourse & Communication 12 (1), 3-19

    Article

    This article explores communicative aspects of preparing others, by studying prenatal education classes in which midwives prepare expectant parents for delivery. Data include documentation from classes and interviews with the presenters. This twofold dataset enables investigation into how ideologies of communication figure into the production of discourse. A dominant idea is that discourse can stand in for lived experience in the endeavor to decrease nervousness and fear in the expectant parents. The observation data are therefore analyzed by paying attention to how the expectant parents’ future deliveries are discursively represented. Drawing on the conceptual framework for analyzing anticipatory discourse, the study shows how the midwives largely frame this future as predictable and the mother as highly agentive. When addressing unexpected turbulence, however, the midwives use the opportunity to stress the agency of medical professionals to maintain a representation of the delivery event as generally predictable.

    Read more about Anticipatory discourse in prenatal education

  • Nine months of entextualizations: Discourse and knowledge in an online discussion forum thread for expectant parents

    2017. Linnea Hanell, Linus Salö. Entangled Discourses, 154-170

    Chapter

    The main argument of this chapter is that knowledge is a phenomenon to be understood in the intersection of discourse and action, and that entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) mediates this relationship. Drawing on mediated discourse analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004; Jones 2013), the chapter explores an online discussion forum thread used by over 200 pregnant women expecting a child in the same month. The empirical examples demonstrate how the participants in this thread exchange information, provide reports and contest knowledge. By way of these examples, the analysis claims that a key process in such knowledge practices is the entextualization of prior actions, often from the private life of the participants. Through such processes, a range of transient actions are treated as a unit, such as an experience, that is given a linguistic form. Recentered in the interaction of the thread, the unit functions as a piece of knowledge for others to draw on. In this vein, the discussion forum becomes a resource for the participants to appropriate control over medical knowledge and the biologically and socially turbulent experience of pregnancy.

    Read more about Nine months of entextualizations

  • The Knowledgeable Parent: Ideologies of Communication in Swedish Health Discourse

    2017. Linnea Hanell.

    Thesis (Doc)

    This thesis explores the communication of health knowledge among new parents in Sweden. Based on three separate studies, the thesis employs a selection of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches, mainly originating from mediated discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Study 1 takes a broad view on the object and asks how knowledge circulates and emerges in a particular arena for parental knowledge. Drawing on nine months of online fieldwork on a discussion forum thread for expectant parents, the study shows that communication of knowledge is engendered by entextualizations and recenterings of previous experiences, including encounters with discourse. This fact challenges categorical conceptions that construct some sources of health knowledge as trustworthy and others as unreliable, and thus, potentially harmful. Study 2 narrows the focus to professionals typically perceived as producers of parental health knowledge, namely, midwives who give prenatal education classes. Drawing on a dataset comprising observations of classes as well as interviews with midwives, the study throws analytical light on anticipatory discourse, that is, discourse designed to dictate and influence the future, and elucidates some of the ways in which midwives prepare the participants for their upcoming delivery by discursively constructing links to these future events. Study 3, finally, takes the perspective of a single individual in whose life several forms of communicated parental knowledge converge as she becomes a mother. The study focuses on a period during which this individual struggles with breastfeeding problems. A combination of the notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body is here employed to grasp this experience as shaped in relation to discourse regarding child care and health. Looking at narrative data through this lens, the study shows how this individual connects failure to follow official breastfeeding recommendations to failure to perform child care in an appropriate way. At heart, the study makes a case for the moral loading of health knowledge and cautions against the assumption that authoritative medical knowledge is the only means for taking action that a new mother might need. In conclusion, the present thesis utilizes a combination of theoretical and methodological tools from MDA and linguistic anthropology to enable a discourse analysis of health communication that privileges a view of language in use as accumulating vis-à-vis engendering meaning over time and in relation to social action. Invoking the notion of ideologies of communication, it demonstrates that parents’ knowledge about their children’s health is a non-neutral issue, and that instrumental aspects of parental health knowledge can never be isolated from moral ideas regarding how particular parenting practices are to be carried out. At the same time, the thesis points out that while representatives of institutions of the welfare state may produce messages to communicate health knowledge, the knowledge obtained by individuals is the product of myriad discursive encounters and other experiences, of which the discourse produced by representatives of state institutions constitutes only one share.

    Read more about The Knowledgeable Parent

  • The failing body: Narratives of breast­feeding troubles and shame

    2017. Linnea Hanell. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27 (2), 232-251

    Article

    This article explores the relationship between discourse and experiences of ill health. Drawing on narratives, it shows how a mother experiencing difficulties breastfeeding embodies sentiments of shame over what she perceives as a failure to perform motherhood. The notions of interdiscursivity and historical bodies are employed to ground the individual’s experience in discursive practices and to argue that shame is a sentiment that arises in the rupture of biopolitical ideologies construed in those practices. Expressing shame becomes a resource for assuming responsibility over failed motherhood, at the same time that it appears to obstruct recovery to smoothly functioning breastfeeding.

    Read more about The failing body

  • ‘That’s weird, my ob-gyn said the exact opposite!’: Discourse and knowledge in an online discussion forum thread for expecting parents

    2015. Linnea Hanell, Linus Salö.

    Report

    This paper is concerned with knowledge as an object of sociolinguistic inquiry. Drawing on some key work in mediated discourse analysis, MDA (Jones, 2013; Scollon and Scollon, 2004), we hold that knowledge is, as it were, a crucial aspect of the processes whereby people take actions with discourses. We frame this pursuit by dwelling on the interwoven relationship between power and knowledge, looking into an online discussion forum thread used by some 200 people who are expecting a child in the same month.

    Read more about ‘That’s weird, my ob-gyn said the exact opposite!’

  • Diskurs i handling: Att studera människors handlingar med medierad diskursanalys

    2014. Linnea Hanell, Mona Blåsjö. Analysing text AND talk, 14-27

    Chapter
    Read more about Diskurs i handling

  • Performance of unprecedented genres: interdiscursivity in the writing practices of a Swedish researcher

    2014. Linus Salö, Linnea Hanell. Language & Communication 37, 12-28

    Article

    This paper investigates the sociolinguistic repertoire and writing practices of a Swedish computer science researcher and his first-time performance of unprecedented genres. Since the use of written computerese Swedish has no historical anchorage in the social practices of his discipline, texts-to-text relationships cannot be drawn from as models of action. Lacking this option, the researcher construes type and token interdiscursive connectivity from iconic Swedish and English texts and from prior discursive events of using academic Swedish orally. The resources comprising an individual’s repertoire are, thus, significantly transposable across languages, modes and genres, when they are enacted in new discursive events.

    Read more about Performance of unprecedented genres

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