Covid-19-pandemin, död och självbevarelse - Diskurser i mediarapporteringen av döende och död under covid-19-pandemin i Sverige

Abstract

Purpose and questions: The ambition of this paper is to contribute with knowledge about discourses of death and dying in the postmodern Swedish society. With that intent, the purpose of the thesis is to demonstrate how death and dying emerged in the Swedish media coverage during the outbreak of the Covid-19-pandemic, at the beginning of 2020. Three questions were asked to fulfill the purpose of the thesis: • Which discourses of death and dying emerged in the media coverage of the two newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet during the outbreak of the covid-19-virus? • How do the different discourses relate to each other? • What different types of subject positions are determined by the discourses? Method and material: The thesis is a discourse analysis based on the news coverage of the outbreak of the Covid-19-pandemic in Sweden. The discourse analysis focuses on discourses of death and dying – how they emerged, were articulated, collaborated, and antagonized – in two Swedish newspapers. To seize the outbreak of the pandemic, the study focused on articles between March 16 and April 12. Based on those considerations 41 articles were included in the analysis. Results: The discourse analysis resulted in seven different discourses; the discourse of medicalization, the discourse of rationalization, the discourse of safety, the existential discourse, the discourse of the other, the discourse of solidarity, and the discourse of catastrophe. Concerning the relations between the discourses, it is a dynamic structure of collaboration and antagonization. However, some overall aspects have been found. Firstly, all discourses contain an attitude of selfpreservation, a strategy to understand and handle the aspects of death and dying. Secondly, the discourse of medicalization is the main discourse, fundamentally articulated in the material. Finally, the discourses could be divided into two different formations. One consisting of a quantitative, calculated distancing of death, the other of a qualitative, meaning-seeking facing of death.