| dc.description.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. | sv |
