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This paper problematises ideological assumptions about journalism’s epistemic authority among Swedish media professionals in relation to notions of post-truth. The study is based on qualitative interviews with journalists who are active in the Swedish news industry. The concept of discursive logics is applied to showcase how journalism is understood and experienced by journalists themselves during an alleged truth crisis. This paper analyses how journalistic practices and ideals are perceived to be disrupted by an ongoing truth crisis and how such practices are envisioned in the future. This paper identifies two major discursive logics in which these disruptions are manifested. The journalists conceived of new techno-political infrastructures in the media as a horrific fantasy threatening their work practices. The second logic is the beatific fantasy of truth-seeking journalism in current times. Post-truth represents a threat against journalism in a double-edged way: first by creating mistrust in established media, and second because, when attempting to counteract fake news through fact checking, the journalist is instead positioned as an activist or a debater.

Vi lever i det som har kallats postsanningens tidevarv - en tid då falska nyheter, faktaresistens och konspirationer präglar samhällsdebatten. Samtidigt krävs att starkare bevis för att kunskap ska erkännas som legitim. I denna spänning formas det som kallas en sanningskris. I Sanningskris - Det postfaktiska samhället och medielandskapets förändringar samlas forskare och skribenter från humaniora och samhällsvetenskap för att undersöka vad som egentligen står på spel. Här diskuteras allt från klimatförnekelse, museers kunskapsroll och abortmotståndets sanningsanspråk till mytavslöjanden på Tiktok och konspirationsteorier om socialtjänstens arbete. Boken erbjuder inga enkla svar - men den öppnar upp för en djupare förståelse av hur kampen om kunskap och sanning formar vår samtid. 

The last decades have witnessed a widespread rise in populist, right-wing, anti-gender movements targeting gender-equality politics and gender studies throughout Europe. While the situation for Swedish gender studies remains relatively stable, with institutionalized gender departments, this paper focuses on how Swedish gender studies scholars conceive of their situation and the status of gender studies in the current era. Through an interview study drawing on the concept of “affective atmosphere”, the article explores how the anti-gender discourse induces a precarious situation that produces a sense of apocalypse and a crisis of hope for gender studies. As such, the anti-gender discourse calls upon scholars to react and engage. In the interviews, the future of gender studies was discussed as being at risk, while at the same time the interviewees described gender studies as an academic success story. However, to avoid falling into the trap of being either too optimistic or too pessimistic about the current state of the art, the authors argue that the knowledge production of gender studies as such can be reconfigured as a site for resistance, for detecting openings and creating possible pathways into the future that extend beyond the hegemonic neoliberal, authoritarian one.

With the ‘new museology’ in the 1990s, a paradigm shift took place, and more critical and reflexive museology emerged. Characteristic of this was an increased focus on the museum activities themselves, their conditions, practices and ideological consequences. This paper examines the effects that the new museology has had on Swedish museums, especially in the light of the era of post-truth that has led to a questioning of traditional authorities, including museums. What forms of ideal of knowledge, ambitions and reflexivity characterize museums of today? What does the new museology mean in relation to the era of post-truth?

The study is based on qualitative interviews with Swedish museum directors, and the findings show that they apply different forms of reflexivity to describe the museums’ activities (epistemological, ontological and critical reflexivity). The findings also illustrate that the reflexive museology is problematic in relation to the era of post-truth, because it can reinforce the tendencies that it claims to counteract. 

In this paper, we engage with five Swedish universities’ discursive articulation of, and responses to, an alleged post-truth crisis in communication, aimed at the public. Taking discourse theory as our point of departure, the aim is to analyse how universities are trying to maintain or restore trustworthiness against a backdrop of problems with fact resistance, fake news, and mistrust in academic institutions. The dilemma for universities is how to counteract post-truth without falling into the trap of returning to a realist paradigm, with its strict notions of truth and objectivity. The paper shows how public events are characterised by a crisis rhetoric, a dislocation, together with imaginaries of both external and internal threats of disorder, which convey a narrow and simplified understanding of scientific knowledge as objective and neutral. ‘Defenders of truth’ seem to foreclose any discussion by deeming knowledge relativism an irrational and dangerous position that fuels arguments claiming a truth crisis. A conclusion is that universities risk increasing polarisation, rather than trying to tackle problems of trustworthiness. The authors argue that, instead, universities need to be attentive to matters of democracy, power, and privilege, as well as a plurality of epistemological ideals, when discussing the so-called post-truth crisis.

The focal point of this chapter is surveillance practices in relation to social media influencers and digital marketing. The aim is to examine how the idea of surveillance can be expanded to include both social and technological aspects that work at individual, peer, and top-down levels. Drawing on examples from the Swedish influencer industry, we discuss and problematise how surveillance can be understood in such a context and how different dimensions of surveillance are manifested, exploited, and contested. The chapter concludes that participatory and gendered peer- and self-surveillance are an inherent part of influencer culture, and that the commercial success of influencers depends upon these practices. Similarly, platform surveillance and data mining connected to digital advertising can be understood as part of a contemporary commercialised surveillance culture that is closely related to both digital technology and the political economy of the influencer industry.