Speaking on behalf of oneself and others: Negotiating speaker identities in journalistic discourse on refugee activism in Sweden

Abstract

Journalism has an important role in making political participation visible to the public. In representing the voices of the public, journalism produces discourses on democratic engagement that tell us a great deal about the norms of how these discourses conceive of practices of political engagement. The aim of this article is to study the ways in which speaker identities are given to and taken by migrant activists participating in Swedish radio interviews. Employing Goffman’s concept of footing, this article shows that there are conflicting speaker identities that the activists are adopting and are given by the framework of the radio interviews. The main conflict in how the speaker identities are made up is based on the negotiations around how the activists are talking about themselves or about others. The article further shows how talking about others in a public discourse such as journalism requires speakers to make difficult choices in how to represent oneself as a speaker, and that such choices might stand in conflict with a news discourse’s preferred authentic and experiential identity of its sources.