Helena Textorius

I am a doctoral candidate at the Department of Swedish and Multilingualism and began my doctoral studies in the spring semester of 2024. In my research project, I follow a conscript group using an ethnographic approach during their military training in order to investigate how they develop an understanding of their role and identity as conscripts in the Swedish Armed Forces. The project combines multimodal interaction analysis and membership categorization analysis with linguistic ethnography to explore identity-construction work from a participant perspective.

The activities of the Swedish Armed Forces are of interest from a linguistic perspective for several reasons. Institutional language use differs markedly from everyday language, and conscripts encounter this structure and must relate to it in various ways. Furthermore, conscripts’ opportunities to express identity are constrained through, for example, standardized uniforms, tightly regulated tasks, and limited personal time, which foregrounds the role of language in their identity construction. The multimodal dimension is particularly relevant within the Armed Forces, where much information is communicated through resources other than verbal language.

Doctoral activities

Conference presentations

• Svenskans beskrivning 40, 2025: What is typical of language use in the Swedish Armed Forces?
• Atypical Interaction Conference 2025: Asymmetric and atypical interaction as tools for military identity construction
• NORDISCO 2025, Trondheim: Interactional re-construction of the institutionally suggested role as a conscript

Seminars and workshops

• Speech, Interaction and Multimodality (TIM): Data session
• Interaction Seminar: Data session
• Research Group Interfler: Data session
• Higher Seminar in Nordic Languages: Project presentation

Completed doctoral courses

• Academic Writing for International Publication, 7,5 hp
• Teori- och metodkurs, 15 hp
• Lingusitic Ethnography 7,5 hp
• Linguistic Discourse Analysis 7,5 hp
• Summeschool in Linguistic Ethnography 2 hp
• Conference 1 and 2 of the Doctoral School Programme