I am primarilly teaching on all the teacher education programmmes ín the course Social relations in school. My main field here is the teacher´s role as a leader in the classroom. I am also responsible for the master's program and teach on several courses in the programme and superwise essays on master´s level. 

My research

I primarilly work within the fields of discourse and narrative analysis. The research area involves child and youth sports and especially talent management and the selection of young sporting talents. My current projects are focusing on fatherhood in youth sports coaching and also on young people, normative body ideals, dieting and eating in social media contexts. 

 

Publications

Kilger, M. (2022). Psychologizing childhood in the reality show Biggest loser: Temporal ordering and narration of a fat identity. Narrative Inquiry. Online First.

Karlsson, J., Kilger, M., Bäckström, Å., & Redelius, K. (2022). Selling youth sport: The production and promotion of immaterial values in commercialised child and youth sport. Sport, Education & Society. Online First. Doi:org/10.1080/13573322.2022.2057462

Kilger, M. (2020). Dad as a coach: Voluntary work in youth sports. Education Sciences. 10(5), 132. Doi: org/10.3390/educsci10050132

Kilger, M. & Blomberg, H. (2020). Governing sports through the brain: constructing cognitive executive function as a way of predicting sporting success. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Journal of the British Philosophy of Sport Association, 14(2), 206-225.  Doi: org/10.1080/17511321.2019.1631880

Kilger, M. (2019). From hard work to grit: On the discursive formation of talent. Scandinavian Sports Studies Forum, 10(2), 29-50.

Kilger, M. & Aronsson, K. (2019). Being a good sport: Players’ uptake to coaches’ joking in interviews for the youth national team. Sports Coaching Review. Online. Doi: 10.1080/21640629.2019.1605727.

Kilger, M. (2019). Talangurval och att prognostisera framtida potential. Tidskriften Ikaros, 15(1), 11-14.

Kilger, M. (2019). Blir du valbar lille vän? I Centrum för barnkulturforskning, skriftserie 2018. . Barnnorm och kroppsform – om ideal och sexualitet i barnkulturen. (ss. 62-74). Stockholm: Centrum för barnkulturforskning.

Kilger, M. & Jonsson, R. (2017) "Talent Production in Interaction: Performance Appraisal Interviews in Talent Selection Camps". Communication & Sport, 5(1), 110-129. Doi: 10.1177/2167479515591789

Kilger, M.& Börjesson, M. (2015) Searching for Talent: The Construction of Legitimate Selection in Sports. Scandinavian Sports Studies Forum, 6(3), 85-105.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Selling youth sport

  2022. Jesper Karlsson (et al.). Sport, Education and Society

  Article

  The contexts in which young people participate in sport are diverse. In Scandinavia, as in many other countries, child and youth sport is mainly organised in non-profit, membership-based and voluntary driven sports clubs. In Sweden, this model is now challenged by commercial businesses providing child and youth sport services. The overall aim of this article is to provide empirically based knowledge about these ongoing and largely unexplored commercialisation processes. The focus of the article is to illuminate how commercial businesses produce immaterial values through the promotion of sport services. In this article, we have explored the cultural and social values produced and promoted by commercial businesses in youth sport. Drawing on the website communications of eight commercial businesses from four different commercial strands, we use the concept of immaterial labour to consider the values produced when child and youth sport is turned into a desirable product on the market. The values generated from the texts on the selected websites are the immaterial values of (i) competence, (ii) individually adjusted training and, (iii) happiness. These values are enunciated differently by the businesses in the different strands. We situate the findings in relation to western social and cultural values and discuss the potential consequences of these value productions for contemporary ideas about youth sport and the way it should be organised. 

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• Talking talent

  2017. Magnus Kilger (et al.).

  Thesis (Doc)

  In sports, there seems to be an eternal interest in discovering young talents and refining them into elite adult athletes. The dilemma of selecting talent, while at the same time ensuring every child´s right to participate, needs to be addressed and have consequences in social practice. This dissertation elucidates the discourse of selection and the process of selecting young sporting talents during final selection camps for youth national teams in football, hockey and floorball in Sweden. More specifically, the aim is to analyze how talent selection is organizationally legitimized, how “selectability” is produced in interaction and how specific narratives are used in success-stories. The empirical material includes research interviews, performance appraisal interviews (between district or national team coaches and the player) and field studies during ongoing final selection camp. Drawing on a discursive-narrative approach, the aim is to investigate how selection is discursively legitimized and, by using narrative analysis, how positioning in talk-in-interaction functions.

  The first article investigates the construction of legitimate selection within the Swedish Sports Confederation by analyzing their organizational documents, sport journals and literature for coach education. The findings show how a specific set of narratives are used to legitimize selection and how legitimacy works both individually to those within the selection system and on a wider arena of welfare politics. The second article investigates the co-construction of selectability in small story-interaction during interviews between the coach and a player in the final selection camp. The analyses highlight how this narrative genre produces certain stories and preferred positions. The third article analyzes how the young participants, in research interviews during final selection camp, uses discursively shared narratives to produce personal stories of success. The findings illustrate how the personal stories of success are balancing the dilemmatic space, positioning yourself as outstanding and at the same time appear a humble team player.

  The principal contribution of this dissertation is to show how talent is organizationally legitimized and how selectability is produced in interaction, as well as illustrate how specific stories are used in stories of success. This work investigates the discursive framework for selection and how rationalities for talent selection are produced (and reproduced) and co-constructed in narrative interaction. In this apparatus of selection it takes more than physical talent to be chosen; it takes talking talent.

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• Talent Production in Interaction

  2017. Magnus Kilger, Rickard Jonsson. Communication & Sport 5 (1), 110-129

  Article

  In sports, there is an extensive interest in identifying and selecting talented children in order to develop elite adult athletes. The process of selecting and screening talents involves not only physical and technical skills but also efforts to find adequate personality traits. Therefore, different types of performance appraisal interviews (PAIs) are becoming increasingly common within the field. Departing from fieldwork in two selection camps for Swedish youth national teams in soccer and hockey, we will take a closer look at the PAIs employed during these camps. This article takes on a narrative approach, emphasizing PAI as a narrative genre and a framework for a specific form of interaction. Our findings show how eligibility is performed in interaction through following three practices: (i) showcasing gratitude without tipping into flattery, (ii) using temporality as a way of displaying developmental potential, and (iii) adopting the role of the self-reflecting subject. This genre of interviews not only produces certain practices but also preferred subject positions and narratives. The PAI is thus a narrative genre where the players are encouraged to perform talent in order to appear selectable.

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• Searching for Talent

  2015. Magnus Kilger, Mats Börjesson. Scandinavian Sports Studies Forum 6, 85-105

  Article

  This article analyzes talent selection within Swedish Sports. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which this process of legitimacy is produced in the case of children and adolescents. The article involves a discourse analytical approach where organizational policy documents, annuals for operation, educational coach literature constitute the corpus of data. The aim is to document how problems of legitimizing talent selection are handled within the organization through the use of different discursive repertoires. The purpose is to deconstruct explicit statements and underlying suppositions through with the current process of selection is legitimized.

  The research material allows us access into how the process for talent selection constitutes a significant part of a discursive apparatus of selection. In order to make the process of selection appear neutral, discursive work is played out in order to make the process appear fair and unbiased. Furthermore, this article shows how the production of the legitimate selection works in two directions, both individually and politically. The process of selection is being rhetorically displayed as legitimate to those within the system, as well as a Swedish egalitarian welfare politic at large.

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• Talent stories in youth sports

  2017. Magnus Kilger. Narrative Inquiry 27 (1), 47-65

  Article

  Success stories are a frequently investigated genre of shared cultural narratives. This paper will pay particular attention to success stories in sports and investigate how young participants in selection camps in soccer and hockey are using a set of shared narratives in order to produce their personal stories of success. By looking at narratives-in-interaction in this specific context, these interviews are investigated as a narrative genre. The analysis shows how a set of shared narratives are used in storylines in order to legitimize the personal story of success and how a number of dilemmatic spaces are addressed. This study shows how personal success stories are intimately tied to “discursively shared narratives” and how this context constitutes a specific narrative framework.

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• Kaxigt och ödmjukt i unga talangers framgångsberättelser

  2017. Magnus Kilger. Svensk Idrottsforskning

  Article

  Ödmjukhet är viktigt i berättelsen om sin egen idrottsframgång. Hos dagens unga idrottstalanger finns även andra sätt att göra sig valbar – att framhålla sig själv som exceptionellt bra.

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• Looks, Liveliness, and Laughter: Visual Representations in Commercial Sports for Children

  2023. Jesper Karlsson (et al.). International Journal of Sport Communication 16 (2), 178-186

  Article

  In contemporary society, visual information is influential, not least when businesses are communicating with potential customers. It represents and influences how people understand phenomena. In sports, much attention is directed toward how media represent elite sports and sport stars. Less attention is directed toward children’s sports. The aim of this article is to explore and analyze visual representations of children on sport businesses’ websites. The sample contained 697 images of sporting children, on which an interpretative content and discourse analysis was conducted. The study shows that the ideal customer emerging on these sites is a White, physically active, able, and slim boy or girl. Consumer culture seems to reproduce and preserve existing normative frameworks rather than producing alternative norms and ideas in children’s sport. Moreover, dilemmatic images of children both as competent and as innocent develop, displaying a childhood that should be both joyful and active but also safeguarded.

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• Psychologizing childhood in the reality show Biggest Loser: Temporal ordering and narrating a fat identity

  2023. Magnus Kilger. Narrative Inquiry 33 (1), 91-111

  Article

  Obesity and overweight are central issues in contemporary western societies, and the public debates in media are extensive. This paper investigates stories from participants in the reality TV-show Biggest Loser, and how the participants invoke temporal identity changes and childhood traumas to produce discursively accepted narratives about the causes for being obese. This study analyses personal stories about being overweight, and narratives of living a life of obesity. The findings illustrate narrative trajectories in personal stories used to explain overweight within a contemporary therapeutic discourse, and how the participants use chronology and childhood as narrative resources to explain their obesity. These narratives do not only produce preferred explanatory narrative elements, but also highlight that a number of psychologized explanatory storylines must be used in order to produce a culturally valid and discursively accepted personal obesity-narrative.

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Show all publications by Magnus Kilger at Stockholm University