My research focuses on masculinity, sexuality, ethnicity/race, age, and language use. Using a linguistic ethnographic approach, often combined with a performativity perspective, as well as narrative- and discourse analysis of talk in interaction, I investigate the construction of identities in young people's everyday lives.Drawing on critical humor studies, I also explore humor and affect in peer interactions. 

Other key areas of interest include narratives of boys failure and underachievement in school, the construction of Swedishness in class rooms, representations of anti-racism in media and everyday conversation, queer perspectives on temporality, and analyses of language ideologies and contemporary urban vernaculars—often referred to as “Rinkeby Swedish.”

Together with Bente A. Svendsen, Jonsson is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture(2023).

Selected publications

Jonsson, Rickard & Franzén, Anna G. (2025) Excluding unlaughter. Humor as affective practice in a youth detention home for boys. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Franzén, Anna G. & Jonsson, Rickard (2024). Banal humor and social order. Overlooked affects in staff interaction with incarcerated boys. Incarceration.

Wiksten, Martina; Jonsson, Rickard & Franzén Anna, G (Accepted) "If you want some pussy, give us freedom". Girls' taboo-breaking humor between subversive and normative. Gender and Language.

Franzén, Anna G.; Jonsson, Rickard & Sjöblom, Björn (2021). Fear, anger and desire: affect and the interactional intricacies of rape humor on a live podcast. Language in Society, 50(5): 763-786.

Jonsson, Rickard (2018): Swedes Can’t Swear: Making Fun at a Multiethnic Secondary School, Journal of Language, Identity & Education

Jonsson, Rickard (2018) “Handling the Other in Anti-racist Talk . Linguistic ethnography in a prestigious Stockholm upper secondary school”. In S Hållsten and Z Nikolaidou  (eds). Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication Capturing linguistic and cultural diversities Södertörn: Södertörn Discourse Studies 7 

Jonsson, Rickard (2015). Värst i klassen. Berättelser om stökiga pojkar i innerstad och förort. Stokholm: Ordfront.

Jonsson, Rickard (2014). Boys’ anti-school culture? Narratives and school practices. Journal of Anthropology and Education Quarterly. ​

Milani, Tommaso & Jonsson, Rickard (2012). Who's afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Public debates and school practices. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.Vol. 22, Issue 1: 44–63.

Jonsson, Rickard (2007). Blatte betyder kompis. Om maskulinitet och språkanvändning i en högstadieskola. Stockholm: Ordfront.

Interview

Boys' Anti-School Culture, Rickard Jonsson

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Banal humour and social order: Overlooked affects in staff interaction with incarcerated boys

  2024. Anna Franzén, Rickard Jonsson. Incarceration

  Article

  Correctional institutions such as youth detention centres are highly emotional places, yet there are only a few studies of youth in locked institutions that take emotions as their starting point, and those who do primarily focus on explosive affects. Drawing on video ethnographic data from a Swedish youth detention home, this study highlights a mild form of joking, what we call ‘banal humour’, employed by staff and youth as a form of affective practice. Grounded in critical humour studies and affect theory, the paper demonstrates how banal humour contributes to maintaining positive affects, and to mitigate both anger and embarrassment, while simultaneously constructing social order and producing desirable subjectivities in the detention centre.

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• The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture

  2024. .

  Book (ed)

  The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture offers the first essential grounding of critical youth studies within sociolinguistic research. Young people are often seen to be at the frontline of linguistic creativity and pioneering communicative technologies. Their linguistic practices are considered a primary means of exploring linguistic change as well as the role of language in social life, such as how language and identity, ideology and power intersect.

  Bringing together leading and cutting-edge perspectives from thought leaders across the globe, this handbook:

  addresses how young people’s cultural practices, as well as forces like class, gender, ethnicity and race, influence languageconsiders emotions, affect, age and ageism, materiality, embodiment and the political youth, as well as processes of unmooring language and placecritically reflects on our understandings of terms such as ‘language’, ‘youth’ and ‘culture’, drawing on insights from youth studies to help contextualise age within power dynamicsfeatures examples from a wide range of linguistic contexts such as social media and the classroom, as well as expressions such as graffiti, gestures and different musical genres including grime and hip-hopProviding important insights into how young people think, feel, act, and communicate in the complexity of a polarised world, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture is an invaluable resource for advanced students and researchers in disciplines including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, multilingualism, youth studies and sociology.

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• “A THIIIEF!”: Humour and affect at a detention home for young men

  2023. Anna G. Franzén, Rickard Jonsson. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture, 48-61

  Chapter

  Total institutions such as detention homes or prisons are inevitably highly emotional places, and studies have illuminated the many negative affects circulating such as pain, aggression and sadness, often conceptualized as part of a construction of (hyper-)masculinity. This chapter draws on video-ethnographic data from a Swedish detention home for boys, in order to investigate, not only these negative affects, but also those of joy and playfulness in the incarcerated boy's humorous interactions. The chapter offers an overview of research on humour and laughter in interaction. Drawing on Wetherell's ( 2013 ) notion of affect as both an embodied and a social meaning-making practice together with Ahmed's ( 2014 ) thoughts on emotions as performative, the analysis explores the boys’ use of humour practices such as stylizations. The analysis illuminates how humour practices produce particular social hierarchies and social order through both laughter and unlaughter, as well as reproduce affective norms in line with previous findings on “hypermasculine” emotion work. However, the use of humour also allows for the boys to enact less tough affective practices such as joyfulness and intimacy between male friends. At the same time, through these humour practices, the participants play with various identity positions linked to age, criminality and masculinity.

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• Speaking Ortensvenska in Prestigious Spaces: Contemporary Urban Vernacular and Social Positioning at an Inner-city Stockholm School

  2022. Hannah Botsis, Mari Kronlund Rimfors, Rickard Jonsson. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 21 (2), 67-82

  Article

  This article investigates how a contemporary urban vernacular (CUV) called Ortensvenska is used for social positioning at a prestigious inner-city Stockholm school. Previous studies have indicated that CUV is often a feature of those on the societal margins, but little research has focused on prestigious spaces where high-achieving students challenge these stereotypes. Drawing on linguistically oriented ethnographic fieldwork among students at a prestigious school, we show how Ortensvenska is used to construct space, class, and identity in everyday school life. It was found that the use of Ortensvenska maintains social asymmetries between class, ethnicity, and place among students at the school. The paper also shows how these linguistic practices blur a fixed separation between languages, styles, and places. We suggest, therefore, that space plays an important role in the analysis of youths' language practices.

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• Narrativ analys

  2021. Rickard Jonsson, Mats Börjesson. Kvalitativa metoder helt enkelt!, 257-281

  Chapter

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• Making the threatening other laughable

  2020. Rickard Jonsson, Anna Gradin Franzén, Tommaso M. Milani. Language & Communication 71, 1-15

  Article

  The threatening young man who speaks Rinkeby Swedish has become a culturally recognizable ‘figure of personhood’ (Agha, 2007) of linguistic and ethnic otherness in Sweden. Drawing upon Billig's theory of humour, we illustrate how this characterological persona is not monolithic; nor does it remain uncontested but is constantly being (re)negotiated in the media. By drawing attention to those humorous performances that rhetorically make fun of entrenched stereotypes, the article explores the subversive, as well as disciplinary, potentials of this kind of humour. Read together, the examples in this article indicate that the ‘exemplary speaker’ (Androutsopoulos, 2016) of Swedish contemporary urban vernaculars can be laughed at and with but cannot easily be fixed into a unified homogenous figure.

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• Fear, anger and desire: Affect and the interactional intricacies of rape humor on a live podcast

  2020. Anna G. Franzén, Rickard Jonsson, Björn Sjöblom. Language in society (London. Print) 50 (5), 763-786

  Article

  Aggressive, sexist humor is often understood as expressions of inner, misogynist attitudes. This article, however, investigates rape humor as a collective and interactive phenomenon. Drawing on an infamous Swedish podcast episode, we illuminate rape humor in terms of affect, desire, and repression (Butler 1987; Billig 1999), and as such, how taboo-breaking arouses both pleasure and fear among the participants. The analyses detail affective practices that both promote and discipline affects. The men in the group interpellate one of the participants as a clown, someone whose taboo-breaking they interactionally support and simultaneously distance themselves from. The article concludes that affects, like subject positions, are interpellated in interaction. Building on Wetherell’s (2013) understanding of affect as both discursive and embodied, we suggest a reintroduction of repression/desire into a discursively oriented framework. 

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• Youth Language

  2019. Rickard Jonsson, Henning Årman, Tommaso M. Milani. The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography, 259-272

  Chapter

  This chapter addresses research on youth language in linguistic ethnography. It explains the value of researching young people’s language for understanding language variation and language change, focussing specifically on work on urban youth styles in multilingual settings in contexts of migration. The chapter starts by defining the term ‘contemporary urban vernacular’ and arguing for its value in referring to youth language practices. It provides a historical overview of work on youth styles, identifying a shift from a more structuralist approach to the more practice-oriented perspective which has now become the dominant paradigm. It identifies critical issues and debates in the field, including problems associated with the labels used for youth language varieties, and the role of sociolinguistic researchers themselves in enregistering youth styles as indexical of Otherness particularly with relation to ethnicity and gender. Three current research areas are then discussed: the study of language ideology and the enregisterment of contemporary urban vernaculars; research which aims to move beyond bounded conceptualisations of language, developing the concept of everyday languaging; and research which locates youth styles in relation to global flows. Future directions identified include the potential for more work focussing on humour, and developing attention to space and mobilities.

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• Swedes Can’t Swear

  2018. Rickard Jonsson. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 17 (5), 320-335

  Article

  During the last decade, Sweden has witnessed a significant increase in public attention concerning the following interrelated linguistic phenomena: (a) a linguistic style labelled “Rinkeby Swedish,” (b) specific “Rinkeby Swedish words” that have been perceived as disparaging in Swedish public debate, and (c) a specific young male immigrant identity indexed by this linguistic style. Drawing on ethnographically collected data and naturally occurring talk in a multi-ethnic Swedish upper secondary school, this article examines a possible shift in language ideology, whereby tabooed words and urban youth styles are not dismissed by the school institution but are incorporated in teaching activities. Furthermore, it is argued that there are reasons to look for other interactional accomplishments than solely identity in the use of urban youth styles. The article shows how identity may be used as a resource in the construction of social hierarchies as well as interactional enjoyment among some male students.

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• Handling the Other in Anti-racist Talk

  2018. Rickard Jonsson. Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication, 15-39

  Chapter

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• Talent Production in Interaction: Performance Appraisal Interviews in Talent Selection Camps

  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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• Shooting the subversive: when non-normative linguistic practices go mainstream in the media

  2015. Tommaso M. Milani, Rickard Jonsson, Innocentia J. Mhlambi. Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st century, 119-138

  Chapter

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• Communicating and hand(ling) technologies: everyday life in educational settings where pupils with cochlear implants are mainstreamed

  2015. Ingela Holmström, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Rickard Jonsson. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25 (3), 256-284

  Article

  Different technologies are commonly used in mainstream classrooms to teach pupils who wear surgically implanted cochlear hearing aids. We focus on these technologies, their application, how pupils react to them, and how they affect mainstream classrooms in Sweden. Our findings indicate that language ideologies play out in specific ways in such technified environments. The hegemonic position wielded by adults with regard to the use of technology usage has specific implications for pupils with cochlear implants.

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• Värst i klassen

  2015. Rickard Jonsson.

  Book

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• Boys' Anti-School Culture?

  2014. Rickard Jonsson. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 45 (3), 276-292

  Article

  Boys' underachievement and oppositional behavior in school has for a long time been the target of various public debates. Drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in two Swedish secondary schools, this article explores how the influential theory of boys' anti-school culture can be interpreted as a master narrative that is reproduced, but also contradicted and subverted, by students and teachers in social interaction within local school contexts.

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• Andra män: Maskulinitet, jämställdhet och normskapande

  2012. .

  Book (ed)

  Sverige är världens mest jämställda land, med världens mest jämställda män. Åtminstone framställs det ofta så, både i offentlig debatt och i vardagliga samtal. Denna bild av den normale svenska mannen upprätthålls dock genom att något annat - eller någon annan - skapas som avvikande, annorlunda, obegriplig eller sjuk.

  I den här antologin diskuteras hur det som uppfattas som goda handlingar används för att representera det gemensamma, medan våldsbrott, kvinnomisshandel och sexism förklaras som ett verk av Andra män. Är det därför som män som misshandlat kvinnor har så svårt att se sig själva som kvinnomisshandlare? Är det därför som fördomsfulla stereotyper av invandrarmän används som förklaring till brott eller sexism?

  Hur kommer det sig i så fall att även feministiska män skapas som avvikande? Och vilka föreställningar utmanas egentligen när äldre män beskriver sina växande bröst som sexuellt laddade och njutbara? Varför kan män med funktionsnedsättning inte debattera hjälp till sex utan att ses som kvinnoförtryckare? Eller varför är pedofilen så närvarande i samtal mellan unga män på ett behandlingshem, medan mäns sexuella våld mot barn är så frånvarande i svenska diskussioner om mäns föräldraskap och män i barnomsorg?

  I Andra män diskuterar forskare från antropologi, genusvetenskap, socialt arbete, sociologi och ungdomsvetenskap hur Andra män pekas ut som avvikande, men också hur dessa män hanterar utpekandet.

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• Who's afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, Complicity, Resistance

  2012. Tommaso Milani, Rickard Jonsson. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22 (1), 44-63

  Article

  Over the last 30 years, linguistic practices of young people in highly dense urban environments in Sweden (also called Rinkeby Swedish) have become something of a Foucauldian conundrum: a phenomenon to be investigated, a problem to be regulated. The present article will explore the dynamic interplay between the ideologies and practices with regard to Rinkeby Swedish. The article will focus on (1) a panel debate that took place in the context of the annual School Forum (Skolforum) in Stockholm in 2009, and (2) a few school interactions among those adolescents whose linguistic practices have generated so much public concern. The main argument of the article is that both the public debate and the school practices are examples of stylized performances in which the participants simultaneously reproduce and complexify or resist dominant language ideologies, together with the (local) cultural meanings and stereotypes associated with them. [youth styles, ethnicity, parody, language ideology, Rinkeby Swedish]

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• Incomprehensible language?: Language, ethnicity and heterosexual masculinity in a Swedish school

  2011. Tommaso Milanin, Rickard Jonsson. Gender and Language 5 (2), 241-269

  Article

  In the Swedish context, the discursive regime about linguistic phenomena is characterized by a 'matrix of intelligibility' (Butler 1999) that promotes images of linguistic practices among adolescents in the suburbs not only as deviant and incomprehensible, but also as essentialized traits of ethnic Otherness, social and educational problems and, more rcently, of an agressive masculinity embodied in sexist and homophobic behaviour. Unlike dominant media representations which depict such linguistic practices as unintelligible as well as inherently sexist and homophobic, the aim of present article is to take a queer stance and illustrate how ethnic insults, gay innuendos and mysoginist talk are meaningful in the sense that they constitute a rich pool of interactional resources that allow the young men in our study to actively partake in the negotiation of a 'local masculine order' (Evaldsson 2005) in which positions of power, authority and solidarity are enacted and/or contested.

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Show all publications by Rickard Jonsson at Stockholm University