Hanna Sofia Rehnberg

As a senior lecturer in Swedish, I investigate language use in contemporary society. My research interests include narrativity and storytelling, communication in the asylum process, media discourses and organizational communication (with a special focus on the public sector). In my research, I use linguistic ethnography, text analysis, and linguistic discourse analysis.

Before joining Uppsala University, I worked as a senior lecturer in Swedish (2015–2017) and Journalism (2017–2022) at Södertörn University, Stockholm. I taught courses in sociolinguistics, text analysis, and writing, mainly as part of the education of communications, which I also coordinated during one year. Further, I taught journalism students how to write reports or portraits, and conduct discourse analyses.

My academic career began in 2014 when I received my PhD in Scandinavian Languages from Uppsala University with the defense of my dissertation on organizational storytelling. Before becoming a PhD student and lecturer at Södertörn University, however, I worked for many years as a journalist, among others at Norrköpings Tidningar and Svenska Dagbladet.

I investigate language in contemporary society. My research interests are mainly in the area of applied linguistics. I work in interdisciplinary settings and apply various theoretical and methodological approaches, such as linguistic ethnography, social semiotics, discourse analysis, and narratology.

I am currently working on a sociolinguistic pilot study focusing on the concepts of security and insecurity, toghether with Daniel Wojahn. Our data consists of free text responses from a survey conducted by the City of Stockholm. We investigate how older people conceptualize security and insecurity in relation to the area where they live and make a comparison with younger people's conceptualization.

I also conduct research on public organization’s news production and their use of journalistic methods and formats (Conducted in affiliation with Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research, Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics.)

Recently, I led the research project Asylum Narratives. In this project, we investigated how narratives about asylum seekers are co-constructed by the different actors in the asylum interview: the applicant, the case officer of the Swedish Migration Agency, the interpreter, and the applicant's public counsel. Further, we studied the recontextualization of the oral narratives into written texts reproduced in the agency's case documents.

Earlier research projects

2017–2018: Auditing the school sector: A comparative study of systems of school inspection in Sweden, Finland, and Poland. I contributed with a discourse analysis comparing discursive media constructions of PISA in Sweden and Finland. (Conducted in affiliation with The Academy of Public Administration, Södertörn University, Stockholm.)

2015–2016 The Swedish Transport Administration, a modern agency. I employed a linguistic perspective focusing on organizational communication, identities, cultures, and branding. (Conducted in affiliation with The Academy of Public Administration, Södertörn University, Stockholm.)

My doctoral thesis When organizations tell stories from 2014 focuses on strategic storytelling.