Extremism Sorted : Materials from the Extreme right in the Swedish national Collection, Discourse and Practice

The aim of this master thesis is to examine discourses and practices in the handling of materials from the ex-treme right in the Swedish national collection at Kungliga biblioteket (the Swedish national library). Questions posed in this study concern what practices have been used in the handling of the material, the discourse sur-rounding the material and its relation to power structures. The source documents in this study come from the library’s archive records between the years 2000 and 2010. As a complement, the study also uses correspond-ence with librarians active during the time period as well as an interview with an expert on the Swedish extreme right. This study uses Foucauldian discourse analysis as a method and searches for discursive patterns and power structures in the source documents. The essay sees a complex progression in how materials from the extreme right have been handled throughout the time period 2000-2010. In summary, the researched material contains two discursive patterns. Although on opposite terms, they can both be linked to the restrictions of the material. During the time period, a separate collection was set up for extremist material, a collection which is now taken apart. This study argues that “extremism” is a relative term by definition and therefor unsuitable for labelling any material in the long run. This study is a two-year master‘s thesis in Library and Information Science at Uppsala University