Positions in discussions about migration

The aim of this study is to investigate and illustrate the local exercise of power between participants in online comments sections of three newspaper articles with different political perspectives on migration and also to motivate and concretize the didactic use potential in SFL-based critical discourse analysis of comments and dialogues in internet-based forums of interaction. SFL and critical discourse analysis form the theoretical basis and with interpersonal analytical concepts as role, genre and attitude it is analyzed how participants position themselves in relation to each other in terms of superiority, inferiority and neutrality and how they legitimize their attitudes and/or positions. The analysis shows that participants primarily take neutral or superior positions but also temporary inferior positions and, in some cases, position other participants as inferior. In the comments section of the article written by a liberal representative, the most prominent participants take the role as highly educated and/or insightful by acting inter alia explanatory. In the comments section of the article written by a Sweden Democrat representative, sarcasm is common among the most prominent participants. The commentaries in the comments section of the article written by a Swedish Green Party representative are largely characterized by strong reactions that are legitimized by discourses based on claims that ‘new arrivals’ benefit at the expense of pensioners or native Swedish young people. The analysis has also shown that the dialogues in the comments sections of both the article by a Sweden Democrat representative and the article by a representative of the Swedish Green Party are often characterized by battles focusing on the opponent’s position, which is not the case in the comments section of the article by a Liberal representative where the conflict rather focuses on challenging the opponent’s values. Local strategies in exercise of power that are made visible include the use of mockery to position others as inferior; to take inferior positions or to impart messages implicitly to increase the possibilities for what can be said with reduced risk of being made responsible and also to make it look like there are more arguments than explicitly reported in order to secure the taken position. The essay concludes by showing how SFL-based critical discourse analysis can be applied in educational contexts. Further research is suggested on what part the role of red-green political rhetoric, on topics that concern migration, plays in the spreading of ideas on the group 'new arrivals' as the winner of red-green policy at the expense of native Swedish citizens