The last outpost of the open society : A discourse analysis of Swedish debates about the public library 2016-2018

The aim of this thesis is to examine how perceptions of the public library are expressed in Swedish debates about the public library during the period of 2016-2018. The debates centered around questions regarding what the public library is, what it should be and to whom it should be for. Two main concerns were formulated within the two greater debates. One was that there is an increasing problem with noisy, threatening and violent groups at the public libraries and the other was that librarians are ideology controlled when making decisions on the media in the library. The main questions posed in this study are: which images of the public library can be found in the debates and who are given the possibility to express these images? The analysis shows that perceptions of the public library as an important institution in a democratic society is consistent through all debates and the discourses within them. But there are different ideas about things that threaten the public library, depending on the view of what the ideal public library should be and what their main concern should involve. Our study also shows that the library has become a place for debates about questions that doesn’t directly relate to the institution as such, but about immigration and the extreme right and that the articles that relate more about that have had far bigger response than the articles about the library as a place and how it should meet new challenges with changes in the media climate and a descending circulation numbers