To Örebro University

This study analyzes how men's domestic cooking is represented and masculinized in cookbooks, written by men for men and published in 1975, 1992, and 2010, respectively. Departing from the concept of domestic masculinities, it uses the methods of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. It asks: what kind of values and ideas connected to men, food, and the home are realized in texts and images? And how are these legitimized and naturalized? As the study's context is Sweden, a country known for its pursuit of gender equality, the study focuses on how men's domestic cooking has been represented in cookbooks published roughly 20 years apart. The analysis shows that, while the first two books are characterized by a 'real man' discourse and working-class masculinity, the 2010 book represents a masculinity in line with a 'new man image' closely linked to consumption and materiality. However, structurally, there are few differences. Values associated with traditional middle-class masculinities, traditional gender norms, and gendered division of domestic labor are reproduced. Men's cooking is recontextualized as a playful leisure activity. In all three books, cooking becomes another way for a man to appear successful - both in relation to other men and women, and in socioeconomic terms.

The lifting of work restrictions for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens in the EU, in January 2014, encountered much resistance both in European political discourse and the media, as these migrants became demonised and presented as social and economic threats. In this article, we show how the Romanian press dealt with such discriminatory discourses against the Romanian migrants. We conduct a thorough Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of news items published in Romanian press, prior to the lifting of work restrictions, and we argue that the Roma emerged as the perfect scapegoats that could explain the deviant and unruly behaviours ascribed by some western media to ‘Romanians’. We also show how racism toward the Roma, referred here as Romaphobia, invokes non-racial practices and instead builds on a reverse victimhood narrative. Such discourses relate in a broader sense to well-established discursive practices in Romanian context but also to the political climate across Europe which is marked by increased intolerance toward the Roma. It is the mixture of stereotypical discourses and populist rhetoric that makes racism towards the Roma appear naturalised and increasingly more difficult to challenge.

Riding on the rising concern of public health and the growing neoliberal self-care agenda, the food market has witnessed a surge in ‘healthy’ food despite the criticism of this food does not help consumers eat more healthily. A growing interest in CriticalDiscourse Studies (CDS) is how food marketers colonise not only the food discourse but also the broader ideas and values such as health, politics, and environment. Contributing to this growing body of research, we look at one of the fastest-growing food trends, ‘functional drinks’, which claim to target physiological and psychological processes in the body, so that consumers can manage their health and performance. Company websites rely on forms of infographics to communicate how the products work. Adopting the notion of ‘integrated design’ from multimodal CDS, we show how these infographics, drawing on their affordancesare particularly useful in symbolising classifications and causalities which could not be accounted for in running texts. The paper argues that this is a way health and science converge with a neoliberal discourse of self-management and enterprise culture. Given the increased use of forms of integrated design incommunication, more critical discursive work is needed in this area.

This paper examines how snack brands represent themselves as producers of healthy food through corporatestories on their websites. The increased emphasis on health in ‘‘the new public health era” has createda market for products promoted as healthy or with some kind of wellbeing association. Riding onthis trend, many companies have emerged and positioned themselves as providing good food options.Employing the theory of social semiotics and using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we ask the following questions: How do these companies use corporate stories to make themselves appear as a better alternative than their competitors? How do they make their products appear healthy and attractive to consumers? And how can this kind of marketing help consumers choose healthier products? The analysis of 22 corporate stories of healthy snack companies shows that healthy eating is colonized by a moral discourse for marketing and branding purposes. Furthermore, the health qualities these companies claim to have are abstract, symbolic, and commercialized. We argue that these corporate stories provide no meaningful indication as to the healthiness of these products and can mislead consumers to consume less healthy food while having the intention to eat healthily.

This paper examines how protein snacks are marketed as good food choices through their packaging and how these packages reproduce a discourse – what we see as a myth – of the benefits of high protein intake. Research shows that consumers believe high protein food has a positive impact on physical performance and body composition, although there is very little evidence of this. Protein foods and beverages are nevertheless one of the fastest growing sectors in the food market and we now see food companies exploit peoples beliefs by adding protein to food that was formerly seen as unhealthy. Adopting a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) we look in detail at the packaging of a group of snacks that are usually high in fat and sugar but now appear as good food options, particularly through accentuating the protein content. The analysis shows that the packages market these products as an outcome of scientific modern technology, but this is done in playful and comforting ways. This goes along with neoliberal ideas about wellness and demands of an active lifestyle. From these findings, we discuss the limitations of existing regulations as marketing shape and capitalize on discourses of health.

This study, based on Swedish data from three elections (2002, 2006 and 2010) and on a revised version of Clayman's and Heritage's conceptualization of aggressive questioning, examines bias in election campaign interviews with leading political figures. In the first part of the study, the prevalence of partisan bias is explored, and this analysis confirms that such bias does not exist. Informed by Conversation Analysis, a limited number of interviews from the 2006 election are investigated in the second part. This analysis also involves questions scripted by journalists, and it compares both quantitatively and qualitatively the differences between the manuscripts and live interaction. The results question the assumption that bias is solely related to journalistic values and actions. The level of aggressiveness in the interviews is also dependent on how the politicians manage the interview questions.

Through an analysis of news journalism in Sweden, the development of a more adversarial, critical or interpretive news journalism is discussed in this article. A frequent form of politicians’ appearances in the news is in short-form interviews in news stories. Such interviews are often reduced to single turns or answers. The aim of this study is to identify the more communicative techniques used, when politicians’ answers are cut and incorporated into news stories, and how these techniques are related to the roles set up for politicians and reporters. What potential relationships are set up between politicians, reporters and the viewers? Swedish television data from 1978, 1993 and 2003 have been analysed. The analysis shows that in the early period, news journalism appears as a mediator or interrogator. In the latter periods, news journalism appears in an adversarial role. It becomes more of an interpreter or a critical interrogator of politician’s actions.

This study takes as its point of departure the discussion around the mediazation of politics. The media are an essential part of, and play a crucial role for, the reproduction of a certain discourse that, within the field of Media and Communications research, has been branded a mediated or mediatized political discourse (Fairclough 1995a; Chouliaraki 2000; Ekström 2001 Ib). Television and TV journalism have been especially important for the development of this discourse (Dahlgren 1995; Thompson 1995).

One aim of this dissertation is to investigate how TV journalism functions to establish, reproduce or transform a mediated political discourse, i.e. different ways of understanding and talking about politics and politicians. In order to understand these processes I am proposing an approach in which the analysis of text, text production and reception are intertwined. Thus, there is also a second aim, a methodological one, with this dissertation. The intent is to develop and test an approach in which the studies of text, text production and reception are integrated in one form of case study. This integrated approach is also meant to be applicable to other fields of investigation than that of my own study. Two case studies have been conducted within this frame. One study follows what I have branded a chronological design. The other follows a retrospective design.

This approach is founded on the framework for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as developed by Fairclough (1992; 1995a; 1995b). Fairclough suggests that the analysis of media discourse should be a multidimensional one: texts must be related to discourse practice – the practices of text production and text consumption – and to the sociocultural practice of which they are a part. In this work I will argue for an “extension” of Fairclough’s approach, i.e. an approach that, in the study of processes of text production and reception, incorporates ethnographic methods, in this case participant observation and interviews.

To summarise the result of the different case studies, I make the following conclusion:

(1) The day-to-day routinised forms of production and representation which characterises TV journalism as discourse practice can lead to the establishment of such discursive elements in the texts that bring forth negative images of politics. The communicative devices used in TV journalism establish functions in the texts that can have the potential of placing the citizens in a position of suspicion and distrust. Here, two conditions are of special importance. One concerns TV journalism’s beliefs and assumptions of what attracts TV viewers, and the other concerns TV journalism’s understanding of self.

(2) Through the functions that they could carry, the texts produced by TV journalistic means reproduce a mediated political discourse that has a tendency to establish a distrustful position in relation to politics. When “offered” this position by TV journalism, it is easy for the citizens to start doubting the politicians’ motives and abilities.

(3) A mediated political discourse works ideologically in such a way that it reproduces an image of politics which ultimately favours the position of TV journalism in society. It is through the incessant production of stories and narratives about its own institution, serving up an image of a profession and a practice useful to society (first and foremost as an investigator and a critic of the political institutions), that TV journalism can appear to be a useful institution in society. This is a position that TV journalism can maintain and reproduce by hiding its power to construct the world around it.

The aim of this study is to deepen the understanding of how journalists use follow-up questions in political press conferences. This ambition also involves a critical examination of the previous research on follow-up questions in this context. For the journalists, a press conference is a time when they have the opportunity to hold politicians accountable for their words and actions, which is a task often seen as a core democratic function of journalism. By asking a follow-up, a journalist can pursue an evasive answer and perform this watchdog role. In total, 6 press conferences from 2009 with the Swedish Government have been analyzed, comprising 29 sequences with follow-up questions. The analysis is organized around the following questions: How are follow-up turns related to initial questions and preceding answers? In what kind of situations do journalists perform adversarial actions and pursue the politician with their follow-up turn? What other kinds of actions are performed through follow-up questions? An essential conclusion is that follow-ups are not necessarily such prominent indicators of adversarialness as previous research suggests. Instead, a clear majority, 18 of 29, of follow-up uestions are nonadversarial in character and used for other purposes than challenging the politicians’ answers.

Drawing on tools from Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis this paper analyses the editing techniques in a Swedish docu-soap showing that humour is used to ridicule the working-class participants, representing them as slow, inflexible, undynamic and unstylish. The paper places this within broader discursive shifts in Sweden where the rise of neoliberalism requires a dismantling of the welfare state, legitimized partly though establishing the lower social economic groups as morally flawed and themselves responsible for their increasingly disadvantaged situation as social inequalities increase.

This article concerns interviews with politicians taking place on a popular talk show. These interviews are informal and playful in character, and above all are structured around personal narratives of the “real life” or “behind-the-scenes life” of the guest. It is often claimed that such interviews have become more important for the politicians. The approach of the study addressed in the article is influenced by research on conversational storytelling and aims at exploring how politicians' more personal narratives are initiated and elaborated on by the participants. The data are comprised of six interviews with leading politicians on a Swedish celebrity talk show, Sen kväll med Luuk [Late night with Luuk]. The analysis shows that personal narratives progress in close collaboration between the host and the politician, and that this collaboration often aims at exploring the humor potential of the stories and invoking laughter from the studio audience. The main argument in this article is that for politicians an appearance on a celebrity talk show is not such a trouble-free method for self-presentation as is often assumed.

Taking off from the theory of social semiotics and using the methods of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how the communicative affordances of a Swedish reality makeover show, The Great Health Journey, are used to promote discourses normalizing extreme fitness ideals. It is a show that reduces health to body fitness and supports a particular health consciousness gaining prominence today, an ideology here depicted as fitnessism. Progressing the ideas put forward by Crawford (1980, Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life. International Journal of Health Services, 10(3), 365-388; Crawford, 2006. Health as a meaningful social practice. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 10(4), 401-420) with the notion of healthism, fitnessism accentuates the careful submission to strict fitness-related regimes as crucial for a healthy lifestyle. It turns the very fit body into a sign of good morals, indicating the values of self-discipline, self-control, and willpower, personal characteristics seen as crucial in the neoliberal era. But the healthiness of this fitness ideal can be questioned. Rather than serving the interest of public health, fitnessism seems to mainly encourage "aesthetic labour" (Elias et al., 2017. Aesthetic labour: Rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan) and support commercial interests to exploit body dissatisfaction.

During the last few decades, the possibilities and limitations of qualitative media audience research have regularly been discussed in media and communication research. Quantitatively oriented researchers have claimed that qualitatively oriented research is incapable of producing general knowledge. From a ‘radical ethnographic’ point of view it has been stated that such knowledge is more or less useless, while other qualitatively oriented researchers have approached the question of generality in a more balanced way, and argued for the necessity to interpret specific events within a framework of more general theories. But these solutions are not satisfactory. The aim of this article is to suggest an alternative conceptualisation of generality. From the meta-theoretical viewpoint of critical realism, this article states that generalisations have to take into consideration the domain of the deep structures of reality. Qualitative media audience research should aim at producing general knowledge about the constituent properties or transfactual conditions of the process of media consumption.

This paper discusses the role of reality television in the ongoing transformation of Swedish workingclass discourse. This transformation is linked to a neoliberal political project and concerns a shifting relationship between discourses of exclusion and inclusion. The key argument is that working-class people are now portrayed through ‘a moral underclass discourse’ in which the working class is devalued and delegitimized, and given moral blame for their own structural situation. This discussion is based on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of participants who appear to be ‘ordinary’ working-class people in Ullared, a docu-soap that follows the goings-on at, and in the vicinity of a popular, rural low-cost outlet (called Gekås). Hence it puts participants’ consumption and consumer behaviour in the foreground, and these activities are ridiculed through a mode of production best described as the ‘middle-class gaze’. Ordinary participants are presented as flawed or pathological consumers and become signifiers of a morally flawed lifestyle.

This article examines a particular form of popular expertise, one that uses aggressive, face-threatening confrontations as a means of achieving its goals. The specific case under scrutiny is the Swedish home renovation programme The Angry Carpenter (Sw: Arga snickaren), here considered as an instance of what has been labelled belligerent broadcasting. The analysis demonstrates that belligerent outbursts and emotional displays serve essential, but varying functions in the construction of the host's expertise. Belligerence is both a method to achieve epistemic status and for the enactment of expertise. Paradoxically, through his belligerence the host promotes a common-sense theory of good communication. A key lesson to be learned from programmes like this is the curative power of 'tough love'. When nothing else works, belligerence is justified as a method for diagnosing problems, dealing with personal difficulties and restoring healthy households.

Taking a historical perspective (1982–2005) and using a multimodal discourse analysis, this paper explores the performance of ordinary expertise in Swedish cookery programmes. In particular it explores the changing forms of audience address in one particular format, called the novice format, which is crucial to understanding the history of Swedish cookery programmes. Typically this format involves two participants: a presenter who plays the role of a novice cook, posing questions about the ongoing preparation of dishes; and a chef who carries out the cooking, providing expert advice by responding to the questions asked. The analysis shows that over time the performance of expertise goes from taking the form of conversational coaching, to being enacted through small talk, to finally arising through the simulation of an interactional give-and-take between the expert and the viewers. When it comes to the ordinariness of ordinary expertise, this development is paradoxical. In the later series of programmes, when the chef appears more like an ordinary guy, the distance between the expert chef and the viewers is reduced. But at the same time the cooking is decoupled from routines associated with work and domestic chores, and in this sense is becoming less tied to everyday life and more escapist in character.

In this paper we discuss the construction of masculinity and male domesticity in cook books written for men. By treating different types of masculinity as discourse (Gill, 2003), we are interested in understanding how cooking as social practice is recontextualized as gendered discourse. Cooking literature, cooking instructions and cook books can be regarded as coded instructions on how to preform gender identity trough cooking practices (Brownlie and Hewer, 2007). Research has shown that cooking in home kitchens has become masculinized. When adapting to their new domestic duties, men have entered the kitchens as chefs, athletes, entertainers and scientists (Swenson, 2009; Ryan Kelly, 2015). Still, men’s activities in the kitchen are limited, carefully chosen and bounded to certain activity types, and they have less responsibility for regular daily cooking than women (Inness, 2001). 

This study focuses three cook books published in Sweden in 1975, 1992 and 2010. It draws on the principles of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) (Machin and Mayr, 2012; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) and van Leeuwen’s (2008) notion of the recontextualization of social practice. More particularly we explore how masculinity and the practice of cooking in a domestic context is realized in design, texts and images in these cook books. The analysis shows that a personal voice and tone is realized through particular lexical, grammatical and visual features in the books. These features change over time and thus reflect different styles of being male; we see different forms of a “laddish” masculinity in relation to food, cooking and the domestic sphere progressing over the years.

By using a longitudinal design and measuring television content and the occurrence of ordinary television and ‘ordinary’ participants at four different points in time from 1982 to 2011, this study investigates the alleged shift towards ordinariness in the 1990s. Using Sweden as a test case, three research questions are posed: To what extent did ordinary television programming increase during the 1990s? To what extent did the participation of ordinary people increase as a consequence of this shift? To what extent has public service television adapted to commercial competition through broadcasting more ordinary television? The analysis confirms the alleged shift towards ordinariness. Ordinary television and ordinary participants did increase during the studied era, but a key argument put forward is that this shift occurred gradually and that one should avoid using overdramatic epithets to characterise it. The results also suggest that the public service broadcaster (SVT) also moved towards ordinariness but that this change was modest and occurred later than expected in Sweden.

In this paper, we examine how protein snacks are marketed as a healthy choice through their packaging and discuss the cultural meanings of protein that are communicated to consumers via packaging. With the rise of obesity and chronic disease, the EU and many member national governments are promoting healthy diet as the solution to this public health challenge. The new wellness food industry is now a trillion dollarbusiness. Food companies are capitalising on this via reformulating products to appear healthier. One common strategy is adding protein to food that wasformerly seen as unhealthy. This is in line with research that has found that consumers believe high protein food has a positive impact on physical performance, body composition, and weight control. It has been discussed that in the West the modern healthy food discourse has become not being healthy perse but instead linked to multiple possibilities of cultural meaning. What has not yet been carefully explored is how ideas of healthy eating and its cultural meaning are embedded in food packaging. Adopting Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) we look at the packaging of a group of snacks that are usually high in fat and sugar that have been reformulated to enhance their protein content and thereby appear to be healthy food options. We argue that the kind of healthy food messages this packaging creates is often confusing and misleading. The discourse favours profit-driven marketers and might have a negative impact on public health.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to extend the image repair theory by focusing on the largely ignored context of the face-to-face communication. The paper offers an exploratory study of how image repair work is carried out in interviews with politicians in the context of press conferences.

Design/methodology/approach - The paper combines theoretical reflections with two qualitative case studies of press conferences of Swedish politicians. These press conferences were held to manage the challenge posed to the politicians’ public image by the media criticism. The analytical frame employed in this study is Conversation Analysis (CA).

Findings - The way journalists act during interviews and how they pose questions have noticeable consequences for the accused actor´s image repair work. Image repair strategies like "apologizing" and "mortification" during the speech section of a press conference tend to be more effective as they give the accused greater opportunities to take control of the interaction.

Research limitations/implications - Due to the exploratory nature of this interactional approach and the fact that the analysis involves only two cases, the findings must be seen as provisional.

Practical implications - The knowledge of how journalists construct question is of high relevance for crisis communication and image repair work, and therefore of high value of public relations practitioners.

Originality/value - The interactional approach to image repair offers a new theoretical frame for the understanding of crisis management in interview situations. The approach especially highlights the importance of journalists' questions in image repair work. 

Taking off from the Media Talk approach, this paper examines the communicative work of a Swedish sports webcast football show, Superlive,asan emerging form of web-based media format called Web-TV. This analysis is situated in a context in which broadcasting is going through fundamental changes, and broadcasters are rethinking their content in order to face the challenges arriving with recent decades’ technological developments, and espe-cially the fact that television is no longer restricted to being broadcast but can be distributed through the web and be received on PCs, tablets and mobile phones. In this ‘post-broadcasting era’ producers are searching for new ways of reaching audiences through creating new forms of audience address. Superlive is a good example of these changes and how broadcasters now explore the possibilities of producing television exclusively for the Web. The analysis shows that what is taking place in Superlive is clearly in contrast to the performances one could expect in the conventional broadcast. Through the participants’ favoring of an interactional style characterized by informality and spontaneity, this show situ-ates itself as backstage to the conventional forms of airings. As a result, this discursive space implies an interactional orientation to “co-presence” with the audience.

In this paper we examine the changing nature ofbroadcasting in relationship to Web-TV, an emerging form of web-based audio-visualformat. More specifically, we examine a Swedish football programme ‘Superlive’ which uses video clips ofhighlights from on-going UEFA Europa League-games. Drawing on a media talkapproach, we explore how the interactional work of the four participants isorganized and presented in order to construct the show as a ‘backstage activity’.We examine these features through the notion of ‘superliveness’, where a highlyspontaneous, playful and lively interactional style also includes overlappingtalk, instant topic shifts and discussion of personal topics not related to thefootball. Here the talk seems to be produced for and between the participantsrather then for an overhearing audience. However while this seems to break withthe communicative ethos of traditional broadcasting we argue that the participant’sinteractional performance orients to the audience as ‘co-present overhearers’ and ‘activeparticipants’. In summary we argue that this evidences a new andevolving sense of the communicative ethos of broadcasting which is adapted to thecommunicative affordances of the web-platform and the potential behaviour ofthe audience and to the context where media today are consumed.

In the present time, we see a rapid development of so-called cosmetic apps promoted by prominent cosmetic companies. Although there is an emerging market for male consumers, these apps are marketed as technological innovations designed to analyse, rate and evaluate mainly women’s facial appearances through the submission of a selfie. Based on the results generated from the selfie, personalised solutions are offered in the form of recommended products to supposedly help women improve their appearances. Drawing on a critical feminist approach and using multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), the aim of this article is to study how these evaluations are semiotically reproduced and presented to the users. The paper examines in detail how apps convey the evaluation process and transform a selfie into measures, presented through diagrams and charts, that is, how the female face is fragmented and metricised. Coming with affordances of being systematic, exact and scientific, these infographics assign the facial evaluations with meaning. A key argument is that these cosmetic apps are changing the way women are implied to consider and control their (facial) appearance. Following neoliberal notions, the apps put strong pressure on women to take the responsibility to engage in intensive forms of aesthetic labour and to consume the ‘right’ products to appear as the best versions of themselves.

This paper explores how web TV productions and journalists’ use of social media change how journalistic formats are being ”done” in terms of both form and content. Illustrating our argument with examples from recent studies of web TV productions, journalistic digital guidelines, and industry interviews, we suggest that “backstage informality” is both a prominent audience orientation in online productions, as well as an overarching characteristic of web TV journalism. Web TV productions expose backstage settings and practices, and journalists construct sociable relations with audiences by performing as if being mates with audiences in talk and interaction. This creates an image of audiences’ accessing the real, unmediated personas of journalists, as well as the real conditions of journalistic productions. We see this orientation to backstage informality as part of the current development of trying to understand audiences’ preferences and expectations in online media contexts.

Den svenska regeringens presskonferenser har under 1900-talet gått från att vara informella träffar mellan statsministern och några redaktörer, till en etablerad form för möten mellan ministrar och journalister. Regeringen kan presentera sin politik och journalister har möjlighet att ställa politiker till svars, som en del av den demokratiska processen.Politikernas arena bidrar med fördjupade kunskaper om de normer och praktiker som kännetecknar den svenska regeringens presskonferenser, och hur formerna för mötena utvecklats och institutionaliserats från Tage Erlander över Olof Palme till den borgerliga Alliansregeringen. Med detaljerade analyser av interaktionen under presskonferenserna undersöks om relationerna mellan politiker och journalister kännetecknas av konflikt eller konsensus, och i boken åskådliggörs hur politikerna agerar för att manifestera enighet. Mediernas rapportering från presskonferenser är också föremål för undersökning.Boken riktar sig i första hand till forskare och studenter i medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap, journalistik och statsvetenskap men även till politiskt intresserade.

In many societies, governments have become concerned about diet related illnesses and the huge economic costs of managing them, disseminating information about things like eating, balanced diets and the foods we should avoid in excess. At the same time in our shops and cafes there have been a proliferation of products which carry possibilities for making more healthy choices. Yet research shows that the health-related properties these products offer are largely contradictory, confusing and more about market buzzwords than actual healthy food. And such healthy choices have tended to blur and merge with notions of ethical and moral shopping. In this introduction to a collection of articles on the discourses of good food, we look at some of the research on ‘good food’ showing exactly what a multimodal critical discourse perspective can contribute to the field. We show that closer analysis of product packaging, marketing, cook books, media reports and policy documents can help us to understand how commercial forces are colonizing and shaping our ideas of what it means to be healthy and also to act as good citizens.

In this chapter we are interested in the ideological use of music in a Swedish television reality show called Böda Camping – how it is deployed to communicate a very specifi c discourse linked to wider socio- political shift s in Sweden. Critical scholars have revealed how such programmes tend to morally evaluate and ridicule working- class people (Skeggs and Wood, 2012). It has been argued that this has been one part of a legitimation of the discourse of a moral underclass, who are undeserving in a neoliberal society where there is a shift away from an emphasis on welfare, investment in education and healthcare and abandonment of collective responsibility for disenfranchised sections of society (Eriksson, 2015). Critical work so far has shown clearly how such discourses are communicated through spoken language and how visually, for example, the participants are placed in situations which point to their lack of education, restricted cultural experience or their lack of taste (Lyle, 2008). Here we show how music plays an important role in realizing these discourses.

This chapter sets out the key aims and focus of the edited volume, arguing that the use of scientific discourse in food marketing has a long history dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing upon key examples from the authors’ many years of research in the area, it outlines why it is necessary to study this topic from both a transhistorical and multimodal perspective and the important insights that this can offer into contemporary food marketing. The chapter also underscores four key themes that run across the 13 chapters that make up the volume—scientific motherhood; the paradoxical blend of science with tradition and/or nature; hygiene and cleanliness in relation to food safety and health values; and healthism and the medicalisation of everyday life—as well as key studies to have been carried out in these important areas of research. It ends by appealing for further dialogue and transhistorical, multimodal studies in order to enrich our understanding of the link between science, food marketing and healthy lifestyles.