To Örebro University

This paper offers a novel perspective on the materiality of fandom by exploring the relational and embodied material networks that connect people, music keepsakes, and domestic spaces. Drawing on object-oriented interviews with fans of Irish blues musician Rory Gallagher, analyzed through a multimodal ethnographic lens, it investigates the motivations behind the arrangement and display choices of keepsakes in the home and how these practices express narratives of memory and the self. Specifically, it examines how items were obtained, where they were initially placed and where they were moved following Gallagher's death, as well as how they are compiled into material assemblages. The study puts forward a typology of micro-, meso-, and macro-displays of fandom to explore these assemblages and understand the logic governing their formation. In doing so, it highlights how such practices are shaped not only by personal memories but also by ongoing relationships-with Gallagher as a felt presence, with other fans through shared meanings, and with evolving selves anchored in past experiences. Ultimately, the paper underscores the vital role of fans in co-creating and sustaining musical heritage from below, showing how material objects enable the persistence of relational selves and collective memory even as living connections fade.

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of polar-themed sheet music covers depicting Norway's celebrated explorers, Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine how visual and stylistic choices shaped national myth-making. It identifies the recurring visual grammar of this genre, examines how these conventions evolved from 1888 to 1930 to reflect shifting national priorities and shows how sheet music contributed to the mediatization of the explorer-hero. The findings reveal that, while both Nansen and Amundsen covers draw on a shared visual language of heroism, they function as imaginative spaces for changing national ideologies. Nansen is primarily depicted as a romanticized, multi-dimensional explorer defined by athleticism, intellectualism and comradeship, mirroring Norway's search for a national icon during its struggle for independence. Amundsen is largely presented as a solitary, self-reliant explorer with calculated expertise, embodying the pragmatic ambitions and modern identity of a newly sovereign nation. These findings invite a re-evaluation of sheet music's role in shaping cultural memory, national pride and popular understandings of heroism. They also nuance our understanding of how visual/popular media actively contributed to the public imagination of explorers, turning their individual feats into shared cultural myths that circulate across time and space.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive examination of the early cannabis-based food products industry, using Sweden as a case study. Drawing upon historical newspaper articles and advertisements from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive, the authors trace the short-lived development of the industry, from the initial exploitation of fears of tuberculosis in the late 19th century, followed by the "boom" in hempseed extract products and the widening of its claimed effects and, finally, increased skepticism and critiques of such products across the popular press in the early 20th century.

Design/methodology/approach: A rigorous search of the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive was conducted to gather newspaper articles and advertisements on cannabis-based foods. The collected resources were scrutinized using critical discourse analysis to tease out key discourses at work, particularly around the concepts of health, nutrition and science.

Findings: The authors find that central to the marketization of cannabis-based foods was the construction of disease based on scientific and medical discourse, fearmongering to create a strong consumer base and individualization to place responsibility on consumers to take action to protect their family's health. This demonstrates not only the long historical relationship between science and food marketing but also how brands' health claims could often be fraudulent or overstated.

Originality/value: It is important to cast a historical lens on the commercialization of cannabis-based food products because demand for similar types of products has rapidly grown over the past decade. Now, just as before, manufacturers tap into consumers' insecurities about health, and many of the same questions continue to be mooted about products' safety. Paying greater attention to the broader and problematic history of commercial cannabis can, thus, serve as a reminder for both consumers and policymakers to think twice about whether hemp really is for health and if the claims it espouses are a mirage rather than a miracle.

This study uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore the growing market of mental health applications (MHapps), particularly those using sound and music to promote wellbeing. Focusing on NuCalm, Endel and BrainTap, it examines the design and functionalities of their interfaces, revealing the underlying assumptions, values and ideologies embedded in their structures. It finds that these apps are structured around a script of self-management and self-improvement, deeply embedded in an entrepreneurial discourse of self-optimisation. What initially appears as a focus on wellbeing, in fact, subtly pushes users to maximise productivity and competitiveness. The study also reveals paradoxes in presenting both technology and users as the problem and solution to mental health challenges. Overall, it provides new insights into how MHapps shape contemporary understandings of wellbeing, reinforcing neoliberal ideologies of self-care as individual responsibility and raising broader questions about whether these technologies help users or simply redefine personal struggles as failures.

This article offers the first scholarly exploration of a set of scrapbooks about Irish blues-rock musician Rory Gallagher, created by Carol Clerk - a teenage girl growing up in 1970s Belfast who would later become a renowned music journalist. It examines how embodied music fandom, affective attachment and female cultural labor are conveyed through the scrapbooks' layout, composition and sensory dimensions. Using textual, material and semiotic analysis, I argue that the scrapbooks function not only as expressions of music fandom but also as sites of refuge, resistance and self-fashioning for Clerk. In a conflict zone where live music was scarce, the scrapbooks became an alternative form of musical engagement, allowing Clerk to assert agency and identity beyond dominant religious and political frameworks. However, their strikingly professional tone suggests that they doubled as a practice space where Clerk honed skills that would shape her future career in music journalism.

This article critically examines the Folke Cheese Initiative, a corporate social responsibility project launched by the Swedish supermarket retailer ICA in 2017 and linked to its hard cheese brand, Folke. Using an historical-archival approach to multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study traces the Initiative's evolution across product development, launch and promotion, call to action and impact, analysing social media campaigns, promotional videos, packaging and websites. The analysis demonstrates how ICA constructs Folke as a symbol of national identity, embedding banal nationalist cues, familiar landscapes and rural imagery, while linking consumption to collective responsibility and social good. While the Initiative foregrounds community engagement, sustainability and national cohesion, it offers limited solutions to structural social and economic inequalities. Folke, thus, exemplifies how food packaging - and its associated promotional materials - can function as strategic instruments, aligning with Swedish social-democratic values while extending corporate influence over local communities. By presenting everyday consumption as a contribution to society, ICA positions itself as a socially responsible actor, even as the long-term efficacy of the Initiative remains uncertain. Overall, this case contributes new insights into the temporal evolution of corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse, the multimodal construction of product-based social responsibility and the national specificity of sustainability practices in the Swedish food retail sector.

The tragic story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the British Antarctic Expedition (1910-13) is a cornerstone of British cultural memory. While Scott's heroism has been widely studied in historiography and biography, the commercial mobilization of his public image has received comparatively little attention. This paper offers the first systematic analysis of advertisements associated with Scott's final expedition, combining visual social semiotic analysis with archival research to examine the interplay of commercial representations and public perceptions of polar exploration. Building on the work of Nielsen, it identifies three overlapping themes-Heroic Masculinity in Extreme Environments, Domestic Comfort andCivilizedConsumption, and Scientific Authority andRationalizedExpertise-through which advertisers constructed Scott's image and conveyed values associated with the expedition. The analysis shows that scientific labour was consistently marginalized; instead, brands prioritized emotionally imagery of endurance, suffering and-following Scott's death-martyrdom. When invoked, science served primarily to signal technical ingenuity and product reliability, often supported by testimonials. At the same time, references to domestic comfort served to bridge Antarctica and home, enabling consumers to participate imaginatively in the expedition. The paper also examines more recent reinterpretations of Scott's image in advertising, demonstrating how he endures as a flexible cultural symbol and a lasting emblem of British exceptionalism.

Purpose: This study aims to examine how sociocultural changes in early 20th-century Sweden, particularly regarding the roles and expectations of women, gave rise to class anxieties and specific performances of femininity. Specifically, it examines how these tensions were constructed and mobilised through the marketing of Maniol hand cream.

Design/methodology/approach: Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, this study examines Maniol's print advertisements from 1920 to 1940, focusing on how linguistic, visual and other semiotic resources were used to navigate and respond to evolving social norms and gender expectations.

Findings: Three key themes emerge: the burden of respectable domesticity; the performance of professional femininity; and hands as a marker of feminine attractiveness. It shows how advertisements constructed both domestic labour and professional life as threats to femininity - threats that could be concealed or corrected through consumption. They also underscored the social risks of neglecting one's hands in terms of female civic responsibilities as workers, mothers and wives, arguing that true femininity required hands untouched by visible labour. In doing so, the brand articulated broader anxieties around gender performance, class mobility and the visibility of domestic work in a society undergoing profound transformations in labour, gender roles and social expectations. At the same time, these discourses reinforced whiteness as the normative standard of beauty, positioning racialised bodies as outside the normative boundaries of modern femininity.

Originality/value: This study uniquely foregrounds the cultural and symbolic significance of women's hands in early 20th-century Swedish marketing, revealing how Maniol hand cream advertisements became a focal point for negotiating class anxieties, femininity and social respectability. Focusing on class - a vital but often overlooked aspect of Swedish marketing history - this paper provides a fresh and critical examination of how marketing strategies in early 20th-century Sweden shaped and reflected class relations and gender dynamics. It, thus, emphasises the importance of situating advertising discourse within its broader sociohistorical context, showing how marketing both mirrors and actively shapes cultural anxieties, ideals and social hierarchies, while also reinforcing whiteness as the embodied norm of beauty and respectability.

This book sets out to historicise our understanding of contemporary trends by studying the long relationship between science, food and drink marketing and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. It aims to bring together contemporary and historical research from a multimodal perspective, considering how scientific discourse and ideas about health and nutrition are channelled through visual and material culture.

Using examples of advertisements, commercials and posters, the 16 chapters in this book will foster a cross-disciplinary and cross-temporal dialogue, uncovering links between past and present ways that manufacturers have capitalised upon scientific innovations to create new products or rebrand existing products and employed science to make claims about health and nutrition. They will, thus, demonstrate the continuity of science in food and drink marketing—even if fundamental ideas of nutrition have evolved over time. The book provides crucial new insights into the significance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period of innovation in food and drink marketing and showcasing how many of the marketing strategies employed today, in fact, have a far broader historical trajectory.

It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Critical Food Studies, Media and Communication Studies, History of Science and Medicine and Cultural Studies, as well as nutritionists, dieticians, sportspeople, in addition to policymakers and practitioners working in the area of food and drink marketing.