Karl Malmqvist
About Karl Malmqvist
KARL MALMQVIST (PhD in sociology) teaches at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. His dissertation, Boundaries of the Public Sphere: Five Cultural Sociological Case Studies of Controversies over Literary Autobiographies in Sweden from 1976 to 2008 (2012), investigated debates about literary autobiographies that took place in the culture sections of major Swedish newspapers during the period mentioned in the title. The dissertation analyzed how participants in these debates fought over boundaries of moral appropriateness in literary practices of self-disclosure and disclosure of others, and identified shifts in these boundaries during the period under scrutiny. These shifts indicated that a process of informalization had taken place in the Swedish literary public sphere during the period – a process that, in turn, was linked to changes in media technology and media culture that brought about a destabilization of the status of established actors in the literary public sphere.
More recently, Malmqvist’s research interests have turned increasingly towards emotion sociology. As a visiting fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen (2014–2015), Malmqvist carried out a research project called Aggressive Emotions in Converging Media Spaces (VR 437-2013-326). Investigating far-right affective-discursive practices in Swedish online discussion threads about begging migrants from eastern EU countries, the project analyzed how participants in these forums jointly try to establish new rules about what emotions one ought to feel and display in relation to whom – feeling rules that differ strongly from those of mainstream public life.
Malmqvist is an active member of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network in the Sociology of Emotions (RN 11), and he is also involved in the Emotion Sociology Seminar at the University of Gothenburg (Emogu).
At the Department of Sociology and Work Science, Malmqvist teaches social psychology, emotion sociology, cultural sociology, and criminology. He also teaches various courses in the teacher-training program at the University of Gothenburg.