“In this [special issue of Communication and Society] we were interested not only in understanding what journalism research makes visible, but mostly what journalism research keeps invisible. We received 53 proposals to this theme issue…This issue is composed of seven original articles contributed by a diverse group of authors … [T]he last article explores the experiences of Sámi journalists reporting on sexual violence in Sápmi, which is a region shared by four countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia) and inhabited by the Sámi people. In the article titled “‘You Can’t Put It in Cotton, Can’t Pack It in Silk’: Sámi Journalists’ Experiences of Reporting on Sexual Violence”, Svea Vikander identifies journalists’ challenges when reporting on sexual violence based on interviews with Sámi journalists (N = 9) and an analysis of news articles (N = 30), approached through situational analysis. Results show that interviewees experience a hostile work environment and deep discomfort that arises from the prospect of running into the subjects of their reporting. Reporting becomes “too close to home”, which leads to internal tensions that are difficult to name within Western frameworks of fear or trauma. The findings point to a need for scholarly attention to the complex internal and relational lives of Indigenous journalists, shedding light into a sample of journalists that is often invisible in the literature.”

—Editors Rita Araújo, Pedro Jerónimo and Thomas Hanitzsch.

Vikander (2025), ‘You Can’t Put It in Cotton, Can’t Pack It in Silk’: Sámi Journalists’ Experiences of Reporting on Sexual Violence. Communication and Society, Comunicação e Sociedade, 48.

In 2022, Google added over 100 minority and Indigenous languages, including Northern Sámi, to its public translation tool. Exciting. But who really benefits from greater access to Indigenous languages? What happens when AI does the job that used to require us to talk to people? And is it any good?

Svea Vikander, Machine Translation and Sámi Journalism: Go Google Translate boahtá Guovdageidnui. Eleventh Annual Conference on the Safety of Journalists, Oslo, 2025.

 “FGM/C is largely performed by women on girls (Ayenew et al., 2023), making these seven journalists among the few Ugandan men to witness it. By pursuing a thematic understanding of their experiences, we aim to better understand how reporting on FGM/C shapes perceptions of masculinity, mental health, and the role of journalists in Uganda. … Six journalists completed the International Trauma Questionnaire (Cloitre et al., 2018). Two met full PTSD criteria… A third participant fell one point short of the PTSD threshold. All but one reported some level of PTSD-related distress: nightmares, intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and avoidance. … Of the four participants who did not meet PTSD criteria, two strongly endorsed items reflecting emotional dysregulation and interpersonal disturbances.

… Transcripts indicate that most interviews carried a strong emotional charge. Three participants’ voices rose as distress increased. Other signs included repetition, fragmented speech, long pauses, inappropriate and nonsensical comments, and physical sounds (throat clearing and sniffles). Narrative disorganization, where participants had difficulty telling of their experiences in a basically sequential, logical order, was also observed in five interviews. We coded such moments as “flooding” or “Being Overcome.” Participant 2, struggling to describe a cutting, said the following:

When they got the flour and poured in the private parts, so, the lady scooped out the thing from, then the blood just splashed out, immediately as the blood is splashing out, they take the flour and they pour there. [holding phone away, hard to hear] So the second time when they cut another girl, I made noise in the room, they chased me from, I mean the girl, they chased me out.

Despite having recounted the event once before in the same interview, his narrative remains near-stochastic: the female cutters and flour, the blood splashing out, the cutters, the flour, the second girl being cut, the narrator being chased out, the second girl being cut, returning to daily life as a reporter, the narrator’s poor mental health, his reporting, the audience, the location of the photos he took, and his mental health again. Narrative fragmentation suggests cognitive overload.”

Vikander, Kabazira, and Volclair, (2025) in Eds. K. Aiseng and C. Uzuegbunam, Navigating Trauma in African Journalism, Volume 1 Scholarly Foundations and Secondary Trauma. Palgrave Macmillan, Switzerland.

 “Legal interference in public discourse, specifically in journalistic reporting, can decrease freedom of speech generally, and is often associated with disrupting the free marketplace of ideas (Mill, 1859). With increasing regularity, court proceedings are used to limit or challenge this exercise. SLAPPs are complex mechanisms of oppression with multiple actors, which express known and hidden power dynamics both in the text of the law and in court processes. We analyze three case studies using Situational Analysis. … [T]he original stor[ies] [were] no longer the focus of media attention and debate. Instead discursive topics centered on the plaintiffs’ ‘victimhood.’”

Amanda Gentz, Svea Vikander, Victor Vicente, Write or Fight: SLAPPs Against Journalists in Brazil, the United States, and Spain. Sur le journalisme, About journalism, Sobre jornalismo 13(1) 2024

June 2021: MA Thesis at Sámi Allaskuvla in Guovdageaidnu, Sápmi/Arctic Norway. Journalism and Indigenous Studies. Click here for presentation.

Findings:

• Five out of six female Sámi journalists interviewed have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work.

• Two out of three male Sámi journalists interviewed had observed the harassment of or discrimination against a female employee in journalism.

• Sámi news reporting in Ávvir, Ságat, and NRK Sápmi avoids victim blaming but prefers to interview experts, speaking of abuse in the hypothetical instead of reporting on specific incidents.

• Journalists face multiple challenges in reporting on sexual violence in Sámi communities, including:

  • social norms of non-disclosure (aka “Culture of Silence”)

  • small communities

  • feeling uncomfortable when work gets too close to home

  • rumours

  • conflicts of interest

Covered by Sámi journalist Iselin Skum in Ávvir. “Sámi female journalists suffer sexual abuse/harassment at work and are afraid to report about [sexual abuse] cases.”

“Obstetric and early childhood care is no longer a setting in which the ‘doctor knows best’ but a flashpoint of new and overlapping rhetorics. The placenta, once considered medical waste, is reappropriated by alternative health practitioners and mothers seeking a ‘natural’ treatment for postpartum depression. Continuing a very young tradition of placentophagy, these practitioners have adopted the second wave feminist rhetoric of the natural earth mother — but dress it in the biomedical language of hormones, disorders, and pills. The result is a changeling, an uncannily convincing union of language. Each rhetoric derives power and validity from the other, their mutual contradictions forgotten or smoothed over.”

Vikander, S. (2024). Rituals of the afterbirth: Postmodern and biomedical health models in placentophagy. In C. G. Dopfel (Ed.), Maternal materialities: Objects, rituals and material evidence of medieval and early modern childbirth (pp. 339-351). Brepols. https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503605739-1

Enveloping and Tethering:
The Cloth-Mother Metaphoric

September 2015: MA Thesis at Goddard College, Vermont. Clinical Mental Health Counseling (click to open in new tab)

Mothering ideologies convey the idea that mothers should be the sole caregivers of their children. In these mental frameworks, infants are chaotic and vulnerable and mothers are morally bound to contain and protect them. The metaphor of the mother as provider of a warm, sheltering space is common to Christian religious traditions and to twentieth century attachment theory. The author proposes that this perception of 'mother- as-envelope' is an instantiation of an underlying metaphor in which the qualities of cloth, such as warmth, flexibility, softness, and facelessness, are considered the qualities of ideal mothering. The author reviews psychoanalytic, feminist, and fictional literatures that perpetuate and critique this metaphorical equation. Through a psychoanalytically- informed framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, three Renaissance paintings of the Madonna-Child dyad are analyzed. Cloth is found to be a metaphor for containment, devotion, and breast milk in these images. Ettinger's (2004, 2006) concept of woven matrixial space and Barthes' (2010) punctum are considered in tandem, as the author identifies areas of punctum in the Renaissance images and discusses their relationship to her own experiences as a mother and to modern-day mothering ideologies.

Keywords: discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, mothering ideologies, cloth, attachment theory

Research cv

Cultural Studies

Kabazira, C., Vikander, S., & Volclair, R. (2024, November 1). The psychological impact of reporting on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Uganda Paper presented at the 10th(!) International Conference on the Safety of Journalists, Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway.

Gentz, A., Vikander, S., & Vicente, V. (2024). Write or Fight: SLAPPs Against Journalists in Brazil, the United States, and Spain. Sur le journalisme, About journalism, Sobre jornalismo, 13(1). https://revue.surlejournalisme.com/slj/article/view/523/537

Note: SLAPPs stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

Krøvel, R. (Lead Organizer), & Vikander, S. (Co-Organizer). (2023, December 18–19). Expanding AI & journalism network and collaboration [Consortium in support of EU Horizon application]. Oslo, Norway.

Getz, A., Vikander, S., & Vicente, V. (2023, July). Write or Fight: SLAPPs against journalists in Brazil, the United States, and Spain. Paper presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference, Lyon, France.

Boyda, K., Kasahara, Y., Maynard, M., Palumbo, E., Posetti, J., Vikander, S., & Yazidi, S. (2022, November 2). Digital security for investigative journalists [Panel discussion]. Safety of Journalists Conference, Oslo, Norway. Discussion included Boyda and Vikander’s proposal Det haster: A machine learning analysis of hateful comments toward journalists.

Vikander, S. (Moderator). (2022, November 1). Proxy server: Digital security mediated by cultural forces [Paper session]. Safety of Journalists Conference, Oslo, Norway. Presenters: K. Urbanikova, M. Nevradakis, & A. Kasyanenko.

Skogerbø, E., Sunna, A., & Vikander, S. (2021, October) in M. Berg-Nordlie (Chair), Sami journalism, urgent issues. Panel discussion at the Seventh International Conference on the Safety of Journalists, OsloMet University.

Vikander, S. He gave up eventually (but I didn’t): Sámi Journalists on their Experiences Covering Sexual Violence in Sámi Media. (2021, September). Presentation at the Sámi Media Festival, Guovdageaidnu, Norway.

Vikander, S. Sámi journalists' experiences and strategies in covering sexual violence, MA thesis, Sámi Allaskuvla, Guovdageaidnu.

Vikander, S. in Costanza, D. Ed. Placenta, Encapsulated: Postmodern and Biomedical Health Models in Present-Day Placentophagy. Pregnancy and Childbirth: History, Medicine, and Anthropology. St. Mary’s College, June 2018. *Recently acquired by Brepols for peer-reviewed publication in 2023.

Vikander, S. (2015) Enveloping and Tethering: The Cloth-Mother Metaphoric, MA thesis, Goddard College, Vermont.

Vikander, S. (2011). Life Lines. Convergence: A journal of undergraduate and community research, 1, 57-59.

Vikander, S. (2010, February). In S. Sadhwani (Chair). Life Lines: Rupture and healing in the personal and social body. Paper presented at Bodies and Sociohistories colloquium, Goldsmiths University.

Lebedinskaia, N., Mahon, M., & Vikander, S. (2010, February). In P. Burtt (Chair). With information-technological...perceptions of the physicalised body have changed. How has this affected...contemporary culture? Panel discussion at Bodies and Sociohistories colloquium, Goldsmiths University.

Vikander, S. (2010, March). Life Lines. Poster presentation at Study in Action, Concordia University.

Vikander, S. (2009, March). In S. Jensen (Chair). Life Lines: Qualitative study of scars and stories. Paper presented at Spaces/Espaces, Sociology and Anthropology Graduate Students Association conference, Concordia University.

Vikander, S. (2006, May). In S. West (Chair). Life Lines: Scars and inscriptions. Paper presented at Inscribing the Body seminar, Bodies of Knowledge Graduate student research conference, University of Toronto.

Psychology

Vikander, S. (2024, April). Advancements in Psychological Research: A Global Perspective [Online Lecture]. European University of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia.

Vikander, S. (2024, March). Collaborating for Academic Publishing: Propelling Your Career with International Partnerships [Presentation]. European University of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia.

• Research assistant at Joan Grusec’s Social Development lab, University of Toronto (2002 - 2006).

• Designed and conducted narrative and questionnaire study of over 100 participants’ experiences of being taught a moral lesson by their parents.

Downey, M.M.D. & Vikander, S. (2016, March) An Introduction to Non-Attached to Outcome Motivational Interviewing. Bay Area Doula Project, Oakland, California.

Vikander, S. (2013) Why Should I Write My Birth Story? And Why Don’t You Write Your Birth Story? Birth Without Fear blog, Austin, Texas. A thematic coding and analysis of over 25 narratives about the psychological mechanics of birth story writing