Celina Ortega Soto
While many countries were locking down due to the spread of COVID-19, Sweden remained open with few restrictions, as authorities relied predominantly on a civil sense of responsibility and collective compliance with government recommendations. Drawing on interviews conducted with workers in retail and logistics in 2020–21, ethnographic work in digital environments as well as in public spaces and demonstrations, this article analyses discourses of everyday life and discourses of rejection, exploring how rejections were shaped in reaction to how the government and the Public Health Agency of Sweden handled the pandemic. Ortega Soto’s article uses the concept of cultures of rejection—emphasizing a complex compound of values, norms and affects that reject different phenomena in different contexts—to analyse how working and living conditions, political opinions, social views and media habits informed workers’ disagreements with and reactions to the official handling of the pandemic, as well as how this may have led to a growing loss of trust in government. Ortega Soto further investigates how the expression of cultures of rejection differs across generations by looking closely into the ways that nostalgia and a sense of loss enhance such responses among various social groups. The article contributes to a wider understanding of the political shifts and cultural changes that were manifested in the context of the pandemic in Sweden.
Swedish ‘cultures of rejection’ and decreasing trust in authority during the COVID pandemic