Representing Sweden: packaging Swedish identity through curators of Sweden

Abstract

In 2011, the Swedish national tourism organisation, Visit Sweden, together with the Swedish Institute, launched a campaign–Curators of Sweden (CoS)–on Twitter, which ended in 2018. Each week a ‘Swedish’ person was chosen as a curator to tweet whatever they liked through the @Sweden account. All the curators were chosen because they represented ‘values, skills, and ideas’ which, according to the campaign, ‘all combined, makes up Sweden’. In this article, we try to understand the contradiction of CoS offering a cacophony of ‘diverse’ voices from Swedes but, at the same time, speaking with the ‘same’ voice. Through dialogism, we locate the different voices, agendas and diverse contexts in reality, and examine how the values, skills and ideas were managed and engineered through the CoS, in a bid to imagine Sweden and Swedish identity.