Research in Media and Communication Studies

Dr Ylva Ekström

Ylva Ekström PhD is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies. She defended her PhD in 2010 on the dissertation "We are like Chameleons": Changing Mediascapes, Cultural Identities and City Sisters in Dar es Salaam. She has worked several years with education and research in the area of communication for development and social change, and has done extensive field work in primarily East Africa. Her research interests include the role of media in everyday life and for identity construction; gender and representation; new media, culture and social change, and she is methodologically primarily engaged in ethnographic research. She was previously involved in the Vinnova-funded project ‘TROPHY: Managing the Digital Transformation of Physical Space’ and ‘CRUSH Covid’ Project on communication during Covid-19 Pandemic. Contact and more info about Ylva Ekström

Assoc. Prof. Peter Jakobsson

Peter Jakobsson is Associate Professor in Media & Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media. His research interests include digital media policy and regulation, currently focusing on the concept of the digital/neoliberal media welfare state. He has also written about various aspects of the relationship between social class and the media, in particular representations of social class, but also the role of social class in media production. He is co-editor of a Special issue on Machine intelligence for Culture machine - an international open-access journal of culture and theory, and co-editor of a special issue on Class and/in the media for Nordicom review. He also leads a VR “Media trust and social imaginaries: A qualitative study about the meaning and formation of media trust” (2022-2024). Contact and more info about Peter Jakobsson

Kristin Karlsson M.A.

Kristin Karlsson has MA in Politics and Mass Media from the University of Liverpool, UK. She researches and teaches on contemporary journalism and has over 20 years of work experience in journalism and strategic communication. She is still active as a freelance journalist following a number of years spent in such key strategic communication positions as Press Manager at KRAV and Communications Manager at CONCORD Sweden. As a journalist, she has worked for local and national media and media in Sweden including the Dagens Nyheter daily. Kristin previously spent several years living in Liverpool UK, where she was covering UK news as well as teaching online journalism at Liverpool John Moores’ University. Contact and more info about Kristin Karlsson

Prof. Michał Krzyżanowski

Professor Michał Krzyżanowski holds since 2020 the Chair in Media and Communications at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he is currently also Deputy Head and Assistant Head Research at the UU School/Department of Informatics and Media, Director of CEMFOR - the Uppsala University's Research Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, and in 2025-27 Chair of the Managing Board of the Uppsala Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (formerly UU Hugo Valentin Centre). He is one of the leading experts in critical discourse studies of language, media and political communication with special interests in the normalization of discriminatory language and hate speech, in dynamics of far-right populist discourse, and in the discursive construction of crisis representations in European and transnational media. Michał is the Editor-in-Chief of the international Journal of Language and Politics and co-editor of the book series Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies, and sits on a number of boards of various journals in critical discourse, language and communication studies and in broader qualitative social research.
Contact and more information about Michał Krzyżanowski

Prof. Amanda Lagerkvist

Professor Amanda Lagerkvist is a media phenomenologist and a founder of existential media studies. Drawing inspiration from existential philosophy she explores the digitalization and automation of the lifeworld. Her research interests include media philosophy, media and memory, death online, anticipation, biometrics, diversity and disability. She is now heading the project “BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds” (2020-2024) within the national programme on AI, humanity and society: WASP-HS. Her monograph in progress, Existential Media (contracted with OUP), focuses on digital-human vulnerabilities and limit situations, in light of the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. She is the initiator of the interdisciplinary research network DIGMEX, and the editor of Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture (Routledge, 2019 with a foreword by John D. Peters). Contact and more info about Amanda Lagerkvist

Assoc. Prof. Johan Lindell

Johan Lindell is Associate Professor in Media and Communications. He is a media sociologist specialized in field theory and the works of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Lindell's research focuses on media consumption, fields of cultural production, social media, lifestyles and cultural stratification as well as the Nordic media system. He has published his research in a wide range of international journals including European Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Poetics, New Media & Society and Journalism Studies. Lindell is currently involved in two externally funded research projects: 1.) The Field of Television Production and 2.) Measuring Mediatization, both funded by the Ander Foundation for Media Research. Contact and more info about Johan Lindell

Dr Daniel Lövgren

Daniel Lövgren is a Senior Lecturer who conducts research on the role of communication in organization, both as a constitutive force of organizing, but also to communicate with internal and external constituencies. He has a particular interest in how institutional conditions impact organizations. His research interests include how ideas and ideal of the private sector influence public sector organizations, the role of identity and identification in universities and elderly care organizations, and how small-scale food and drink producers and collectives relate to a sense of place and the idea of a common good. He currently also works on the Swedish Research Council Research Project "Strategic Communication and Organizing in the Scandinavian Higher Education Sector: Towards the Promotional University?”. Contact and more info about Daniel Lövgren

Dr Therese Monstad

Therese Monstad is a Senior Lecturer whose research draws on Organizational Communication theories, as for example, Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO) perspectives to explore the constitutive dimensions of communication in work interactions focusing on issues- & crisis management, health communication and organizational change processes involving tensions, participation, authority negotiation and digitalization. Her work appears in academic journals such as for example New Media & Society, in edited books and research- & authority reports. Contact and more info about Therese Monstad

Dr Jacek Smolicki

Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator who is currently a research fellow at the UU Informatics and Media Department. Smolicki’s research explores temporal, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving practices in human and more-than-human realms while his current research at IM looks specifically on the impact of AI technologies on human and other-than-human voices. He holds a PhD from the School of Arts and Communications at Malmö University and was 2020-23 guest postdoc researcher at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and a 2022-23 Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard University. His edited book “Soundwalking. Through Times, Space, and Technologies” was published by Routledge in 2023. Contact and more info about Jacek Smolicki

Dr Cecilia Strand

Cecilia Strand is a Senior Lecturer who has previously worked 2003-10 as a development practitioner in Lesotho, Namibia and Uganda, parallel to completing the dissertation Perilous Silences and Counterproductive Narratives Pertaining to HIV/AIDS in the Ugandan, Lesotho and Namibian Press. A decade long focus on human rights advocacy in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Ugandan LGBTQI community’s struggle for equal rights in particular, has resulted in numerous articles, book chapters and conference contributions. Sha has been part of a Swedish Institute funded research project, studying human rights advocates’ understanding of digital security and risk mitigating digital practices. The project also explores how increased mediated visibility, which is often understood as a necessary component of human rights advocacy, is related to increased vulnerability in repressive contexts. Contact and more info about Cecilia Strand

Dr Göran Svensson

Göran Svensson, PhD, has taught media, communication and journalism at Uppsala since 1988 and has also previously been Media and Communications’ Interim Chair & Subject Leader. He is also a trained journalist with experience in print, radio and freelance journalism. The basic goal of his research is to bridge critique/criticality and institutions, and to investigate the impact thereon of traditional/digital mediated communication. He currently conducts research in three main areas: media criticism and accountability, digital & public diplomacy, and digitalization processes of institutionalization in media and journalism. He has published in Sociologisk forskning, Javnost-The public, Media, Culture and Society, Nordicom-Review, Journal of Social Science Education, and has been the editor of the sociological textbook Sweden- Everyday life and Structure as well as a contributor to the Swedish Handbook in journalism research and to several reports by IMS, Institutet för mediestudier. Contact and more info about Göran Svensson

Dr Matilda Tudor

Matilda Tudor is a Research Fellow in Media and Communications. As a media phenomenologist, she works at the intersections of existential media studies and critical theory, particularly focusing on feminist and queer perspectives. She has been exploring the existential implications of living with and through digital media among sexual minorities in Russia, developing an original framework for a queer digital media phenomenology. Currently, she is working on digital-human vulnerabilities in relation to biometric AI within the WASP-HS project BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds. Contact and more info about Matilda Tudor

Sandra Bergman

Sandra Bergman is a Ph.D. candidate in media and communication studies with her work focused on organizational communication. Previous research has been regarding the development of leadership communication. Currently, she is studying how team communication practices are affected by non-human agents being part of the team structure.

Kateryna Boyko

Kateryna Boyko is a Ph.D. candidate in Media and Communication Studies with research interests in identity construction, online communities, and the intersection of entertaining content and politics. Her doctoral research explores civic cultures of torrent communities in Eastern Europe. In particular, she focuses on conjunctions and interplays between civic and file-sharing practices, in how and under what conditions illegal file-sharing becomes embedded in the civic context. Kateryna also holds a Master degree in Journalism from Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University while her second MA degree in Media Studies was obtained at Södertörn University (Stockholm).

Alexandra Brankova

Alexandra Martin Brankova is a PhD student at the Department of Informatics and Media (IM) and the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES), Uppsala University. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on Russian patriotic and nationalist organisations and their ways for constructing national identity through competing discourses, digital practices for user engagement and interconnectivity. Alexandra has graduated the MSc Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies from the University of Glasgow. She also worked as a research assistant at the University of Glasgow for a project about illicit economies in the Republic of North Macedonia.

Pedro Camelo

Pedro Camelo is a PhD student at the Department of Informatics and Media (IM), Uppsala University currently working on his PhD in the wider area of Critical Discourse Studies of Media and Political Communication. In his doctoral dissertation, Pedro examines discourses on right-wing populism and neoliberalism in Brazil. Working previously as a Masters student at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) and a member of the Media and Public Sphere research group (EME-UFMG), Pedro examined debates on ”Escola Sem Partido”, an ultraconservative organization targeting Brazilian education.

Martin Lindstam

Martin Lindstam is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication at the Institute for Informatics and Media. His PhD project is part of the WASP-HS research project "AI Design Futures" led by Mark Coeckelbergh while his research focuses on AI, labor and mental health explored from the perspective of existential media studies. He has a previous professional background in news journalism, social media and entertainment.

Maria Rogg

Maria Rogg is a Ph.D. candidate in Media and Communication Studies. Using existential media studies, her research explores bodyhacking as a negotiation of agency and emerging subjectivities in an age of automation looking at the limits imposed by biometric artificial intelligence such as strategies to resist it. Maria is part of the research project BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds and attends the WASP-HS graduate school on challenges and consequences of autonomous systems and AI in society. She holds MA from Södertörn University and worked previously on designs of mediated citizenship during convergence festivals.

Emma Rönngren

Emma Rönngren is a PhD Candidate in Media and Communication at the Department of Informatics and Media (IM) and the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES). Her research project explores the reception of Russia’s strategic narratives among young Russian speakers in the Baltic states from a media perspective. The doctoral project is set to finish in 2024. She is editorial assistant of the Journal of Baltic Studies.

Yanthe Zebregs

Yanthe Zebregs is a PhD student in Media and Communication Studies. Drawing on Critical Discourse Studies of media and political communication - and researching both global and national media and communication contexts - Yanthe’s work uses cross-national abortion discourse as empirical entry point to engage with the wider discursive nature of democratic and political dynamics. She holds MA in Global Media Studies from Stockholm University, Sweden, where she previously also worked as a research assistant for a project on news representations of social inequalities and threats to communication rights.