me
I am an associate professor of Media and Communication Studies and of Technology and Social Change at the Department for Thematic Studies (TEMA-T), at Linköping University in Sweden. I am also a ProFutura Scientia XVII Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, and a research affiliate at the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab led by Lisa Parks at the University of California Santa Barbara.
My research explores the politics of power, worth, inequality and difference that arise when media infrastructures (such as “AI”, software, data centers, satellite ground stations, telephone networks, energy technologies like solar panels or wind turbines, etc) are being built, maintained or dismantled across situated contexts.
I completed my PhD in media and communication studies at Södertörn University in 2018 with a thesis on the making of free software for computer graphics media production, in particular the 3D animation software Blender and the 2D Synfig. My dissertation was awarded in 2019 the second prize for best PhD thesis in media and communication studies in Sweden.
Between 2018 and 2022 I was the vice-chair of the Media Industries and Cultural Production section of the European Communication and Research Education Association (ECREA), and between 2018 and 2020 I was a post-doc in Digital Innovations at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the University of Helsinki. There I was part of the Data, Self & Society group, and my position was 50% funded by the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities. In the beginning of 2023 I founded and currently co-chair the Data Lab at Linköping University.
My work is positioned at the intersection between media and communication studies, STS and cultural studies of digital technologies. I take a lot of inspiration from various strands of anthropology, and the sociology of science and technology. My main research currently focuses on understanding the dismantling of communication infrastructures as a cultural and sociomaterial practice; and what does it mean for people, social arrangements, materials, chemicals attached to them. Until then, for 6 years I have been researching the materialities and energetic politics of “the cloud”. I have been deeply interested in questions about the converging relations between data and energy infrastructures (see my new project on friction between data and energy!) and I am currently working on a book, Bits and Watts, that brings together this research. In the meantime I am also working to develop critical perspectives and a conceptual vocabulary on the end of life of media infrastructure and the politics of dismantling networks. All along, I have also done detours to think and write about agency in relation to algorithms, metric cultures in the digital everyday life, as well as infrastructural work in data centres, among other issues.
Besides academic work, I love Nordic skating on lakes, hiking in high mountains and playing board games with my children.