I am a full professor of Media and Culture at Linköping University in Sweden. I am also a ProFutura Scientia XVII Fellow (2023-2028) at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, and a research affiliate at the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at the University of California Santa Barbara.

My research is about digital infrastructures and cultures. I am interested in the materiality of the internet and “data”, and their relationship to public values, time, labor arrangements and environments. I am fascinated by the practices through which people build and dismantle media- and digital technologies.  My focus in the past decade has been on the backends of media and  the growth of data centers in Sweden and Finland with focus on their relationships to questions of sustainability, energy and resource use, and the public good. Since 2022 I am also conducting a large project on the politics of knowledge and understandings of responsibility that govern the ongoing planned dismantling of basic communication networks with focus on the analog telephone lines and the analog internet, and also 2G, 3G, radio networks etc.

My work is positioned at the intersection between media and communication studies, STS and cultural studies of digital technologies. My research is currently on the end of life of communication infrastructures in Sweden.  For a decade I have also been studying the relations between digital infrastructure and energy with focus on data centers and the cultural production of ideas of digital sustainability (see the website of the Megabytes vs Megawatts project). I am currently working on several major writing projects that bring together this research.

My academic trajectory in brief

I come from Bulgaria and I moved to Sweden in 2008, during the global financial crisis after a decade of work and a fast career in the NGO and private sector in the sphere of internet governance, open source and internet policy making in Bulgaria. After a few years of work in the cultural sector in Sweden, I pursued an academic career.

I completed a PhD in media and communication studies at Södertörn University in 2018 with a thesis on the cultural politics of making 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. Between 2020 and summer 2025 I worked first as an assistant professor and then associate professor of media studies, and of technology and social change at the Department for Thematic Studies (TEMA-T) at Linköping University in Sweden. In the beginning of 2023 I founded and currently co-chair the Data Lab at Linköping University.

I live in the countryside in Sweden where I enjoy growing a vegetable garden in the summer and getting better in Nordic ice-skating in the winter.