Projects and Impact

Renira Gambarato on Transmedia Storytelling

MKV Professor Renira Gambarato on why transmedia matters for organisations, audiences and activism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYkCIyRE5Ug

Annette Hill on Media Engagement

MKV Professor Annette Hill on the power of media engagement not as a metric but a marker of power relations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5ZORWbH5Vk

Joke Hermes on the Art of Listening

Cultural scholar and Professor at InHolland University Joke Hermes on listening, reflection and responsibility within practice led research and audience research.

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David Morley on Regrounding Media Studies

David Morley, from Goldsmith’s College, London, talks about how to reground the field of media studies. He argues that the promises of digitinally enabled, friction free globalised connectivity have now withered. In the wake of multilevel crises and military conflict, we need to reformulate the geographically and historically situated premises on which media studies rests, if it is to be relevant beyond the affluent countries of the world's North-Western Temperate Zone.

https://play.ju.se/media/David+MorleVy/0_kv3pcgic

Academic Publishing Roundtable with Routledge, Intellect and open access journal Media Theory

Julia Brockley and Natalie Foster, Commissioning Editors from academic

Publishers Routledge and Intellect, join Lecturer and Editor Dr. Simon Dawes to shed light on the world of scholarly publishing. Drawing from their collective expertise across journals and books, the speakers unpack best practices for finding ideal publication venues that best fit your research.

https://play.ju.se/media/Academic+Publishing+Roundtable/0_0nrx8ki5

Deniz Duru on Frictions of Conviviality

Deniz Duru, from Lund University, reflects on the island of Burgaz, a place where different communities live together and represent their diversity in media productions such as documentaries and novels. She offers a framework of conviviality that highlights shared ways of living together in diversity.

https://play.ju.se/media/Deniz+Duru/0_33itu2i5

Christine Geraghty on Television Soap Opera and Friction

Christine Geraghty, from Glasgow University, uses the longest running soap opera in British television to consider how friction is a key element in the generation of stories. She shows how enigmas are set up and how quarrels and disagreements create an atmosphere in which friction dominates the hermeneutic possibilities.

https://play.ju.se/media/Christine+Geraghty/0_woeiq0q5

Maren Hartmann on Roofless People and Friction

Maren Hartmann, from Berlin University of the Arts, considers her research project on homelessness and media use as an example of friction in concepts like the digital or leisure divide and the use of mobile media by people experiencing rooflessness.

https://play.ju.se/media/Maren+Hartmann/0_uh2vk2ax

Joke Hermes on Data Literacy Friction

Joke Hermes, from InHolland University, imagines a conversation with her dad, an electrical engineer who believed in the power of clean design. She reflects on a European project on data literacy and the challenges of understanding the frictions that teaching data literacy needs.

https://play.ju.se/media/Joke+Hermes/0_azgn9hl9

Annette Hill on Authenticity Frictions

Annette Hill, from Jönköping University, asks what are audiences to do when facts and authenticity have unstable generic identities? She reflects on empirical research for streaming content to shed light on the value markers for authenticity in streaming media such as documentary and reality television.

https://play.ju.se/media/Annette+Hill/0_2pbnwjx6

Dylan Mulvin on Rage Rooms

Dylan Mulvin, from London School of Economics, considers the moment of rage rooms, that for a one time fee offer their customers a closed space, a menu of breakable objects, and a weapon. He reflects on rage in the context of injustices and the contradictions surrounding anger and political rage.

https://play.ju.se/media/Dylan+Mulvin/0_zhimw5ht

Kristian Møller on Queer Party Frictions

Kristian Møller, from Roskilde University, reflects on the political potential of frictions within queer party "collectives" emerging in nightclubs around the world. He looks at how these collectives are guided by principles such as consent, care, responsibility, intersectionality, and how conflicts can enable learning within alliance formations.

https://play.ju.se/media/Kristian+M%C3%B8ller/0_sp7rpbwg

Susanna Paasonen on Social Media and Frictions

Susanna Paasonen, from Tampere University, challenges ways of seeing social media users as seduced by the platforms they engage with. Instead, she reflects on frictions within everyday participation with the ambiguities of socio-technological connections.

https://play.ju.se/media/Susanna+Paasonen/0_mzb4oo7i

Media Frictions: an introduction to the symposium and network

Why focus on friction? In this podcast we discuss our motivation for the theme and why we wanted to work together as a network of scholars from the Nordics.

With Annette Hill, Deniz Duru, Magnus Andersson, Kristian Möller and Roger Norum.

Host Joakim Staf

https://play.ju.se/media/Media+FrictionsA+an+introduction+to+the+symposium+and+network/0_5md699e0

Hot desks in cool places

Interested in working remotely? This groups of researchers, part of a network Geomedia, talk about their research on Swedish professionals working in cool places, and the frictions that come with these work spaces.

With André Jansson, Magnus Andersson and Karin Fast.

Host Joakim Staf

https://play.ju.se/media/Hot+desks+in+cool+places/0_lui43epn

Media use for the least privileged

Who has access to the media? This group of researchers talk about their three research on the digital divide and roofless people in Germany, lower income groups in Norway and Sweden. With Göran Bolin, Maren Hartmann and Torgeir Uberg Naerland.

Host Joakim Staf

https://play.ju.se/media/Media+use+for+the+least+privileged/0_20jmboau

Mobile people

What do we know about migrants and digital nomads? This group of researchers talk about the challenges and frictions that come with digital media and migration, or professional nomadic lifestyles. With Hans-Jörg Trenz, Erika Polson and Deniz Duru.

Host Joakim Staf

https://play.ju.se/media/Mobile+people/0_3hkz54oz

Joke Hermes on cultural citizenship

https://play.ju.se/media/Interview+Joke+Hermes/0_l4jql8fg

Jens Sjöberg on PhD research at HLK

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/66VnYP9hSNDRfGMMRG9UVR?si=ab3f3ef625814f0e

Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/GMGkVd9WabqVLQVr6

Companion to Media Audiences

Hear from the editors directly about the making of the new brick of a book on Media Audiences, published by Routledge. This companion takes you by the hand and highlights various theories and methods for media audiences from around the world.

https://play.ju.se/media/Companion+new/0_z1gfnwzs

EduComics - Radu Dinu (in English)

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

February 2024-January 2025

Researcher: Florencia Enghel (individual fellowship)

Mentors: Professors Karin Wilkins (Dean, University of Miami’s School of Communication, US) and Lisa Richey (Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)

Based on in-depth investigation of the daily lives of Argentinian women at a time of digital capitalism, inequality, and precariousness, this book project will synthetize findings from a cutting-edge research project into a scholarly book about everyday activism for gender justice today. The planned monograph will be among the first to go beyond studies of feminist activists’ media practices and digital struggles and focus on ordinary women. Based on new qualitative data that approaches female communicative and media practices from an intersectional perspective, I will show how women deal with claiming their right to an everyday life free from gender inequality, discrimination, and violence. Via an in-depth portrait of the Argentinian case, I will foreground the significance of the micropolitics of civic participation in current struggles against gender injustice worldwide. "Rethinking women’s everyday activism in precarious times" will contribute insights for governmental and private actors to rethink their positive commitments towards gender justice, and for feminist movements to tap into the agency of ordinary women.

Project’s RJ link: https://www.rj.se/en/grants/2023/rethinking-womens-everyday-activism-in-precarious-times/

Digital by default? Older adult citizens and digital welfare interfaces

The Swedish Research Council (grant 2022-05290)

Researcher: Ernesto Abalo

The project will study older citizens' (65+) encounters with digital welfare interfaces. (How are welfare interfaces (such as 1177.se, pensionsmyndigheten.se and municipal websites) designed and what do they require of the user? How do senior citizens understand, feel and act in the encounter with these digital interfaces? How can these interfaces be developed to facilitate their use for senior citizens? This should the research project Digital as default? Older adult citizens and the interface of welfare examine. The project group consists of Tobias Olsson (project manager, Malmö University), Mia-Marie Hammarlin (Lund University), Dino Viscovi (Linnaeus University) and Ernesto Abalo.

The project will use a mixed methods design to capture several stages in the older adult’s encounters with the interfaces. An analysis of the websites' interfaces is combined with interviews and vignette experiments with older users of these.

The research project will last for three years, starting in January 2023. The project was granted 4.8 million in the Swedish Research Council's call for project grants for research into the societal consequences of digitalization.

Fostering inclusion: Migrants, action competence and social justice in the Citizen Engagement Lab.

Funding, Educom 2024-2025, School of Education and Communication (HLK).

Researcher PI Gustav Persson, co-researchers Mahama Tawat and Annette Hill

Stakeholders: Jönköping kommun, Jönköpings stadsbibliotek

This project explores the challenges faced by migrants in engaging with media within the democratic public sphere and seeks to find out what is needed for more inclusive and participatory practices. The Citizen Engagement Listening Labs is a platform where migrants, researchers, and stakeholders will collaborate to co-create strategies for more equal and inclusion public engagement.

In today’s media ecology, we see how increasingly unequal power structures shape public discourse, often marginalizing migrant voices. The project addresses such inequalities by developing participatory spaces seeking to empower migrants to engage in democratic life.

The project has three key objectives:

1. Understanding how migrant media engagement create barriers to civic engagement and participation
2. Developing participatory spaces where migrants can share experiences and develop inclusive democratic practices.
3. Establishing guidelines for a participatory model that promotes action competence and political inclusion.

The Citizen Engagement Lab is implemented through a structured three-step methodology: Recognition, which involves engaging stakeholders and recruiting migrant participants; Engagement, where focus groups and discussions explore migrants’ challenges; and Representation, where research findings inform strategy development for policy and civic inclusion co-crated between researchers and participants in dialogue with stakeholders.

Overcoming climate change worry: how action competence can contribute to psychological well-being among young adults

Funding body: HLK

Time frame: 2024 – 2025

Researchers: PI Yuliya Lakew, co-researchers: Ellen Almers, Per Askerlund, Tobias Samuelsson

Young people worry—about climate change, about governments not doing enough, about an uncertain and unsettling future. While this concern is a valid response to the state of the world, the level of anxiety can be overwhelming. This research project explores how young people feel about climate change and what actions they are willing to take. Using the concept of action competence, we examine how the potential for action can transform climate anxiety into constructive engagement and what measures are needed to safeguard young people’s psychological well-being. The study is based on survey data from students across various programs at JU, collected at the beginning and end of their studies.

Riksbanken Jubiliumsfond Initiation Grant and HLK at Jönköping University

Researchers: PI Annette Hill, co researchers Susanne Almgren, Otto Hedenmo, Yuliya Lakew

2025-01-16 to 2025-01-17

ju.se/ecomediafootprints

The workshop ‘Eco Media Footprints’ brings together international researchers working in the area of eco media footprints, a new line of scientific research on the ecological footprints of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), including carbon footprints of data and energy use, digital devices and infrastructures and sustainable solutions to mitigate harm to the environment.

There is a two-day international workshop on 16 to 17 January 2025 including invited scholars in a combination of thematic panels and interactive workshops that addresses work in progress on the topic of eco media footprints. The workshop explores analytical and empirical tools to reboot research for sustainable media.

A range of international scholars in media and communications studies, cultural studies, gender, science and technology studies, will share academic work in progress to an intended audience of postgraduate, early career and senior researchers, with the goal to generate academic publications on the future trajectories for eco media footprints and sustainable digitalization.

Impacts of generative artificial intelligence on the disinformation ecosystem: Applications in educommunication in the post-digital context

National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil

Dates for project: 04.01.2025 to 31.01.2027

Researchers: Renira Gambarato and Paola Sartoretto.

Collaborators, stakeholders: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, Jönköping University, Sweden, Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, Federal University of Pará, Brazil, and Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

The research project explores the evolving disinformation ecosystem shaped by generative AI, particularly in a post-digital context where human and technological experiences merge. It examines how generative AI’s capacity to autonomously create content introduces risks such as misinformation, deception, discrimination, and data colonialism. The project aims to analyze the socio-technical and communicational impacts of these technologies, identifying emerging disinformation patterns and their ethical, logical, and aesthetic implications. A key focus is developing educommunication strategies to enhance public school students' ability to critically engage with generative AI tools, fostering awareness of both the integrity and potential misinformation effects of AI-generated content.

Link: https://ju.se/en/research/news/news-archive/2025-01-08-risks-of-ai-disinformation-in-schools.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawIWm_BleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHZb0g3PRUSMmhORYRrhYCr8b2zFhWyGuodHflruvE96PYclIKAJdFChgTw_aem_Umz9611g-KSZHedIgV3zbQ

Transmedia educommunication for sustainability in the context of the climate crisis: Applications in public schools

Funding body: National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil

Dates for project: 08.01.2025 to 31.01.2027

Researchers: Renira Gambarato.

Collaborators, stakeholders: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, Jönköping University, Sweden, Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, Zambezi University, Mozambique, Federal University of Pará, Brazil, UNA University Center, Brazil.

The research project explores the role of transmedia communication in developing educommunication strategies for sustainability in the context of the climate crisis. It expands the concept of sustainability beyond environmental, social, cultural, and economic dimensions to include a communicational perspective. This involves both material aspects (such as infrastructure and technology) and immaterial factors (like misinformation, climate denialism, conspiracy theories, hate speech, and digital colonialism) that impact the sustainability of communication processes. The project aims to investigate how communicational sustainability can support collective actions that promote cultural diversity, social responsibility, and environmental awareness. Building on prior transmedia education experiences in Portuguese-speaking countries (Timor-Leste, Mozambique, and Brazil), the research seeks to refine and apply a methodological framework that integrates sustainability into educommunication practices. The refined approach will be tested in schools in Brazil and Mozambique, with insights shared with Swedish researchers specializing in sustainability and communication. After evaluation, the methodology will be made publicly available to encourage broader applications and international collaboration.

Communities, technologies, and territories - new sociotechnical articulations and paths for popular participation in urban life

Funding body: National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil

Dates for project: 01.02.2025 to 31.01.2027

Researchers: Paola Sartoretto

Collaborators, stakeholders: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Federal University of South Bahia (UFSB).

Throughout the 20th century, cities became the core of social life and citizenship. However, rapid urbanization, and commercialization of urban space, led to inequality, violence, and environmental problems. In response, many propose digitalization—often framed as the "smart city"—as a solution to urban challenges. Yet, this concept is shaped by corporate interests, downplaying the social and political dynamics of urban life. Particularly in the Global South, valuable popular knowledge and ancestral technologies risk being erased by technocentric narratives. This project aims to understand spatial justice and urban sustainability beyond digitalization, emphasizing collective action and the commons as key to addressing climate and urban issues. Research actions include participatory and collaborative mapping of initiatives and practices centered on communication for local political participation and urban sustainability among marginalized communities in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, as well as public workshops and an international symposium focused on communication and spatial justice.