Doctoral projects
All aboard the digital train: technological marginalization in public transit
Digital marginalisation in public transit.
Digital infrastructure has expanded rapidly and become integrated into the fundamental structures of society. Public logistical structures are no exception, with Swedish public transit utilising digital platforms enabled by mobile media for both travel planning and ticket management. However, the structural expectation for individuals to integrate themselves with digital technologies could create frictions for people who do not use smartphone technologies.
My research interest is in how mobility is structurally affected by smartphones, and what we expect from public infrastructures in Sweden’s state of extreme digitalisation. I examine this by looking at practices of non-smartphone users in public transit. By lifting this marginalised perspective I hope to create understandings of what it actually means to live as a digital outsider, while saying something about general phenomena of mobility and digitalisation.
Henrik Bergius, PhD student, Centre for Geomedia Studies
VR at Home: Do You Have VR at Home? Would You Like to Contribute to Our Understanding of Virtual Reality?”
Linnea Saltin is a doctoral student researching how people’s relationships with places are influenced by technological developments. By interviewing individuals in their homes, she aims to shed light on how physical spaces and social connections can be renegotiated through technology use. The questions focus not only on people’s experiences with using VR but also on how they organize their homes to accommodate VR usage.
Linnea emphasizes that research on VR often overlooks the physical starting point. While VR allows us to virtually transport ourselves elsewhere and be less tied to specific locations, our bodies still exist somewhere. Linnea believes that exploring the differences between VR’s possibilities and physical constraints can lead to new geographical insights. She is particularly interested in understanding people’s behaviors and their personal reasoning.
Participation in this project is entirely voluntary. Informed consent will be obtained, ensuring that interviewees have full transparency regarding the data collected and its intended use. Unauthorized access to the collected material will not occur, and interviewees can withdraw from the study at any time upon request.
If you’d like to participate in the study, please contact Linnea Saltin:
Linnea Saltin, Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Geography, Center for GeoMedia Studies
Linnea Saltin’s research interests revolve around the relationships between humans, technology, and place. She has previously explored how conventions and gatherings serve as focal points for human practices related to using technology to transcend physical and social location constraints.
Communicating climate action: Combining action repertoires and linguistic repertoires in social movement message construction
Sol Agin
In combating the climate crisis, climate activist and movement groups are key in shifting public perceptions and public opinion. Despite this, research has neglected these groups to focus on how the traditional media frame climate change. This thesis examines how communication from both conventional and disruptive climate protest groups is received in the European context, using a large-scale European survey and an experiment conducted in Sweden. The results indicate that the general public is more inclined to believe, trust, and act on climate messages when the linguistic style of the messages aligns with the groups’ action repertoire (conventional, disruptive, or violent).
To explain this, the thesis introduces the theoretical concept of the Communicative Action Repertoire (CAR), in which communications and actions are understood as part of a single intertwined message. Communications and actions that align with each other, and with the group’s perceived ethos, are seen by members of the public as coming from a more trustworthy, more knowledgeable, and less biased and sensationalist source. In turn, this inspires people to take action more readily. Importantly, this alignment effect applies whether or not the group is conventional or disruptive in their CAR. The reverse is also true: when actions are misaligned to the groups CAR, the group is perceived as less trustworthy, less knowledgeable, and more biased and sensationalist. In general, communication aligned with a conventional CAR will inspire communicative action on the part of recipients inclined to take action, while communication aligned with a disruptive CAR will inspire direct action. Thus, where message recipients must construct a cohesive mental model of an abstract and complex issue, like the climate crisis, CAR alignment provides a map for practitioners and scholars alike to analyse and structure cohesive messages that minimise potential cognitive dissonance.