Welcome to our next K3 seminar. It will be held by Tina Askanius, who has just assumed the position of Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at K3. At the seminar, she will present herself by talking about previous research she has conducted, and about her future plans. It will be held on Wednesday, February 8 at 10.15-12.00 in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is Media and Political Engagement: Addressing Three Thematic Strands of Research

Here is an abstract for the talk:

My research interests fall in the area of media and political engagement. In this talk, I address the three lines of thought that I have engaged with so far within this broad research area.

First, the bulk of my published work deals with questions related to the social movement/social media nexus. In November 2012, I defended the thesis Radical Online Video (Media and Communication Studies, Lund University) dealing specifically with the implications of, at the time, new forms of digital video and online video sharing platforms to the practices of political activism in social justice and climate change movements across Europe. On the basis of this project, I have engaged more broadly in questions around social movement media practices in the context of both radical left and far-right activism.

A second line of inquiry thus includes digital media practices in extreme-right activism. A smaller project funded by the Wahlgren Foundation in 2013 led me into questions of how the rise of extreme right discourse and movements in Sweden and Denmark is related in complex ways to the twin crises of economic recession and upsurge in far-right populism across Europe.

In January 2018, I start working on a related research project, Digital radicalization, analogue extremism? (MAW, 2018-2022), with colleagues in sociology of crime from Stockholm and Lund University. The project seeks to understand the relationship between online discourses of violent extremism, extremists’ autobiographies, and records of criminal offending. With this comparative and interdisciplinary study, we hope to make a critical contribution to research on the interplay between online propaganda and mobilizations of violent extremism in the takfiri and extreme-right movements.

Finally, a third strand of research on media and political engagement involves audience studies on the interplay between popular entertainment formats and cultural citizenship conducted as part of a post-doc in the international research project Media Experiences (MMW 2013-2016). The project concerns production and audience research of drama, documentary and reality formats in Denmark, Sweden and Great Britain. Within this project, I’ve delved into issues of fan engagement, political documentary audiences and the role of popular culture in shaping civic identity, community and political engagement.

With this talk, my ambition is to give new colleagues a sense of who I am as a researcher and what I’ve done so far but also to discuss upcoming projects and open up a dialogue on potential collaborations, co-publishing etc. in the new and exciting time to come as part of K3 at Malmö University.