Samuel Merrill will receive NordForsk funding for a three-year project involving researchers from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland led by Manuel Menke from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Communication. The project, which will start in December 2023, is called: PastForward: The political uses of the past in digital discourses about Nordic futures.
In democratic elections, voters regularly have the chance to decide the future of their country. They can choose between parties with different visions for society that promise them to solve today’s problems and crises. In the project PastForward, we want to find out how parties communicated these visions in their online communication in the last elections in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. We will do this with a specific twist by asking how they used the past to justify their visions of the future and how this is debated on social media.
Read more about the project [here].
Samuel Merrill is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Umeå University, specializing in digital and cultural sociology. His research interests centre on social movements, collective memory, cultural heritage and digital media.
Read more about DIGSUM’s research group on Digital Sociology [here].