DIGSUM’s research group in Digital Sociology has recently appointed Kalle Eriksson, who has a background as a doctorate student and board member of DIGSUM, as a new postdoctoral fellow. Kalle holds a doctorate in Political Science and has written the doctoral thesis “Politicising Automation: Ideas on Work, Technology, and Agency in the Swedish Political Debate”.
Kalle will be working in the project PastForward. The main objective of PastForward is to gain insights into the political uses of the past in the Nordic region to understand how futures are negotiated based on legitimacy claims derived from collective memories and histories. To do so, the project will analyze how the past featured in the digital campaign material and social media communications of the main political parties during the 2021 Norwegian election, 2022 Swedish and Danish elections and the 2023 Finnish election as well in the responses these communications prompt from other users. The study designs and analyses aim at comparing the findings across the party spectrum on the one hand, and the four Nordic countries on the other. PastForward is funded for three years by NordForsk, with participating researchers at Umeå University, University of Copenhagen, University of Helsinki, and Oslo Metropolitan University. Kalle will primarily work with DIGSUM-researcher Samuel Merrill at Umeå University’s Department of Sociology with the remote support of Katarina Pettersson (University of Helsinki). As a postdoc, Kalle will be involved in most parts of the project, but will primarily work with qualitative and quantitative content analyses relating to the Swedish and Finish linguistics contexts.
Read more about the project [here].