PhD Projects

Janne Bjørgan: Climate Change, Information, and Adaptability (2023-2027)

Janne Bjørgan began her doctoral studies in July 2023, researching how public and private actors’ perception of climate change and their willingness to adapt are influenced by the information they receive through media use and other channels. In addition to being part of the Media Use Group, she is affiliated with the CET - Center for Climate and Energy Transition. Her supervisor is Associate Professor Silje Kristiansen.

Ida Martine Gard Rysjedal: Masculinity and Gaming Behavior (2023-2027)

Ida Martine Gard Rysjedal is working on a Ph.D. project that explores how gaming behavior and communication aspects can serve as a way to channel masculinity. She investigates two different forums (one open and one closed) and selected YouTube/Twitch.tv channels. Her work is associated with the research project Understanding Male Gamers.

Solveig Høegh-Krohn: Public Affiliation and Socio-Material Relations (2023-2027)

Solveig Høegh-Krohn’s project examines how social and material relations contribute to various practices of public affiliation. This concept refers to an individual’s orientation toward a sphere where matters of public significance are addressed. The project considers both mediated and non-mediated practices as part of public affiliation. This includes an individual’s social network, affiliations with organizations, and work life, as well as news reading and media use in their public connections.

By using qualitative methods such as fieldwork, participant observation, and individual interviews, the project seeks to understand how public affiliation is experienced as an integrated part of everyday life. It also examines how macro processes, such as changes in political and economic conditions in a geographical area, interact with individual circumstances, such as work routines, family life, and personal finances. 

By using qualitative methods such as fieldwork and participant observation, the project seeks to understand how public affiliation is experienced as an integrated part of everyday life. Here, I examine how macro processes, such as changes in political and economic conditions in a geographical area, interact with individual circumstances, such as work routines, family life, and personal finances. The project’s focus is also particularly directed toward how various forms of precarity, understood as living with persistent uncertainty in daily life, affect the conditions that individuals have for orienting themselves toward the public sphere. In other words, I investigate latent public affiliations of people in precarious situations, rather than their concrete knowledge of politics.

Rune Søholt: Social Media Poverty: Exploring social media practice and public connection among citizens living in poverty 

The Social Media Poverty project aims to explore practices on social media among citizens experiencing poverty and how poverty affects public affiliation. Media serves as a crucial link to the society beyond citizens’ private spheres. Therefore, media use is a significant factor shaping citizens’ orientation toward the public and political life, which is referred to as public affiliation, and is crucial for the exercise of informed and active citizenship. Over time, social media has become a dominant source of news and other information. This makes social media an important factor to explore in relation to public affiliation.

In Norway, as well as in other countries, citizens experiencing poverty are systematically linked to low political participation and public disconnection. However, we currently have limited knowledge of how poverty affects the media use of the affected citizens in general and, specifically, their use of social media. The Social Media Poverty project explores this through extensive qualitative investigations. Together with participants in the Media Poverty project (MePo, NORCE), of which this project is a part, we will conduct 60 in-depth interviews with informants from selected socio-demographic groups in the municipalities of Bergen and Ullensvang.

Ida Kvilhaug Sekanina: How do Norwegian Local Communities Address Our Contemporary Global Challenges? 

In my doctoral project, I aim to investigate how Norwegian local communities respond to the major global challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through ethnographic methods, I am focused on understanding how different actors experience and interpret these phenomena.

The project is linked to a larger interdisciplinary research project, Media Use in Crisis Situations: Resolving Information Paradoxes, Comparing Climate Change and the COVID-19 Pandemic (MUCS), spanning the Department of Information Science and Media Studies and the Center for Climate and Energy Transition (CET).

Marianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus: What does it mean to spend time and money on news?

As a result of the fact that we increasingly make use of digital news sources in our everyday lives, the digital traces we leave behind are recorded to an increasing extent. Clicks, sales and page views are monitored in detail by the editors and help shape the understanding of the audience's interests and preferences. Such quantitative usage data is useful for illustrating preferences and tendencies among the public, but also has limitations when it comes to motivations and experiences that shape people's news use.

An overall motivation for this project is to provide new insight into how to understand media experiences that hide behind the digital usage patterns. Through qualitative audience studies, the project will study willingness to pay for news, time use and reading habits, as well as expectations for journalistic quality and content. The project is associated with work package 1 at MediaFutures which examines usage patterns and media experiences across digital media.

Ingeborg Hedda Paulsen: Rhetorical Processing: Public Emotions and Mental Health

The project is a study that will gain insight into how we experience media texts and public debate characterized by strong, emotional and experience-based argumentation. The project will acquire new knowledge about the function of emotions in the public, through analyzing the rhetorical processing of media stories about mental health. The study will thus provide new empirical insight into how we use health information at a time when traditional healthcare authorities are being challenged, and individuals are seen to a greater extent than before as stewards and responsible for their own health.

The study is three-part, and designed to understand 1) which dominant narratives are presented about mental health in the media, 2) how individuals interpret and encounter such texts, and finally 3) what kind of rhetorical processing people do in social groups in
encounter with these texts. The purpose is to study society's conversation with itself about mental health, and will provide valuable insight into how we as a society relate to one of today's biggest health challenges.

Andreas Roaldsnes: Social inequality and children's participation in leisure activities

Andreas Roaldsnes is employed by Bergen Municipality and is carrying out his doctoral project through the Norwegian Research Council's Public PhD scheme. The PhD project is financed by Bergen municipality and the Research Council of Norway. The study has families with children living in Bergen as the most important unit of analysis.

The project will provide increased insight into whether the degree of participation in organized culture, sport and leisure activities for children and adults is conditioned by social background, and which factors shape participation. The project aims to uncover the most important barriers to participation for those families with children who participate little and which the public has a particular responsibility to reach and to investigate the possible opportunity the public has to increase their participation.

Mehri S. Agai: How does social inequality affect youth digital disconnection?

Social inequality in health follows a gradient through the population, in that people with lower education, low occupational status and low income generally have poorer health and live a shorter life. The existence of this phenomenon is problematic in several ways. Primarily because it poses a justice problem and robs the individual of the opportunity for life development.

The aim of the project is to find out whether a social gradient also exists within digital disconnection. It examines what characterizes young people in upper secondary school who want and/or choose digital disconnection; what strategies they use; and whether socioeconomic status affects the connection between digital disconnection and perceived quality of life. The project is part of the larger Digitox project, which studies ambivalence and attempted disconnection from digital media. Digitox builds on interdisciplinary insights from media science, game studies and psychology to investigate the causes of, and consequences of, digital media's increased presence in people's lives.