Collaborative projects

Project leader: Torgeir Uberg Nærland (Mediebruksgruppen, UiB)

We currently have very limited knowledge of how poverty affects people's media use. At the same time, the political instruments are largely limited to giving citizens a minimum of access to news, without taking into account that a life in poverty can entail major restrictions on actually making use of the media that is available. The aim of this project is to strengthen the understanding of this problem area and improve the means of doing something about it.

Media Poverty investigates media use among citizens living in poverty, with a focus on the importance of media use for their opportunity to exercise citizenship. The project is financed by

The project is coordinated by NORCE, and led by Torgeir Uberg Nærland, who is affiliated with both NORCE and the University of Bergen.

Research is used as a basis for political decisions, and as a basis for people to form opinions on political issues. The experiences of recent years have shown that a high level of trust in research cannot be taken for granted, and that trust has been challenged, among other things, by an increasing politicization of research knowledge. A lack of trust in research can lead to society not being able to agree on what is true and false. At the same time, blindly high trust can lead to a lack of critical debate and decisions on a failing basis.

This project will generate knowledge about trust in research in Norway in a comparative perspective. The project is led by the Institute for Social Research v/Signe Bock Segaard, and the Media Use Group's Hallvard Moe is a participant from UiB. Read more on ISF's website.

The research project studies current issues related to high consumption of digital media. While many studies focus on the positive aspects of digital media, this project highlights ambivalence and attempts at disconnection. 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. The project particularly examines the phenomenon of digital detox – a new term that describes mobile breaks or other forms of withdrawal from digital media.

Digitox is financed by NFR and coordinated by the University of Oslo. The project is led by Trine Syvertsen at UiO, and the media use group's Brita Ytre-Arne, Hallvard Moe and Mehri S. Agai from UiB participate. Read more about the project here.

There is little knowledge about how young men actually experience and negotiate what it means to be a gamer - or what identities and communities gaming enables and delimits, in Norway today. The project will investigate this through focus group interviews with 30 young, male players, aged 16 to 19. The project will investigate how gaming is included in negotiations about gender and identity, at a time when more and more people have an experience and opinion about this, and online gaming cultures form a central part of young men's everyday lives. It will focus on young men's emotional reactions to the increased diversity and gendered politicization of gaming discourse - and examine how gaming-related practices can create anchoring and belonging to certain identities and communities. A question to be investigated is what space for masculinity the gamer identity offers the target group to explore and negotiate.

The project is led by Synnøve Lindtner and is funded by the Norwegian Council for Applied Media Research (RAM).

The tendency for national media to lose out to global media platforms creates media policy challenges that affect the media's legitimacy and financial sustainability.

The project is about young people's media habits at a time when traditional media are unable to reach young people, and also examines what measures national media producers and media policy actors are taking to be relevant to young media users. The project combines audience studies, production studies and media policy studies.

The project is financed by the Research Council of Norway in the period 2021-2025. The project is led by Marika Lüders at UiO and involves researchers from several institutions, including Kristine Jørgensen from UiB. At UiB, we will conduct longitudinal studies where we follow local young people over a three-year period. Read about the project here

As computer games have matured as a medium, there has emerged a tendency for computer games and gaming culture to increasingly become an arena for political themes. Computer games today often involve themes that comment on political reality, there is an increased awareness among players and game developers that different ideologies and 

rdies characterize gaming culture, and there is a tendency for players and streamers to use a rhetoric that mixes the political and the playful. At the same time, we know little about whether players experience computer games and gaming culture as politically charged, and how they deal with this in their everyday gaming. The project examines computer gamers' experiences with gaming culture as a political arena, and will serve as an initial survey of gamers' experiences with computer games and gaming culture as an arena for political discussion and engagement. The project is based on a broad understanding of politics that goes beyond political processes and state governance. This project focuses on how ideology and political currents in society find their way into game content and game culture, and will study how such currents affect how players interact with each other and talk about computer games.

The project is led by Kristine Jørgensen and is financed by the Norwegian Media Authority/Council for Applied Media Research.

Computer games and computer gaming have traditionally been seen as a boy's activity, a notion that is slowly changing as computer games have become a medium for a large and diverse player base. At the same time, gaming culture is still an area where gender still creates friction. This friction concerns, among other things, the representation of gender in computer games and to what degree
Previous research on gender and gaming has given us valuable insight into problematic gendered practices in gaming, such as misogyny and harassment. But at the same time, this research has focused on women's experiences, and there is little research that examines men's experiences of conflicts around gender in computer game culture. Some researchers have explained the friction around gender in game culture in the light of a masculinity in crisis linked to the challenges of redefining new and flexible masculinities in the light of a feminist consciousness, but what is missing from such discussions is an awareness of how negotiations about masculinity are linked to social inclusion and exclusion processes.

In light of this knowledge gap, the aim of Understanding Male Gamers is to investigate male gamers' experiences of gaming culture as a contested, gendered area, where we focus on their subjective and lived experiences. We will study what games and gaming mean for the establishment of a male identity, including how men experience the negotiations around norms related to gender in gaming culture and to what extent they experience that the demographic changes in gaming culture challenge these.

Understanding Male Gamers is a collaborative project between the University of Bergen at Infomedia, Vestlandsforskning, OsloMet and the University of New South Wales. It is led by Kristine Jørgensen and is funded by the Research Council. Read more about the project here.