Research supported by The Research Council of Norway

The Research Council of Norway (NFR) is one of the biggest governmental sources of research funding in Norway. Several researchers at Faculty of Social Sciences has ongoing projects that has been funded by NFR. 

Ongoing NFR-funded projects at the Faculty of Social Sciences

Marit Skivenes, professor, Department of Government

With the project: Med prosjektet: LEGITIMACY CHALLENGES / An analysis of mistrust in core institutions and the normative fundament of the welfare state (2020-2025).

This project aims to reveal conditions and mechanisms for sustaining legitimacy in societies in which there is a backlash on social and political right developments. 

And the project: Child Protection Systems Across the World (2022-2029)

CPS-WORLD aims for transdisciplinary research, and will combine innovative methodological approaches and cross-country examinations, applying several data sources and combining survey, vignettes, experiments and text analysis. 

Martina Vukasovic, associate professor, Department of Government

With the project: Policy capacity of interest groups (2021-2025)

This project analyses policy capacity of interest groups focusing on education in Norway, through in-depth case studies of key organizations in this domain representing the interests of the professions, providers, and users of education services.

Kristine Jørgensen, professor, Department of Information Science and Media Studies

With the projectt: Understanding Male Gamers (2023-2028)

Understanding Male Gamers is the first comprehensive research project that investigates the current schism in videogame culture from the perspective of male gamers, and it is also the first project to explicitly bring together game studies with masculinity studies.

Kerry Ryan Chance, associate professor, Department fo Social Anthropology

With the projectt: Habitable air / Urban Inequality in the Time of Climate (2022-2026)

This is a project that examines how the urban poor, living in the shadows of jointly-owned petrochemical companies, manage the cultural and corporeal effects of chemical air pollution. 

Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme, associate professor, Department of Social Anthropology

With the project: SEATIMES / How Climate Change Transforms Human-Marine Temporalities (2021-2026)

Drawing on recent developments in posthumanist and multispecies anthropology, SEATIMES aims to develop a new posthumanist marine anthropology that is better able to account for how humans and marine life are entangled and how these entanglements are transformed by climate change.

Julia Fleischer, professor, Department of Government

With the project: The State as a Corporate Actor: Structural Choices, Historical Legacies, and Organisational Legitimation (2021-2026)

STATECORP analyses the relevance of structural choice politics and historical legacies for corporatisation patterns in Norway and Sweden (1950–2020) as well as their consequences for organisational legitimation. 

Erik Knudsen, researcher, MediaFutures / Department of Information Science and Media Studies

With the project: NEWSREC / The Double-edged Sword of News Recommenders Impact on Democracy (2021-2025)

NEWSREC deals directly with one of the most pressing questions facing the news media today: What are the precise conditions under which news recommender technology are for the better or the worse for the democratic role of the news media?

Raimondas Ibenskas, professor, Department of Government

Med prosjektet: Party Instability in Parliaments (2021-2026)

In this project an international research team examines parliamentary party instability in eight carefully selected established and young democracies over several last decades. 

Thomas Lorentzen, professor, Department of Sociology

With the project: Admission Impossible? School Choice in European Cities (2021-2025)

The research study investigates how and why school choice programmes are designed differently across European cities and what consequences this has for parental freedom to choose and educational equality.

Brita Ytre-Arne, professor, Department of Information Science and Media Studies

With the project: Media Use in Crisis Situations: Resolving Information Paradoxes, Comparing Climate Change and COVID-19 (MUCS) (2021-2025)

MUCS studies media use amongst Norwegian citizens in relation to two complex societal crisis situations: the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. 

Annelin Eriksen, professor, Department of Social Anthropology

With the project: Technologies for Immortality: A study of Human Futures

This project will explore contemporary pursuits of immortality in order to enhance our understanding the social and cultural basis for these developments.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, professor, Department of Social Anthropology

With the project: Enclaving: Patterns of global futures in three African cities (2018-2024)

Through ethnographic fieldwork in three African metropoles, Accra, Johannesburg and Maputo the researchers will explore enclaving as a globally emerging cultural orientation that works as a key driver for the reordering of the urban fabric, one that it is generative of new forms of sociality that need to be understood in their local context. 

Edvard Hviding, professor, Department of Social Anthropology

With the project: OCEANSTATES / Island Lives, Ocean States: Sea-level Rise and Maritime Sovereignties in the Pacific (2018-2024)

The OCEANSTATES project is empirically, methodologically, and theoretically ambitious and wide-ranging, and addresses central global challenges of our time, unfolding on the combined scenes of ocean and climate change, by taking the pulse of this particular axis of rapid, massive transformation of human existence and security.