Researchers and Doctoral students
Inga Narbutaité Aflaki
Inga Narbutaité Aflaki, PhD in Political Science, has a focus on innovative local and regional policy processes with an emphasis on human motivation, policy entrepreneurship and structural potentials. Currently she specializes in policies to support smart specialization and new forms of co-governance in civil society, especially policies that address social challenges such as immigrant integration.
Lotta Braunerhielm
Lotta Braunerhielm has a PhD in Human geography. Her research in human geography and tourism studies is focused on culture and tourism and is strongly intertwined with place and destination development. For many years, research has focused on the increased interest in the commercialization of places and is strongly related to the commodification of places, regional development, identity, cultural heritage and attractive living environments. In recent years, research has focused on digital development in the tourism industry based on geomedia studies. The effect of technology on places and the effect of place on technology is central in research projects on tourism digitalisation. In close collaboration with actors in the tourism industry and ICT sector, methods for place-based development and innovation have been developed and used in several projects.
Mikael Granberg
Mikael Granberg is Professor of Political Science and a senior researcher at the Centre for Societal Risk Research (CSR). His research focuses on political processes in a broad sense, often from a new institutional perspective.
Lena Grip
Lena Grip, Associate Professor in Human Geography. My research in different ways show how people's everyday and working lives are affected by conceptions of place, gender and ethnicity, and how these conceptions influence politics and the practical implementation of politics; in integration policy, gender equality projects and spatial planning, as well as how it affects individuals' everyday lives, working lives and opportunities.
Beatrice Hedelin
Beatrice Hedelin, PhD in Environmental and Energy Systems, is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science. Her research is inter-disciplinary and concerns procedural aspects of sustainable development, focusing on participation and collaboration in contexts of multi-level governance. The empirics studied are mainly processes of natural resources and hazard management at municipal and regional levels, e.g., river basin management and the EU’s Water Framework and Floods Directives.
Fredrik Hoppstadius
Fredrik Hoppstadius, PhD, works as a Lecturer in Human Geography. His research includes empirical studies on sustainable development and sustainable tourism in biosphere reserves. Some keywords are sustainable development, sustainable tourism, place, landscape and biosphere reserves.
Annika Jonsson
Director, CRS research school
Annika Jonsson is a senior lecturer in sociology at the Department of social and psychological studies. Her research has concerned gender equality and regional development, and she is now taking an interest in, among other things, issues of equality in the context of end of life care. She teaches environmental sociology at the master programme in critical analysis.
Majken Jul Sørensen
Majken Jul Sørensen is a senior lecturer in sociology at the Department of social and psychological studies. Her research investigates different forms of nonviolent resistance, including organised collective struggles as well as hidden and quiet everyday resistance. She primarily focuses on the participants' experiences and people's agency and ability to create change from below.
Avit K. Bhowmik
Avit K. Bhowmik is an assistant professor of Risk and Environmental studies. He is currently leading the modelling activities of the ”Exponential Roadmap” initiative, which outlines solutions and exponential societal transformation pathways for climate mitigation, fossil fuel free energy and information systems, and sustainable food production. He has also been involved with the “The World in 2050” project since 2016. This project is an initiative within the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and models pathways for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. CRS is a member of the SDSN and Avit is the key contact person.
Peter Lampert
Peter Lampert holds a PhD in Biology Education and has previously worked at the University of Vienna. He received a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme and is now working at KAU as a PostDoc. His research project "Developing Action Competence for Insect Preservation" aims to contribute to stop insect decline, which is a major global problem for the environment and society. The project investigates people's competences to help insects and how these competences can be increased through education.
Magnus Lindh
Magnus Lindh, PhD in political science, has a focus on regional strategic leadership in a context of multilevel governance. Strategic thinking and action of how to handle EU-related issues and ‘get the best out of the EU’ is relatively poor. In relation to this topic, he has an interest in cross-border regional action in a theoretical context of differentiated integration. He claims that the dynamic of cross-border politics needs to be studied in relation to “the bigger picture”, i.e., processes of European integration. In addition, another field of interest concern how subnational actors handles, sometimes conflicting, climate-related EU policies.
Åsa Melin
The democratization and modernization that permeated national politics during the second half of the 20th century is relevant to my study where focus is the municipalities and the way to a unified school. In the dissertation, the significance of local conditions and the interests of various local actors in the process of implementing a comprehensive nine-year school in the years 1950-1968, are investigated and analysed.
Tomas Mitander
Tomas Mitander is PhD in Political Science. His research interests revolve around issues of development politics and equality in times of globalization and regionalization.
Michaela Padden
I am interested in policy and regulation concerning ‘big data,’ in particular whether the current European data protection framework is sufficient to meet not only privacy needs, but emerging ethical/political/legal challenges posed by processes such as real-time tracking, predictive analytics, algorithmic decision-making and the goal of behaviour modification. I defended my thesis in political science, "Governing Surveillance - Digitalisation, data protection and democracy", in October 2024.
Kristian Petrov
Kristian Petrov is Associate Professor of History of Ideas and Academic Head of Cultural Studies. He received his doctorate in 2006 with a thesis on glasnost and perestroika that offers a conceptual-historical matrix for understanding the fall of communism and the Eastern European democratization processes and structural changes, which then were set in motion. Besides current interests concerned with medical humanities and general cultural history, he is doing research on political-philosophical issues surrounding globalization, human rights, post-colonialism and cosmopolitanism, partly with a focus on development in the post-communist and post-Soviet world.
Eva Svensson
Eva Svensson is Professor of Environmental Sciences at Risk and Environmental Studies. Her main research focus social, ecological and interdisciplinary approaches to forest landscapes in a long-term perspective with an emphasis on the Viking Age, The Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, and the material culture and living conditions of the subalterns in the period c. 1700-1950. Other fields of research include cultural heritage and participation, dilemmas in the environmental management and sustainable development, and the relationship sustainable lifestyle and material culture.
Moa Tunström
Director, CRS
Moa Tunström is senior lecturer in Human Geography and her research is primarily focused on contemporary Swedish urban planning discourses, the social in sustainable urban development and citizen participation in planning.
Martin Åberg
Researcher
Martin Åberg is Professor of History. His research field is comparative studies of local level political mobilization and organization, mainly with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ulrika Åkerlund
Ulrika Åkerlund is a PhD in human geography. Her main research interests include mobility and migration in relation to lifestyle, place attachment and place bound resources. Second homes and event tourism are other research interests. In her current research project she studies family migration out from metropolitan areas in relation to a socially sustainable everyday living.
PhD students
Khabat Amin, Risk- and environmental studies
Researches on safety for pedestrians in road traffic environment.
Sofia Billebo, Human Geography
Tove Bodland, Risk- and environmental studies
My research interest concerns the societal ability to prepare for, manage and recover from extreme weather events. My research is based on a resilience perspective on risk and crisis management in a Swedish context with a focus on the local level (region, municipality and civil society). More specifically I am currently looking at issues related to obstacles and opportunities for collaboration between different societal actors. My research includes various theoretical aspects of community resilience, such as issues of knowledge and learning, relationships and networks and governance.
Peter van Eerbeek, Human Geography
Peter's dissertation project focuses on the rise of platform companies entering the Swedish public primary care from 2016 onwards by providing consultations with healthcare professionals via apps.
Kristin Gustafsson, Risk- and environmental studies
Maja Herstad, Gender Studies/Sociology
My research area is gender equality and diversity work in organizations. In my licentiate thesis I explore emotions as important components of gender equality work in organizations, work often involving spaces where employees and external gender expert functions meet. I am particularly interested in emotions that are valued or common in this work, and their linkages to recurring practices, localized power relations and organizational contexts. My work draws on Sociology of Emotion and Critical studies of gender equality/gender mainstreaming. I am affiliated with the Centre for Gender Studies (CGF) and the research school of the Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation.
Monika Högsnes
My researchproject investigate experiences, thoughts, feelings and perceptions of psychosocial support in health care for people with acquired brain injury. The study is based on interviews with persons with acquired brain injury and their relatives, that has own experience of psychosocial support.
Lisa Lindqvist, Gender Studies/Sociology
Lisa Lindqvist, PhD candidate in Sociology, studies digital feminism in the Swedish context, especially examples of feminist hashtags. The research is focused on how activism and technology are entangled and how social media platforms give rise to particular expressions of feminism through their features and affordances. Simultaneously, it emphasizes the agency of activists and studies what strategies they employ to perform feminism online.
Leigh Ann Loebs, Social Work
My research concerns violence against children and the help that these children receive from Child Welfare Services. I am a part of an ongoing project at FoU Välfärd Värmland called SAVE - Support and protection Against Violence, on Equal terms for all children. My research has a practical approach, and part of my participation in the SAVE project includes continuing development of the local Child Welfare Services.
Shahab Mirbabaei, Sociology
My dissertation explores everyday – verbal and physical – practices of racialization among youth. In this study, I approach racialization as a process, and as a form of othering and social differentiation. I have collected data through participant observations and group interviews at a youth recreation center (YRC) in Sweden. Particularly, I am interested in ideas of difference and similarities, categories and stereotypes, racial intersections with other categories, and approaches to phenotypical markers. Through this in-depth study, I will nuance our understanding of when, where and how racialization matters in Sweden.
Kristoffer Nilsson, Social Work
His thesis investigates public views, opinions and trust of local authorities’ social services and social workers. Factors advancing perceptions and trust as well as consequences for social work practice are explored. Both in relation to social workers day-to-day practices as well as in relation to the social services as an organisation.
Linda Persson, Risk- and environmental studies
My research is about resistance in relation to issues of environment and risk. The type of resistance I’m looking at is not coming from people who resists environmental action for example, but those who resist current practices, status quo or business as usual. This involves, among other things, studies about counterurbanization as resistance towards the risks of neoliberal urbanization, as well as the Fridays for Future movement inspired by the school strike of Greta Thunberg.
Alesia Rudnik
Ph.D. student in political science. Her research project focuses on analyzing democratization and digitalization of politics in autocratic countries. Doctoral research looks at how social media are used for political mobilization, what are the responses of autocratic regimes, as well as at relations of regimes and social networking platforms.
Alexander Thielen
My research area concerns the researchers relationship to their science communication in mass media. My thesis explores how science communication can be understood as a meaningful tool for Swedish researchers in light of the logic of mass media and academia. I am particularly interested in understanding this phenomenon from the perspective sociology of knowledge.
Kenny Turesson
In my research, I have investigated factors associated with social vulnerability related to climate risks in Sweden, then examined the public’s trust in the rescue service and to what extent individuals protect themselves in the form of owning protective equipment. Continued research intends to investigate how risk in the Swedish context is perceived, understood, and prioritized. My research interest concerns societal risk management with a particular interest in risk understanding and prioritization.