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.
Margareta Dahlström
Margareta Dahlström is professor emerita of Human Geography at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication. Her research is in the intersection between economic geography and planning. The research focuses on issues in relation to regional innovation systems, regional development, green transformation, the inclusion of civil society in transformation, sustainable forest-based bioeconomy and policies in relation to these themes. Margareta also works with methodological perspectives and methods for multidisciplinary research and for transdisciplinary research, i.e. research that includes non-scientific actors.
Mikael Granberg
Mikael Granberg is Professor of Political Science and Director of 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.
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
Peter van Eerbeek, Human Geography
Mathilde de Goër de Herve, Risk- and environmental studies
Mathilde’s doctoral thesis studies justice issues within risk management. In the context of sustainable development, she considers different dimensions of justice: social, ecological, spatial and temporal. In a first part of her thesis, she investigates justice considerations in flood risk management and develops a general framework called risk justice. In a second part, she looks deeper at temporal aspects of disaster risk management and their impacts on future generations.
Kristin Gustafsson, Risk- and environmental studies
Per Göransson, Human Geography
In my research, I examine the relationship between choirs, place and societal context. The background to this is that Sweden is usually described as one of the world's most secular countries. However, religious elements are still present in society. For example, through religiously coloured cultural activities and different types of encounters and tensions between religious and secular expressions in our society. Analysing choirs in a Swedish context is interesting as about six percent of the population regularly sings in a choir. The choir members are geographically distributed all over Sweden in both urban and rural contexts. Choirs also have a long tradition as a Christian cultural expression, which has provided a rich cultural heritage from the long history of earlier choral activities in Sweden. There are also a large number of both sacred (religious) choirs and secular (non-religious) choral activities in Sweden. Choral activities are an example that can highlight the encounter between the sacred and the secular and how it is distributed geographically in a secularised country like Sweden.
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
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
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.
Michaela Padden, Political Science
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.
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.
Johanna Tangnäs, Political Science
My research interests include governance, democracy, political legitimacy and possibilities for transformation. The research I am conducting for my PhD in Political science is focused on the absence of political articulation and conflicts within the area of growth and sustainability (primarily in a Swedish context). I am interested in movements and discursive practices in Swedish regions, deriving from the changes and challenges at the international level, but which nonetheless possess a certain regional logic.
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.