Research
My dissertation, Watching Television Series: A Study of Engagement and Fictional Competence among Viewers of Television Series within Subject Specific Literature , examines how upper secondary school students engage with and make meaning from television series as leisure-time fiction.
The study is based on 13 focus-group discussions involving a total of 46 upper secondary school students who self-identify as viewers of television series. The discussions centred on one or two of five selected series: Breaking Bad, Euphoria, Friends, Gossip Girl, and/or Stranger Things.
Using reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies four recurring ways of talking about and relating to television series. In the dissertation, these are conceptualized as distinct viewing modes: the immersive, the informed, the reflective, and the contextual viewing mode.
A central theoretical premise of the study is Jonathan Culler's argument that extensive engagement with poetry fosters literary competence (Culler, 2002/1975). From this perspective, the focus-group discussions are analysed in relation to the forms of literary competence described by Theo Witte and colleagues (Witte et al., 2012). The findings suggest that the participants demonstrate a form of television series literacy that corresponds closely to good or very good literary competence according to Witte and colleagues' model.
The dissertation thus contributes new knowledge about young people's meaning-making in encounters with television series as a form of fiction and proposes the concept of fictional competence as a way of discussing what may be shared across engagements with different fictional media.
Culler, Jonathan (2002/1975), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, (Routledge).
Witte, Theo m.fl. (2012), An empirically grounded theory of literary
development. Teachers' pedagogical content knowledge on literary
development in upper secondary education, L1 Educational Studies in
Language and Literature, 12, 1–33.
Teaching
• 20 years' experience teaching Swedish and History at upper secondary level (certified subject teacher since 2001).
• 5 years' experience teaching in the Swedish Secondary Teacher Education Programme at the University of Gothenburg.
• 3 years' experience teaching in the Swedish Secondary Teacher Education Programme at Karlstad University.