Kaarina Nikunen

Closing Plenary with Erika Polson, Jenny Sundén, Kaarina Nikunen and Paul Adams

Chair: Cornelia Brantner

The Geomedia Coda: Passion, Place & Media

Marking the 10th anniversary of the Geomedia Conference, this closing panel gathers leading scholars to reflect on the transformative power of passion in shaping media, place, and culture. As a “coda”, the session both concludes the 2025 conference and opens new horizons for the next decade of geomedia research.

Erika Polson is a professor in the department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies at the University of Denver. Her critical cultural research on digital media, mobility, and placemaking is published in leading media and communication journals, as well as the (2016) book, Privileged Mobilities: Geo-Social Media, Professional Migration, and a New Global Middle Class. Recent projects include co-editing a Special Issue on “Digital placemaking” in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2021) and articles in Special Issues in Mobile Media & Communicationon “Homelessness and mobile media” (2023), in Space & Culture on “Gentrification and the right to the geomedia city” (2024), and in the International Communication Gazette on “Urban Places, Technologies and People: The Importance of Urban Communication for Communication and Media Studies” (2025). She is currently working on a book about how mobile and social media have changed travel and impacted places.

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Uppsala University and Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her work is situated at the intersection of digital media studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory, and affect theory. She is currently working on queerness and digital intimacy, the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures across Nordic, Baltic, and Anglo-American contexts, and the politics of pleasure. She is the author of Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter (MIT Press, forthcoming, with Susanna Paasonen and Katrin Tiidenberg), Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MIT Press, 2020, with Susanna Paasonen), and Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (Routledge, 2012, with Malin Sveningsson).

Kaarina Nikunen is Professor of Media and Communication Research at Tampere University Finland. Her research interests include digital culture and datafication, affect and emotions, solidarity, migration and hate speech. Her current research explores the emerging intimacies, inequalities and vulnerabilities in data driven society with combination of computational, qualitative and ethnographic methods. She has also led several research projects on hate speech and online racism with focus on affective circulation of hate, politics of irony and gut feelings on social media context. Her book Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power and Justice in the Digital Age (Sage, 2019), explores critically the ways in which emotions and affect drive solidarity and political participation in the digital media landscape.

Paul Adams is the Erich W. Zimmermann Regents Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the Human Geography editor for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and was the founder of the Media and Communication Specialty Group in the American Association of Geographers. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1993) and has taught at Virginia Tech, SUNY-Albany, and Texas A&M University. He has also held visiting research and teaching appointments at McGill University and University of Montreal (Canada), the University of Bergen (Norway), Karlstad University (Sweden), University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and Johannes Gutenberg University (Germany). He has published over 60 peer reviewed articles and chapters and 8 sole-authored and co-authored books, including Geographies of Media and Communication (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), which won the James W. Carey Media Research Award and has been translated into Chinese.

Chair:

Cornelia Brantner is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University and coordinator of the Centre for Geomedia Studies; her research spans geomedia, visual and digital communication, digitalized publics, participation, visibility/invisibility, inequality and responsibility in digitized spaces, and the mediatization of space. She leads “Digital infrastructure sovereignty: Towards a public value-based media policy for the datafied Swedish welfare state” (2022–2026), funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant 2022-05392), and is co-Principal Investigator of “From Pixels to Peace: The Role of Visual Communication in Conflict Transformation” (2025–2029), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).