What is your professional background and primary research domain?  
I have a master’s degree from the interdisciplinary programme Communication and IT from University of Copenhagen. This means that I have broad knowledge within several fields, including information technology, computer science and communication and media studies. In the wake of my postgraduate studies, I was employed as a PhD student and initiated my project, which was finished in November 2022.   

I have been continuously interested in the relationship between new technologies and people’s everyday lives, that is ‘media usage studies’. I have investigated how people acquire new technologies, how new technologies integrate in our lives, and how they influence both our individual and family lives. Here, the aforementioned fields fuse as I rely on both my media and communicational background as well as my knowledge about digital technologies, digitalization and datafication.   

My PhD project concerned algorithms in digital media. Through a media usage perspective, I investigated Danish media users’ understanding of and interaction with algorithms, including if and how our surroundings influence algorithms. One motivation for starting the project was that new media influence often prompt polarized opinions that leave out nuances of how media users actually experience digital technologies. It is crucial that we acknowledge these nuances and the importance of empirically investigating them. This does not mean, however, that we should not be aware of potential risks of new digital technologies – I have too found great inspiration in the approaches of critical media studies, but it is important to include the nuances in these discussions.   

What are your ongoing research projects in SHAPE about?  
After my PhD studies, I was employed as postdoc at SHAPE where I am currently examining digitalization of the Danish welfare state. In overall terms, I am investigating how the relation between citizen and welfare state is negotiated and transformed when this relation is being digitalized and dataficated. I will, more specifically, explore how people’s everyday lives are influences e.g. based on the assumption that digitalization potentially creates new forms of vulnerability as some will be more equipped o navitage in the digital transformations than others. This means that we risk excluding some groups – also in the debate about the digitilization and datafication of our welfare society.  

We are currently examining the Danish government’s digitlization and AI strategies in order to concretize the political visions of digitilization and how the notion of citizenship is considered in this context. Furthermore, we are embarking on a project about young people’s vulnerability in collaboration with the social services department of Aarhus Municipality. In this project, we will investigate how young people are made into data when involved in social initiatives by public authorities, and how social workers, educators, and leaders engage with digital tools in social interventions in order to visualize both potentials and challenges related to increased digitalization and datafication within social affairs.   

What future projects do you have in the pipeline?  
In relation to the project on social vulnerability and digitalization, I will be researching vulnerable young people’s experience of living in an increasingly more digital society where their life circumstances are made into data. I will be researching this through fieldwork in the coming months.   

Furthermore, I recently co-organized the student workshop StudenterTing together with colleagues. The workshop took place on May 16, and our aim is to gather students from all over Aarhus University to discuss and learn more about the relation between citizen and public administration, including limits of trust in relation to data collection. We already know that Danish citizens have a generally high level of trust in the state, and use of data in health research is e.g. highly supported by the public. The main objective of this workshop was therefore to give the students the opportunity to discuss the limits of our trust in public authorities when it comes to digitlization and datafication. Regarding an interesting workshop, we plan to organize more, e.g. at boarding schools or libraries.