Project leader: Mia Lövheim
Mia Lövheim participates in Mediatized Stories with her research project "Between Post modernity and Tradition: Young Women's Values in Mediated Stories on the Internet" that is supported through a post doc scholarship from the Swedish Research Council.
The project focuses on Swedish female bloggers between 18-30 years old. Blogs have been described as a new genre that bridges private and public spheres of communication. Young women are the most frequent readers and users of blogs in Sweden. Sweden also represents the country where a general, cultural shift from traditional to post-modern values, and from religious to secular rational values in the Western world is most salient. Previous research has shown that for young women in particular this shift is rather experienced as a constant negotiation of traditional and normative gender roles and expectations in society. Thus young Swedish female bloggers represent a key group for understanding processes of stability and change as well as the role of digital media in this development.
The aim of the project is thus to analyze the content and use of blogs as a form of mediated stories through which young women construct identity in a context of transformations of relations between self and society, boundaries between public and private spheres and gender roles in contemporary Sweden. In order to connect "private" uses of blogs and their "public" social and cultural context, the study will combine an in-depth analysis of individual blogs and interviews with bloggers and an overview of the most popular blogs written by women in the age group on Swedish blog-ranking sites. An analysis of the position of young women's stories in the wider Swedish "blogosphere" is thus an important part of the analysis.
Publications
Lövheim, M. (2012) Negotiating Emphatic Communication. Feminist Media Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.659672
Lövheim, M. (2011) Personal and Popular. The Case of Young Swedish Female Top-bloggers, Nordicom Review, 32(1): 3-16.
Lövheim, M. (2011) Young Women’s Blogs as Ethical Spaces. Information, Communication & Society, 14(3): 338-354.
Presentations
Lövheim, M. (2010) Unplugged. Panelsamtale ved "Generationer och jämställdhet", Fredrika Bremer Förbundets sommarseminarium. Apelryd, Båstad, 6-7 August.
Lövheim, M. (2010) Young Swedish Female Top-Bloggers and Performance of Authentic Selves.
Paper presented at International Communication Association (ICA), Singapore, 22-26 June.
Lövheim, M. (2010) Freedom of (self)expression – is the personal political? Workshop on "Cyberativism – changing the world?" Womens bloggers network, KVINFO, DCCD and Danish PEN. Copenhagen, 11 May.
Lövheim, M (2010) Bloggprinsessene. Bloggen som iscenesettelse og forhandlingsrom. Presentation at PUBLIC SEMINAR with presentation of research results from the Mediatized Stories project. Forskningsparken, Oslo, 14 April 2010.
Lövheim, M. (2009) Bloggers and audiences: a case study of young female top bloggers in Sweden. Paper presented at Transforming Audiences 2. London: University of Westminster, 4 September.
Lövheim, M. (2009) Blogs as Self-Representation: a gendered perspective on agency, authenticity and negotiations of public and private in digital media. Presentation at the Mediatized Stories preconference on 'The presentation of self in everyday digital life', London: University of Westminster, 2 September.
Lövheim, M. (2009) Queens of the Blogosphere? An analysis of young female top-bloggers in Sweden. Paper presented at Nordmedia09, Karlstad, Sweden, August 2009.
Lövheim, M. (2009) Representations of Gender among Swedish Top Bloggers. Paper presented to
The 7th European Feminist Research Conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 4-7 June.