Lina Eklund

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As a researcher my focus is on understanding human action and interaction in and with digital technology. I received my doctorate in sociology from Stockholm University in 2013. My PhD thesis was titled The Sociality of Gaming: A mixed methods approach to understanding digital gaming as a social leisure activity and was an explorative, in-depth study of social engagement, relationships, and design in digital gaming, investigated through several case studies utilizing a mixed methods approach.

After my PhD I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology in Stockholm, which included a scholarship-funded exchange with Mia Consalvo at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada in her interdisciplinary game studies lab. In 2014, the summer, until the end of 2015, I was invited to and spent 1.5 years at the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley, California, U.S.

In 2017, I applied for a position as biträdande lektor / lecturer (assistant professor) in Human-Computer interaction at the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University.

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Digital Management of Reproductive Health

The digitalization of everyday life does not stop at the most intimate areas of healthcare, such as sexual health, fertility, and reproduction. Today, many people use apps to track menstrual cycles, detect (in)fertile phases, or virtually follow fetal development. Others use online forums to share and compare such self-monitored data, and many, often younger, people predominantly educate themselves about sexuality and reproductive health online. In other words, digital technologies allow for a novel external management of the reproductive system.

Various technologies have a long history tightly interwoven with women’s struggles to gain power over their bodies and reproductive abilities. However, digitalization has brought many aspects of reproductive health back from the doctor’s office into the individual’s, –the user’s– hands. So far, little is known about this digital management of reproductive health and its effects on individual experiences, or on the ways it changes social and cultural understandings of reproduction, fertility, sexuality and the body.

The overall aim of this interdisciplinary project is to explore user experiences in conjunction with the historical, medical, and technological normativities which intersect with the use of technologies for the management of reproductive health.

Members: Helga Sadowski, Lina Eklund, Renita Sörensdotter, Gabriele Griffin, Morag Ramsey, and Ylva Söderfeldt.

PLATYPUS-Participatory Play in Public Heritage Spaces

PLATYPUS addresses the complex challenge of how to engender participation and empowerment in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums)-sector by exploring play as a creative intervention to disband the user/institution dichotomy. We do this through exploring a series of key contemporary challenges: 1) how to redistribute power over meaning making, 2) heritage as representation of dominant ideologies which can potentially alienate people, 3) the conflict between play and learning in heritage sites. These challenges are inherently interdisciplinary and thus require a cross subject approach in order to solve them.

PLATYPUS develops comprehensive theoretical understanding and new methods for how play and play-like activities in heritage sites can allow for multiple interpretations of the base activity for a culturally and socially diverse set of visitors. We explore how play can be used to increase participation and help heritage sites to meet their policy requirements that exist in the Nordic countries.

Members: Lina Eklund, Jon Back, Olle Sköld, Anna Foka, and Patrick Prax