A profound curiosity on the connection between the development of communication technologies and their impact on politics and democratic development; and, perhaps the most important, a concern that in research, as everywhere else, there are blind spots and overlooked issues. Media studies is often a trendy, hot field that focuses on the new and exciting digital technologies, but it has always been important for me to bear in mind that opportunities are not equally distributed between peoples, classes, and groups. When I teach, this is always what I try to engage students to grapple with and these questions keeps me motivated.
Impact is both a requirement that we increasingly meet with when applying for funding, and a political and social objective. As a requirement, it can feel forced, as the impact of research projects sometimes are difficult to formulate and may seem short-sighted and instrumental. As an objective, I think every piece of research I have ever done, has been directed at making some kind of political or social impact, long-term or short-term. What do I mean by that? In my thinking, research always have objectives and goals and is intended to have some kind of effect, either on knowledge building in general or on societal problems. For instance, when I and my colleagues do research on how social media is implemented in election campaigns, we don’t do that just to collect data and publish articles in research journals, we want to understand and build knowledge on how digitized political communication work across the world, what it does, whose perspectives attract attention and which do not and how democracy develops and changes. And perhaps the most meaningful – and effective in terms of impact – research that I have been involved in, is on Indigenous media and Indigenous politics in the Nordic countries. These projects, which are usually multidisciplinary, multilingual, often cross-border, comparative and involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, have contributed to extend the political communication and media research agenda, raised public awareness about Indigenous politics and influenced policy making in several fields.
There are many challenges. Communicating complex research findings is one that media researchers should be particularly apt at, since we by profession know the media logics, but it is still difficult to translate from research publications into the public domain. The academic publishing system, too, needs a revision that removes pay walls and allows for real open access to research results. For education: To remain relevant and provide students with expertise for handling the communicative and political aspects of current and future crises is the most important challenge, I believe.
