Together with PhD student Stine Lomborg from the University of Aarhus I am currently planning a PhD course about social media to be held in Denmark next year (24th to 26th of June 2009). The course is entitled “Social Media: Analysing Identity, Sociality and Creativity in Online Networked Environments” and is open to PhD students who do research into the uses of new social media in everyday life.

The general aim of the course is to address new social media as means of self-creation, peer-to-peer production and social networking. The more particular aims are 1) to discuss conceptual and theoretical tools to analyse the intersections of identity formation, community building and content creation in online networked environments 2) to strengthen the participants’ analytical skills when dealing with complex and multimodal empirical data 3) to enhance analytical reflexivity when studying the everyday uses of social media.

The course will be funded and sponsored by The Danish National Research School for Media, Communication, and Journalism (FMKJ) and The Post Graduate Research School of Human Centered Communication and Informatics (HCCI) at Aalborg University. Read more about the course here.

So far, we have a number of interesting international scholars who will present their research and give feedback to PhD students during the course. At the moment Nancy Baym, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at University of Kansas, José van Dijck, Professor at Universiteit van Amsterdam, Anne Scott Sørensen, Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark, and Marika Lüders, Researcher at SINTEF, have confirmed their participation.

Stay tuned for more info.