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.

Today (1st of July) I am exactly half way through my three year PhD scholarship. That means it is time to really concentrate on me and my PhD project. It also means that I must learn the crucial gift of being able to say no.

Up until now, I feel like I have been much preoccupied with pleasing other people (e.g. students, journalists, colleagues, course participants, professionals, librarians or others who are interested in my research area) and although I like communicating my research results, giving interviews and public talks or being called on as an “expert” in different contexts, I must stop accepting all the invites to exciting activities and start being a bit more selfish in order to get my dissertation done in time.

Of course, it helps that I have now fulfilled all my teaching obligation here at the university. As a PhD student at The Department of Communication at Aalborg University I have to teach 600 hours during my three years of employment. At the end of this semester, I have fulfilled this obligation. Although I enjoy teaching and supervising students, not having to do that for the next year and a half will probably (hopefully) help me to concentrate more on my project and my interesting data.

Let the writing begin!
(And let’s hope I don’t suffer from P.Q.S.… )

My colleague and friend Anders Albrechtslund will be defending his PhD dissertation next Monday. The dissertation is called “In the Eyes of the Beholder: Introducing participation and ethics to surveillance“ and is a collection of seven published papers.

Anders writes about his dissertation:

The main focus of the dissertation is to understand surveillance, and participation and ethics have been ways to grasp the concept. I introduce the concept “participatory surveillance” to emphasize aspects of surveillance practices which are not adequately expressed in the current surveillance studies literature… [...] This way of grasping surveillance might be in stark contrast to the everyday understanding of something unpleasant and unwanted, which terrifies and controls its passive victims, a description we know so well from depictions in books, films and TV series. However, when certain everyday social relations are studied, e.g. online social networking, these practices can be described as active, positive engagements with surveillance. Consequently, there seems to be more to surveillance than meets the eye.

Especially, I find Anders’ paper on “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” interesting. Here, the practice of online social networking is conceptualised in relation to the social and playful aspects of surveillance.

I wish Anders the best of luck with the defence and look forward to attending the event.