Research

I am employed as Associate Professor in Social Psychology of Everyday life at the Department of People & Technology, Roskilde University (Denmark). My research mainly seeks to contribute to the sociomaterial psychological study of the human-technology-world relationship from within everyday life. To that end I draw inspiration from many other fields of research and their relational theorizing, by connecting my participatory take on conceptualizing a dialectical developmental process psychology to audience research, critical childhood studies, environmental humanities, feminist technoscience, and multimodal ethnographical design studies.

My main research interest has been revolving around the question of why people develop so strongly differing and ambiguous views of what is happening in the world, and what this may imply for democratic societies. In particular, I got interested in the role of increasingly customized mass media as a potential catalyst. Since my PhD project (2010-2014), I have especially focused on what it means for the relations between children, parents, professional educators, and the people around them, to be developing their agency in societies whose communication is heavily digitalized and mediatized. This also includes studying the possibilities and limitations of situating psychological research in praxis, and thus of engaging as a humanistic and social science researcher from within the everyday life of those I do research together with.

During my studies of psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), I spent an ERASMUS semester at the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy) and was a guest researcher at the New York University (USA). In 2010 I moved to Denmark to realize my PhD project at Roskilde University on the role of media technology for kindergarten children’s everyday understandings and actions. I am on the editorial board of the open access journal Outlines.Critical Practice Studies and have co-edited special issues for Human Arenas (on relational ethics in psychological research; with Jaakko Hilppö & Antti Rajala), for Outlines (on the psychological study of everyday life; with Jacob Klitmøller & Pernille Hviid), for the Journal für Psychologie (on the psychological study of children’s media practices; with Ernst Schraube), as well as a German language anthology on the emancipatory potentials of the social sciences (with Martin Dege, Till Grallert & Carmen Dege). Together with Kim Rasmussen, Pernille Juhl and Thomas Gitz-Johansen, I co-authored a book in Danish on how wellbeing is relationally and materially done in daycare institutions. Currently I am working on a monograph on the psychological importance of a democratic, caring communication across generational, technological and other anthropocentrist divides. Moreover, I am section editor of the upcoming Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and the Planet: Environment, Climate, Sustainability and Nature (chiefly edited by Luca Tateo).

Since 2024, I am member of the Executive Committee and Treasurer of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP; istpsychology.org). I am also member of the International Environmental Justice Committee (Div. 52, American Psychological Association; https://div52.net/activities/apa-division-52-international-environmental-justice-committee/) and of several other professional societies.