Marja Åkerström

Marja åkerström is a PhD in Media and Communication Studies and associate professor at Department for Strategic Communication (ISK) at Campus Helsingborg, Lund University, Sweden. 

Background

Marja Åkerström's doctoral thesis in Media and Communication science (Lund University: Cosmetic Democracy, 2010) is about democracy in local politics of Sweden and strategies used on- and offline by citizens, politicians and journalists in order to exercise influence and power.

Area of Research

Her main research fields are within strategic communication, political communication, digital media and democracy, organizational communication and crisis communication. Lately (2013-2015)  she has done research onDigital Naturals and how they think about democracy, opinion building and politics and what they demand from democracy (coming publications, July 2015, Routledge). Another study concerns how opinions form today on digital communities and the interplay between traditional media versus digital media (coming publication in July 2015, Routledge). Earlier research projects include studies of social movements like Attac within EU context, studies on the discourse of registrations of political opinions of Swedish citizens, environmental communication and studies on risk communication on a national level.

Teaching

For the last 3½ years I´ve been working at Strategic communication and here I am (or have been) giving courses and lectures in various fields of strategic communication such as digital media and society, organizational communication, marketing communication, PR, methodology, philosophy of Social science and Crisis communication to mention some. I am also responsible for the last course and semester (six) at the two bachelor programs (Strategic communication - digital media and the Strategic communication) where students write their bachelor thesis. The course is also known as “blood, sweat and tears”... I supervise bachelor thesis as well as master thesis in Strategic communication.