PhD-programme
Digitalisation and Society
Background
Maren Svendsen Folkvord has worked as a researcher at Nova, OsloMet for over two years in the Childhood, Family and Child Welfare section, where she researched vulnerable young people and their families. She holds a master's degree in sociology from the University of Oslo (2021). The master's thesis was about differences between digital and bodily interaction between people, as well as the creation and feeling of community and closeness.
Academic interests
Folkvord's research interests include children and young people, digital communication and social media, body and emotions, digital childhoods, phenomenological and everyday sociological approaches, inclusion, friendship and community.
At present Folkvord is taking a PhD at Østfold University College, where she is exploring children's digital everyday life. Today’s children are growing up in an era of rapid digital transformation that profoundly shapes their lives and societies they live in. In Norway, digital media are deeply embedded in children’s everyday lives and function as a key social arena where friendships, belonging, and identity are formed. Despite this, research still privileges quantitative measures of everyday aspects such as “screen time,” leaving children’s perspectives, embodied practices, and meaning-making largely unexplored. Central to this project is the commitment to learning from and with children rather than merely about them; if we aim to understand children’s everyday lives, we must listen to the experts – the children themselves.
Through ethnographic fieldwork in a seventh-grade class at a primary school in Oslo, Folkvord explores how digital technologies shape 12–13-year-old’s activities, routines, play, relations and identity. Using a body- and post-phenomenological approach, she is interested in how technologies are felt, sensed and embodied by children. The fieldwork also includes a participatory digital diary method, where seven children photographed and recorded videos of aspects of their everyday lives with a digital camera, and Q methodology, which enables the researcher to capture variations in children’s digital everyday experiences, based on the perspectives and priorities they themselves bring forward in the fieldwork. With this approach, the project seeks to generate nuanced insights into how children live, feel, and make sense of their digital everyday lives.
- Supervisors: Lilliana Del Busso (Østfold University College), Ida Bruheim-Escobar (University of Stavanger) og Tina Mathisen (Nova, Oslo Metropolitan University)
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Partners
- Welfare Research Institute Nova, OsloMet