Martin Karlsson

Martin Karlsson began his PhD program in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Media Studies in the autumn of 2015. He is currently one of the members in the ongoing research project Screening Protest. Martin has a great interest in media, culture and history. He graduated with his Master's thesis Struggling Nation (2015 ), where he explored the representation of Russian refugees who arrived in Sweden in 1906 in three Stockholm newspapers . In the project Screening Protest Martin continues in a similar vein by studying the representation of protests for democracy and political rights in television news between the 1960s and today.

Martin's research deals with the representation of political protests in television news from a historical perspective. The intention is to understand how television through history has contributed to shape politics and political participation, against the background of technological, cultural and political processes such as globalization, acceleration, deregulation and convergence. More specifically Martin's research adress questions such as how television has shaped the conditions for citizens to appear in public, compared to societal elites, and to what exten television has contributed to expand and/or limit imagined communities beyond the local and national in reports of protest from afar.

Currently, Martin is one of the participants in the research project Screening Protest. The project compares visual representations of protests in different genres and historical periods with the intention of understanding the meaning of these representations in processes of social and political change . Martin's study is a historical comparison and touches upon issues such as the struggle for suffrage in Europe in the early 1900s and the Arab spring in 2011. The source material consists mainly of moving images from different periods and includes newsreels from the silent film era and contemporary news broadcasts from the Swedish program Aktuellt