Martin Karlsson

Martin Karlsson began his PhD program in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Media Studies in the autumn of 2015. 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 Sweden in 1906 in three Stockholm newspapers. In his thesis project, 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 is particularly interested in the forms and conditions of politics in media through history, and what can and should be expressed during different periods. This is an interest that can be found in Martin’s Master’s thesis about the Swedish partypress, and that continuities in his ongoing PhD project about Swedish public service journalism.

Martin’s research explores power and knowledge in the governance of Swedish public service journalism. More specifically how the governmentality of Swedish public service jorunalism has continued, changed and conditioned the conduct of journalism between 1965 and 2015. The primary source material consists of public enquiries about Swedish public service from this period and news broadcasts from the evening news program Aktuellt. The intention with this project is to contribute with a more concrete reconstruction of how journalism has continued and changed over time.