My current work is concerned with the intersection of child culture and cultural heritage of terrorism. Everyday things that we often associate with children and play - such as cuddly teddy bears, toys and hand-made drawings - are common objects to find on sites of spontaneous memorials and in other practices through which the publics commemorate victims of terrorist attacks. These things later may be collected and preserved at museums and archives and this way child culture becomes an ingrained part of cultural heritage. How can we make sense of the actually far-from-obvious connection between child culture, commemoration, and cultural heritage? This is one of the main questions I explore by studying two museum collections made in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in central Stockholm in April 2017. Ethical issues of working with archival material is another focus in the project.
This postdoctoral project is run in connection to the larger project Children's cultural heritage - the visual voices of the archive, see more information below.
Children and corporate charity "by kids, for kids"
I defended my PhD thesis Children helping children? Values and concerns in corporate charity in 2021. The thesis focuses on so called "cause-related marketing" campaigns where for-profit companies donate part of or entire turnover from the sales of a product to a charitable cause. I examined one such campaign, organized by the international furniture and home design company IKEA in collaboration with the international non-profit organization Save the Children. Through the marketing, the campaign is presented to the publics as an initiative where children help other children with imagination and design. The thesis argues that corporate charity invites many questions about how charitable campaigns are presented to consumers as charity and what counts as charity today. Larger questions about values ascribed to children also emerged in this empirical case given the framing of the campaign as an initiative "by kids, for kids".
The thesis combines two interdisciplinary fields - Child Studies and Valuation Studies which draws theoretically on Science and Technology Studies (STS).
