Universitetslektor at Humlab
I am a researcher and educator (PhD) in design, gender studies and digital humanities. My research examines how design and technology relate to systems of power, including gendered, racialised, and classed forms of privilege and oppression, and how these relations can be transformed toward more justice.
In my doctoral thesis Feminist Design Strategies for Transforming Design Museums Towards More Just Futures (2024), I explored how design museums participate in the reproduction and contestation of dominant structures of knowledge and power. Through museum visits, participatory design workshops, and engagement with community archive and activist practices, I developed feminist design strategies for transforming design museums towards what I describe as a “metabolic design museum”. The thesis contributed a set of feminist design strategies, a set of characteristics of a metabolic design museum, and a feminist design methodology for mapping institutional assemblages and identifying possibilities for intervention and reconfiguration. My doctoral thesis was a collaboration between Umeå Institute of Design and The Gender Research School, Umeå Centre for Gender Studies.
My teaching background is rooted in design education but has a strong interdisciplinary profile that combines feminist theory and design research, and more recently also digital humanities. I have taught in studio- and practice-based formats as well as in seminars, lectures, and workshop-based settings, often in international and bilingual classrooms. My teaching has an emphasis on critical thinking, collaboration, and creative engagement with complex social issues. I have held both sole and shared responsibility for teaching and course development, primarily at BA and MA level, and mainly within the Swedish higher education system.
My pedagogical approach is informed by my training as a designer and researcher in design and gender studies, as well as by my experience as an interdisciplinary, international, and multilingual educator. In my teaching, I aim to support students in framing, exploring, and analysing complex issues in creative and critical ways. Central to this approach is encouraging reflection on norms, power relations, and knowledge production, as well as questioning assumptions about objectivity and criteria that are often taken for granted.