This volume contains short versions of four noteworthy master theses written within the international master’s programme in Media, Communication, and Cultural Analysis at Södertörn University and defended in 2025. Running since 2009, the programme has more than 100 alumni who are now employed in the media, academia and education. In 2020, the department chose to highlight the best theses in a printed volume. This is the sixth volume in the series. 

The contributions in this volume cover four different topics: the representation of loss in science fiction films in relation to theories of modernity; the portrayal of the same robbery in different TV genres (news, documentary, and dramatised TV series); users’ experience of trust when interacting with communicative AI chatbots; and the ways in which users’ engagement with Spotify Wrapped can be understood as a media ritual. Although stretching across four such different topics, the chapters share an interest in on how media can be understood in relation to narration. In the first two chapters, the authors explicitly use narrative theory as a tool for understanding how mediation always incorporates narrative. The following two chapters focus instead on the narratives that arise when users interact with machines (AI chatbots) and on how algorithms shape annual personal stories about what kind of music listener you are (Spotify). Common for the four chapters is that they fruitfully re-center our attention on how narrating frames our encounter with media.

The aim of this article is to understand how students at schools for photojournalism and documentary photography understand photography's relation to reality. Theoretical discussions on the digitalisation of photography and related technological developments over the last 30 years have often highlighted that the relationship of photography to reality has fundamentally changed and with it the role of the photographer. To investigate this, this study uses focus group interviews, conducted between 2018 and 2020, with young adults ('digital natives') at schools for photojournalism and documentary photography from two countries - Russia and Sweden - with very different historical traditions of practising photography. Photo schools are interesting as sites because they may provide a freer space to discuss and challenge conventions around how to practice photography, outside of professional constrains. However, when the students reflect upon photography, technology, and the role of the photographer, it is not centred around the digital photograph. Understood as a remediation process, the photo students invest the 'new' medium (the digital photograph) with certain assumed qualities of the 'old' one (analogue photograph). The dominant understanding of photography is rooted in the history of photography and, despite the two distinct national contexts, has more similarities than differences.

Using theories of rhythm, temporality and photography, this study explores how the rhythm of visual news flow is shaped in today’s newsrooms and how it affects the truth-telling mission of news journalism. The material on which the study is based was collected in 2024 through participant observation and interviews with visual professionals at a regional Finnish newspaper, at a national Swedish newspaper, and through interviews with Russian visual professionals working in newsrooms in exile. The results show that the 24-h news cycle of online news, where there is a constant need for new visual material, as well as new opportunities for slower visual journalism, creates a rhythm where images do not need to give evidence to certain specific moments in time. Although visual journalism professionals express a restrictive attitude towards AI-generated images and a protective attitude towards photography as a registration, truth claims tend to focus on ‘abstract’ and ‘emotive’ truths. New opportunities to obtain detailed information on user behaviour also affect the rhythm of how, what, when and where to publish, and newsrooms are struggling to find a rhythm that corresponds to users’ experience of living in media-saturated societies.

This volume contains adaptions of three excellent master theses that were written and defended within the international master’s programme media, communication, and cultural analysis at Södertörn University in 2024. Running since 2009, the programme has more than 100 alumni who are employed in the media, academia and education. In 2020, the programme coordinator together with the programme and the department councils, chose to distinguish the best theses in a printed volume. This is the fifth in the series. 

The contributions cover three different topics: how gender influences the representation of influential people in AI; how Ukrainian women from the European diaspora interact with ChatGPT about the Russian–Ukrainian war; and the anti-fandom culture surrounding Taylor Swift on social media. Although stretch-ing across three such different topics, the chapters share an interest in on how media can be understood in relation to gender. In two of the chapters, gendering is explicitly made visible as an ongoing process, while in the study on women interacting with ChatGPT it is done indirectly. However, common for the three chapters is that they fruitfully re-center our attention on how gender frames our everyday digital practices and discourses.

This volume contains adaptions of two excellent master theses that were written and defended within the international master’s programme media, communication, and cultural analysis at Södertörn University in 2023. Running since 2009, the programme has more than 100 alumni who are employed in the media, academic and education. In 2020, the programme coordinator together with the programme council and the department council, chose to distinguish the best theses in a printed volume. This is the fourth volume in the series. 

The contributions in this volume cover two very different topics: how social media and content streaming sites are used to shape relationships between K-pop superstars BTS and their fan base in Sweden and how vegans/vegetarians respectively meat eaters react to the use of shock advertisements by the organization for animal advocacy, PETA. Although stretching across two such different topics, the chapters share an interest in zooming in on how media can be understood in relation to engagement and emotions.

This chapter focuses on an essay by French philosopher and cultural theorist Roland Barthes. His book from 1980 attempts to answer the question: What is the essence of photography? It is also an attempt to think beyond structuralism and semiotics, which were previously important to him. The media-ontological approach of Barthes’s essay is also relevant in relation to other media, and opens a range of important questions in media studies. Moreover, his book is still useful for thinking about the role and importance of photography in our digital age. It demonstrates the limitations of structuralist semiotics and highlights the importance of affect and personal life experience in the process of meaning-making.

This volume contains adaptions of three excellent master theses that were written and defended within the international master’s programme Media, communication, and cultural analysis at Södertörn University in 2022. Running since 2009, the programme has more than 100 alumni who are employed in the media, academic and education. In 2020, the programme coordinator together with the programme council and the department council, chose to distinguish the best theses in a printed volume. This is the third volume in the series. 

The contributions cover a broad range of topics: how the Sami community is implicated and affected by the data center industry that is increasingly being established in the Northern parts of Sweden, Finland and Norway directly impacting Sápmi; how the NIPCC (The Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change) can be understood as a cultural industry producing social meaning, not knowledge, in its dissemination of climate disinformation; how what has been coined the contemporary space race has very little to do with its precursor in the 1960s, today it stands for a particular vision for humanity envisioned by tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. 

The aim of this study is to understand the ‘photographic selves’–the collective competences and skills required for making, interpreting, and communicating through photographs — that are articulated in the educational framework for future photographers in Russia and Sweden. These are two countries with very different histories in relation to photographic practices. Theories on photography from recent decades have emphasized that digital photography is a different medium from analogue photography. This study seeks to understand whether and how this is addressed in two different cultural contexts, based on interviews with teachers and department heads, combined with written descriptions of courses and educational programs. The material makes visible different ideal photographic practices. One, the most common in both countries, is firmly embedded in the international documentary tradition. Other ways, represented by teachers at a Russian art school for photography, stress a more critical perspective toward established conventions. However, absent at the studied schools are more freer understandings of photography in the wake of digitization. Photography is still framed by the historically anchored indexical relation to the surrounding world and as a fixed object.