Professor Dr. Ylva Ekström

Biography

Ylva Ekström is an Associate Professor in Media Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University. She defended her PhD in 2010 with a dissertation titled "We Like Chameleons": Changing Mediascapes, Cultural Identities City Sisters Dar es Salaam. Her research encompasses education, communication for development, and social change, with extensive fieldwork primarily in East Africa. Ylva's interests involve the role of media in everyday life and identity construction, gender representation, and new media's impact on culture and social change, employing ethnographic research methods. Since the pandemic, she has collaborated with the Uppsala Region on health communication initiatives, focusing on mental health literacy for residents of Uppsala County. She has also contributed to the multidisciplinary research project CRUSH COVID, which addressed local outbreaks of COVID-19. Additionally, she participated in the TROPHY project, aimed at understanding communication between digital and physical spaces.

Research Interests