Hillevi Ganetz Professor Emerita

Research interests: Media, gender and popular culture. In particular popular music, wildlife films, televised science (i.e. The Nobel Banquet), reality TV and popular literature, the #MeToo movement in Sweden. Also idols and fans, consumption and shopping, shopping centres and media as commodities.

I am a media researcher with a Cultural Studies perspective, focusing on gender and popular culture, mostly fiction in various forms. In 1997 I received a Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University with a dissertation on Swedish, female rock lyrics, focusing on popular music as a cultural and mediated form. Later I continued to work in this area in a larger project on gender and popular music, with three other researchers involved and funding by the Swedish Research Council. My study investigates how masculinity, femininity and sexuality are created in the process of ”becoming an artist", with material from the talent-reality series Fame Factory (see a summary of the project at the Swedish Research Council's website).

Another area of interest is representations of nature, which I have analyse in a project focusing Swedish nature programs on television. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council and titled ‘How are Animals Made?’ The main objective is to explore how nature magazines in images, music and words represent nature, gender, 'race' and sexuality.

Last but not least, I participated in the steering group of the large project ‘Popular Passages: Media in the Modern Space of Consumption’ (funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation). In this project, which had a big mall in northern Stockholm as ethnographic field, I have written about books as commodities, shopping as a social process, how a shopping centre’s body and soul can be interpreted, etc.

I have also previously been involved in youth research, but today I am most interested in the relationship between fans and idols.

I have for a couple of years studied the televised Nobel Banquet, trying to understand how science and the scientist are constructed there, examining the ambivalence found in the interdependence of media and science (funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation).

Today I have been involved in a project that studied the Swedish #Metoo movement. The project has resulted in several articles, published in international journals, plus an anthology in Swedish, Maktordningar och motstånd (Nordic Academic Press)

Following my doctorate, I have worked as a lecturer at Södertörn University College, and as Assistant Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, where I became Associate Professor. I have also worked as lecturer and director of studies at the Centre for Gender Studies, Uppsala University. But a few years ago I retired and am now professor emeritus at the institution.