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Hanna Jansson

About me

I work as an administrator at the Centre for the Advancement of University Teaching (CeUL), where I manage the centre’s range of courses, workshops, and other activities focused on higher education pedagogy and professional development.

CeUL is a network-based organisation with staff from several departments at Stockholm University. We aim to promote engaging and high-quality teaching at all levels within the university. We support teachers and departments in developing their teaching and creating effective learning environments that best support student learning.

Feel free to visit our website to learn more about current projects aimed at stimulating pedagogical development within the university’s departments. The idea is to build pedagogical competence by focusing on the various teaching and learning environments in which university educators operate.

You are welcome to contact me with questions about professional development in higher education teaching, our ongoing pedagogical projects, or if you have an idea for a teaching development project within your own department that you would like to realise.

I also hold a PhD in Ethnology and have a background as a researcher and university teacher. My research interests focus particularly on narrative, ritual, and cultural heritage issues, and I have extensive experience teaching cultural studies themes such as culture, folklore, cultural history, and qualitative methods.

Teaching

I have taught in ethnology at both undergraduate and advanced level. As course director, lecturer, and seminar leader I have worked with themes such as folklore culture, gender, ethnicity, narrative, ritual, qualitative methods, and cultural heritage. I have also supervised many theses and particularly enjoy supporting students in developing their independent writing and analytical skills.

Research

My research primarily addresses topics that can be associated with the folkloristic strand within ethnology. In my studies, I have explored how people use storytelling, rituals, and digital platforms to create meaning and navigate their lives, more recently focusing on existential questions related to death and grief.

In one project, I investigated people’s experiences of scattering the ashes of a loved one at sea. Through interviews with relatives and professionals, as well as analyses of legislation and case law, I examined how the sea is constructed as a burial place through narratives, rituals, and practices. This project has contributed to cultural research on the contemporary cultural meanings of death and has led to new research questions concerning, among other things, dignity, cremation, and the impact of new AI technologies on our relationship with the deceased.

Together with Sanna Händén-Svensson, I have also studied the legal and administrative process surrounding the protection of the Great Lake Monster in Jämtland. Here, we analyzed how a governmental authority, through play and humor, could afford protection to an animal that might not even exist, and how this process negotiated issues of conservation, tourism, and local identity.

My dissertation examined the travel narratives of long-distance sailors on blogs and websites. By analyzing texts, images, and interviews with sailors, I demonstrated how digital platforms reshape the conditions of storytelling and become an integral part of the journey itself.

As a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher, I have been affiliated with the Centre for Maritime Studies (CEMAS), a research center funded by Stockholm University and the Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums, bringing together ethnologists, historians, and marine archaeologists. Researchers at CEMAS aim to illuminate people’s relationships with the sea from their respective perspectives. For me, this has provided an opportunity to combine a focus on maritime contexts with folkloristic and ethnological perspectives on ritual, memory-making, place, and storytelling.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Med tanke på läsarna

    2019. Hanna Jansson. Tidsskrift for kulturforskning (1)

    Article

    This article discusses narrative and social challenges following development in communication technology. The paper aims to show how Swedish cruising sailors adapt the style and content of their online travel writing, with the interest of different audience groups in mind. How do they manage the sometimes conflicting interests of different audience groups? What is considered un-tellable, and why? The analysis is based on interviews with Swedish cruising sailors and on analysis of primarily four online cruising travelogues. The article combines folkloristic and socio-linguistic perspectives on communicative competence and on immediate or ongoing storytelling, to describe a narrative awareness of the cruisers. As I show, concern for the readers make online travel writing whilst travelling a work-like task. The cruisers develop strategies to write entertaining and exciting stories without worrying family members, and must try to instruct fellow cruisers without boring the non-sailors in the audience. Lastly, the article advocates a combination of online and offline qualitative fieldwork to enable an understanding of online and ongoing storytelling practices, and the social and narrative strategies of people active in social media.

    Read more about Med tanke på läsarna

  • Drömmen om äventyret

    2017. Hanna Jansson (et al.).

    Thesis (Doc)

    This dissertation investigates the online travel writing of Swedish cruising sailors. The aim is to analyze how crews in online travelogues describe ongoing experiences, and to show how the journeys, the stories and the storytelling are mutually related to one another. As journeys are both the plots of the stories and the contexts for the storytelling, the travelogues in question challenge established narrative definitions. The analysis combines Amy Shuman’s folkloristic research on immediate storytelling with historian Reinhart Kosellecks’ perspectives on time as situated and subjective. Storytelling is thereby understood as a contextual and variable practice: conditioned, enabled and limited by the writers’ current position and point of view, and by a series of practical, technological, narrative and social factors. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork online and offline. The material primarily consists of four crews’ blogs and web pages, written texts, photographs, and readers’ comments. Interviews were conducted with the main informants and an additional fifteen crews in Sweden and in the harbours of Horta and Las Palmas. As the analysis show, the sailors’ write and publish updates from ever-changing positions in time and space, thereby depicting their journeys as a practical and cognitive process. These stories are to a great extent motivated by and directed towards the future, as sailors long for warmer destinations and worry about upcoming passages. The sailors write for a real-time audience partly consisting of families and friends, who anxiously wait for new updates. Writing is therefore sometimes perceived as a work-like task, and the sailors must develop strategies in order to write entertaining and exciting stories without further troubling their readers. The study’s result indicate that online storytelling can be understood as a process, which cannot be separated from the described events, nor from its everyday contexts. Stories, storytelling and experiences are understood as integrated with each other, since the storytelling as a practice become an established part of the everyday life during journeys.

    Read more about Drömmen om äventyret

  • Resans mikrodramer

    2017. Hanna Jansson. Angöringar, 39-58

    Chapter

    Det tar nästan en månad att segla från Kanarieöarna till Karibien. Det är en överfart som sägs göra seglaren till en riktig långfärdsseglare, men som också sliter på humöret och tålamodet. För de många långfärdsseglare som nu bloggar om sina resor för läsare därhemma innebär atlantöverfarten ytterligare en utmaning. För vad skriver man om när ”ingenting” tycks hända?

    Read more about Resans mikrodramer

  • Länsstyrelsen och o-djuret: Lek som strategi ifridlysningen av Storsjöodjuret 1985–2005

    2022. Hanna Jansson. RIG (4), 210-225

    Article

    In 1985 the County Administrative Boardof Jämtland initiated a process to protect Storsjöodjuret (the Great Lake Monster). Asother famous cryptids, the Monster has become a valuable resource in the process of cultural heritage, marketing and tourism. We apply Bateson’s theories of play (1972) and Goffman’s concept of frame (1974) to show how play offers a metacommunicative strategy to circumvent expressions of disbelief in a locally important folkloristic phenomenon. We ask what reactions the board’s invitation to play are met with, and how the case’szoological, cultural and juridical frames are negotiated.

    The process is analysed with respect to the different actors’ relation to genres and keys. The playful process in 1985 is contrasted by the judicial intervention in 2002 by the parliamentary ombudsman by whom humour and play are not deemed acceptable communicative strategies. We understand this in terms of closeness, and find that closeness to Storsjöodjuret is a direct factor both to the complexity of suitable communicative strategy, as well as to the creation of the protective decision made as such.

    Read more about Länsstyrelsen och o-djuret

  • Grankvistar, äppelkaka och improvisation: Erfarenheter av arbetet bakom personliga begravningsritualer

    2021. Hanna Jansson. Tidsskrift for kulturforskning (2), 59-77

    Article

    Requests for personal funeral rituals increase with growing secularization and the indi-vidualization of death. Based on interviews, this article discusses four women’s experi-ences of independently planning and conducting secular memorials and ash disposals. Idiscuss the role of improvisation in the processes surrounding these rituals. Imagination,invention, improvisation, independence and inspiration emerge as characteristic aspectsof their accounts. Due to the atheist beliefs of the deceased, the families have activelydistanced themselves from the Church’s funeral ritual, and undertakers were not con-sidered helpful. To amend this, the relatives assumed responsibility for planning thesecular funerals rather than leaving responsibility to the dominant authorities of death.Arranging memorials and burials without previous experience made the mourners feelinsecure, but they also took pleasure in the creativity of the process, through which theycreated meaningful and deeply personal memorials and ash disposals. The study showshow rituals were (re)created by combining personal details with already establishedfuneral ritual elements, as the mourners both mimicked and actively distanced them-selves from existing ritual forms.

    Read more about Grankvistar, äppelkaka och improvisation

  • Here, There and Everywhere: Ash Disposal at Sea and the Construction of aMaritime Memory Landscape

    2021. Hanna Jansson. Facing the Sea, 263-283

    Chapter

    Ash disposal at sea is a rapidly growing phenomenon in Sweden. To scatterthe ashes of a loved one over water may appear particularly appealing if thedeceased had had a strong connection to the sea. It may also give rise to private sites of memory in the maritime landscape as the mourners attribute newmeanings to the sea. 

    Read more about Here, There and Everywhere

  • At the Times of Writing Expectation and Experience in Cruising Sailors' Online Travelogues

    2020. Hanna Jansson. Western Folklore 79 (2-3), 251-283

    Article

    This paper on cruising sailors' online travelogues examines storytelling as an ongoing process. In this work, I combine perspectives from research on narrative and on the experience of time to introduce an analytical simile comparing storytelling with the embroidery stitch backstitch. I show the ways in which cruisers write their way along travelled routes, describing past and future events from an ever-changing present position for a contemporaneous audience.

    Read more about At the Times of Writing Expectation and Experience in Cruising Sailors' Online Travelogues

Show all publications by Hanna Jansson at Stockholm University

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