I mainly teach courses in Swedish as a second language for the deaf and courses in bilingualism, the history of deaf education, and sign language theory. At present, however, I have a break from teaching to devote myself to several research projects and administrative tasks at the department.

My overall research interests lie in communication and interaction between deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing people in different contexts, where they make use of different linguistic resources. I obtained my doctoral degree in Education at Örebro University in 2013 with the dissertation Learning by hearing? Technological framings for participation, which covers my main areas of interest described above. My dissertation included a socio-historical analysis of periodicals from 1890 to 2010 that report about technologies, language, and identity of deaf and hard-of-hearing people over the course of time. Moreover, I conducted two case studies about two children with Cochlear implants who are mainstreamed in hearing classrooms. Of particular interest in this study were the topics of participation, power, and technology use, together with overarching questions about communication and interaction.

Since 2014, I have been affiliated with the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University, where I have engaged in various research projects. 

The most recent is the project Sign Language Abilities of older deaf and Hard of Hearing Individuals in Sweden, funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, with Dag Lindeberg as the project leader.

 Additionally, I am involved in the project LäsTecken (Promoting the reading of deaf students in sign language-based classrooms) financed by the National Agency for Educational Sciences, with Krister Schönström as the project leader.

Until 2024, I led the project Mulder, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2020-2023). The project is about the multilingual situation of deaf refugees in Sweden. Project Mulder information in International Sign.

Another of the projects I have worked on is about the bilingualism of the deaf and hard-of-hearing, the DHT project, which focuses on special schools as well as municipal schools and schools with special programs for hard-of-hearing students. In the project, we investigate how deaf and hard-of-hearing students' written Swedish and Swedish Sign Language looks like today.

Teaching-related issues are another of my special interests and I have in several projects studied e.g. teaching methods and classroom interaction. Among other things, I currently lead a project that deals with teaching Swedish Sign Language as a second language for hearing beginner students, UTL2. In this project, we study various aspects of the teaching, with the main goal of increasing the knowledge about how the teaching can be carried out to lead to good progression in the learning of Swedish Sign Language. Another related project is the MM project, in which we studied multimodal multilingualism in teaching conducted by deaf teachers in higher education (see Holmström & Schönström 2018).

Interaction outside the school context has also been one of my research interests. I have participated as a researcher in the project PAL (Participation for All?) which is led by Professor Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta at Jönköping University. The project focuses on young adults who have ADHD or are deaf and their participation in society.

I also have experience from studies based on surveys and interviews. The latest is a survey of parents' experiences of parenting a deaf or hard-of-hearing child and the forms of communication that families use, such as Swedish Sign Language, sign-supported Swedish, and/or spoken Swedish. A previously completed project that is also based on a survey together with in-dept interviews is the HP project where I mapped the competence that exists in the municipalities when it comes to hard-of-hearing school students. Results from this study can be found in Holmström & Schönström (2017).

For other publications from my different research projects, see the publication list.

Research interests

• Communication and interaction
• Participation
• Swedish Sign Language
• Swedish for deaf and hard-of-hearing
• Bilingualism and multilingualism
• Language acquisition
• Teaching issues
• Deaf education