Katarina Winter Associate Professor

Associate Professor (docent) and Senior Lecturer in Criminology with a PhD in Sociology, interested in knowledge production and expert-public relationships in fields such as drug policy, crime policy, and digitalization. My research combines Science and Technology Studies (STS) and sociological perspectives on knowledge production and the everyday, and often centers on explaining how everyday practices influence the establishment of knowledge and technologies. My previous and current projects examine Swedish alcohol, drug, and criminal policy as well as studies of digital crime prevention and security technologies.

Policing people who use illegal drugs in a changing drug political landscape (PI Josefin Månsson, Dept. of social work, SU). This project focuses on the simultaneous demand for both control and harm reduction in drug policy and how this is handled by policing agents in their daily work.

The project Promises and consequences in security technology (2023-2025, PI Katarina Winter) investigates “security apps” to analyze the societal knowledge consequences brought by the emerging security market for questions on responsibility, (fear of) crime, and public participation.

In the project Prioritizations and knowledge in digital crime prevention (2022-2023, PI Katarina Winter) I focus on knowledge processes among public and private actors in the establishment of municipal digital crime prevention initiatives.

Together with colleagues within the Department of Social Work and Public Health Sciences, SU, I work on the project Risks of injection drug use in a Swedish context (RISK) (2022-2024, PI Jessica Storbjörk). Developed in collaboration with the Needle Exchange Program in Stockholm, this project aims to deepen understanding of how people who inject drugs, healthcare professionals, and other societal actors (media, politics) coproduce knowledge about risks and harm.

In the project Scientific state or state science?  (2016-2021, PI Johan Edman), my work continued to focus on knowledge production, including the involvement of the public in political knowledge processes. "The people" function partly as tools to transport knowledge and to challenge and replace traditional expertise.

My thesis Everybody knows? Conversational coproduction in communication of addiction expertise (2014-2019) examined communication of addiction expertise as processes of "conversational coproduction" across three arenas: media, public conferences, and local politics.

Interdisciplinary and Artistic Collaborations

Together with choreographer and artist Nadja Hjorton, I have created the sociological/choreographic works Finding Memory (2014) and Pocket of Time (2018). These projects explore how memory, time, and conversation can be deconstructed and transformed. The forthcoming final part, Talking Beyond, focuses on transformations of normative conversational logics, a process in which multiple seemingly incompatible conversational practices are brought together.

In autumn 2019, I participated alongside several other researchers from Stockholm University as an interpreter in This Progress (Tino Sehgal), which inaugurated the opening of Accelerator, Stockholm University's art exhibition space. In 2020, I also joined Accelerator's group for research collaborations.

Together with colleagues, I initiated the working group for Green Criminology, which aims to provide a platform for new and established initiatives to meet and collaborate on issues related to environmental and climate-related harms and crimes.

Since 2020, I have served as an assistant editor for Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Teaching: Qualitative methods, Criminological analysis and knowledge use, Digitalization and public health, Media and Crime, Drug and control policy, supervision BA/MA/PhD