Stockholm university

Kristina StenströmResearcher

About me

Kristina is currently active as a qualitative researcher in the project “Life quality among older adults in contemporary Sweden: Financial conflicts, relationship quality and equality” headed by Ann-Zofie Duvander and Linda Kridahl. She is also a lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Linnaeus University. 

During 2018-2020, Kristina studied how existential process relating to involuntary childlessness materializes in online settings in the postdoctoral project “Spaces of loss and becoming: Involuntary childlessness online” at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. She has also researched the relationship between embodiment and media through dimensions of production, spectatorship and participatory culture. 

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Money practices and couplehood among individuals in the third age in Sweden

    2023. Kristina Stenström, Linda Kridahl, Ann-Zofie Duvander. Families, Relationships and Societies, 1-19

    Article

    Couple relationships and money practices are intimately connected. Money can often cause disagreement and conflict within couples and represents symbolic values and expectations between partners. This study adopts a practices approach to exploring money practices among Swedish couples in the third age (60–80 years old) through 17 semi-structured interviews. We focus particularly on how money practices constitute and are constituted by dimensions of ‘being and doing couple’. We find that money practices both reflect and constitute couplehood. Our analysis has revealed that money practices are interlinked with couplehood through the primary themes of togetherness, fairness and trust, independence and finally, a reluctance to imagine oneself outside of couplehood, for other reasons than widowhood.

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  • Collective, unruly, and becoming

    2021. Kristina Stenström, Katarina Winter. MedieKultur 37 (71), 31-53

    Article

    Online contexts offer an important source of information and emotional support for those facing involuntary childlessness. This article reports the results from an ethnographic exploration of TTC (trying-to-conceive) communication on Instagram. Through a new materialist approach that pays attention to the web of intra-acting agencies in online communication, this article explores the question of what material-discursive bodies (constructs of embodiment and medical information) emerge in TTC communication as the result of shared images and narratives of bodies, symptoms, fertility treatments, and reproductive technologies. Drawing on a lengthy ethnographic immersion, observations of 394 Instagram accounts, and the close analysis of 100 posts, the study found that TTC communication produces collective, unruly, and becoming bodies. Collective bodies reflect collectively acquired, solidified, and contested medical knowledge and bodies produced in TTC communication. Unruly bodies are bodies that do not conform to standard medical narratives. Becoming bodies are marked by their shifting agency, such as pregnant or fetal bodies.

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  • Existential vulnerability and transition

    2021. Kristina Stenström, Teresa Cerratto Pargman. Nordicom Review 42 (S4), 168-184

    Article

    In their efforts to find others who share their experiential reality and existential struggle, many involuntarily childless women turn to Instagram to engage and participate in the practice of trying-to-conceive (TTC) communication. Through the conceptual lens of digital existence, where the digital and online are regarded as constitutive of existential transition, we draw on ten interviews and an online ethnography to explore some of the struggles that involuntarily childless women experience with and through technology. We find that TTC communication can be constitutive of coming to terms with the status of involuntary childlessness. In particular, this study illustrates that TTC communication, for involuntarily childless women, is both a site of struggle and a safe space as they transition to nonmotherhood in an existential terrain where they share an intimate journey.

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Show all publications by Kristina Stenström at Stockholm University