Linnea Bodén

Director of Studies

Ongoing research projects:

In the project Swedish tweenhoods. Between online and offline lives, inside and outside the school, 2026-2029 funded by the Swedish Research Council, Bodén together with Tanja Joelsson is investigating how 10-12-year-olds experience and navigate their everyday lives at two Swedish schools. Middle school students find themselves at the borderland between childhood and adolescence – a period where online and offline life are deeply interwoven. The adult world often speaks of an "accelerated childhood" where children "grow up younger," but few studies have examined how students themselves perceive this time.

The project conducts ethnographic fieldwork with fifty students in grades 4 and 6 at schools in socioeconomically different areas. By combining fieldwork in and outside of school, online and offline, the study reveals how leisure time and school influence each other. Using an interdisciplinary approach based on childhood and youth studies, critical education studies, and feminist theory, the project illuminates how tweens actively create and negotiate their childhood. The project contributes to understanding contemporary childhood in a digitalized society and highlights tweens' specific position – not as in-between, but as being here and now, in the middle of their own lives.

Associated researcher Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences/CHAP in the project Forte ECHOES, PI Anna Sarkadi

Supervision, PhD student Jessica Samsioe: Förskolans hall

Previous projects:

Children in research: Investigating preschool children’s experiences as participants in randomized control trials As the PI of the research project Bodén investigated children’s perspectives on research and on being part of a research project. Through a multitheoretical perspective, the project explored methodologies to research children's participation as well as how different methodologies within a research project could produce different, and sometimes unexpected, forms of participation. The project is a continuation of the research project Enhancing preschool children´s attention, language and communication skills. Together with Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Bodén has published a book, building on knowledge from these two projects. The book Development and Postdevelopmentalism in Studies on, to, with, for, by Young Children is open access and provides a discussion on how young children’s development, learning, and lives are understood in the developmental sciences, and in the humanities and social sciences

Completed postdoctoral project: Children as Central Agents in a Research Apparatus: Producing Knowledge about Preschool Children's Experiences and Perspectives of Being Part of a Research Project Within the research project: "Brain Pathways in Preschool": Enhancement of Preschool Children's Attention, Language and Communication Abilities: An Interdisciplinary Study of Socio-emotional Learning and Computerized Attention Training.

PhD: Bodén defended their dissertation in 2016 in Educational Work at Linköping University, with a thesis on digital registration of students' attendance and absence. By examining the seemingly everyday and "neutral" activity of digitally registering students' attendance and absence, the thesis shows how digital systems not only register attendance and absence but actively create and recreate the phenomenon of school absence itself.

Supervision, PhD student Emilia Åkesson: Teacher Education Becoming Elsewhere

Supervision, PhD student Teresa Elkin Postila: (In)finite water: A study of how preschool children as connoisseurs engage in social environmental issues

Supervision, PhD student Frederikke Skaaning Knage (Aarhus University, DPU): "Skolevægring"