Viktor AronssonPhD student
About me
My academic background is mainly in Human Geography (MSc, BSc) and History of Ideas (BA). My research interests are mainly linked to meaning-making practices during transformative geographical and social circumstances, with a specific focus on place-making, landscape interactions, and memory practices. With my master's thesis, for example, I explored collective memory among workers at the railway Roslagsbanan in Stockholm and the significance of this memory during changing geographical, social, and organisational conditions.
Since 2024, I am a PhD Student at the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University.
Teaching
I have taught in the following courses:
- Urban and Regional Planning—Practices, 7.5 hp (supervision)
- Bachelor's Thesis in Human Geography, 15 hp (supervision)
Publications
Undergraduate and graduate theses
Memory in Development and Ruination: Tracing workers’ memories and futures on a transforming railway in Stockholm, Sweden. 2023. Viktor Aronsson. Master's thesis in Human Geography, Stockholm University.
Suffering, Peacefulness, Memory and Grief: Perceptions and Attitudes regarding Death during the Spanish Flu in Östersund and Jämtland. 2021. Viktor Aronsson. Bachelor's thesis in History of Ideas, Stockholm University.
Tracks of Meaning: Train drivers’ place-making on Roslagsbanan. 2021. Viktor Aronsson. Bachelor's thesis in Human Geography, Stockholm University.
A selection from Stockholm University publication database
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'A visit from a dear friend': Meaning-making through embodied spectres and places in everyday railway labour
2025. Viktor Aronsson.
ConferenceRead more about 'A visit from a dear friend'In this piece I extend arguments for the productive social potential of ghosts. More specifically, how ghosts and spectres not only provide haunting illuminations of social ills, destruction, or absences, but how the conjuring of them can have 'enchanting' and critical capacities too (Holloway and Kneale 2008; Pleasant and Strangleman 2019), and particularly so for meaning-making amid ruination.
Taking the case of Roslagsbanan, a commuter's railway in Sweden, I explore the spectres that appear through workers' embodied practices and places in the doing of railway work through an (auto)ethnographic approach. At this railway, spectres are not absences of rapidly onset trauma or even industrial closure, but are oftentimes familiar ghosts residing amid a slow, neo-liberal ruination of railway work under the guise of development. While these ghosts may be reminders of that slow ruination, they equally work as spectres of hope and meaning. These half-'exorcised' ghosts (see Edensor 2008), then, linger both because and despite of these ruinations, and haunt bodies and places in often surprising and meaningful ways that become part of an meaning-making among workers that links pasts, presents, and futures.
In applying a geographic perspective, I focus on the relations of people, their embodiments and places in apprehending these spectres, and how they become part of work-life identities. To present these engagements between bodies and places, I draw on calls for 'animated' and more-than-representational writing in geography to attempt an itself spectral, fleeting and evocative account that weaves theory and practice into one (see Vannini 2015).
Show all publications by Viktor Aronsson at Stockholm University
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