Göran Bolin

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The University of Tartu has conferred the degree of Honorary Doctor of Media Sociology on Professor Göran Bolin for his significant contribution to promoting the international renown of media researchers and sociologists of Estonia and the University of Tartu, and forming their new generation.

Göran Bolin was born on 10 April 1959 in Stockholm, Sweden. He studied journalism and cinema studies and received his PhD from the Stockholm University in media and communication studies. Since 1998, he has worked at the Södertörn University in Stockholm, where he was elected professor in media and communication studies in 2004.

Professor Bolin’s research is broad and combines multiple dimensions of the society, such as cultural, social, technological, and economic. Therefore, he has become one of the leading figures in media sociology in the northern European countries. His main fields of scholarship are social media surveillance and experiences of authoritarianism; mediatisation and datafication; commodification and cultural production and consumption in digital markets; media consumption and the production of value; media generations and (media) nostalgia, cultural identity, and nation branding.

Professor Bolin is a member of several governing bodies and international networks in his field of research. For example, he is the chairman of the Film, Media and Visual Studies section of Academia Europaea, and a member of the executive board of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). Göran Bolin has held visiting professorships at the University of Bremen (2018), the University of Augsburg (2016), the Catholic University of Portugal (2013), and the University of Westminster (2006).

Professor Bolin’s close partnership with the Estonian researchers and the University of Tartu started in the early 2000s through a comparative research project on transforming media landscapes in the Baltic Sea area. The research cooperation has continued in the form of follow-up projects, joint workshops, and contribution to doctoral studies. Such collaborative research, with a focus on the transforming Estonian society, has helped to increase the visibility of the school of media sociology of the University of Tartu in the Nordic countries and Europe.