Monika Marie Bergflødt

PhD candidate, OsloMet

Monika Marie Bergflødt is a PhD Candidate in Social Sciences at OsloMet, affiliated with the Department for Childhood, Family and Child Welfare (NOVA). She holds a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Health Research from the University of Oslo (2021). In her master’s thesis, she examined embodied experiences and health among multicultural girls as part of the project Inequality in Youth – A Qualitative, Longitudinal Research Database. Bergflødt’s research interests encompass social inequality, childhood, and the sense of belonging within multicultural and digital societies. She is particularly interested in understanding gender dynamics and intersecting social categories/subject positions in people’s everyday lives.

Tell us about your project!

The PhD project explores how boys and girls in stigmatized neighborhoods connect with people and places while navigating their identities in various social settings, both offline and online. Identity formation is understood as a dynamic interplay of social, cultural, and psychological processes, where individuals develop their sense of self through interactions with others and within broader societal structures.

To capture various layers of these processes, the project combines qualitative interviews with participatory methods and ethnographic fieldwork. The aim is to gain insights into the everyday experiences of young people in their physical and digital spaces. Additionally, the research seeks to add depth to ongoing discussions surrounding the upbringing of youth in stigmatized neighborhoods.

With everyday life as an empirical starting point for exploration, the PhD project will both apply and contribute to phenomenological and gendered theoretical perspectives.

“ The aim is to gain insights into the everyday experiences of young people in their physical and digital spaces”

—Monika Marie Bergflødt on her research project “Sense of Place and Identity Exploration in Young People's Physical and Digital Everyday Lives”