Silje Anderdal Bakken
Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Oslo
Silje Anderdal Bakken is a postdoc at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law. Her main research interests are situated within the field of digital criminology and digital qualitative methods. In 2022, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Copenhagen, based on her thesis "Drug dealing on social media" focusing on risk, trust and capital in digitalized illegal markets. Her current postdoc project focuses on the consumerization of DNA and DNA as forensic evidence in crime case. Overall, she mainly works with qualitative methods, such as online ethnography, app-based textual interviews, visual analysis, and network analysis. She also teaches and supervises students within the topics of crime and technology, and digital/online qualitative methods.
Tell us about your project!
The postdoc project follows the lines of the ERC funded project “Digital DNA” of Mareile Kaufmann by looking into consumer genomics and the privatization of DNA and its relations to DNA as forensic evidence. One focus is on how DNA is handled differently through various technological means when it is collected and handled by private vs. public organizations with different aims for the analysis. The second is on how the consumerization of DNA has become a massive driving force in developing and pushing the boundaries of DNA as evidence in crime investigations. The project relies on qualitative data collected through interviews and ethnography (online and offline), as well as network analysis of information flow.
“One focus is on how DNA is handled differently through various technological means when it is collected and handled by private vs. public organizations with different aims for the analysis.”
— Silje Anderdal Bakken on the research project “DNA as forensic evidence and a commodity: The role of consumer genomics and possible technological futures on DNA as evidence”