Forschungsprojekte

Regulating new media: protection of minors, construction of childhood

• The materiality of governance
  Different media may appear similar when you approach media content in isolation. Sex is shown in computer games as it is on mobile phone displays as well as on the Internet. Violence can be found on the Internet and in the other medias as well. However, we may look in vain for similarities when studying the ways in which different media are used. Crucial differences also appear between the forms of production and forms of distribution of the three technologies. What about media regulation for the protection of minors? What differences and similarities do the regulation of computer games, Internet and mobile phone content display? And which are the discourses of childhood constructed through these regulation regimes? These are the questions posed by this research project. Germany is the first 'case' in a longer row of international comparative studies of media regulation. The aim is to learn about the ‘materiality of governance’ and the imaginaries of childhood produced with these different materialities.
• Methodological approach: the ‘how’ of multiple regulation
  Legal and political studies have to some extent described the formal and structural differences between the forms of regulation. We however lack a micro-analytical understanding of how legal rules and political structures are enacted in practice. The focus of the study is directed towards regulation processes and less on the results of regulation. The question is how regulation is done, not what is made. Regulation is done in regulatory agencies. But not only here. Also in retail stores, in schools and in homes is children's access to new media regulated. Just as it is in the development of a computer game and in the press. The sites of regulation are multiple, and my study covers these multiple sites in order to achieve the complexity and distributed character of regulation that regulation studies fail to describe.
• Theoretical focus: governance as a social-material assemblage
  The study’s theoretical focus is the question of how the technical materiality of an object of governance contributes to forming the governance process. While the governance literature generally focus on the social dimensions of governance like interests, traditions, decision processes and ideologies, this study highlights the material aspects of governance. Thereby, a new perspective is suggested in the theory of governance in which governance is understood not as a construction of social actors, but as an assemblage of socio-material entities.

n the basis of these theoretical and methodological interests the project raises among others the following questions:

• How do media’s different technological platforms influence the way in which they are regulated?

• What characterizes the particular forms of regulations of computer games, mobile phones and Internet?

• Where are the different media regulated?

• Which infrastructure of actors and technology must be in place in order for regulation to work?

• Which role do human actors play (producers, distributors, testers, classifiers, users, parents, educators) in procedures of regulation and which how do they relate to each other?

• Which role do law, formula, guidelines etc. play in the practice of regulation? When and how are these involved in by the process of regulation?

• Which other resources (e.g. scientific investigations, political requirements, administrative procedures) are involved, and how?

• Which differences can be found in the forms of talk about users and media harm emerging in the process of regulation?

• For more information, read the project description here

Curriculum Vitae

• 2006 Gave birth to Gulliver Scheffer-Sørensen
• 2003 Gave birth to Nanna and Karla Scheffer Sørensen
• born 1967 in Copenhagen

• 2008 Post.doc. at the Collaboratory: Social Anthropology at the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt University2007
• Granted Alexander von Humboldt post. doc. stipendium to study German regulations regimes for children’s access to media at Technische Universität Berlin
• 2005 Associate professor at The Danish Educational University, Department of Pedagogical Psychology
  

• 2004 Evaluation of method used for the Media Council’s ’child panel’ in film rating practices
• 2002-2003 Appointed research manager for EU-project in charge of monitoring and managing research progress among Danish, Swedish and Spanish researchers
• 2002-2003 Supervisor on Media Council’s SAFT project on Nordic-Irish survey
• 2002 Visiting scholar at Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, England
• 2001-2004 Project manger in EU project: "5th Dimension: Learning in a global world"
• 2000-2006 Member of the Media Council for Children and Young People
• 2000 "Situflex" - contribution to the exibition "Tools" in Wolfsburg Kustverein, Germany
• 1998-1999 Head of Section, Ministry of Research and Information Technology, project manager of "Digital Denmark - Conversion to the Network Society"
• 1997-1999 Ass. professor at Roskilde University, Department of Psychology
  

• 2005 Ph.D degree granted on basis of thesis: “STS goes to school – Spatial Imaginaries of Technology, Knowledge and Presence” at Faculty of Social Science, University of Copenhagen

• 2000-2005 Ph.d. scholar at University of Copenhagen
• 1997 MA in Psychology, final thesis about learning from computer games
• 1994-1995 Student at Freie Universität, Berlin
• 1991-1994 Bachelor student at University of Copenhagen, Department of Psychology

• 1996-1997 Scolarship grant by Danish Cancer Society

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