Heike Graf

Heike Graf is a Professor at the School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, with a focus on media and communication studies. She studied Scandinavian Studies and Philosophy at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University in Greifswald, Germany (1977-1982), earned her PhD in 1990 on Nordic media policy, and has been affiliated with Södertörn since 1998, becoming a docent in 2010 and a professor in 2018.

Her research explores the intersection of communication technologies and social dynamics in migration contexts, ecological collectives, and diversity management. She has led interdisciplinary projects funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation, including studies on trust-building among refugees through digital media, media representations of 'the other' in Berlin and Stockholm, and the role of intercultural communication in suburban immigrant media consumption.

Heike Graf's work applies Niklas Luhmann's systems theory to analyze complex societal relations within media organizations and ecological movements. She has contributed to understanding how face-to-face, virtual, and imagined communities shape environmental discourse and how diversity management impacts media institutions in Sweden and Germany.