معرفی
Karin Jarnkvist serves as Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Sociology at Mid Sweden University's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in Sundsvall. She holds key responsibilities including oversight of doctoral education in sociology, management of the master's program in sociology with research focus, and coordination of the Network for Critical Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies. Her academic home within the university centers on sociological inquiry with strong interdisciplinary connections to religious studies and gender research.
Her educational foundation includes a PhD in Religious Studies from Umeå University (2011), where her dissertation "När jag gifter mig ska jag göra det på riktigt: Berättelser om barn, brudar och bröllop" analyzed gender and class dynamics in young adults' wedding narratives. This doctoral work established her methodological approach combining narrative analysis with critical theoretical perspectives.
Jarnkvist's research program interrogates the nexus of social stratification, gender relations, and ritual practices in contemporary society. She examines how individuals negotiate meaning in close relationships, construct family identities, and navigate life rites such as weddings and funerals within secularizing contexts. Her signature contribution involves applying intersectional frameworks to reveal how class, gender, and ethnicity shape experiences across diverse domains from climate risk perception to funeral practices. This critical-feminist lens consistently exposes power dynamics in seemingly neutral social processes.
Analysis of her recent publications reveals three converging trajectories: pandemic-era transformations in funeral practices (particularly Swedish media representations during COVID-19), the emergence of civil ceremonies as sites of meaning-making, and the application of intersectionality to non-religious ritualization. Her work increasingly bridges ritual studies with environmental sociology, examining how climate risks are experienced through stratified social positions.
As an educator, Jarnkvist supervises theses from Bachelor's to doctoral levels while teaching core sociology courses including Qualitative Methods, Sociological Gender Theory, and Class/Gender/Ethnicity. Her research collaborations span multiple institutions including Umeå University, Uppsala University, and Norway's University of Agder, where she conducted pandemic funeral research. Major projects have addressed refugee reception in rural areas (2018-2021), climate change and housing (2015-2017), and intimate partner violence (2014-2016).
She actively shapes academic discourse through leadership roles including coordinator of the Network for Critical Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies since 2019 and membership in the steering group for Mid Sweden University's Forum for Gender Research. These positions facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue on ritual practices and gender dynamics in institutional contexts.
