معرفی
Karin Osvaldsson Cromdal is Professor of Social Work at Linköping University, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Social Work (SOCARB) and Department of Culture and Society (IKOS). Her research focuses on how people make themselves understood to each other, with particular interest in children and young people's participation in institutional contexts such as special youth homes, help lines, emergency services, and digital platforms. She serves as Research Leader for the Department of Social Work and is actively involved in university governance through membership in the Social Work Program's Program Council, the Council for Ethics and the Promotion of Good Research Practice, and the IKOS Research Council.
Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Children's Studies from Linköping University (2002), a Licensed Psychologist qualification (1993), and a Psychology degree from Lund University (1991). She was promoted to Associate Professor in Children's Studies in 2014 and Assistant Professor of Social Work in 2018 before achieving her current professorship.
Professor Osvaldsson Cromdal's research is fundamentally concerned with understanding how people, particularly children and young people, navigate communication in institutional settings. Her work employs close analysis of natural interactions, examining both face-to-face and online communication to uncover how social practices enable or limit young people's ability to make their voices heard. She investigates network meetings, school contexts at Special Youth Homes, emergency calls (including 112), children's helplines, and electronic bulletin boards, focusing on institutional work and participants' local identities within these contexts.
Her recent publications reveal a strong focus on digital social work, institutional accountability in youth residential care, discursive psychology, embodiment, and children's communication in help-seeking contexts. There's a clear trajectory toward examining how technology mediates social work practices while maintaining her longstanding interest in interaction analysis within institutional settings serving children and vulnerable populations.
As an academic supervisor, Professor Osvaldsson Cromdal serves as main supervisor for doctoral students Mikael Boregren, Jessica Peterson Berge, and Kevin Tankred, contributing to the next generation of social work researchers. Her leadership extends to the research environment Social Work at Linköping University, which she describes as safeguarding justice, guided by the principle of the equal value of all people, and working for social change toward a more sustainable and inclusive society.
She is a key member of the research group 'Children, Young People and Families in Social Work,' which focuses on children's and young people's living conditions and experiences in various welfare state contexts. Additionally, she contributes to SAMSOC (Conversations in Social Work), a research collective examining communication and interaction within social services across different client groups and organizational settings.
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