Liv Ohlsen, BA MA
About the Person
Since 12/2025 │ Fellow of the doctoral program „Dynamics of Inequality and Difference in the Age of Globalization", University of Innsbruck
Since 09/2025 │ PhD student, Faculty of Philosophy and History, University of Innsbruck. Associated in the VW-founded Project “Young People in Remote Regions – Prospects for Strengthening Democratic Attitudes and Participation” (YouReACT)
PhD project title: „Mapping rural democracies online. Politische Kulturen im digitalin Dorfgeflecht” Supervisors: Marion Näser-Lather, Silke Meyer
2025 │ Ursula-Schneider-Preis, 2nd place winner of the student thesis award, Freundeskreis des Hamburger Museums der Arbeit, Hamburg, Germany
2024│ MA Social Anthropology, University of Hamburg, Germany, master thesis: “Wohnungslosenfreie Gesellschaft? Diskursethnografische Betrachtung zu Zukunft als (Aus)Handlungsfeld der professionalisierten Wohnungslosenhilfe"
2024│ Scholarship for master’s thesis, Karl H. Dietz-Stiftung, Begabtenförderung der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Hamburg, Germany
2022│ BA Social Anthropology, University of Hamburg, Germany, bachelor thesis: “Als ich noch Mörder war. Selbstnarration als Bewältigungsstrategie des Stigmas Straftäter”
2018│State-certified social pedagogue for people with disabilities, Fachschule für Soziale Arbeit, Hamburg, Germany, final paper: “Sondervorstellung. Inklusionsstand der Hamburger Kulturlandschaft”
PhD project
MAPPING RURAL DEMOCRACIES ONLINE: Political cultures in digital village networks
The doctoral dissertation is being developed as part of the externally funded research project “Young People in Remote Regions - Prospects for Strengthening Democratic Attitudes and Participation.” The interdisciplinary research team – from political science, social psychology, and empirical cultural studies – is focusing on the political experiences and engagement of young people (aged 17–28) in rural border areas in Schleswig-Holstein, Saxony, and Bavaria. Democracy is understood as a social way of life between people that is lived out on a daily basis. In order to describe the diversity of lived (and threatened) democracy in Germany from the field, an innovative multi-method ethnographic approach is being developed, which is called “politography.” In cooperation with partners from three institutions active in youth work—the Landjugend, the Landessportbund Sachsen and the Young European Federalists (JEF)— a bridge is being built between the heterogeneous needs and knowledge bases of local actors and the respective research-analytical approaches in the field. In addition, we are developing participatory exchange formats such as Democracies Labs to open up spaces of possibilities for young actors to stand up for their concerns as experts in their everyday realities and to be heard.
Precisely because social interaction is permeated by digital technology—and can therefore be viewed as hybrid—and because politics unfolds as a space between people, this opens up a linking research perspective that I would like to pursue with the conception of my dissertation project. The dissertation project begins with an independent interregional cultural analysis and considers the selected localized research fields of YouReACT as social-material arrangements of democratic coexistence, from which the question arises as to how political scope for action and democracy are experienced in a hybrid way. Alongside the research question of how political scope for action and democracy are experienced, negotiated, and defined in the everyday lives of young actors in rural areas in the context of the digital world, my dissertation research aims to reconstruct everyday political practices in their hybridity (“Mapping rural Democracies online”): putting up posters, sharing links, or leaving a group. Democracy(ies) should be viewed in their fragmentation as a space of experience and a field of conflict. I pursue democracy in the field as an everyday imaginary: as a symbolic interpretive framework in which young people locate themselves, orient themselves politically, and network. My research interests lie in the “in-between” spaces of political experience: between attitude and action, between village communities and digital communities, between associations and group chats, between logging in and logging out. Of particular interest is finding out what participatory formats exist, where engagement encounters specific challenges, and how field-specific online-offline spaces are designed in this context. The political experience of young actors is not analyzed from a dichotomous online or offline perspective, but rather by observing the hybrid, social everyday worlds from within the field. Using grounded theory, a multi-method approach consisting of participant observation, interviews, and digital ethnography is used to conduct an in-depth ethnographic exploration of the sociomaterial everyday worlds. The multimodal data material enables a discourse-ethnographic snapshot of actor-centered democratic positions from the field based on actor-specific multi-voicedness and interregional analysis. How are democratic dynamics shaped with and by young actors in everyday life? How and why is the village or region as a shared living space also produced online, and how do these ideas take shape depending on the region, digital infrastructure, community practices, and sociocultural environment?
Research Interests
- Social Inequalities
- More-than-digital fields
- Political Anthropologies
Contact
Department of History Studies and Empirical Cultural Studies
Innrain 52d
Raum 40730, 7. Stock
6020-Innsbruck
Email: liv.ohlsen@uibk.ac.at
Tel.: +43 512 507-43355