Public defence: Siri Frisli
Siri Frisli will defend her thesis for the PhD in Social Sciences, specialization Journalism and Media Studies with "Conflict in a high-trust democracy. Exploring digital dissent in pandemic Norway".
Siri Frisli will defend her thesis for the PhD in Social Sciences, specialization Journalism and Media Studies with "Conflict in a high-trust democracy. Exploring digital dissent in pandemic Norway".
The trial lecture will last from 10:00-10:45.
The title of the trial lecture: “Understanding and measuring online misinformation as a rare phenomenon in light of Mouffe and Habermas’ theories on dissent and consensus”.
The candidate will defend her thesis at 12:00.
The committee is:
Leader of the public defence is Vice Dean Steen Steensen, Oslo Metropolitan University.
Main supervisor is Senior Researcher Yuri Kasahara, Oslo Metropolitan University.
Co-supervisor is Associate Professor Yngve Benestad Hågvar, Oslo Metropolitan University.
This doctoral dissertation examines digital dissent during the COVID-19 pandemic by exploring the role of misinformation and critical humor as tools for contesting institutional authority in Norway. Using Twitter data spanning three years of the pandemic, it conceptualizes these practices as forms of political resistance within modern, liberal democracies.
The first article focuses on the task of misinformation identification, developing a semi-supervised self-training framework for short-text classification. The second article examines misinformation discourses, revealing ways in which vaccine-related misinformation was used to challenge institutional authority. The third article develops a framework for multimodal humor detection, and explores the use of humor for delineating symbolic boundaries between citizens and political elite.
Together, these articles provide empirical insight into how digital dissent operates in a high-trust democracy during a time of prolonged pressure and uncertainty.