Victoria Vallstrom
About Victoria Vallstrom
Victoria Vallström is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on digital media and climate-related communication, examining how climate misinformation, skepticism, and denial discourses circulate and take shape across social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, blogs, and Twitter/X. She is part of the research project "In the Eye of the Storm: Climate Adaptation in Times of Increasing Polarization and Disinformation," funded by FORMAS, and is affiliated with IFORCED — the Institute for Research on Climate Change and Disinformation.
Her work spans multiple platforms and formats. She has studied the structure of Swedish climate-contrarian networks through social network analysis, the role of political influencers in shaping climate discourse on YouTube, and the spread of climate misinformation among political elites on Twitter/X. In her doctoral project, she turns to short-form audiovisual content, particularly TikTok, where visuals, sound, and text interact in processes of meaning-making. A central focus is how climate-related narratives are formed and gain resonance in these environments, and how they relate to broader cultural patterns and ways of knowing in digital society.
Methodologically, she combines computational approaches for analyzing large-scale social media data, including computational multimodal content analysis, large language models (LLMs), topic modeling, and social network analysis, with qualitative, theory-informed interpretation to study the social and cultural dynamics of digital communication.
Her research interests include digital culture, multimodal (mis)information, social media, knowledge and meaning-making in digital environments, and computational approaches to qualitative research.