Maria Bäcke

Currently holding positions as programme director for the master's programme LeaDS (Learning, Digitalization, and Sustainability) and as leader for the research environment CCD (Communication, Culture, and Diversity) at Jönköping University, Maria Bäcke has a PhD in TechnoScience. She is also the co-coordinator of the EARLI SIG 21 “Learning and Teaching in Culturally Diverse Settings.“ Her PhD thesis (Power Games: Rules and Roles in Second Life, 2011) focuses on power, hierarchies and roles in online role-play groups. Her current research centers around similar issues as she studies structures of ownership, power, authority and subversion as well as digitalisation in schools and in postcolonial contexts. She has also worked in teacher education since 2004. 

Bäcke's current research thus merges the fields of digitalisation, education, and cultural studies. The cultural aspects have been her main research focus for a long time as has has analysed this in fictional literature, but she has drawn on this perspective also when analysing non-fictional reseach material related to digitalisation, diversity, and education.

In various constellations, Bäcke is currently studying the reasons for, and processes behind, the selection of EdTech and the implementation of AI for students. A related area of interest is students' use of the same tools in schools, at leisure centres, and in municipal adult education, drawing on issues of power and subversion in "Big Data," i.e. data ownership and data mining/harvesting.

Current Research

Bäcke is the PI for the project Goda exempel för skolnärvaro (Good examples for school attendance),  financed by ULF for the years 2025-2026, where researchers from Jönköping University and Gothenburg University collaborate with school leaders and staff in Jönköping and Värnamo. The goal is to coordinate efforts and facilitate for children and youngsters who either fail to attend school (i.e. problematic school absence) or risk finding themselves in that position.

She is also the Swedish PI for the GTSF (Global Teachers for a Sustainable Future) project funded by Erasmus+. The focus of the GTSF project is internationalisation at home within teacher education with partners from Spain (overall PI), Austria, Germany, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, and Sweden. Associates of the project can be found in Malaysia, Colombia, and Mexico.

The book chapter Digital hållbarhet (Digital Sustainability) will soon be found in the book Digital kompetens för lärare (Digital Competence for Teachers) (published by Gleerups). It focuses on ecologic, economic and social sustainability in relation to digitalisation in schools.

The project Futures Day – Who holds the future? is a collaboration with an upper secondary school in Jönköping, but a series of collaborations with other schools in other parts of Sweden are underway. Focus in this project is students' ideas about technology and the role of AI in the future drawing on futures scenarios as a framework. It focuses on sustainability from ecologic, economic and social points of view.

Student Imaginaries for Global Citizenship and Sustainable Internationalisation is a collaboration between researchers in Spain, Austria, Romania, Ukraine, and Sweden. How do students in higher education envision the future regarding internationalisation and globalisation?

The REaD-IT project (2022 - current) focuses on the reading strategies of students at upper secondary level and highlights the invisible competencies (primarily digital and language ones) as paths towards active citizenship.

The work on the book chapter The Unbearable Lightness of Imagination in a GenAI Era has only just begun. Together with fellow researchers at Jönköping University I'm writing about the Futures Day project for the book Postdigital Imaginations: Critiques, Methods, and Interventions.

Other tasks and qualifications

See ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9212-8551

Hemsida: http://www.baecke.se