Julia Velkova

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies, TEMA, Linköping University.
Research Affiliate, Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, University of California, Santa
Barbara.

Julia Velkova defended a Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in 2018,
with a study of the cultural production and politics of computer graphics animation software, for which
she won the second prize for best Ph.D. thesis in media and communication studies in Sweden in 2019.
She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki
(2018–2020); and vice-chair of the Media Industries and Cultural Production section of the European
Communication Research and Education Association (2018–2022). In 2023 she founded the Datalab at
Linköping University, which is an inclusive interdisciplinary forum for collaborative co-creation and
experimentation with diverse forms of doing and communicating academic knowledge about the role of
digital data in society. She is currently co-chair of the lab. 

Velkova’s research lies at the intersection of media infrastructure studies and science and technology
studies. Her questions concern how values, relations of power, and inequalities are shaped, contested,
and transformed with the development and dismantling of media infrastructures – such as software,
sensing media, data centers, and communication networks - in Nordic and Eastern European contexts.
She is the co-editor, with Lisa Parks and Sander De Ridder, of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures
and Sociotechnical Relations (University of Illinois Press, 2023) and of the special issue Data Centers
and the Infrastructural Temporalities of Digital Media (with Jean-Christophe Plantin). Her research has
been published in lead journals in the field, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication
& Society, and Big Data & Society, and in a wide range of edited collections. As PI, Velkova has received
grants from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation; CHANSE/FORTE; and the The Foundation
for Baltic and East European Studies.

Velkova’s Pro Futura project, “When Communication Networks Come to Die: Socio-Cultural Perspectives
on Infrastructural Dismantling” explores how the taking down of century-old media infrastructure refigures
relations of power, knowledge, and understandings of citizenship in everyday life, with empiric focus on
the ongoing decomissioning of the landline telephone network in Sweden.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.