Sapere Aude grant for Associate Professor Julie Uldam

Associate Professor Julie Uldam has received a Sapere Aude grant for the project, ‘Imagining Digital Power and the Power of Digital Imagination in Business and Society Encounters’. The project examines the role of imagination about digital media for dialogue between multinational companies and social movement organisations.

Digital media have been vested with hopes for facilitating dialogue. But dialogue between companies and social movements in digital media remains largely absent. Instead, their relationship is often seen as a struggle between David and Goliath, while

the business models of digital media platforms such as Facebook are increasingly shown to privilege the powerful.

By examining companies’ and social movement organisations’ imaginaries – their assumptions and expectations – about digital media and each other, which may be grounded in fear and mistrust, this project contributes to public knowledge and debate about how we can find avenues beyond mistrust and polarisation and towards collaboration for more sustainable business practices, which are much needed at this time of climate crisis.

The project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark’s Sapere Aude programme which aims ‘at providing excellent younger researchers, i.e. researchers who have carried out top class research in their field, with the opportunity to develop and strengthen their research ideas’. The project is funded with DKK 6 mio. and will include a postdoc and a PhD student. It will run for four years from 2021-2024.

For further information, please contact Julie Uldam, ju.msc@cbs.dk.