Johan Miörner is an Associate professor at the Department of Human Geography and faculty coordinator for Social sciences at CIRCLE, Lund University.
What does this recognition mean to you?
I am of course honoured to have been selected to the Young Academy and will serve as a member for the next five years. For me personally, it will be fun to engage with peers across different academic disciplines and universities in the Swedish context. This platform really provides new opportunities for collaboration which don’t emerge automatically in the day-to-day academic life.
What do you hope to achieve being part of the Young Academy of Sweden?
I will use the opportunity to work with questions related to ensuring fair and constructive publication practices and how to preserve the legitimacy of academic knowledge in a broader sense. I also want to work with questions related to internationalisation and building platforms for exchange with universities in other parts of the world.
What does your research involve?
My research focuses on innovation and transformation of societal infrastructures that we all depend on, such as water from the tap, electricity in the socket, mobile payments, the bus to work and rubbish collected every week. These sectors are similar all over the world, despite vast differences in physical, institutional, and economic preconditions and they change remarkably slowly regardless of the increased pressure from geopolitical instability, climate change and urbanisation. My research is driven by questions about what gives rise to this pattern and what it takes to renew systems we all fundamentally depend on.