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Cultural science research into film and gaming is based around a film studies perspective on the history, theory and methodology of the audiovisual media. The field has solid empirical and philosophical foundations, and is both locally and internationally based, and socially and technically oriented. The research conducted within the Department involves film analyses from a feminist philosophical perspective, historical studies of various kinds of documentary film, audiovisual analyses of moving image media, psychological and aesthetic studies of mobile media platforms, historical/aesthetic analyses of game mechanics, analyses of films for children and young people, and locally rooted projects concerning archives and the conservation of films and games in partnership with cultural institutions and companies.

Visual Culture encompasses a wide range of visual expressions in various media and display contexts. The field is not restricted to the examination of artifacts, but also turns its attention to vision and perception and the position of the beholder. Contemporary phenomena are studied, as well as the visual culture of bygone eras. The disciplines most closely associated with the field include art history, film studies and media studies, but visual culture is also a common theme in gender studies, history, history of ideas and philosophy, as well as in several other disciplines.

The main focus of the research field Youth and Popular Culture is directed towards the life conditions of the modern individual and their need for a sense of meaning and community. Contemporary social and cultural processes of change – such as globalisation and mediatisation – have led to the dissolving of traditional patterns of identity once connected to class, gender, ethnicity, nation and religion. The central interest for our research is to study how children, young people and adults use symbols, styles, cultural codes and consumption, and the production and uses of music, dance, film and fashion, to deal with changes in their contemporary life world. By putting phenomena like these into their social and historical contexts, we can study their functions and understand them as signifying practices. Seen through this kind of theoretical lens, these cultural phenomena can all be seen as symbolic expressions for the struggles of the contemporary individual to deal with and understand the life conditions of late modernity.