Cristian Norocel

Background

In 2014, I became Doctor of Social Sciences (Politices Doktor) in Political Science at the University of Helsinki with the thesis "Our People a Tight-knit Family at the Same Protective Roof: A Critical Study of Gendered Conceptual Metaphors at Work in Radical Right Populism". Afterwards, I have been a visiting researcher at Stockholm University and Uppsala University, and a junior researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2017, I was awarded the title of Docent (Dosentti) in Political Sciences at the University of Helsinki, and in the same year I was employed for 2 years as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In 2019, I returned to Sweden when I took up the position of Associate Senior Lecturer in gender studies at Lund University.

Research areas

• Intersectional perspectives on politics

• Critical masculinity studies and right-wing extremism

• Anti-gender campaigns and retrogressive politics in Europe

• Gender, social media, affect and (right-wing populist) politics

• Critical qualitative methods

Ongoing research and teaching

My research focuses mainly on issues of right-wing populist political communication during election periods; political discourses aimed at normalizing extreme right opinions; as well as the construction and maintenance of various power hierarchies within these discourses. I examine these phenomena in a comparative perspective both in the Nordic countries, with a focus on Sweden and Finland, as well as in Central Europe, with focus on Hungary and Romania. I participate in the project Anti-gender campaigns in Europe: knowledge challenges, power issues (Campaigns «anti-genre» a Europe: enjeux de savoir, enjeux de pouvoir, CAGE) (AUF-IFA 2019-2020).

I am course coordinator for module 2: Gender and social change and the internship course at the bachelor’s level, and teach at both the candidate and master's level. I supervise both bachelor’ and master’s theses.