Biosketch: Ann-Charlotte Bivall

In spring 2015 I will finalize my doctoral thesis where I explore continuity in backstage activities in a highly specialized and technology infused help desk team. My interests revolve around questions of how helpdesking activities are achieved and re-constituted over time in contemporary society where help desks maintain important societal and business functions. The overarching aim of the study is to scrutinize how knowing and competencies are maintained and shared as an intrinsic aspect of professional work. By gaining insight in professional work at a help desk service provision I will contribute to our understandings of how particular forms of knowing and communication is organized and emerge to sustain professional activities. In other words, this thesis directs attention to general topics in educational science such as lifelong learning and collective knowing. Particular interest is appointed to empirical investigations of the characteristics of knowing and collaboration from the participants’ perspective as they engage in activities in their work setting. More specifically, I have studied how such communicative activities together with local technologies come to be used as resources in the organizing for continuous learning and sharing of knowing within the team of help desk engineers.

Academically, my background is in Human Resources, with pedagogy/education as main subject. My main research interests revolve around collective knowing, learning and development, interaction, and empirical studies primarily within work organizations and business, or similar settings. Prior, I studied music at the Faculty of Arts and Education at Karlstad University and at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Music as an artform and space for learning still remain a great interest, not least because of the pleasure classical music engenders.