Research profile

Kim Toft Hansen is a media scholar whose work centers on Danish and Nordic television and film in an international perspective, with recent research extending to the platformisation of generative AI and its educational impact.

He maintains a prolific interest in media production with special interests in the production of Danish television series. He is an expert in the field of Nordic Noir and the Scandinavian variations of the crime genre. These fields of research bridge a relationship between cultural policies and business policies as well as a notable interest in the production of place through mediated representations. Recent ventures include an interest in teaching policies regarding digital literacy in Danish majority language teaching.

He is currently the PI of the NordForsk-funded research project GAIYA (Generative AI in Education of Young Adults: A Gender-Inclusive Nordic-Baltic Perspective). In close collaboration with researchers from Gothenburg University, Østfold University College, and Tartu University, GAIYA researchers conducts empirical studies of how generative AI has been appropriated in majority language subjects in Nordic upper secondary educational programmes.

Previously, his production research has introduced location studies as a new method within media production research, branching off into tourism studies and ethnographic and political interests into place and space. His profound interest in place-making also embraces special attention towards peripheral media production and municipal utilisation of especially local television production for an international audience. The centre-periphery relationship between urban and rural settings feeds directly into his expertise in the crime genre.

He has a profound interest in media history and the relationships between history and media. His 2015 book 1864: tv-serien, historien, kritikken (1864: TV series, History, Criticism) sparked media debates about the uses of history in popular cultural media production. His contribution to the volume Medietemaer (Media Themes) on "History" emphasizes a number of dominant functions in the relations between media, communication and history.

He has partaken in a range of profiled research projects, including recently What makes Danish TV drama series travel? (DFF 2014-18), DETECt – Detecting Trancultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (H2020 2018-21), and GEMINI (Gender Equality through Media Investigation and New training Insights) (EU-CERV 2023-25). In the last-mentioned, he led a work package on Creative Industries, conducting production research into literature, film and television. This has also involved the maintenance of a charitable stakeholder network with close collaboration with TV 2 Denmark and Miso Film, a few among a range of stakeholder contacts with great importance for his work.

The through-line of his research revolves around local and international media production, media platformisation, streaming services, municipal business model through media production exposure, settings and locations in television and film, media peripherality, media and digital literacy, history and media, and the increasingly close relationship between business and cultural policies. When he finds the courage, he likes to play around with media production himself, and a new-found joy has been fiddling with video essays. This may even include a few dangerous utilisations of generative AI.

He teaches media and cultural studies and media history at different departments at Aalborg University, most importantly at the programmes for Danish studies, Media Studies, and Communication and Digital Media. He teaches and supervises all levels, including PhD research into local media production and creative industries. He maintains the role as an digital counselor for a board of digital learning at The Institute of Culture and Learning. In this way, he connects his research field and teaching responsibilities to his interests within creative industries and applied knowledge into educational programmes.