Matilda Tudor has been awarded the Segerstedt Prize (Segerstedtspriset) by the Swedish Sociological Association (Sociologiförbundet) for the best article in the journal Sociologisk Forskning in 2025, for the article The Truth, the Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Media Discourses on Body Data in Medical Age Assessments.”
The award recognizes an article published in the journal Sociologisk Forskning that has made a significant contribution to the development of the discipline if sociology. The motivation reads:
“In the article The Truth, the Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Media Discourses on Body Data in Medical Age Assessments, Matilda Tudor presents a critical discourse analysis of how a technology for medical age assessments of unaccompanied refugee children – magnetic imaging of knees – was described in Swedish media during the so called “flyktingkrisen” (The refugee crisis) 2015-2017. Tudor shows how a medicinal technology with shaky evidence came to be used to establish new “objective truths” about who the typical unaccompanied refugee child is in the Swedish public sphere. Tudor convincingly demonstrates how human subjects were discursively reduced to biometric data to circumvent ethically problematic aspects of increasing Sweden’s refusal of those seeking help. The article is an excellent example of how sociological research can be conducted in a both morally engaged and engaging manner to illuminate and criticize social injustices.”
Matilda Tudor is a PhD and researcher in the Department of Informatics and Media. She is a media phenomenologist and feminist media researcher. The article is part of the project: BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds, funded by WASP-HS led by Professor Amanda Lagerkvist at IM/Uppsala University. The project’s central aim has been to investigate the experiential range of encounters with these technologies, focusing on both their possibilities and their challenges and vulnerabilities, in order to examine the urgent ethical imperatives they pose for a networked humanity.
