What kind of knowledge helps us live more liveable lives?

This question lies at the heart of Tove Lundberg's research.

Associate Professor Tove Lundberg is a licensed psychologist and holds a PhD in Cultural and Community Psychology from the University of Oslo.

Research should remain accountable to the lives it seeks to understand. This conviction guides Lundberg's research across psychology, medical humanities, and interdisciplinary health research. Rather than treating theory as an end in itself, or lived experience as something that merely illustrates theory, their work explores how knowledge develops through an ongoing dialogue between theories, institutional practices, professional knowledge, and people's lived worlds.

Lundberg is interested in how knowledge shapes lives and how lives, in turn, reshape knowledge. Their research examines how psychological theories, healthcare systems, educational practices, and societal assumptions become part of people's everyday lives, while asking how people's lived worlds can challenge, refine, and generate new theoretical understandings. Across their work, research is understood not simply as producing knowledge about people, but as developing knowledge together with the lives it seeks to understand.

Methodologically, Lundberg works primarily with qualitative and mixed methods research within an abductive, reflexive, and theoretically pluralistic tradition. Drawing on psychology while engaging with medical humanities, science and technology studies (STS), philosophy, and critical social theory, they use empirical research as a site for knowledge development. No single theoretical tradition is assumed to have the final word. Instead, theories are continually brought into dialogue with one another and with people's lived worlds, allowing both theory and understanding to evolve.

Current empirical research spans LGBTQI+ lives, variations in sex characteristics (intersex/DSD), Long Covid, sexuality and relationships, healthcare encounters, higher education, and other contexts where health, institutions, and everyday life intersect. These are not separate research interests but different empirical settings through which recurring questions are explored about knowledge, institutions, ethics, and human lives.

Lundberg's long-term research programme aims to develop forms of psychological knowledge that remain responsive to the complexity of human lives. Rather than seeking definitive explanations, the ambition is to cultivate richer understandings that help researchers, professionals, institutions, and communities think differently about health, care, identity, and everyday life and ultimately contribute to more liveable lives.

Lundberg welcomes collaborations with researchers, clinicians, educators, students, and community organisations interested in theory development, qualitative and mixed methods research, medical humanities, and interdisciplinary approaches to psychology, health, and lived worlds.

Together with colleagues at Linköping University and Örebro University, Lundberg co-leads the national research network Queer Psychology in Sweden (QueerPsy). They are also part of the international SENS project on healthcare experiences among people with variations in sex characteristics (intersex/DSD), co-lead research within the SNAP network on sexuality and sexual wellbeing in Sweden and Spain, collaborate in interdisciplinary research on Long Covid and other long-term health conditions, and are affiliated with Birgit Rausing's Centre for Medical Humanities.