Erik Hannerz is associate professor in sociology at Lund University. He earned his PhD in Sociology at Uppsala University, his dissertation seeking to develop and refine the concept of subcultures to allow for heterogeneity and plurality, using punk in Sweden and Indonesia as the main case.
His later research projects include “Rewriting the city” that investigates how graffiti writers perceive and make use of urban space and “Citizen police work and digital crowdsourcing” that focuses on the work and meaning-making of internet detectives. He is currently working on a project about gang recruitment through social media . He is the author of Performing Punk (Palgrave 2015) Urban Creativity (Dokument Press Akademi 2024, with Peter Bengtsen) and Gängkriminalitet (Liber 2025, with David Sausdal). His research has been published in journals such as Symbolic Interaction, Visual Inquiry, Journal of Youth Studies, Crime Media Culture, Cultural Sociology, New Media & Society.
Hannerz is co-founder of the research environment Cultural Space, the research group Urban Creativity, as well as of the master program in Cultural Criminology. In 2022 he was awarded the Students of Lund University pedagogical prize.