This volume contains short versions of four noteworthy master theses written within the international master’s programme in Media, Communication, and Cultural Analysis at Södertörn University and defended in 2025. Running since 2009, the programme has more than 100 alumni who are now employed in the media, academia and education. In 2020, the department chose to highlight the best theses in a printed volume. This is the sixth volume in the series. 

The contributions in this volume cover four different topics: the representation of loss in science fiction films in relation to theories of modernity; the portrayal of the same robbery in different TV genres (news, documentary, and dramatised TV series); users’ experience of trust when interacting with communicative AI chatbots; and the ways in which users’ engagement with Spotify Wrapped can be understood as a media ritual. Although stretching across four such different topics, the chapters share an interest in on how media can be understood in relation to narration. In the first two chapters, the authors explicitly use narrative theory as a tool for understanding how mediation always incorporates narrative. The following two chapters focus instead on the narratives that arise when users interact with machines (AI chatbots) and on how algorithms shape annual personal stories about what kind of music listener you are (Spotify). Common for the four chapters is that they fruitfully re-center our attention on how narrating frames our encounter with media.