On Tuesday, March 31 at 10.15, Anuradha Reddy, PhD candidate in Interaction Design, will hold her 90 percent PhD seminar. The title of the forthcoming thesis is At Home ‘in’ IoT? – A Design Inquiry. Daniela Rosner, Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington, will function as discussant.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom.

To be sure that everything works smoothly, please install the Zoom software on your computer beforehand. Please then join the meeting through https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/494267134 (Meeting ID: 494 267 134). Please join the meeting in time and turn off your audio and video during the first part of the seminar. The chat will be open for questions (or pointing out technical issues) throughout the seminar. We will try to have a broader round of questions at the end where all listeners can turn on their microphones.

Below you can find an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to read the manuscript before the seminar, contact Anuradha (anuradha.reddy@mau.se).

The technology frameworks supporting the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) have operated in domestic spaces for several decades now i.e., smart connected homes. However, its strong scientific and industry hold has left little room for understanding what it means to be at home in everyday spaces constituted by things participating in hidden and distributed data networks. The thesis argues that stories of use and appropriation in IoT’s design and development fall short of many meanings of home, generated by the continually shifting nature of data-driven things and potentialities for interaction. The thesis acknowledges how IoT brings us, at once, intimately closer to things and contexts we could once never reach—lending new homely imaginaries, and also how IoT’s capacities can help surface the complexities in what is conceived as ‘home’ today.

This Interaction Design thesis focuses on ‘participation’—the central tenet that guides our sense of belonging—to be at home in the world. This focus examines different forms of participation that are currently at play in IoT and how they support sense-making processes involving people, things, sensors, and data. By adopting frameworks in participatory design, technoscience, and feminist approaches, this thesis tackles sense-making at the most intimate level—situated, material, and embodied—and extends those meanings to things that have uniquely artificial, agential, and immaterial capacities. A methodological framework called ‘tales of things’ is employed to elicit subjective and reflexive experiences in the participatory sense-making process through design experimentation and prototyping. Importantly, the thesis sustains the ongoing ethical project of surfacing the implications of IoT by calling for active and responding bodies in re-claiming the sense of home in our daily lives.

Wednesday’s seminar with Michael Krona is postponed. A new date will be announced.

On Friday, March 20 at 10.15, Michelle Westerlaken, PhD candidate in Interaction Design, will hold her 90 percent PhD seminar. The title of the forthcoming thesis is Imagining Multispecies Worlds. Alex Taylor, sociologist and associate professor in the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University of London, will function as discussant.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom.

At the time of the meeting click on: https://mau-se.zoom.us/my/michellewesterlaken. To be sure that everything works smoothly, you could install the Zoom software beforehand but it should not be necessary. Please join the meeting in time and turn off your audio and video during the first part of the seminar. The chat will be open for questions (or pointing out technical issues) throughout the seminar. We will try to have a broader round of questions at the end where all listeners can turn on their microphones.

Below you can find an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to read the manuscript before the seminar, contact Michelle (michelle.westerlaken@mau.se).

It can be considered the most systemic, deadly, and all-encompassing form of institutional violence that currently exists: speciesism, the oppression and exploitation of other animals. For most people on our planet, speciesism is something completely normalized, justified, and encouraged through many facets of dominant culture. In the field of critical animal studies and political theory, as well as certain branches of ecofeminism and posthumanism, the normalization of speciesism has been thoroughly questioned and analysed, but one topic is given little academic attention: what can a counter-concept to speciesism actually look like, without saying what it is not?

This thesis is concerned with the imagining of ‘multispecies worlds’, with the objective to construct positive rather than negating aspects of such worlds. What can worlds that abandons speciesism contain? How can we engage with one another in such societies?

Rather than approaching these questions in a search for singular answers, this thesis argues that on a more contextual, local, and relational level, many people know quite well what it means to have friendships with other animals, care for them in many different ways, share our living spaces, respect our distances, negotiate conflicts, or develop mutual understandings with each other. Especially in alternative worldviews (such as indigenous cosmologies) and lived experiences with other animals, these multispecies worlds already exist in plenty. In this thesis, I will develop and further illustrate a framework to imagine multispecies worlds. I will do this by connecting a more relational understanding of our lives with other animals to the development of a counter-concept to speciesism in which we recognize and engage with the ability to respond to each other.Thereby, this thesis answers to – and builds on – various scholarly and activist discourses, including standpoints from ecofeminism, decolonialism, and critical animal studies, and is theoretically grounded in feminist and postmodernist epistemologies. With a focus on imagining worlds and negotiating possibilities, this dissertation is also a work in (interaction) design. The design practice that I undertake here is that of tracing and negotiating multispecies responses with other animals, and expressing those narratives as a design research program. These responses are presented as a Multispecies Bestiary, in which ten protagonist animals guide the reader through a collection of multispecies stories. By framing design in this way, I argue that we are able to – together with other animals – find possible meanings of multispecies worlds not as a single (broken) solution, but as ever-expanding directions and more flexible transformations that are able to permanently unsettle and unmake the established speciesist order.

The K3 seminar with Maliheh Ghajargar scheduled for Wednesday, March 18, will be held on May 13. Oscar Hemer’s seminar, scheduled for that time, will be postponed to the fall.

The seminar with Maliheh Ghajargar, due to be be held on Wednesday, March 18, is postponed. A new date will be announced.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Martin Lundqvist, visiting PhD student in Peace and Conflict Studies.

The title of the talk is:

Nep-hop for peace? Political visions and divisions in the booming Nepalese hip-hop scene

It will take place on Wednesday, March 4 at 10.15-12.00 in the K3 Open Studio.

Anders Hög Hansen, K3, will function as discussant. 

Below you will find an abstract for the seminar.

The emerging ‘cultural turn’ in peace research suggests that we may find traces of peace politics within contemporary culture. As such, this ‘turn’ to culture encourages peace researchers to explore various expressions of popular culture within divided societies, with the aim to uncover their potential for inducing peace. While breaking new intellectual ground for peace research, this development has thus far been mostly concerned with English language sources, and it has moreover seen limited engagement with how popular culture is received by its consumers. In order to remedy these research gaps, the present study explores the booming Nepalese hip-hop scene – commonly known as nep-hop – discussing whether, and if so how, the scene may contain visions of an alternative politics relevant for peacebuilding in Nepal. Not only does this line of inquiry contribute to the theoretical development of the ‘cultural turn’ in peace research, it also unpacks an academically un-explored popular culture phenomenon, namely nep-hop.  

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Marie Hållander, Author and Senior Lecturer in Education, Södertörn University. The title of the talk is:

Among the girls and machines of the textile dust: On poetry, textile work and archive.

It will take place on Wednesday, February 19 at 10.15-12.00 in the K3 Open Studio.

Marie Hållander is an author and researcher within philosophy of education. Her debut novel Tjänster i hemmet (2013) is a poetic novel about working in elderly care service. Det omöjliga vittnandet (2017) is a re-written version of her PhD thesis, published  by Eskaton and can be read online for free: http://eskaton.se/?attachment_id=395. The book will be published in English by Palgrave Macmillan (2020). Hållander is also project leader for the literary scene Sjuhärad text, that arranges literary readings around Sjuhärad and is working as a senior lecturer in Education at Södertörn university.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

In the presentation “Among the girls and machines of the textile dust: poetry, textile work and archive”, I will present an artistic, literary, poetic project which deals with textile workers’ history and specifically textile stories from Sjuhärad, the area surrounding Borås. It is a project where I want to understand and write about the conditions for textile workers in this specific area, which is known for its strong connections to the textile industry. The project draws on material of archive searches and interviews with former workers, as well of my own lines and spatial passings in forms of autobiographical elements, since I am situated in this area and history.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Alicia Smedberg, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3. The title of the talk is:

“Because we say so”: Democratic infrastructuring in the intersection between public and civil sectors.

It will take place on Wednesday, February 12 at 10.15-12.00 in the K3 Open Studio.

It will be Alicia’s 50 percent PhD seminar, and Ylva Gislen, Docent in Artistic Practice, will function as discussant. 

Below you will find an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to read Alicia’s draft document for the seminar, mail her (Alicia.Smedberg@mau.se).

Recall the feeling of beginning a sentence, in the heat of an argument, without quite know- ing how to finish it. This text is one such sentence, in the midst of things: urgent yet unfin- ished. The text is a result of two and a half years of participatory design practice situated within public sector work in Malmö and Lund, Sweden. The text also marks a milestone in a project with a Marxist-feminist theoretical framework, seeking to articulate the impera- tive of infrastructuring that is both pluralistic and sensitive to power imbalances. This has been framed around the initial question of how we, as participatory designers, can work with and around the issue of agency which arises the inter-sectional work between public and private sectors.

Following Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the public sphere and of politics as articulation and action, the project proposes an approach termed collaborative anecdotalization which, within infrastructuring processes, entails both the recognition of the individual perspective as well as the collaborative practice of building a shared worldview in disparate groups.

Welcome to the term’s first K3 seminar. It will be held by Susan Kozel, Professor of New Media, K3.

The title of the talk is:

Performing phenomenology, phenomenology in performance

It will take place on Wednesday, February 5 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk.

“breadth of thought reacting with intensity of sensitive experience stands out as an ultimate claim of existence” (Whitehead 1929)

Supporting the goal of systematically connecting phenomenology and performativity, this seminar will explore a methodological, practical and fundamentally corporeal connection between the two. It expands ongoing work toward refining a method of phenomenological reflection that can account for the nuance and liminality of affective and somatic states.

The exploration of performance and phenomenology will be grounded in the work of choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir; in particular, a collaboration with her that produced a Mixed Reality archive as part of the Living Archives research project. Attention will be devoted not simply to demonstrating the MR installation, but to the special relationship between phenomenology and performance occurring through Guðjónsdóttir deeply somatic choreographies.

This is an applied phenomenology but it does not adhere to a formula that can be brought to bear to experience, like a tool out of a box. Rather, in and through its performance, the bodies of the dancers and the observers come to be. This commitment to understanding and applying a variation of phenomenological method is faithful to the Merleau-Pontian spirit which has shaped it, acknowledging the inherence of the one who sees in that which she sees, “a self through confusion,” one that is “caught up in things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future.” This method exists in motion, in its very application by an unstable self. When applied to the experience of watching dance, it becomes a phenomenology of performance and phenomenology as performance.

The spring program for the K3 seminar series is now finalized, and you can reach it at the top of this page. The first seminar will be held by Susan Kozel on February 5 and we will continue until early June. Most seminars will be held on Wednesdays between 10.15 and 12.00, but not all.