Welcome to a K3 seminar with Veera Virmasalo, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies. The title of the seminar is:

Discursive construction of bourgeois civic culture(s) in the tech innovation scene of post-apartheid Namibia

It will take place on Wednesday, May 23 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

This is Veera Virmasalo’s 30 percent PhD seminar. Jacob Svensson, Docent and Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, will function as discussant.

If you would like to read the text that the seminar is based on beforehand, please send a mail to Veera (veera.virmasalo@mau.se).

Here is an abstract for the talk:

Namibia, a southern African country of 2.2 million inhabitants, and my home since 2007, is one of the most unequal societies in the world. 28 years into independence from South Africa, a new black elite and middle class has emerged but little is known about how they see their role in the unequal society, or whether the new generation of white Namibians has adopted dispositions different from their parents. My PhD project explores these questions through the lens of ‘tech innovation’, focusing on discursive negotiation involved in attempts that aim to persuade the Namibian bourgeoisie to support inclusive tech innovation, which is purported to benefit the marginalised.

Using a combination of ethnographic and practice-based methods, the research will produce thick descriptions of discourses circulating around tech innovation in Namibia. It will also challenge dominant discourse(s) through scenarios, counter-images and coproduction of media. Much of the work will be based on my involvement in a 2-year project called The Inclusive and Collaborative Tech Innovation Hub. The project is implemented by the faculty of computing and informatics at the Namibia University of Science and Technology and funded by the Finnish government as part of its support for developing an ‘inclusive economy’ in Namibia. The Hub trains marginalised youth in skills needed in developing for-profit innovations, promotes their inclusion in innovation projects undertaken by local ICT companies, and rallies to engage the local private sector as supporters for its work. Finally, it will also organise a series of workshops to co-design digital media concepts with the aim to increase social justice thinking among privileged Namibians.

The research aim is to explore the role of international development industry as a discursive vassal of global ideologies and simultaneously chart possibilities and instances of resistance by local actors, as well as from within the development industry. In this way, it is a research project within the ethics of Communication for Development and Social Change, calling development organisations and communicators within them to reflect on whether the discourses used by them in fact promote what they are purporting to promote. This call is not restricted to international development organisations, as there are also many local actors from government entities to non-governmental organisations and private citizens reproducing discourses, which at least at first sight seem to erode the potential of collective action towards a more just society. This research takes a closer look of such discourses and their specific articulations, trying to understand what is actually suggested by and understood through them in today’s Namibia. 

With an emphasis on Communication for Social Change and the communication aspect in Media and Communication Studies, my project will contribute to existing research on discourses of development, and the role of media and communication in promoting civic culture.

Keywords: Communication for social change, civic culture and privilege, digital innovation; discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe / Essex school)

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Hugo Boothby, Lecturer in Communication for Development. The title of the seminar is:

Music for Universities

The seminar will be held on May 16 at 10.15-12.00 in the K3 Open Studio, fifth floor of Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

In this K3 seminar I present the first prototype and initial findings from the artistic research project “Music for Universities”. This is a practice-based intervention that employs transversal media tools to interrogate the affordances and materialities of the MP3 audio format and the iPod digital media player. In this work the MP3 and iPod are used as the principle tools in a generative music composition.

Generative music is produced using a machine or system in which degrees of randomisation are defined by the composer, this partial removal of authorial control allows the system to play the composition indefinitely (Eno, 1996, p. 330). The composition that I present during this seminar, titled “Music for Universities pt1: Haunted Format”, is written for 12 iPods, sampled voice and the MP3. For this generative composition the randomisation engine is the shuffle algorithm of the iPod. Timbral variation in the composition is achieved by encoding the voice sample multiple times as an MP3. The MP3 is an audio compression format engineered to reduce the data needed to encode a piece of audio, facilitating transfer and storage within digital systems. Every time a piece of audio is encoded as an MP3 more data is removed producing loss at certain frequencies, and noticeable digital artifacts and aliasing.

Within the conventional aesthetics of sound recording or broadcasting the sounds of the MP3’s processing would be considered undesirable. However, for this composition these imperfections become part of its aesthetic, an important sonic texture. Combining together 12 iPods to create a musical instrument also emphasises the compositional potential of the iPod’s shuffle mode, working to reveal how shuffle’s reordering of our music collections, the seemingly random juxtapositions and repetitions that occur, can be understood as a significant process of musical composition, one that has become a routine and mundane part of many people’s lives.

This generative music composition using iPod and MP3 seeks to operationalise a transversal media practice employing the transversal media tools, “residual media”[i] and “eventualisation”[ii] (Gansing 2013). Hauntology (Derrida 1994; Reyonlds 2006 and 2011; Harper 2011 and Fisher 2014), is used to compliment these transversal media tools. These concepts are used because they all work to disrupt established narratives of technological development within audio media. Specifically, the powerful linear narrative of progress towards increased verisimilitude. What Jonathan Sterne defines as “the idea that a new medium is closer to reality and more immersive and interactive than its predecessor” (2012, p. 4). This composition also works to disrupt audio media’s equally significant linear narrative of compression. The narrative of compression is understood here as the drive to build “additional efficiencies into channels and to economize communication in the service of facilitating greater mobility” (Sterne, 2012, p. 5).

This generative music composition is an “eventualisation” that manifests both the narratives of verisimilitude and compression, revealing how as “residual media” the MP3 and iPod can embody both stories and hold them in tension. Hauntology draws attention to processes whereby music production and composition in itself can be used as a tool for music criticism and analysis. I propose specifically this methodology as an exercise in combining theory and practice in media and communication studies research.

References:

Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge

Eno, Brian (1996) A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. London: Faber and Faber.

Harper, Adam (2011) Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making. Winchester: Zero Books

Fisher, Mark (2014) Ghost of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.

Gansing, Kristoffer (2013) Transversal Media Practices: Media Archaeology, Art and Technological Development. Malmö: Malmö University. Doctoral dissertation

Reynolds, Simon (2011) Retromania: Pop Cultures Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber

Reynolds, Simon (2006, November) Haunted Audio. The Wire Magazine pp. 26-33

Sterne, Jonathan (2012) MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press.

Further listening:

Basinski, William (2002) The Disintegration Loops. Track nr1 “dlp 1.1”

Eno, Brian (1978) Music for Airports. Track nr2 “Music for Airports: 1/2”

[i] Residual media is “near-obsolete or naturalised media devices and practices that increasingly inhabit and enact a powerful influence on everyday life” (Gansing, 2013, p. 301).

[ii] An eventualisation is “a specific form of intervention which exploits the performative rationale behind any technological development and in this sense it is intervention as a process of invention, adapting existing developments to tell new stories or instigate new events” (Gansing, 2013, p. 301)

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Michelle Westerlaken, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3. This will be her 50 percent PhD seminar. The title of the seminar is:

Imagining Multispeciesism

The seminar will be held on May 2 at 10.15-12.00 in the K3 Open Studio, fifth floor of Niagara. Jonas Löwgren, Professor of Interaction and Information Design, University of Linköping, will function as discussant.

If you would like to read the text that the seminar will be based on beforehand, send an email to Michelle (michelle.westerlaken@mau.se).

Here is an abstract for the talk:

The more we are willing to research the complexity of animals, the more we learn about their sentience, their cognitive capabilities, their preferences, and their unique traits. These new insights are potential springboards for a deeper and better-informed concern about the way we conceptualize, treat, and exploit animals. However, rather than pursuing interests that can put an end to animal (or human) exploitation or can minimize their suffering, within Western culture we have mostly used this knowledge to develop technology and practices that extract profit and increase productivity (Hribal 2007). Rather than working towards better animal (or human) treatment, I argue that technology ranging from horse shoes, barbed wire, restraining devices, and automatic feeders all the way to genetic manipulation, specialized breeding, animal tracking, and artificial insemination has only allowed for more efficient exploitation and control of animals. It also enabled us to operate factory farming on much larger scales. In other words, we can argue that generating scientific insights concerning animal welfare and animal suffering does not necessarily lead to an improvement in their life conditions.

Following a more situated theoretical perspective in my PhD research, I suggest that contextually and personally engaging with the life of another animal is a much more powerful way to develop compassion and care. It helps to develop a kind of affective gut feeling regarding other animals’ needs, perspectives, preferences, and potential suffering. This instinctual kindness towards other animals arises out of certain perspectives, projections that are created in our minds, local knowledges, and specific situations.  Furthermore, I argue that, specifically in the attempt to articulate a ‘worldview’ (Redström, 2017) that we can design with, it is unhelpful to maintain a focus on critique and negations regarding the notion of speciesism and critical theory. Instead, I propose to do ethics and philosophy as a form of ‘multi-speciesist’ thinking, through creating stories of our engagements with animals that are just big enough to inspire alternative ways of thinking but do not attempt to explain or define our relationships with other beings once and for all. They consist of stories of surprises, joy, play, and unexpected responses we get from interacting with other animals (Haraway, 2016, Bogost, 2016), they involve intense moments of caring for other species (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017; Tsing, 2015), they are re-interpretations of past engagements that we can attempt to understand in a new light (Berardi, 2017), they include the articulation of new concepts that allow for new modes of thinking about the world (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994/1991), they consist of deliberate practices of self-fashioning and re-structuring our lives through values that are currently located outside of our norms (Foucault, 1988; Gibson-Graham, 2008), and they encompass constructions of hopeful or utopian narratives (Le Guin, 2016; Zylinska, 2014).

In this 50% seminar, we will focus on discussing the main proposed structure of the PhD thesis, the general argument it tries to make, and the method that is used for attempting to construct the proposed ‘multispeciesist worldview’.

References

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. (2017). Futureability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. London, UK: Verso.

Ian Bogost. (2016). Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (1994/1991). What is Philosophy. London, UK: Verso.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Martin L. H., Gutman, H. and Hutton P. H. London, UK: Tavistock Publications.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008). Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”, Progress in Human Geography, pp. 1-20.

Donna J. Haraway. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jason Hribal. (2007). Animals, agency, and class: Writing the history of animals from below. In Human Ecology Forum, 14(1), pp. 101-112.

Ursula K. Le Guin. (2016). A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be. (Part III: Essays). In Utopia, by More, Thomas, London, UK: Verso Books, pp. 161-194.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in more than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Johan Redström. (2017). Making Design Theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Anna L. Tsing. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press.

Zylinska, Joanna. (2014). Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. London, UK: Open Humanities Press.

Welcome to a seminar with Anuradha Reddy, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3. This will be her 50 percent PhD seminar. The title of the talk is:

“Feeling at home” with the Internet of Things

The seminar will take place on April 25 at 10.15-12.00 in K3 Open Studio, fifth floor of Niagara. Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, professor of Media and Communication Studies, will function as discussant. 

If you would like to read Anuradha’s text before the seminar, send her a mail (anuradha.reddy@mau.se). 

Here is an abstract for the talk:

Whereas the frameworks and infrastructures supporting the ‘Internet of Things’ have operated in domestic spaces for over a decade, their strong ties to the industry have left little room for understanding what it means to ‘feel at home’ with a technology that is largely networked, distributed, and hidden. In this regard, my thesis is concerned with the increasing gap between the logics that dominate distributed networks of the Internet of Things and that of situated, material and embodied contexts of use. As various sources of computation and capacities for agency are being exploited to ‘care’ for our well-being, there is a crucial need to understand what kind of logics are at play in the way care is enacted through networked devices of the Internet of Things. In that, the concept of care provides for an analytical provocation to examine and probe into the tensions that might surface from the disjointed logics operating in situated contexts of technology use, and in turn explore what new perspectives and possibilities arise for our sense of ‘feeling at home.’

Based on the theoretical commitments of feminist scholars who acknowledge ‘interdependency’ as the ontological state in which humans and countless other beings live (Bellacasa, 2017), my research into the Internet of Things engages with care in domestic contexts in human and more than human ways (Mol et al., 2010; Latour, 2005; Hill-Collins, 2002). Seeing domestic spaces as vital sites for ecologies and human and non-humans relations is a necessary step to imagine how care might ‘take place’ in meaningful ways (Latimer and Munro, 2009). The research embodies a form of ‘design anthropology’ (Gunn et al., 2013) that is able to bring to design the tradition of theorising concepts like ‘Internet of Things’ through the contexts of its usage and the acknowledgement of nonhuman agencies, their relationalities and the emergence of new materialities in the configuration of reality (Lucy and Wakeford, 2012). To sum up, the purpose of my thesis is to create a conceptual space for reframing the role of the Internet of Things in domestic contexts beyond a culture of what is technologically possible and consumable to a broader context of thinking critically about its alternative role in everyday life.

References:

Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.

de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Gunn, W., Otto, T., & Smith, R. C. (Eds.). (2013). Design anthropology: theory and practice. A&C Black.

Latimer, J., & Munro, R. (2009). Keeping & dwelling: Relational extension, the idea of home, and otherness. Space and Culture, 12(3), 317-331.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-networktheory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies).

Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (Eds.). (2012). Inventive methods: The happening of the social. Routledge.

Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (Eds.). (2015). Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms (Vol. 8). transcript Verlag.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jakob Svensson, Senior Lecturer and Docent in Media and Communication Studies, K3. The name of the talk is:

Behind the Algorithm

The talk will take place on Wednesday, April 18 at 10.15-12.00 in  room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

Algorithms are on the agenda today. Scholars argue that algorithms start to replace many things, from production to consumption of media, from editors to journalists, and might even influence election results. Still algorithms are far from perfect. There is a debate whether Amazon is homophobic, whether Google is racist and then we had the scandal over Microsoft’s chat program Tay that quickly turned to obscene and inflammatory language after having interacted with Twitter users. Studies have also found gender biases as a consequence of image search algorithms and that black people are not recognized as humans in face-recognition algorithms.

This research project contributes to this with a much-needed sociological approach to research on algorithms by focusing on the humans behind them. Hence, algorithms are approached as non-neutral and as socially constructed. Being engineered by humans, they embody rules, ideals, imaginations/ perceptions and cultures. They are encoded with human intentions that may or may not be fulfilled. Still, algorithm programmers and software engineers have largely been ignored in empirical studies. Nonetheless it is known that programmers and software engineers mostly belong to the youth, are to a majority white and male. Does this have any influences on the algorithms, and by extension our internet experiences?

The question the research project seeks to answer is: What logic, or combination of logics, informs the practices of designing and programming algorithms?

This question will be answered through a study software engineers and their intentions, imaginations/ perceptions, rules, ideals, different cultures and how this feeds into their programming and designing of algorithms. The question will be addressed in two different studies:

1) An interview study targeting software engineers, algorithm programmers and designers at in particular social media and search engine organizations

2) An ethnographic study of a news organization. The study will take place at a leading Swedish daily and study the programmers’ work with their webpage and the ranking/ placing of news.

Algorithms should be understood as systems. These systems are not standalone little boxes, but massive networked ones, with sometimes hundreds of hands reaching into them, tuning, tweaking and experimenting with them. We thus need to examine the logics that guide these hands. The methodological framework is therefore inspired from the concept of media logics. For this project, the media logics framework has been adjusted and will based around five so-called “sensitizing concepts” that interact with, and inform, each other in a dynamic circuit informing the practices of programming and designing algorithms. These concepts are rules, ideals, intentions, cultures and imaginations/perceptions. It is important to underline here that these sensitizing concepts are not separate. They intersect and inform each other.

In the seminar I will present the first result of this 2 year research project (funded by the Swedish Research Council).

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jenny Wiik, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, University of Gothenburg, and K3. The title of her talk is:

The rise of ‘the manager’ in news work. Journalistic professionalism under pressure of managerial ideology

The talk will be held on Wednesday, April 11 at 10.15-12.00 in room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

In liberal democracies, the institution of journalism rests upon fundamental professional values such as autonomy, discretion and public interest. Current development in the news industry, however, has led to shrinking news rooms, constant reorganizations and an increasing focus on commercial goals. A parallel movement can be added to this, and that is the rise of managerialism in those organizations (Wiik & Andersson, 2016; Andersson & Wiik, 2013). The ideology of managerialism contrasts professional values by promoting centralization of control above peer review; individual performance before collective processes; and measurable (economic) indicators instead of more abstract democratic values. It has been described as an expansive and all-encompassing force with impact on all levels of society (Entemann, 1993), an ”ideological enslavement and asphyxiation” (Klikauer, 2015: 1114).

What is the practical influence of this development to news work? In my presentation I address this question based on results from my project ‘Journalism meets management’.

Empirical support is drawn from thematic interviews with Swedish journalists and their managers, as well as survey studies of news workers and chief editors. The study provides evidence for the erosion of journalistic professionalism for the benefit of the pervasive force of managerialism. The results are discussed on the background of democratic expectations on journalism, as well as the neoliberal roots of managerial ideology, and how the clash of those leads to a dismantling of journalism as a democratic fundament.

Welcome to a seminar with Henry King, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, K3. The name of the talk is:

The Soho School and the Aesthetics of Sociality

The talk will take place on Wednesday, March 28 at 10.15-12.00 in  room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

The Soho School is a ‘lost continent’ of 20th century British poetry. Although some members of the group are individually well-known (e.g. W.S. Graham, George Barker, David Gascoyne), the contours of the group and their aesthetic specificity has rarely been acknowledged and little researched. My research aims to excavate this group and insert them into the history of British poetry in the mid- to late-20th century.

Mid-century British poetry has often been discussed in terms of stylistic and social groups: Blake Morrison’s classic work on The Movement, and more recent studies such as William Wooten’s The Alvarez Generation, have aimed to define these groups, plotting their personal interrelationships and aesthetic affinities. Taking a similar approach, I argue that the Soho School demonstrates equal—if not greater—coherence over a longer period of time, and furthermore, that their sense of forming a coherent social as well as stylistic group is foregrounded in their work. The Soho School is also notable for its inclusion of painters, and their collaboration in various publishing projects. I will discuss the group’s constitution and the shared aspects of their creative work. I also argue that the group has had an under-acknowledged impact upon the wider poetic culture of the UK, through the creation of durable institutions which continue its legacy.

At the same time as working to rehabilitate this group, I also take a critical attitude to it, especially with regard to gender politics: although women played important roles as writers and collaborators (as well as the more traditional role of the muse), they occupied an ambivalent, liminal place within the group, which I aim to explore.

Welcome to a seminar with Jens Pedersen, senior lecturer in Interaction Design at K3. The name of his talk is:

Action or Interaction? A Phenomenological Approach to Design of Agency.

It will be held on Wednesday, March 21 at 10.15-12.00 in room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio).

Here is an abstract for the talk:

In my talk I will question the notion of ‘interaction’ in interaction design and propose that it at least for certain purposes may be more fitting and valuable to speak about ‘design of agency’ or ‘action design’. Interaction means ‘reciprocal action or influence between two separate entities’, but to the extent that interaction design is concerned with the design of tools it is not quite right to describe use as reciprocal interaction, because tool and tool user are not two separate entities in use. We don’t interact with hammers or keyboards; we use them — or are being used by them — in hammering or writing. If it would be appropriate to say we interact with tools it would be because we ‘misuse’ the tool or it is ‘malfunctioning’. Thus when we can be said to interact with — are over-and-against — a tool it can be argued with Heidegger that it is a symptom of a breakdown in the functioning whole of our activity, an inability to take proper care of our dealings, and hence, it could be argued, a failure on behalf of the tool designers. In this particular interpretation designing for interaction means in fact impeding the agency of the users of the tool. 

In practice, and in most cases, IT designers do quite rightly not strive for the kind of reciprocal interaction described above, but rather for a seamless and transparent use of artefacts. Thus it is a bit of misnomer to call what they do for ‘interaction design’. At the same time, though, there is not a clear understanding in interaction design what ‘design of agency’ means beyond particular design guidelines and practical heuristics.

To create a better correspondence between design practice and how it is conceptualised (agency rather than interaction) I propose (tentatively) a framework for design of agency, which indicate what needs to be in place, what the practical conditions of possibility are, for the ‘ability-to-act’. The framework is inspired by Heidegger’s analysis of our everyday careful dealings and handlings of tools (Zeug). I propose that the condition for the possibility of action is ‘availability’ and that availability is dependent on ‘familiarity’ and ‘access’; and that familiarity is further dependent on skill and understanding, while access is further dependent on provisioning and arranging.

For example, for a text document to be available for writing, we have to be familiar with text editors and their hardware, which is dependent on bodily skills; the text document also has to be accessible (present) which is dependent on it having already been provisioned and arranged. Thus, in this manner we can begin as designers to articulate important dimensions in what needs to be designed for for tools (Werkzeug) and workspace (Werkstatt) to be available for the work (Werk) we are doing and thereby gifting the worker (Handwerker) with agency.    

The best candidate for an alternative articulation of ‘design of agency’ is Gibson’s notion of ‘affordances’, which I will briefly discuss at the end of the talk.  

Welcome to a K3 seminar with The Service Design group from Aalborg University Copenhagen. At the seminar they will present three EU projects they are currently involved in, they will talk about their Master’s education in Service Design, and they will open for a discussion of possible collaborations with K3. The persons holding the seminar are Amalia de Götzen, Nicola Morelli and Luca Simeone.

It will be held at Wednesday, March 7 at 10.15-12.00 in room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk as well as short bios of the participants

In this talk we will present the different activities of our research group that only very recently decided to re-define itself as a Lab. We will shortly explain how the group has evolved in the last 6 years and what is the approach we have towards the discipline, taking as a point of departure the core activities we have: the Service Systems Design Master. 

Service design education is still young and it is still interpreted in many different ways, according to the design programs in various universities, where it usually plays a minor role. Very few education schemes provide a complete curriculum on service design and embark on the challenge of equipping a designer who will want to have an important role in providing solutions for people and in supporting new forms of social innovation that happen through new processes both in public and private services.

In our education, we try to map new value-creation processes according to a three level structure, proposing a framework of new competences and tools that are being developed in design education and research. The three levels of “value in use”, “infrastructuring” and  “governance” are also used as a framework to support our research activity, starting from the three Horizon2020 funded projects we are currently working on: Open4Citizens (www.open4citizens.eu), Designscapes (https://www.designscapes.eu/) and Mobility Urban Values (https://www.muv2020.eu/).

Our talk will briefly introduce these three projects, providing us the opportunity to look at how the traditional design approach is nowadays challenged, moving from the idea of a “genius designer” to the one of a designer (and service provider) as actor that ignites and mediates the process of co-creation, supporting the ecosystem for the value creation process.

We will focus then on the proposed multi-level structure, that includes the value-creation level, in which design is a prerogative of the stakeholders participating in the value-creation action; the level of infrastructuring in which designers use their expert knowledge to support the interaction in the value-creation phase; and the level of governance, in which designers must figure out and understand the implications of his/her action on the structure of the ecosystem in which the value-creation process can be adequately organized and possibly scaled-up.

We will conclude our presentation with some of the activities we want to pursue in the future and possible opportunities of collaboration with Malmö University.

Nicola Morelli (PhD) is Professor with Special Responsibility at the AD:MT at AAU. He is now coordinating the EU-H2020-funded Open4Citizens project and part of the research consortium of the EU-H2020-projects MUV and DESIGNSCAPES. In recent years he has been the technical coordinator of the EU-Funded Life 2.0 project and among the main promoters of the new master in Service Systems Design, in Copenhagen.

Amalia de Götzen (PhD) is Associate Professor at the AD:MT at AAU. She graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Padova and got a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Verona. Her main research activity includes Service Design, Digital Social Innovation and Interaction Design.

Luca Simeone (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the AD:MT at AAU and his work is situated at the intersection of design practice, research and entrepreneurship. He has founded 6 design companies and has conducted research and teaching activities at universities such as Harvard, MIT and Malmö University.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Ann-Sofi Ljung Svensson, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, K3, and Therese Hellberg, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies, K3.

At the seminar, Ann-Sofi Ljung Svensson will present her research project Hem till gården. Idyllens ideologi och estetik i ett svenskt litterärt och populärkulturellt perspektiv (funded by The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences), and Therese Hellberg will present her PhD project Att skapa den ideala medborgaren i folkhemmets Sverige: Upplysning, anpassning och motstånd i svensk litteratur 1940-1955.

The seminar will take place on Wednesday, February 28 at 10.15-12.00 in room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Below are abstracts for the two talks:

Ann-Sofi Ljung Svensson:

Jag kommer under seminariet att presentera huvuddragen i mitt litteraturvetenskapliga projekt ”Hem till gården. Idyllens ideologi och estetik”, och jag ser med stort intresse fram emot era synpunkter. Studien utgår från nutidsrelevanta texter och perspektiv, som dels utforskar idyllgenrens samhällskritiska potential och estetiska karaktär, dels sätter in genren i ett svenskt litterärt och populärkulturellt sammanhang.

Idyllen är en litterär genre med lång tradition och den har periodvis haft hög prestige. I den kanoniserade svenska litteraturen under 1900-talet har landsbygdsidyllen emellertid haft en svag ställning. Förklaringen ligger sannolikt i förhållandet till moderniteten. Sverige är ett land som har präglats av moderniteten och bejakat den. Det har gett avtryck i 1900-talets litteraturkanon, som huvudsakligen omfattar skildringar av hur Sverige blir modernt. Ivar Lo-Johansson, Sven Delblanc och Kerstin Ekman är exempel på författare som gestaltat Sveriges förvandling från ett agrart till ett urbant land. De har litterärt skildrat samhällsutvecklingen, vilket blivit den hegemoniska diskursen – ”den stora berättelsen” –  i svensk litteraturhistorieskrivning.

Huvudtesen i min studie är att landsbygdsidyllen dock har använts och fortfarande används för att från olika ideologiska utgångspunkter utöva djupgående kritik mot samhället genom att gestalta och diskutera alternativa samhällslösningar. Under 1900-talet har i idyllens form kritik ofta riktats mot delar av den svenska välfärdsstaten, dvs. folkhemmet. Lösningarna har förlagts till landsbygden, och omfattar även ekokritiska perspektiv som står i relation till moderniteten i allmänhet och det svenska samhällsbygget i synnerhet.

Genom fem nedslag i svensk litteratur under 1900-talet och fram till idag ska idyllens samhällskritiska och estetiska dimension och dess förankring i sin samtid tydliggöras. De valda texterna är skrivna av Karl-Erik Forsslund (1872-1941), Vilhelm Moberg (1898-1973), Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002), vissångaren Bernt Staf (1945-2002) och bloggaren Clara Lidström (1986-). Urvalet är gjort med avsikt att lyfta fram de perioder i den svenska nutidshistorien som kan förknippas med ’gröna vågor’. Urvalet speglar också en populärkulturell medieutveckling från massproducerad bok till tidningsföljetong, tv-film, lp-skivor och blogg. Man kan betrakta idyllgenren under det senaste seklet som ett fenomen som ständigt manifesterar sig i nya medieformer. Radikala lösningar och alternativ ingår i en återkommande självreflexiv diskurs i moderniteten. Den moderna människan vänder sig ständigt om och betraktar det hon skapat. Med min studie vill jag visa att denna diskurs under 1900-talet bl. a. tagit sig uttryck i idyllgenren, och hållit den vid liv. Genom att ständigt förflytta sig till modernare medier har både genren och diskursen förnyat sin aktualitet.

Therese Hellberg:

Jag kommer att ge en övergripande presentation av mitt forskningsarbete: ”Att skapa den ideala medborgaren i folkhemmets Sverige: upplysning, anpassning och motstånd i svensk litteratur 1940–1955”.

I min forskning fokuseras prosafiktion skriven 1940–1955 av outforskade kvinnliga författare samt sakprosa utgiven under tidsperioden. Syftet med planerad forskning är att synliggöra förbisedd prosafiktion och bredda bilden av svenskt litterärt 1940- och 1950-tal. Syftet är också att bidra med ny kunskap om det svenska samhället och folkhemmet genom analys av aktualiserade texter.

Skönlitteraturen ses både som en konstform med tolkningspotential och som medium av föreställningar och perspektiv från sin samtid. En intersektionell teori, utifrån bland annat De los Reyes och Mulinari (2005), kommer tillämpas. Forskningen kommer bedrivas utifrån ett kritiskt genusperspektiv och antagandet att nationen konstruerar genus.

Ett urval av de aktualiserade prosaverken kommer att lyftas fram i sin helhet för att narratologiskt analyseras och bidra till att synliggöra en mer komplett bild av några av de fokuserade kvinnliga författarskapen. Prosafiktionen tillsammans med sakprosa kommer även att analyseras tematiskt genom att undersöka hur texterna förhåller sig till: moderniteten, äktenskap, hemarbete, moderskap, sexualitet, abort, (ut)bildning, yrkesarbete samt försörjning.

För forskningen utgör det (idé)historiska och politiska skeendet kring folkhemmets uppbyggnad och framväxt kontext. Tidigare forskning som behandlar de sociala reformer som genomfördes på 1930–40-talet samt bidrar till att bredda bilden av litterärt svenskt 40- och 50-tal kommer användas.

I min presentation kommer jag även att lyfta fram textexempel på sakprosa och prosafiktion av Gertrud Lilja, Maj Hirdman och Birgit Tengroth. Härigenom visas hur folkhemsidealen tar uttryck i texterna samt delvis texternas komplexitet, då de innefattar både anpassning till och motstånd mot såväl moderniteten, nationalismen som folkhemsidealen.