Welcome to a K3 seminar with Berndt Clavier and Asko Kauppinen, senior lecturers in English Studies, K3. It will be held on Wednesday, March 8, 10.15-12.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is On Veridiction: Metrologies of Art in the European Welfare State

Abstract for the talk:

In this paper, we elaborate on Foucault’s term “veridiction” and explore how it illuminates the recent developments in the governance of the arts in European Welfare States. Veridiction is basically a calculus, which measures governmental intervention to ensure that the intervention is of the right kind and intensity. Since Foucault’s analysis, the instruments of veridiction have evolved considerably. This development, we believe, warrants an analysis of its own. Borrowing the term “metrology” from Latour, we hope to expand Foucault’s analysis of veridiction in ways that illuminate contemporary neoliberal governmentality.

In Biopolitics, Foucault develops veridiction along two lines: the market (exchange) and the public authorities (utility), which together form the principal “interplay of interests” in liberal and neoliberal governmentality (45). Further, the market becomes something like “nature,” a site and principle of veridiction (verification-falsification) of liberal governmental practice. Foucault talks about the process of veridiction developing in the 18th century involving “a number of technicians who brought with them both methods and instruments of reflection” (33), but he never elaborates on the details of these methods and instruments in Biopolitics. Instead, he traces liberal and neoliberal governmentality as a “number of economic problems” that are “given a theoretical form;” for instance, he delineates how the council brought together by Erhard in 1947 successively paved the way for the abolition of price-controls in Germany, or how the analysis of “human capital” by Schultz and Becker produces the notion of the “entrepreneur of himself” (33, 80ff, 226ff). Ultimately, Foucault’s analysis develops a link between economic activity and political sovereignty that joins exchange and utility. This joint, we argue, is developed concretely in the instruments of veridiction. Understood as metrologies, such instruments constitute a critical but under-examined development of neoliberal governmentality. Our case will be the metrologies of art and culture in the European Welfare State.

In a Welfare State context, the governance of art and culture has been comparatively exempt from sustained references to the market, and thus from the processes of veridiction. However, recent decades have seen this situation change. In the 1960s and 1970s most European states formed Ministries of Culture and they quickly developed concrete forms of governmental intervention in the arts. At first the focus was on policy goals such as democratization and increased access to excellent art together with allocations of funds for these purposes. More recently, however, the focus has been on developing cultural policy into industrial policy, and into policies of sustainability and social cohesion. In this respect, the market is now undeniably an important site of veridiction for the governance of art and culture.

And here, precisely, we find the most heated contemporary debates about the arts and culture: what should act as the “nature” against which the right level and type of intervention is measured? Should the arts and culture be managed in the name of merit goods, such as shaping “reflective individuals,” producing “engaged citizens,” helping “peace building and healing after armed conflict,” creating “vibrant urban life” and improving “health and well-being”? And if so, how is this calculated? Or should the arts belong more strictly to an economic calculus and be a feature of city development and the creative economy with trackable knowledge, industry and network spillovers such as “facilitating knowledge exchange and culture-led innovation,” “boosting innovation and digital technology,” and “creating an attractive ecosystem and creative milieu for city branding and place making”?

Welcome to our next K3 seminar. It will be held by Erin Cory, who is a post-doctoral researcher in Media and Communication Studies and Refugee Studies at Malmö University. She will talk about her previously conducted PhD and the work she will do as post-doc. It will be held on Wednesday, February 15, 10.15-12.00 in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is Putting Down Roots in Precarity:  Some Thoughts on Memory, Media, and Urban Space

Here is an abstract:

My work is generally concerned with how people use media, broadly conceived, to tell their stories and to connect these stories with others across time and space.  In this seminar, I will both discuss previous research and present preliminary thoughts on the work I hope to do at Malmö. 

My doctoral thesis, based on fieldwork in Beirut, builds on the theoretical insights of memory studies, cultural geography, and performance studies to introduce the idea of “re- membering.” I use this term to describe how artists and activists engage memories of civil war-era Beirut (1975-1991) in their expressive practices and humanitarian initiatives, in order to publicly communicate the common experiences of otherwise divided (spatially, culturally, and politically) groups.

My proposed project at K3 examines the media praxis of refugee youth as they negotiate bifurcated identities between their homelands and their adopted countries.  Employing media and grounded ethnography, the project aims to offer an intimate look at communities and identities that are in the process of unfolding.

Welcome to our next K3 seminar. It will be held by Tina Askanius, who has just assumed the position of Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at K3. At the seminar, she will present herself by talking about previous research she has conducted, and about her future plans. It will be held on Wednesday, February 8 at 10.15-12.00 in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is Media and Political Engagement: Addressing Three Thematic Strands of Research

Here is an abstract for the talk:

My research interests fall in the area of media and political engagement. In this talk, I address the three lines of thought that I have engaged with so far within this broad research area.

First, the bulk of my published work deals with questions related to the social movement/social media nexus. In November 2012, I defended the thesis Radical Online Video (Media and Communication Studies, Lund University) dealing specifically with the implications of, at the time, new forms of digital video and online video sharing platforms to the practices of political activism in social justice and climate change movements across Europe. On the basis of this project, I have engaged more broadly in questions around social movement media practices in the context of both radical left and far-right activism.

A second line of inquiry thus includes digital media practices in extreme-right activism. A smaller project funded by the Wahlgren Foundation in 2013 led me into questions of how the rise of extreme right discourse and movements in Sweden and Denmark is related in complex ways to the twin crises of economic recession and upsurge in far-right populism across Europe.

In January 2018, I start working on a related research project, Digital radicalization, analogue extremism? (MAW, 2018-2022), with colleagues in sociology of crime from Stockholm and Lund University. The project seeks to understand the relationship between online discourses of violent extremism, extremists’ autobiographies, and records of criminal offending. With this comparative and interdisciplinary study, we hope to make a critical contribution to research on the interplay between online propaganda and mobilizations of violent extremism in the takfiri and extreme-right movements.

Finally, a third strand of research on media and political engagement involves audience studies on the interplay between popular entertainment formats and cultural citizenship conducted as part of a post-doc in the international research project Media Experiences (MMW 2013-2016). The project concerns production and audience research of drama, documentary and reality formats in Denmark, Sweden and Great Britain. Within this project, I’ve delved into issues of fan engagement, political documentary audiences and the role of popular culture in shaping civic identity, community and political engagement.

With this talk, my ambition is to give new colleagues a sense of who I am as a researcher and what I’ve done so far but also to discuss upcoming projects and open up a dialogue on potential collaborations, co-publishing etc. in the new and exciting time to come as part of K3 at Malmö University. 

Welcome to the spring’s first seminar. It will be held by Nikita Mazurov, Post-Doc within the Living Archives project, on Wednesday, February 1 at 10.15-12.00 in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is Against the Stream: Countering the Netflix Attack on the Archive

Here is an abstract for the talk:

This workshop will seek to interrogate the practice of streaming as a figuration of nonspatial destinerrance, wherein the cyber-utopian promise of unbridled data dissemination is defracted, via a culturalized repressive desublimation, into a boundless buffer state, ultimately never being allowed to reach its destination by virtue of never leaving its origin in the first place. In other words, the great triumph of streaming providers, the great lie of so-called Video on Demand services, is their ability to successfully market the myth that they provide content, whilst in actuality what they supply is precisely the lack thereof.

The resultant stream slurry, an endless erring of destinerrant media, intermittently reveals itself in the brutal congealment of cracked and bloodied bones, ripping through the otherwise seamless facade of the new flesh of on-demand video via its technophilic death throes in the forms of geo-IP based content restrictions and DRM playback injunctions, compatibility errors and buffer loops, and through the legal restraints of licensing restrictions and DMCA takedown notices.

These streaming practices or disservices, such as they are, constitute what may be collectively dubbed as the ‘Netflix Attack’ on data archival: a weaponized assault on guerrilla archivists who are viewed as a threat to the state-backed forces of centralized, monopolized control over cultural output.

Following said analysis of the problematics of streaming media, the workshop will then present an ethnographic explication of a myriad strategies guerrilla data archivists have deployed in the service of actualized data dissemination achieved via the contestation of streaming mythology, by going against the stream.

In collaboration with the Swedish Organization for Media and Communication Researchers (FSMK), on Wednesday, January 25, K3 organizes a seminar on Media and Migration.

Participants:

Pieter Bevelander, professor in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Malmö University

Erin Cory, postdoctoral researcher in Media and Communication Studies, K3, Malmö University

Emma Leijnse, journalist, Sydsvenskan

Federico Rodriguez Moreno, journalist, KVP/Expressen

Jesper Strömbäck, professor in Journalism and Political Communication, University of Gothenburg

Room: Hörsal C, Niagara

Time: 25 January 2017, 13.00-15.00 (coffee/tea with cake 15.00-16.00)

Please mail Ulrika Sjöberg (ulrika.sjoberg@mah.se) in order to register. 

The spring 2017 K3 seminar series program is now ready. You can find it under its own heading. There you can also find some other K3 related events. 

The program will start Wednesday, January 25, 13.00-15.00, with a panel debate on Media and Migration. The panel members are:

Pieter Bevelander, professor in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Malmö University

Erin Cory, postdoctoral researcher in Media and Communication Studies/Refugee Studies, K3

Emma Leijnse, journalist, Sydsvenskan

Federico Rodriguez Moreno, journalist, KVP/Expressen

Jesper Strömbäck, professor in Journalism and Political Communication, University of Gothenburg.

The debate will take place in Hörsal C, Niagara. Please mail Ulrika Sjöberg at Ulrika.Sjoberg@mah.se if you want to attend.

Welcome to our next K3 seminar. It will be held by Lotta Sörensen on Wednesday, November 30 at 10.15-12.00 in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541)

The title of the talk is Material and Materiality.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

Material and Materiality carry ambivalent meanings in the English language. On one hand material is defined as the physical aspect of things on the other hand something of which anything is composed. In relation to material, materiality signifies the notion of conveying the quality of being material despite its being non-material in actuality. K3’s researchers approach material and materiality in many different ways. I will present my approach and afterwards open up for a discussion between the disciplines. Where are the touchpoints and can we cross pollinate each other’s work?

Wednesday, November 16 at 10.15-12.00

On Wednesday, November 16 at 10.15-12.00 Susan Archives and the Living Archives research group will hold the seminar Living Archives: anatomy of a large research project.

It will be held in room: NIC 0541 (the Open Studio) at Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the seminar:

Beginning in 2013, the Living Archives project had an ambitious goal enhancing the role of the public archives, at the same time as emphasising the importance of private archiving practices, or counter-archiving. The project has been extremely critical of discourses around access, inclusion and openness, at the same time as it has been generative of practices, in the forms of writing, performances, design prototypes and workshops. This seminar will open out some of the multiple research strands initiated by various members of our group, but it will also be a chance to discuss the mechanics of being in such a large project: what works, what doesn’t work, how to present and account for multiple practices, methodologies, thought processes, collaborating institutions and research outputs.

On Wednesday, November 9 at 13.15-16.00, Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, PhD student in Interaction Design, will hold her 60 percent PhD seminar. Title: Crisis Computing.

It will be held in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (NIC 0541).

Our next seminar will be held on Wednesday, October 19, at 10.15-12.00 in the Glocal Classroom (room NIC 0502) in the Niagara building, fifth floor. It will be held by Simon Niedenthal, docent and senior lecturer in Interaction Design at K3. Below you can find an abstract for the seminar.

This seminar will be an introduction to olfactory interaction and smell-enabled game design research at K3. Our Unique Sense of Smell (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and Nosewise (M. & M. Wallenberg Foundation) are two recently-funded Swedish olfactory research initiatives, and both include a game design component. We propose to explore whether regular training through smell-enabled games can improve memory and expand sensory capacity. This research could prove useful in interventions related to dementia in the elderly, a looming public health challenge. Besides introducing the topic of olfactory interaction design, and showing our developing game concepts, we will also reflect upon the opportunities and challenges that emerge when game designers and social scientists collaborate. We are part of a long and vital tradition of interdisciplinary research, one which harkens back to K3’s founding vision as being a place where different research cultures can meet, We hope our seminar will include give and take that can contribute to the current discussion about K3’s (research) profile.