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.
Welcome to a K3 seminar with Magnus Nilsson, K3.
The title of the talk is:
Poetry, Publics and Politics
It will take place on Wednesday, December 18 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.
Below you will find an abstract for the talk.
The Swedish poet Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) is generally recognized as an important figure in both Swedish literary history and the history of Swedish working-class literature. This status rests almost exclusively on poetry collections published in the 1940s, 1950s and 1970s. In addition to this, however, Sjödin was also active as a poet within the labour movement. By including these activities, and discussing their relationship to his poetry collections, this seminar presentation aims at broadening the understanding of Sjödin’s oeuvre. It also argues that research on modern Swedish working-class literature must transcend the traditional realm of literature.
The K3 seminar with Maliheh Ghajargar that was scheduled for December 11 is postponed until the spring.
The K3 seminar with visiting PhD student Luka Zhang Lei, scheduled for November 27, will be held at 13.15-15.00 instead of 10.15-12.00. Same location: K3 Studio. Same title: “The specter of workers”: The (im)possibilities of working-class literature from Asia.
Due to the Collaborative Future-Making symposium on Tuesday and Wednesday, there is no K3 seminar this week. But we will return with two seminars next week, both taking place in the K3 Studio, fifth floor of Niagara:
On Monday, November 18 at 15.15-17.00
Sarah Fox, Postdoctoral Fellow, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University: Looking Out from the Stall: Hygiene Resources, Maintenance, and the Internet of Things
On Wednesday, November 20 at 10.15-12.00
Robert Appelbaum, Senior Professor of English Literature, K3: The Renaissance Discovery of Violence
Below you will find abstracts and short bios.
Sarah Fox: Hygiene Resources, Maintenance, and the Internet of Things
Abstract:
Restrooms may appear far from contemporary sites of innovation. But over the past decade, corporations and public institutions have begun developing internet of things (IoT) technologies for these spaces in ways that increasingly define people’s experiences of hygiene resources. Drawing on a 3-year multi-sited ethnographic study, Sarah Fox will discuss how digital technologies entwine with existing forms of collaborative labor to sharpen managerial control of public restroom access and maintenance. Informed by this work, she will describe her collaboration with local activists and custodial staff to reimagine these technologies. Across 18 months throughout the city of Seattle, she developed and deployed a networked sensor designed to support the needs of people without regular access to everyday hygiene resources. This work highlights and contends with a tendency for IoT devices to prioritize concerns for cost-reducing efficiencies and regulatory techniques, rather than support collective responsibility—a concern of increasing importance as design and human-computer scholarship attends to data ethics in public life.
Bio:
Sarah Fox is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Her research focuses on how technological artifacts challenge or propagate social exclusions, by examining existing systems and building alternatives. Her work has earned awards in leading computing venues including ACM CSCW, CHI, and DIS, and has been featured in the Journal of Peer Production and New Media and Society. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington and has worked in design research at Microsoft Research, Google, and Intel Labs.
Robert Appelbaum, Senior Professor of English Literature, K3: The Renaissance Discovery of Violence
Abstract:
Violence has a history, affected by factors ranging from technological developments to the structure of the household. The representation of violence in art and literature has a history too. In the first place, it documents changes in the history of violence. In the second place, it plays a role in moulding sensibilities, of calling attention to the uses and abuses of violence, of examining heroism, perfidy and victimhood, of bringing spectators and readers not only to see but also to feel what violence is, and of exploring what we can or ought to feel about it.
In this introductory presentation of my VR-funded project on the Renaissance Discovery of Violence, I call attention to writers like William Shakespeare and Matteo Bandello, an Italian novelist, as well as to painters like Michelangelo Caravaggio. I argue that beginning in the fifteenth century, if not sooner, violence was de-normalized in Europe – writers and painters began addressing violence as an exception in human affairs. In addition, representations of violence were subjected to aesthetic reflexivity. In other words, violence increasingly came to be seen as an expression of a grievous will to power which needed to be tempered with self-restraint and observed, at least sometimes, with horror.
Bio:
Born in New York City and educated at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Appelbaum is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Uppsala University and Senior Professor in Arts and Communication at Malmö University. Currently the Erik Allardt Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, he is the author of numerous essays on literature, culture and history, and six books, most recently Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland and France 1559-1642 (Oxford, 2015) and The Aesthetics of Violence: Art, Fiction, Drama and Film (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). In addition to completing his project on Renaissance violence, he is editing a volume for Bloomsbury, A Cultural History of Myth in the Renaissance and a special issue for Studia Neophilologica, “Is economic inequality also a literary problem?”
Welcome to a K3 seminar with Sara Gottschalk and Juliana Restrepo, PhD students in Interaction Design. At the talk they will present their ongoing PhD projects.
The title of Sara Gottschalk’s talk is:
Sustainability for rent? Designerly approaches for forms of sustainable living.
The title of Juliana Restrepo’s talk is:
Relational Home-making – An everyday practice focused on existing and potential relations between home, nature and systems.
They will take place on Wednesday, November 6 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.
Below you will find abstracts for the talks.
Abstract Juliana Restrepo:
My research positions itself in relation to metadesign, home geographies, feminist theories and sustainability research. The overall focus is on (future) homes and sustainability. I will use the term ‘Relational home-making’ as a concept that focuses on situated care and ethics, and that nurture people’s curiosity to acknowledging the constitutive relations between what is visible/invisible, included/excluded, wanted/unwanted; in practices that create, maintain and develop home(s) and feeling of home(s).
I am interested in exploring how different meanings, narratives, habits create different everyday understandings of home. This exploration will consider a broader perspective about the meaning of ‘home’ while reflecting on the interdependence between a home with its location and the interactions within.
The project aims at building a collection of everyday stories and to co-design ‘new tales’ (stories of practical knowledge) that can create transdisciplinary understandings about how to care and nurture for our homes through sensitization, preparation and collaboration.
Keywords and concepts: Home-making, wisdom, resilient, re-orientation, preparation, know-how, survival, everyday doing, well-being
Abstract Sara Gottschalk:
My research starts in an interest in the relationship between design, societal transformations for sustainability and adaptation to climate- and environmental changes. In this transformation, home and housing has a strong connection both to the individual and society at large, and plays a central role to enable various forms of sustainable living. Though many sustainable concepts are being proposed for new buildings, my interest lies in the transformation of the existing housing stock and the possibilities of doing this process in a democratic and collaborative manner, with a special focus on tenants´ position and participation in this transformation.
At this seminar I wish to discuss:
The Swedish average environmental impact, can be expressed as about 10TCO2e* per capita (2016) (1) or as consumption equivalent to about 4 planets/year (2018) (2), a clearly – environmentally and socially – unsustainable standard of living. In Sweden, as well as globally, this impact is unequal distributed, but as a quantitative measurement it gives a hint of what is considered as “a normal way of living”. The first Swedish environmental goal (3) stipulates a society without net greenhouse gas emissions after 2045, and a truly sustainable consumption level means consumption within “one planet”. It is hard not to interpret these numbers as a call for major changes of “the normal way of living”, both as individuals and the Swedish society as a whole. Solutions for changes, technologically, economically, politically, culturally and behaviorally are being proposed, but efforts made so far, are not enough.
In the richer parts of the world, lifestyle changes are at the very heart of sustainable change, connecting the everyday life of individuals to infrastructural organizations of the society. One aspect of this infrastructure is housing, where and how we live. In Sweden, a deep split in the housing market has become evident, where sustainability/unsustainability is used in two completely different ways. One the one hand environmental sustainability being branded in new built “flag-ship” areas such as Västra Hamnen in Malmö (4), Kvillebäcken in Gothenburg (5) and Hammarby sjöstad in Stockholm (6); all areas criticized for being targeted towards middle-class/upper-middle-class, and through “tech-fixes” and relative sustainability, green-washing life-styles with rather large environmental impact. On the other hand, the social dimension being discussed in terms of the unsustainable segregation, “renoviction” (“renovräkning”) and a dysfunctional building market targeting another group of people. The current debate about the Swedish housing situation is dominated by the shortage of affordable housing, especially tenure apartments, mainly in the three major cities. The urgent need to build affordable housing has sparked a discussion of building with lower standards of quality. The §marketisation of the housing sector has contributing to the consumerist view of home as an object of investment, and interior design as something to wear and tear, contributing to increased pressure on natural resources. From this perspective, environmental and social sustainability does not meet in the Swedish housing discussion.
With this background I see a great importance for alternative ways to address, interpret, develop and give form to various ways of sustainable living, and how to make them robust enough to meet future challenges of climate- and environmental changes. In Sweden, 51% of the housing stock consists of apartments, of which just over 59% are tenure apartments (11). I have a special interest in the tenant’s position and opportunities to participate in the design process of various sustainable living formats. In accordance with Allbolagen from 2011 (12) all tenants are to be offered co-influence in the housing and in the housing company (13). Today, there is no praxis in how this is to be done.
This also requires a better understanding of forms for sustainable living. One approach to sustainability is to focus on environmental and social goals of the sustainable development concept, giving the economic dimension a subordinated role, either embedded as a mean in social sustainability or simply as an outcome of environmental and social goals instead of a goal in itself. This can be exemplified in models such as the Global Sustainable Development Quadrant (8), the critical and heterodox doughnut economy model (9) and recently in the Swedish research project Beyond BNP (10). This approach on sustainability is something I am interesting to elaborate with in a housing context.
* Emissions embedded in production from abroad included.
Welcome to a K3 seminar with Florencia Enghel, Senior Lecturer in Communication for Development and Docent in Media and Communication Studies
The title of the talk is:
Prime-time protest? Screening the news coverage of transnational women’s protests in global TV networks (2017-2019).
It will take place on Wednesday, October 30 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.
Below you will find an abstract for the talk.
On 8 March 2017, 2018 and 2019, women’s protests were held in various parts of the world to coincide with International Women’s Day. These actions were spurred to a significant extent by Latin American feminist collectives that have mobilized regularly since late 2015, seeking to coordinate efforts regionally and internationally within a framework of transnational solidarity (Campillo, 2018; Król & Pustułka, 2018). Emerging studies suggest that protests have been profusely documented by activists themselves via social media and covered in varying ways by national news outlets (Matos, 2019). But have they been televised globally? Based on footage from the flagship news programs of eight global newsrooms (BBC, CNN, Deutsche Welle, Euronews, France24, Al Jazeera, Russia Today and China Central Television), I analyse how the protests, which have grown in extent and in digital/local visibility, were covered by international TV networks news year-on-year.
Although the prime-time news broadcasts of global television networks are arguably one among other sites where meaning regarding protest movements is produced and circulated in digital times, understanding how these outlets have recorded and represented the international women’s strike in the past 3 years is nonetheless important given their sustained symbolic power. Moreover, unpacking their politics of representation regarding ongoing women’s struggles can serve to inform the strategic design of counter-strategies for the feminist movement to strengthen its appeal for international solidarity (Sarikakis & Shaed, 2007; Gallagher, 2014).
To this effect, this study takes a qualitative descriptive-interpretative approach. Building on the analytical framework developed by the Robertson (2018), I screen the 2017-2019 data in three senses: 1) by focusing on representations of women’s protest on television screens; 2) by comparing coverage across global broadcasters, identifying which (and how) made the protest visible and which screened it out, as well as similarities and differences in their journalistic narratives; and 3) by providing insights into how global TV networks are meeting (or failing to meet) the challenge of representing the increasing number of women who find that political representation has failed them, and are taking to the streets of the world to seek justice (Fraser, 2008).
Developed with data provided by the Screening Protest Project (funded by the Swedish Research Council and based at Stockholm University’s Dept. of Media in Sweden; see http://screeningprotest.com/), the study contributes to updating existing indicators for the analysis of gender portrayals in the news (in particular by problematizing earlier propositions according to which misrepresentation could be addressed by incorporating female journalists into newsrooms) and examines how the prime-time coverage of global TV news networks between 2017 and 2019 may have promoted or hindered greater understanding of, and solidarity with, the claims of women’s movements.
References
Campillo, Inés (2019) ‘If we stop, the world stops’: the 2018 feminist strike in Spain. Social Movement Studies, 18:2, 252-258, DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2018.1556092
Fraser, Nancy (2008) Scales of Justice / Reimagining Political Space in a Globalized World Polity Press, Cambridge
Gallagher, Margaret (2014) “Reframing Communication Rights: Why Gender Matters” in Padovani, Claudia and Calabrese, Andrew (2014) Communication Rights and Social Justice. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Król, Agnieszka & Pustułka, Paula (2018) Women on strike: mobilizing against reproductive injustice in Poland. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20:3, 366-384, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2018.1460214
Matos, Carolina (2019) Feminist Media Studies Across Borders: Re-visiting Studies within the Brazilian National Context. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 20(2), 11-25.
Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol20/iss2/2
Robertson, Alexa (ed.) (2018) Screening protest. London: Routledge.
Sarikakis, Katharine and Shade, Leslie (2007) Feminist Interventions in International Communication: Minding the Gap. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Welcome to a K3 seminar with Therese Hellberg, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies.
The title of the talk is:
Den villkorade gemenskapen: folkhem, kön och nationell identitet i svensk litteratur 1940-1955.
It will take place on Wednesday, October 23 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.
This will be Therese’s 50 percent PhD seminar. Tina Askanius, Senior Lecturer and Docent in Media and Communication Studies, will function as discussant.
Below you will find an abstract for the talk. The seminar will be held in Swedish.
Abstract:
På seminariet kommer främst (utkast till) kapitel som presenterar mitt ramverk att diskuteras. Det finns också artiklar att ta del av för den som önskar en vidare inblick i hur analyser av mitt primärmaterial kan se ut.
Skicka ett mejl till Therese – therese.hellberg@mau.se – om du vill läsa text inför seminariet.
Under seminariet vill jag fokusera på möjligheter, svårigheter och begräsningar i mitt nuvarande upplägg. Det innebär bland annat diskussioner om avgränsningar, interdisciplinära dialoger, positionering(ar) och mitt perspektiv på media, kön och nationsforskning.
Sammanfattning av mitt doktorandprojekt:
Syftet med min forskning är att bidra med nya kunskaper om svenskt mediesamhälle och folkhem under 1940- och 50-talen genom studier av underutforskade eller rent av outforskade romaner och sakprosatexter skrivna av kvinnliga arbetar- och medelklassförfattare.
Forskningen bedrivs utifrån ett kritiskt feministiskt perspektiv med föresatsen att synliggöra mekanismer som villkorade dels författarskapen i det samtida medielandskapet och dels värdering och urval av betydande texter i (allmänna) litteraturhistorieskrivningar. Min studie av exkluderade kvinnliga författares texter sätts i dialog med dessa för att bredda historieskrivningen.
Min forskning bidrar med tolkningar av romaner och sakprosatexter utifrån frågeställningar som: Vad kan exkluderade texter ur den svenska litteraturen som var vällästa under sin samtid medföra för vår förståelse av folkhemstiden liksom till förståelsen av makten bakom kunskapsproduktioner och historieskrivningar? Vilka kunskaper kan min studie tillföra till periodens medie-, litteratur- och feministiska historia?
Det innebär att jag sätter texterna i relation till det samtida medielandskapet, föreställningar om höglitterär estetik och litteraturens kopplingar till samhälle och politik samt den feministiska kritiken av könade och rasifierade samhällen. Texterna analyseras utifrån hur de diskuterar tillhörighet och utanförskap i den nationella gemenskapen – folkhemmet – liksom producerar och förhandlar föreställningar om kön, klass och svenskhet. Det görs med utgångspunkt i förståelsen att texter är medproducenter av (föreställningar i) samhället och att typen av nationellt projekt påverkar synen på vem som inkluderas och exkluderas i den nationella gemenskapen. Svenska mediers nations- och könsskapande funktioner har studerats vad gäller 40- och 50-talens radio och filmproduktioner vilka min studie går i dialog med. Den går också i dialog med forskning som finns om periodens politiska och historiska skeenden som berör välfärdsbygge och befolkningsdebatt med tillhörande diskussioner av svenskhet och kvinnor och mäns roller i samhället. Studier av kvinnorepresentationer i svensk 40- och 50-talsprosa är dock knapp. Däremot historiseras mina analyser med hjälp av tidigare undersökningar som behandlar föreställningar om kvinnors roller i samhället från 1890 fram till och med andra världskrigets utbrott.
Welcome to a K3 seminar with Maria Hellström Reimer, Professor in Design, Erin Cory, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, and Per Möller, Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, all K3.
The title of the talk is:
Translocality and translocal subjectivities. A research overview across the fields of migration-, culture- and urban studies
It will take place on Wednesday, October 16 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.
Below you will find an abstract for the talk. The report, which the talk is based on, will be made available at the latest on Monday October 14. To obtain it, send a mail to maria.hellstrom.reimer@mau.se.
The seminar takes as its point of departure the ongoing work with a Mistra Urban Futures Research Report concerning the role and understanding of urban culture, cultural practices and cultural movement in the midst of ongoing migration. While the notion of culture is again central to political debates, it is often confined within a territorial, ethnic or identitarian framework. The aim of the report is to trouble this tendency by drawing attention to relevant interdisciplinary studies of culture and cultural practice, with special consideration given to issues of mobility and migration.
Increasing spatio-temporal ambiguity has not only prompted a wide array of emergent cultural practices, but has also given rise to new challenges in the study of cultures and cultural movement(s). Following Williams’ (1981) critique of strictly observational and classificatory cultural research, the report acknowledges the political, historical, and disciplinary complications associated with the study of evolving, cross-boundary cultural formations ‘in-the-making.’ Thus, the question becomes not only how new conceptual frameworks may contribute to intensified critical reflection and deepened understanding, but also if and how cultural research may affect cultural policy and everyday urban social sustainability efforts.
Welcome to a K3 seminar with Anne-Marie Hansen, senior lecturer in Interaction Design.
The title of the talk is:
Designing for relations between people beyond technology supported interaction
It will take place on Wednesday, October 2 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.
Below you will find an abstract for the talk.
Anne-Marie S. Hansen presents a critical perspective on the technology fascination that lead to the production of different kinds of connectivity through social media, welfare technologies, sharing economies and internet of things. She introduces an exploratory approach to the field of interaction design where design for relations beyond technology-supported interactions is in focus. By drawing upon experiences from Hilary Cottam’s studies of the British welfare system, as well as a selection of studies in spirituality, we will look into potential aesthetics (and ethics) of interaction that can serve as inspiration for designing connections between people, building community infrastructures and resilience in situations of climate emergency and scarcity of resources.