Hugo Boothby’s PhD seminar scheduled for March 14 has been postponed. A new date will be announced.

The seminar on artistic research, scheduled for March 9, has been cancelled.

Welcome to a K3 PhD seminar on Dealing with Ethics in Design and Action Research.

The seminar focuses on formal aspects of approaching ethics in action research and design research. Together with invited speakers and the audience the seminar aims to develop a more practical and situated understanding of the following questions:

What counts sensitive data?

What counts as a vulnerable group?

What does it mean to affect someone?.

Program:

10.15 Welcome

10.20-10.40 Annika Rosén presents Etikrådet

10.40-11.10 Panel discussion with Annika Rosén, Josepha Wessels (docent K3) and Kristoffer Holm (postdoc at Dept. of Urban Studies) about the following questions:

• what counts as sensitive data?
• what counts as a vulnerable group?
• what does it mean to affect someone?

11.10-11.30 Josepha Wessels presents a case where she applied for ethics approval 

11.30-12.00 questions and discussion 

The seminar is organized by Anna Seravalli and Kristina Lindström, Senior Lecturers in Product Design, K3

It will take place on Wednesday, March 2 at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online seminar. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

Welcome to a K3 PhD seminar with Kristoffer Gansing, Professor of Artistic Research, International Center for Knowledge in the Arts/The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

The title of the seminar is Navigating the Pre-, -Mid and Post- of Artistic Research

It will take place on Wednesday, February 23 at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online seminar. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

This is the third K3 seminar in a series dealing with artistic research. Here is a short abstract for the talk:

Abstract:

Recent years have seen the rise of critiques of artistic research, formulated from within the field itself, and which often express a desire to move beyond the epistemological limits of “research” into a state of an “after” or post-research. In this presentation, I will argue for a less linear approach than what the post-research perspectives usually suggest, while still in keeping with its openness to new avenues of knowledge production. Instead of post-research then, I propose a more transversal perspective where the many possible pre’s- , mid’s- and post’s- of artistic research have been, and very much are, co-existing as well as up for re-negotiation and rediscovery. This also calls for a humble epistemology, of onto-epistemic openings that arise out of specific spatio-temporal conditions for artistic research. The presentation comes out of an experience of engaging with artistic research in Denmark, which in terms of institutionalization has arguably not even left the “pre-” stage of Artistic Research, but which in other respects has developed its own unique traditions.

Welcome to a K3 PhD seminar with Alison Gerber, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Lund University

The title of the seminar is Drawing the Line: Comparison and Evaluation in New Disciplines

It will take place on Wednesday, February 16 at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online seminar. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

This is the second K3 seminar in a series dealing with artistic research. Here is a short abstract for the talk:

Abstract:

Artistic research – research carried out by artists, through artistic practice – has all the markers of a burgeoning academic discipline. In keeping with dominant perspectives on such developments, we may expect practitioners’ boundary work to play a decisive role in the development of the field. But when binary understandings come up against multiplex meanings, when and how do binaries matter? With a focus on the Swedish artistic research field, I consider the ways that evaluations and boundaries interact in an emerging research discipline, showing how an analytical perspective focused on the relationship between commitments to boundary work and orientations to boundary objects can offer specific insights on the ways that new artistic and academic fields are defined and how research in such fields is evaluated.

Welcome to a K3 PhD seminar with Alicia Smedberg, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3

The title of the seminar is The Issue of Agency in Public Sector Infrastructuring Processes.

It will take place on Monday, February 14 at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online seminar. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

This will function as Alicia’s 75 percent PhD seminar. Discussant: Maria Hellström Reimer, Professor of Design in Theory and Practice, K3

The seminar is collaboration between the K3 seminar series and the Collaborative Future-Making Platform

Abstract:

One of Participatory Design’s (PD) quintessential concerns is the issue of agency. The discipline holds a commitment towards democratic engagements, and within the theoretical framework of infrastructuring (Ehn, 2008; Karasti, 2014) resides both affordances and hindrances towards relational agency. Understanding the push-pull of agency becomes imperative when disparate groups meet, and when actors with established, decision-making power seek to work with those who lack it. This is particularly true in civil settings, and within the public sector – where there is an added dimension of care and responsibility within the assignments of public sector workers. It follows that the question of how we do/activate/perform infrastructures is of relevance to PD: these are political interventions often hold a dual nature of empowering and depowering. Understanding infrastructuring as a political action requires that we understand both its constraints and its possibilities, its constructive as well as its destructive power.

While design has often been seen as an artisan practice, infrastructuring uses much of design’s tools, repertoire and affordances in an ongoing care- and maintenance labour. In particular when tied to public sector work, where the common or collective “good” is and should be a factor, the practice of infrastructuring demands negotiations and compromises on behalf of the many. The artisan designer may produce the most beautiful, most prestigious or the most ingenious solution to a problem, but the collective designer’s priorities must always be to develop situated designs. To make a distinction between artisan design work and collective care work through design this thesis has borrowed the concepts of work and labour from Hannah Arendt’s (1958) writings in political philosophy.

The research has been conducted through programmatic design research where the program acts as a “frame and foundation for carrying out a series of design experiments and interventions” (Brandt, Redström, Eriksen and Binder, 2011., p. 19). A bricolage of methods has been used, reflexively, to drive the program forward, and these have always been informed by an ethics of care. There are three projects that form the basis of this design program: Amiralsstaden (2017-2019); Livskonceptet (2017-2018); The Democracy Ambassadors (2019). These three primary case studies were all situated within public sector work, and conducted alongside Malmö Stad. The design programme has generated two programmatic answers. The first programmatic answer, Affective Infrastructuring, highlights the importance of heeding affect when mobilizing social infrastructures, and represents a gap in previous literature around infrastructuring. The second programmatic answer suggests a method of approaching affective structures: Collaborative Anecdotalization. The final programmatic answer – Feral Infrastructures – presents a critical discussion around the role of Participatory Designers within the public sector.

References:

Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]). The Human Condition. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Binder, T.; Brandt, E.; Ehn, P., and Halse, J. (2015) Democratic Design Experiments: between parliament and laboratory. CoDesign. Vol. 11 No 3- 4, pp. 152-165

Brandt, E., Redström, J., Eriksen, M-A., and Binder, T. (2015) The Perform Codesign

Experiment – On what people actually do and the relation between program and experiment in research through design.

Ehn, P. (2008) Participation in Design Things. Proc. PDC 2008, 92-101.

Karasti, H. (2014) Infrastructuring in participatory design. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 141-150).  .

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Ken Friedman, Professor of Design Innovation Studies, Tongji University, China.

The title of the talk is:

The Promise and Peril of Artistic Research

This is the first K3 seminar in a series dealing with artistic research. Here is a short abstract for this first talk in the series:

Most of us agree that the practice of research needs renewal. This is not simply the case for artistic research: this is a common view in many fields. What that renewal requires and how it is to work is the subject of intense debate. Artistic research offers specific challenges and problems that we see in few other fields. This talk will explore some of the relevant issues to open a topical conversation.

The seminar will take place at Wednesday, February 9  at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online seminar. Please join here: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

Welcome to this term’s first K3 seminar. It will be held by Line Henriksen, Post-Doctoral Researcher in Media and Communication Studies, K3.

At the seminar, Line will present the research project she works on while at K3. The title of the talk is: The Digital Gothic. Rethinking Ethics, Media and Monsters in a Digital Age

The seminar will take place at Wednesday, February 2  at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online seminar. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/65682405618.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk and a short biography of Line:

Abstract:

Recent years have seen a proliferation of online stories that combine the Gothic – a literary genre preoccupied with the supernatural and the unknown, usually expressed through the manifestations of monsters and ghosts – and the digital. Such narratives, here referred to as the Digital Gothic, primarily revolve round the supposed risks of copying, sharing and responding to digital files. Considering how monsters traditionally embody a given moment’s cultural anxieties, what anxieties regarding the uses of digital technologies might the monsters that haunt digital media indicate? Further still, considering how the current moment is marked by vast, abstract events such as climate change and pandemics, can the monsters of digital media teach us how to relate to such anxiety-inducing yet ghostly terrains? Through analyses of digital ghost stories and tales of monsters as well as through the framework of hauntology – an ontology of hauntings –  I explore the digital gothic not as a contained phenomenon, but as a product of and response to its contemporary (haunted) moment.

Bio:

Line Henriksen is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, and affiliated with MEDEA Lab. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from Linköping University, and an MA in Modern Culture and Cultural Communication from the University of Copenhagen. She is currently working on the research project ‘The Digital Gothic: Rethinking ethics, media and monsters in a digital age’ funded by The Crafoord Foundation, and she is co-organizer and co-creator of the project ‘Monsters of the Anthropocene’ at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. Her research interests revolve around subjects such as monster theory, hauntology, creative methods and digital storytelling, and she is co-founder of the international research and art network The Monster Network.

The program for the spring K3 seminar series is now available on the top of the webpage. As always, it will be a mixture of seminars with K3 researchers, doctoral students at K3, and invited researchers. We will start on Wednesday, February 2 with a seminar by Line Henriksen, who is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Media and Communication Studies at K3, presenting her project on the digital Gothic. In the early spring there will be a number of seminars dealing with artistic research. Later on, there will be, among other things, a workshop dealing with ethics in research, and one on how to get students and adjuncts more involved in research.

All seminars will be available to attend online. Hopefully later in the term it will be possible to attend also physically

Welcome to the term’s last K3 seminar. It will deal specifically with the writing of applications for the appointment as an associate professor (docent) at Malmö University. But it will also be of relevance for the writing of applications for promotions to senior lecturer or professor. The title of the seminar is:

Becoming a Docent (or Trying to): A Seminar to Unravel the Technicalities and Various Dilemmas of Writing a Docent/Associate Professor Application in Design (or Another K3 Field).

The seminar is organized by Anna Seravalli, senior lecturer in product design, K3. At the seminar, Anders Hög Hansen, K3 member of the Academic Appointments Board (Lärarförslagsnämnden), and Rebecca Nordh, HR specialist and also member of the Academic Appointments Board, will talk about the work carried out by the board. Anna Seravalli, Kristina Lindström, Margareta Melin and Åsa Harvard will talk about their experiences of working on writing applications. There will also be time for questions and discussions.

Before the seminar, please have a look at the MaU webpage “Careers at the University”, which gives information on how to apply for appointment to docent, and how to apply for promotion to senior lecturer or professor (https://staff.mau.se/your-employment/karriar-inom-universitetet/).

The seminar will take place at 10.15-12.00 on December 15. It will be an online seminar. Please join here: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/66973739811