The program for the spring series 2019 is now complete. You can find it on the page “Seminar series spring 2019” as well as below:

Wednesday, January 23 at 10.15-12.00

Elisabet Apelmo, visual artist and Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Work, Malmö University

Non-disabled bodies, stares and emotions. A visual study in ableism

Wednesday, January 30 at 10.15-12.00

Åsa Harvard Maare, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication, K3

Designing for collaborative problem-solving

Wednesday, February 6 at 10.15-12.00

Alicia Smedberg, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3

Modalities of agency within infrastructuring processes (30 percent PhD seminar)

Wednesday, February 13 at 10.15-12.00

Tobias Olsson, Vice Dean and Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University

Warm experts for elderly users: Who are they and what do they do?

Wednesday, February 27 at 10.15-12.00

Temi Odumosu, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, K3

The crying baby: On colonial archives, digitisation, and ethics of care in the cultural commons

Wednesday, March 6 at 10.15-12.00

Li Jönsson, Associate Senior Lecturer in Design, K3

Caring for ghosts, decay and magic in posthuman design

Wednesday, March 20 at 10.15-12.00

Solveig Daugaard, Comparative Literature researcher, K3, spring 2019

Media ecologies of literature in a digital age: affective interfaces and alternative infrastructures

Wednesday, March 27 at 10.15-12.00

Susan Kozel, Professor of New Media, K3

“Affective choreographies” or a Somatic materialism of mobile media

Wednesday, April 3 at 10.15-12.00

Charlotte Sörensen, Lecturer in Product Design

A framework for teaching reflective practices in design education

Wednesday, April 10 at 10.15-12.00

Dario Salvo, Associate Senior Lecturer in Design, K3

Technologies for the good: Mobile health and IoT for the environment

Wednesday, April 17 at 10.15-12.00

Jakob Svensson, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, K3

Behind the algorithm

Wednesday, April 24 at 10.15-12.00

Maliheh Ghajargar, Associate Senior Lecturer in Design, K3

A journey from (Industrial) design to (Interaction) design… and vice versa

Wednesday, May 15 at 10.15-12.00

Jens Pedersen, Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design, K3

Cultivating desire and absence in design ethnography

Wednesday, May 22 at 10.15-12.00

Johan Farkas, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies, K3

Disguised propaganda in the digital era: Race and racism in weaponised media (30 percent PhD seminar)

Wednesday, May 29 at 10.15-12.00

Maja Fagerberg Ranten. Interaction Designer and PhD student in Computer Science, Roskilde University

Designing artistic interactive systems from a phenomenological perspective – Designing for the body with the body

The seminar with Amanda Lagerkvist, due to have taken part on December 19, is postponed until the spring of 2019.

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

The Performative Space of a Smartphone – Interaction design and choreographic composition in mixed reality experiences

This is Marika’s 30 percent PhD seminar, and it will take place on Wednesday, November 28 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara. Per Linde, senior lecturer in Interaction Design, will function as discussant.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk. If you would like to read Marika’s text before the seminar, please mail her: marika.hedemyr@mau.se.

Abstract:

Hedemyr’s PhD in Interaction Design (ID) offers a tight dialogue between ID and choreography, expanding the domain of embodied interaction. The research seeks to unfold the potential of the intimate space of the smartphone with specificity to users in a public space.

 This space is seen as a physical, mental, social and mediated space: a hybrid space. It will be explored how augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and location-aware applications in a smartphone create this hybrid space, and how it can be designed for new forms of critical cultural interaction and aesthetic expressions. With relevance to interaction design, this research will explore how devices shape people, and how people shape devices.

 The method of a site-specific choreographic practice is applied, which offers an interdisciplinary approach and methods for analysis, creation, composition and design, placing the body/user at the centre. Hedemyr’s area of specialism is the convergence between choreography and interaction design, with relevance to embodied interaction, and public spaces.

 At the current date, November 2018 the first three case studies, Mixed Reality Walks, have been realized, premiered and are available to the audience as part of a museum or art exhibition. In the seminar they will be presented as an installation where parts of the walks can be tried out.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Oscar Hemer, Professor of Journalistic and Literary Creation, K3. The title of the talk is:

Excerpts from the World Waltz. Contamination as research method and literary genre.

It will take place on Wednesday, November 21 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara

Below you will find an abstract for the talk. Oscar has also produced two texts that you can receive before the seminar by mailing him: Oscar.Hemer@mau.se.

Abstract:

To what extent do the academic and literary practices truly converge? Is it even desirable that they fuse into new genres? These are questions that I have struggled with the last decade in my double capacity as literary writer and academic researcher.  I am currently exploring a cross-genre that I at first, for lack of a better term, called ethnographic fiction (Hemer 2015; 2017). I have however lately decided to opt for the term contamination, based on the alleged tradition outlined by Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006), going from Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer, whose fusions of comedy and tragedy were called ‘contaminations’, to Salman Rushdie, the supposedly foremost contemporary successor. I take Appiah’s barely elaborated idea as an open and intriguing suggestion for a trans-genre in the borderland of art and academia, in which I am happy to inscribe my own work.

Contamination as a genre would be a congenial form for exploration of contamination as a subject – the purity/impurity discourse (Douglas 1966); creolisation (Glissant 1990; 1997; Hannerz 1986; 1996; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2015; Erasmus 2017) – with South Africa as my principal case at present.

 At the seminar I intend to give a background to the ‘World Waltz’ project and present some of the challenges of my work in progress, the Cape Calypso.

References

Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism : Ethics in a world of strangers. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge & K Paul

Erasmus, Z. (2017). Race Otherwise : Forging a new humanism for South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press

Glissant, É. (1990). Poétique de la Relation. Poétique III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil

Glissant, É. (1997). Traité du Tout-Monde. Poétique IV. Paris: Éditions du Seuil

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. (2015). “Archipelago Europe: On creolizing conviviality”, in

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E., and S. A. Tate (eds.). Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press

Hannerz, U. (2010 [1986]). “The World in Creolization”, in Cohen. R. and P. Toninato (eds.). The Creolization Reader. London: Routledge

Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational connections: culture, people, places. London: Routledge

Hemer, O. (2012). ”Hillbrow Blues”, in Chapman, M. (ed.). Africa Inside Out : Stories, tales and testimonies. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Nartal Press

Hemer, O. (2015). ”Bengaluru Boogie : Outlines for an ethnographic fiction”, in Hansen, A. H., Hemer, O. & T. Tufte (eds.)(2015). Memory on Trial : Media, citizenship and social justice. Zürich: Lit Verlag

Hemer, o. (2017). ”Till kontaminationens lov / Bengaluru Boogie”. Kulturella perspektiv 2/2017

Unfortunately, due to illness, today’s seminar with Temi Odumosu is cancelled. It will be re-scheduled for a later date.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Temi Odumosu, Senior Lecturer in Art History, K3. The title of the talk is:

The Crying Baby: On Colonial Archives, Digitisation, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons

It will take place on Wednesday, November 14 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara

Here is an abstract for the talk:

This seminar sketches key concerns I am engaged with in a new speculative paper I am writing for Current Anthropology on representational ethics and care. In essence I am concerned about attending to the dead in the digital commons. I argue that as museums, archives and other cultural heritage institutions make their colonial collections digitally available online – providing direct public access to troubling and contested materials – unresolved representational issues are magnified and new dangers emerge. If digitised artefacts represent a form of remembrance, ensuring that artefacts are not forgotten in storage (a solution to decay), then what shifts in institutional practices could take place, if we asked questions such as:

• What does it mean for an archive or collection to provide open digital access to materials representing violated subjects who did not necessarily consent to being documented?
• To what extent are institutions taking seriously non-European perspectives on looking at, or engaging with, ancestor remains?
• How can we better understand the effects of unmediated, screen-based engagement with the material outcomes of biased and racist value systems?
• And, how can we extend concepts of caretaking and custodianship beyond the institutionally directed ethical guidelines, currently provided by professional advocacy institutions?

Exploring what an ethics of care and/or custodianship might look like when engaging with such questions, this seminar seeks to provoke critical dialogue about the delicacies of caretaking colonial histories both on and offline – histories rife with carelessness. At the same time, I explore reparatory artistic engagements with such digitised images, and further describe how metadata might be rethought as a cataloguing space with the potential to alter the imbalances of historical power.

The seminar with Åsa Harvard Maare, originally set for October 31, will take place on November 20 at 13.15-15.00 in room NIB 0501 (Niagara, fifth floor). 

Learnable and learnworthy. Math games and motivation in the classroom

Here is an abstract for the talk:

The topic of the seminar will be learning design, and more specifically how to consider social motivation and observational learning in the design of learning activities. The approach can be summarized in the notions of learnability and learnworthiness, and it builds on social and sociocultural learning theories, extending into neuropsychology and the importance of imitation for social bonding and for learning.

Put briefly, the idea is that by offering learners opportunities to observe other learners engaged in a game or a learning activity, this will increase both the learnworthiness of the activity (it can be shared with peers) and its learnability (learning through observation is efficient). I will exemplify the approach using examples of children engaging in mathematical games in the leisure-time center and in the classroom, and discuss how the approach can be applied in concrete design of a math game (see www.symmetry.one for a presentation of the game).

However, classroom experiences indicate that there are variations in the way learners use the social resources of the classroom. Also, how the concept of  “game” is translated into action in different pairs of learners differs vastly. Using examples from my field work in a math classroom of 3rd graders I want to discuss these differences, and how design of learning activites can cater for different types of learners and their motivations to learn.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Soraya Tharani, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, K3. The title of the talk is:

UNHCR, Stories of Refugees and the Public Sphere – UN and Social Media Language

It will take place on Wednesday, November 7 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara

Here is an abstract for the talk:

Social media has changed how the landscape of the public sphere can be formed. The movement from linear to interactive models of communication has led to new spaces in which public opinion can be built. Social media is also becoming increasingly significant as a place for building relationships. The ways in which public debates are carried out in various social media forums today are relevant for understanding how different voices from the civil society engage in debates.

The public sphere as defined by Habermas is my point of departure for researching discussions in UN social media forums. For Habermas, the public sphere is a discursive arena where public opinion can be formed from reasoned debate. The UN is a supranational organisation that produces textual and audio-visual stories for their global social media audiences. The participation of diverse voices in conversations taking place in these forums can give insight into dialogues regarding transnational issues.

In this presentation, I will talk about a part of my research into UN and social media language, namely the way content in UNHCR social media platforms is discussed. I am studying how engagement is expressed in the forums regarding the stories of people escaping war and/or persecution. Social media makes it possible for individuals from conflict areas, regional neighbours and those more geographically distant to enter into dialogue on global issues in these spaces. Some of the guiding questions that I will take up in this presentation are: What stories about refugees containing celebrity endorsements is UNHCR publishing on their social media platforms? What aspects are discussed by the participants in the forums? How do people use language in the forums to talk about the issues? My ongoing research into UN’s social media presence aims to problematise and understand the place of reasoned debate in global social media public spheres.

The October 31 seminar with Åsa Harvard Maare is postponed. We will come back with a new date for the seminar.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Åsa Harvard Maare, Senior Lecturer in Design, K3. The title of the talk is:

Learnable and learnworthy. Math games and motivation in the classroom

It will take place on Wednesday, October 31 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

The topic of the seminar will be learning design, and more specifically how to consider social motivation and observational learning in the design of learning activities. The approach can be summarized in the notions of learnability and learnworthiness, and it builds on social and sociocultural learning theories, extending into neuropsychology and the importance of imitation for social bonding and for learning.

Put briefly, the idea is that by offering learners opportunities to observe other learners engaged in a game or a learning activity, this will increase both the learnworthiness of the activity (it can be shared with peers) and its learnability (learning through observation is efficient). I will exemplify the approach using examples of children engaging in mathematical games in the leisure-time center and in the classroom, and discuss how the approach can be applied in concrete design of a math game (see www.symmetry.one for a presentation of the game).

However, classroom experiences indicate that there are variations in the way learners use the social resources of the classroom. Also, how the concept of  “game” is translated into action in different pairs of learners differs vastly. Using examples from my field work in a math classroom of 3rd graders I want to discuss these differences, and how design of learning activites can cater for different types of learners and their motivations to learn.