Please note that the seminar with Maria Hellström Reimer, scheduled for Wednesday, May 17, has been moved to the fall.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Eric Snodgrass, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies. This will be Eric’s 90 percent PhD seminar, and Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London, will function as respondent. The seminar will take place on Tuesday, May 9, between 13.15 and 15.00 in room NIC 0541 (The Open Studio) at Niagara.

The title of the talk is Ecologies of the Executable

Here is an abstract for the talk:

This research looks to develop methods for describing and engaging with dominant expressions of power as they can be seen to be at work in contemporary networked and computationally-informed situations. In doing so, it adopts a “material discursive” approach that aims to pay particular attention to the mutually constitutive material and discursive forces involved in any particular set of relations, aiming to show how any executing practice in the world involves an ongoing negotiation of these forces. Each of the examples worked through (including early developments in computing, the Facebook Like button, a user video live-stream and the EU’s border surveillance regime) highlights how dominant executing practices and powers of the present can be seen to descend from and emerge within active and intersecting sets of orientations and affordances, with the research aiming to pay particular attention to some of the ways in which these technologically-informed practices achieve their particular forms of dominance. In seeking as it does to address the seemingly basic question of “what is executing here?” the intention is not only to develop concrete methods for describing and understanding these computational and networked practices, but also to show how in doing so one might be able to strategically question the sense of any dominant practice as given, pointing to other possibilities of execution and its material discursive enactment in the world.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Michelle Westerlaken, PhD candidate in Interaction Design. It will be held on Tuesday, May 2, 10.15-12.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: 

Uncivilized Utopias. Imagining Non-Speciesism

Abstract:

We live in a world where (non-human) animals are killed and abused in numbers that are almost beyond comprehension. This killing is ubiquitous and omnipresent, and yet largely invisible to most people. Once we come to the realization that the normalization of animal oppression is something that we should oppose, envisioning futures that abandon ‘speciesism’ requires an almost unimaginable rethinking of our current society. Yet, resistance and alternative practices do exist. These forces consist of alternative opinions, attitudes, feelings, meanings, and values, which are not considered to be the norm, but can somehow still be accommodated and tolerated within dominant culture. 

In this modest approach towards imagining non-speciesist futures – which invites serious ethical consideration of animals – I aim to bring those under-emphasized and hidden alternative perspectives to light in order to make them more valid and more real as practices that counter hegemony. By paying attention to existing philosophies and personal affective accounts, this text highlights alternatives and possibilities for designers/artists, in the broadest sense of the word, to imagine and shape futures that are utopian, not just for humans, but for animals as well. I conclude by arguing and exemplifying how shared encounters with animals that are open to surprises, joy, and playfulness can inspire us to re-negotiate relationships with other beings. In this set-up, we can explore alternative scenarios, practice our sensitivity, develop empathy, and try out different realities together with other animals. 

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Anuradha Reddy, PhD candidate in Interaction Design. It will be held on Wednesday, April 26, 10.15-12.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: 

Engaging Design with the Internet of Things

Abstract:

IoT is currently a major force in the way technologies are entering into our homes and becoming deeply integrated into our lives. Drawing from studies in co-design, HCI and STS, I bring forth a practice-oriented perspective of technology-use by placing my focus on the participation of assemblages of humans, animals, devices, settings and environments through which practices are carried out. HCI in the past has significantly explored the home as a site for computing, where emphasis has been laid on what it means to live in a home that is shared, loaded and contested. As more and more aspects of our mundane lives interact with the outside world, it becomes crucial to explore how we might leverage from IoT’s complex capacities and begin to engage with technologies in a meaningful manner. It demands an understanding that ‘living’ does not simply take place inside the four walls of a home but that it constantly shifts between various sites of socio-material practices. The proposed research is an exploration at the intersection of people and their material practices to develop new forms of engagement through IoT-based interaction design practice. 

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Kareena Coelho. It will be held on Wednesday, April 12, 10.15-12.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: 

Frozen Screens: Exploring Internet in Nunavut, Canada

Abstract:

This presentation provides an introduction to my doctoral research on internet in Nunavut, a territory in the Canadian Arctic that is primarily populated by the Inuit, an indigenous group. Internet in Nunavut is often described as failing, as “slow, unreliable and expensive.” My research explores the role of the Canadian federal government in creating these issues, while also being attentive to the ways that Nunavummiut communities negotiate with and around this internet, making it useful to their lives. This approach is influenced by scholars such as Giddens (1984) and de Certeau (1984), who probe the interactions between power and agency, as well as Brian Larkin (2008), who emphasizes approaching media as culturally situated and specific.

I will focus on three threads from my research: exploring the Canadian government’s problematic approach to internet funding and policy-making;  investigating the ways Nunavummiut communities employ persisting media such as television, the radio and the postal service, to facilitate their usage of internet or to circumvent it; and examining community access sites in Nunavut, which as spaces of both policy and community, exemplify the politics of Nunavummiut internet while also showcasing the inventiveness of Nunavummiut, who use these spaces and their technologies for cultural purposes and projects.

The evidence presented will suggest that internet in Nunavut emerges from, and is implicated within, processes and interactions between power and local communities, between policy and usage; that widely held definitions of internet should be complicated; and that linear, progressive understandings of technological development should be countered with insights provided by a focus on technologies-in-use (Edgerton 2007).

Kareena Coelho is a doctoral student in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She holds a Masters of Arts from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelors degree from the University of Toronto. Her research has been published in the Journal of New Media and Culture, with forthcoming publications in Inuit Studies and the Canadian Journal of Communication.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Maria Engberg, senior lecturer in Media Technology and Per Linde, senior lecturer in Interaction Design. It will be held on Wednesday, April 5, 10.15-12.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: 

City Fables: The Right to History and the Fictionalizing of Data

Here is an abstract for the talk: 

The overarching goal for the City Fables project is to gather, stage, and problematize the stories and storytelling in the contemporary city through an interplay between site-specific media, facts and fiction. Through public participatory event we explore how citizens understand, take their place in and form counter-narratives to the stories of a city.

In the two main projects of City Fables—Follow the Money and Larmgränd—we engage in and respond to the narratives of the future and the past that actors within any city continuously create. The urban trend has since the industrial revolution been constant, and cities and megacities across the globe continue to grow. Although hardly a megacity, the harbor city Malmö has grown more than any other city in Sweden since the end of the 1990s after what is often referred to as a long period of post-industrial depression. Like many harbor cities, the city of Malmö reinvented itself. Although having a local flavor, the metamorphosis was not unique: it followed a typical pattern seen in many post-industrial cities.

 Follow the Money

The entanglement of production of space and the flow of capital led the project to  engage in analyzing and re-articulating the naturalized language of the current economic order, the flow of capital and in particular taxation (as well as the avoidance of taxations). These monetary flows are foundational for deciding what should belong to and be funded by the state and thus belong to the common good, on the one hand and what should be financed and paid for by private means and owned privately on the other. These were the underlying foundations for elaborating the theme of “following the money” in the project.

Follow the Money has been conducted as a speculative art and design-based economic research lab that addresses strategies and experimental materializations dealing with procedural techno-economic analysis, capital flux, transnational flow, multicultural money, tax haven bliss, free/grey zones, invisibility, space-time compression, systemic depersonalization, fractalized precarious work, cellularization of time, fable-capitalism lingo and economic bullshit speak. These materializations were a series of enacted plays on tax evasion, apps for economical personality tests, randomized web encyclopedias on economical rhetoric, graphical designs and other new media expressions.

 Larmgränd

An important strategy in City Fables has been the concept of “fableing” and how the “fable” as organizing metaphor can be used as a speculative research method.  In particular, our approach takes seriously the potential of narrativization and possible worlds explorations through methods of, what we in our work call, “fableing.” In Larmgränd, the “fableing” is performed upon historical material from Malmö 1900-1925 in order to design a historiographic locative media experience, connected to specific sites in Malmö. These smaller histories, in the

Historical moments and people have the potential to serve as counterpoint to the histories and realities of contemporary cities, and we work with fictionalizing characters and events as a way of informing public debate. From a perspective of historiography, official archives are at once authority structures, providing specific facts and viewpoints as well as repositories of fragments of individual people’s lives. Eschewing the particular strategies of history-making in the archives, we use a process of remediation and fictionalizing in public settings to create an experimental zone. This in turn highlights knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and agency in a similar way as design labs. The technologies we explore in Larmgränd, as a means for researching the above-described issues, are place-specific media and Augmented Reality (AR).

An exhibition will be set up at Malmö Museum in May 2017 where we visualize historical material from Malmö 1900-1925 through the creation of a fictive world of characters from the time, exploring how they encounter larger political and cultural events in their everyday life. Materials used for the creation of these characters are movie snippets and photos from Malmö from the time period, as well as statistics and other material from the City archives. As such, the narratives are related to actual historical events.

A fictive Malmö street, Larmgränd, will be represented in the form of wall-sized posters in the exhibition. By using an AR mobile phone app the visitor can “trigger” shorter movies from these characters’ lives by browsing the houses on the posters, i.e. when the phone is directed at a particular, predetermined spot on the poster, the film starts playing in the phone.

The exhibition will be complemented with workshops/seminars, where the role of such fictionalizing in relation to how they can create public debate around contemporary political and cultural issues will be discussed. Further, the exhibition will include some historical artefacts from Malmö that were part of the early “media explosion” that took place in the turn of the century.

This work has been presented at the conference “Creating the city” in Malmö on the 9-10 of February 2017, as well as in Bergen April 2016 at the symposium “Visual technologies, place and space”.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jakob Svensson, new docent and senior lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at K3. It will be held on Wednesday, March 29, 10.15-12.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: Social Media, Logics and Participation in the Global Age

In the talk, Jakob Svensson will discuss previously carried out work as well as discuss ongoing projects. Here is a short description of his background and research interests:

“It is above all within the area of social media & political participation that I have conducted research. This is a continuation of my doctoral thesis that I defended in 2008 at Lund University. The thesis dealt with civic communication in civic committees, a municipal initiative in the city of Helsingborg. These committees were an apparent result of participatory and deliberative democracy trickling down to municipal officials and local politicians. The analytical focus of thesis was how citizenship was negotiated within civic committee initiated deliberations.

After the thesis my interest in political participation has continued. But it has moved from municipal deliberations to the internet and social media platforms. I have delineated the analytical field into three different levels depending on from where political participation is initiated (parliamentary, activist and cultural participation). Consequently I have focused my empirical studies in these three levels. Concerning parliamentary initiated participation I have studied politicians online, especially during election campaigns. Activist initiated participation has been studied within a middle class demand to save a local bathhouse, how they used social media in intersection with more offline methods. Here I have also worked together with European colleagues to generalize social media and activist participation theoretically as well as develop a typology of activist types. And finally, acknowledging that political participation may take place all over the socio-cultural landscape, I have studied and currently publishes on political discussions in the Nordic queer community Qruiser.

A reason for conducting these studies has been curiosity of participants’ motives for participating politically. This is particularly interesting on social media platforms given the democratic potential that is ascribed to the internet, not the least because of an expectation of a lowered threshold for political participation when made possible online. In other words, what role(s), if any, does the internet and social media play for the motives for participating politically? What rationalities, or combination of rationalities, can be discerned when users participate politically in increasingly digital media and communication landscapes?

Motivation and political participation are issues that caught my interest already during the doctoral studies. My point is that we need new tools for analysing political participation besides theories of instrumental and communicative rationality, a dichotomy within which many studies have been set in the field. The conclusion is that rationality and motivation may also be understood as expressive and not only on a scale between egoism and altruism (striving for consensus or a common good). I also argue it is particularly fruitful to approach motivations as expressive in an increasingly digital media and communication landscape. The internet and late modern individualism and reflexivity mutually informs each other, increasingly emphasizing expressions of ourselves and the connection of self-images to political causes and demands. 

Having summarized my findings in a popular scientific book from 2014 I am currently mostly engaged in spin-offs from these studies. In particular I am collaborating with prof. Uta Russmann (Austria) to study Instagram uses by political actors. We have also conducted a comparative study of political parties uses of social media in non-election times (a random week in early 2016) for a special issue of Javnost – the Public (to which we have been invited to submit).  I will also edit a special issue with prof. Russmann on visual communication in political marketing for the Journal of Media and Communication Studies. Dr. Anders Larsson and I are also currently developing a research proposal together with Dr. Nils Gustavsson in Lund, in collaboration with Swedish public service broadcaster SVT to study agenda setting during the yearly political festival in Almedalen. 

Of particular importance is the theory of Network Media Logics I have been developing together with Dr. Ulrike Klinger (Switzerland). Being dissatisfied with the theoretical departure points in studies of political participation in general (and politicians online in particular) we are working on a theory of network media logics (with an article in New Media & Society and book chapter for Routledge). The argument is that the theory of media logics offers a possibility to discuss what changes with the internet and social media platforms without resorting to either techno-determinism or normalization (that nothing change when moved online). Today we are working on a study of algorithms in relation to media logics. I am currently working on a research application on algorithms and the programmers/ designers behind them.   

Connected to this I am working together with my partner Oriol Poveda on developing the theoretical perspective of the Global Age. Building on sociologist Martin Albrow’s work, and sharing his general discontent with an all-embracing perspective of Modernity, we argue that interrelated characteristics of this Global Age are interdependence, opacity and inertia. In an open access article (recently published in TripleC: http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/775/891) we exemplify this with the environment (and the crisis of climate change), the economy (its collapse in 2008 and current reinstatement) as well as the internet.”

Welcome to a K3 seminar with design duo Brave New Alps (Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz). It will be held on Monday, March 20, 14.15-16.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: Building QuerciaLAB – Towards a Community Economies Research and Resource Centre.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

What does it mean to live and work in common in today’s world ridden by socio-economic as well as environmental crises? To grapple with this pressing question in our everyday life, in September 2016 we began to build QuerciaLAB, a community economies research and resource centre as a space where to experiment with non-hegemonic socio-economic relations.

The still ongoing building process unfolds in collaboration with others currently inhabiting the Vallagarina valley in the Italian Alps as well as with people in our international network of practitioners. As the Centre starts out, it is hosted in a disused industrial space (200m²), which is part of a complex of buildings that have been re-functioned in 2015 in order to host up to 80 asylum seekers.

 During this seminar, we want to share our experiences so far and open up a space for constructive debate about what role socially engaged designers can play in creating situations where to enact a prefigurative politics of life in common.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Tobias Denskus, senior lecturer in Communication for Developmnent, K3. It will be held on Wednesday, March 15, 10.15-12.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: Aidworker Voices. Between Quantitative Data, Ethnographic Insights and Artistic Representation.

An abstract for the talk:

Aid work, development research and communicating global development are currently at an interesting juncture. Between humanitarian traditions and expatriate lifestyles my presentation will focus on how contemporary aid work is communicated in the context of traditional research and new media. I will share some preliminary findings from my research on aid worker (auto)biographies, a growing genre that provides different insights into how aid (does not) work.

Key questions include how to use alternative forms of writing in our teaching, research and outreach and why it matters in a social and political climate where foreign aid is questioned and research alone will not be enough to remind the public of the value of global engagement.

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”?