Berndt Clavier – Pale Kings of the bios politikos: Wallace, Barth, Pynchon and the Politics of Literary Form

25/03 – kl 10-12 – Room E203 (Aktersalongen)
Berndt Clavier, Senior Lecturer, Malmö University
Pale Kings of the bios politikos: Wallace, Barth, Pynchon and the Politics of Literary Form

Berndt Clavier holds a PhD degree in American Literature but has also published in various other fields, including migration studies and cultural studies. In 2007, he published John Barth and Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage (Peter Lang). The seminar is a continuation of that work and addresses the way literary form might be understood as a technē for the crafting of ethics and politics. The focus of the seminar is on the ways the cultural and historical techniques of the novel may be brought to bear on recent American postmodernist fiction, Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King (2011), Barth’s The Development: Nine Stories (2008) and Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011), and Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013).

18/03 – kl 10-12 – Seminar on Openness

18/03 – kl 10-12 – Medea
Seminar on Openness
Politics, practices, problems and potentials of openness: the debate spans Open Data Creative Commons, Open Knowledge, Access, Inclusion, Participation, Appropriation and Privacy.
Join the Living Archives group to discuss the manifold dimensions of openness. Anyone is invited to offer statements or provocation to launch the discussion.

http://livingarchives.mah.se

Somatic Archiving Symposium: performance and discussion event around the body, somatics and archiving

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Photograph of Luanda Carneiro Jacoel by Åsmund Kaupang, used with permission.

Wednesday 25 February

18:00 performance by Joan Laage followed by warm drinks in the Slottsparken Greenhouse, Malmö, located next to Slottsträdgårdens kafé.

Thursday 26 February
9:30 coffee and registration. Roundtable and performances from 10:15 until 16:30, at the Medea Studio, Malmö University.

The “somatic” refers to a deep layer of the body, radiating outwards through physical and affective exchanges with the wider world. This symposium/event opens questions around the somatic, archiving, memory and cultural heritage. Performances by Joan Laage (USA), Boaz Barkan (Denmark) and Luanda Carneiro Jacoel (Brazil/Norway) will be interspersed by round-table discussions with contributions from academics, students and independent professionals.

We do not yet know what Somatic Archiving means. Expanding a performative mode of artistic research, we invite you to join us in posing questions or offering performative provocations to explore the zone where archiving, cultural memory and the body converge.
How does the body record and archive memories?
How can we access body memories through dance and somatic practices?
How can we archive, collect or disseminate corporeal memories?
What is activated in the body of a performer when they connect with people, memories and experiences of the past?
Does reawakening the past “pre-mediate” or anticipate future physical and cultural forms?
What political and social implications are revealed when historical memory is accessed and restaged through the living body?

For detailed schedule, registartion and more information please visit: http://livingarchives.mah.se/2015/01/somatic-archiving-symposium-feb-2015/

 

 

18/02 – kl 10-12, Katarina Karlsson – Det essentiellt ”feminina” – en kartläggning genom konstnärlig praktik av det feminina territorium som den tidigmoderna musiken erbjuder

18/02 – kl 10-12, Room E203 (Aktersalongen)
Katarina Karlsson, University of Gothenburg
Det essentiellt ”feminina” – en kartläggning genom konstnärlig praktik av det feminina territorium som den tidigmoderna musiken erbjuder

I vårt samhälle pågår ett ständigt namngivande av vad som är “kvinnligt”. Att använda ordet ”feminin” i kombination med ”essentiell” är provocerande. Samtidigt används begreppet ständigt till exempel i tv-programmen ”Trinny och Susannah stylar om”, där olyckliga kvinnor kläs upp och stylas till “femininare” versioner av sig själva. Men begreppet ”femininitet” har inte alltid gjort kvinnor lyckliga. För fyra hundra år sen i England förknippades kombinationen kvinnlighet och musik med horaktighet och lättja. I debatten som föregick det engelska inbördeskriget (1642-1651) ansågs musik leda till dålig moral genom att vissa element i musiken, som drillar, falsettsång och kromatik, förkvinnligade män. I denna sociokulturella kontext uppstod genren lutsång, en tonsatt text där en förskjuten älskare begråter sitt öde och anklagar kvinnan för falskhet, svek och grymhet. Sångerna skapar en matris för kvinnans beteende där hon fråntas möjlighet att vara vänlig, rädd eller ointresserad. Kärlek eller hat är de enda alternativen. I många sånger övergår anklagelserna till hot om självmord och i ett fåtal till hot om våld.
När verbal aggression har belysts i kombination med musik har det hittills handlat om rap och rock. Tidigmoderna lutsånger har betraktats som kärlekssånger. Att verbal aggression som gränsar till ett dysfunktionellt beteende ingår i lutsångernas retorik är uppmärksammat av litteraturhistoriker, exempelvis Cynthia E Garretts artikel Sexual Consent and the Art of Love in the Early Modern English Lyrics, 2004. Trots detta är det ignorerat både av de som utför musiken och/eller skriver om den. Den luckan vill jag fylla med det här projektet.
Allt oftare framförs tidigmodern musik i genreöverskridande sammanhang, men knyts sällan till andra discipliner som genusteori och psykologi.
I det här projektet synliggörs det kulturella bagaget som medföljer begreppet ”femininitet” från tidigmodern debatt för att förstå något om maktstrukturer idag.
Genom att många sångtexter på några få rader går från avvisad kärlek till besatthet och hot, vill projektet kartlägga hur psykologiska mönster sammanfaller med tidigmoderna kärlekssånger. Den retorik lutsångerna representerar jämförs med textmeddelanden mottagna av offer för stalking för att synliggöra en grå-zon som kan skapa igenkänning genom publika framträdanden. Detta är viktigt för att många människor någon gång kan ha varit i närheten av ett sådant beteende eller blivit utsatta för det. Med den kraftfulla emotionella kommunikation som musik innebär kan projektet leda till större förståelse för hur en strategi av detta slag uppstår. Genusteori kommer att användas för att se hur kön görs i tidigmodern musik. Lutsångernas retorik analyseras och jämförs med textmeddelanden mottagna av kvinnor utsatta för verbal förföljelse via sms, facebook, mail mm.
Två kvinnliga tonsättare åter-komponerar tidigmoderna musiken för solist och vokalensemble Med hjälp av publika framföranden i Sverige och England kommer de utmaningar och provokationer som uppstår ur detta nå många och helt andra människor än de som nås av vetenskapliga artiklar.

Translator, traitor? Translational processes and academic entrepreneurship in design labs by Luca Simeone,

11/02 – kl 10-12 – Medea
Luca Simeone, PhD Candidate in Interaction Design
Translator, traitor? Translational processes and academic entrepreneurship in design labs
 – 75% Seminar
Discussant: Scott Brown, Parsons DESIS Lab – The New School

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This study builds upon the concept of translation in order to investigate three academic labs and their entrepreneurial dimension: Medea at Malmö University, MIT SENSEable City Lab and metaLAB (at) Harvard. The three labs are headquartered within academia, but use design to foster coordinated actions with different stakeholders (industry, government, NGOs, citizens).
This dissertation argues that in these situations design can (1) favor translational processes, where ideas, concepts, requirements, needs, interests of multiple stakeholders are translated into different languages or articulations, for example through the production of sketches, visual representations, prototypes, and (2) consequently connect and align the stakeholders to a point where coordinated actions can be carried out.
Findings – Findings emerge as perspectival constructs and illustrate that design-based translational processes favor entrepreneurship in the specific form of coordinated action. As the Italian adage ‘traduttore, traditore’ (‘translator, traitor’) suggests, these translation processes unfold through relations of power and resistance, cultural slippages, appropriations and remixes of meaning.

If you are interested to read the entire text or a 30-page extract please send an email to luca.simeone@mah.se

Amin Parsa – The Image of Military Target in Contemporary Armed Conflicts

The laws of armed conflict, in particular the principle of distinction, take protection of the civilian population in times of armed conflict as its main objectives. In doing so the Principle of distinction between civilians and combatants in time of attack, produces its ‘legitimate target’ at the intersection of a certain configuration of ‘knowledge-vision’. This configuration is comprised of organisation of adversarial willpower in terms of state army as well as a series of material obligations on part of combatants in order to make themselves ‘visible’ at all times. In insurgency however there is no such thing as compliance with the legal obligation of visibility on part of the insurgents. Given the invisibility of the insurgents, the counterinsurgent forces, in our case the US, engage in expansive practices of visualisations. I seek to look in to the practices of the US COIN forces in order to understand what is the image of the target in contemporary armed conflicts.

John Lennon – Conflict Graffiti

John Lennon is Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. His book project, Conflict Graffiti, follows the global roots and routes of graffiti in areas experiencing war, poverty, and natural disasters. He is in the initial stages of this project that will take him to numerous geographical regions to investigate, photograph, and theoretically analyze graffiti in a particular area and context (its roots) before teasing out the ways that the form itself speaks and is interpreted by a global audience (its routes). While Lennon’s talk will touch on his overarching thoughts on graffiti, he will specifically speak about his findings of revolutionary graffiti in recent trips to Beirut, Lebanon and Cairo, Egypt.

Dr Temi Odumosu – Inside the Crooked Room: Visual politics of slavery and its legacies

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Dr Temi Odumosu is an art historian, writer and creative educator, with a passion for bringing to light hidden histories, and using art as a tool for building bridges of cultural understanding. Her PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge explored the representation of African characters in British satirical  and comic prints during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Her research and curatorial work investigates how images frame and participate in identity politics and more broadly explores the relationship between history, cultural heritage and collective memory. Recently she has been working collaboratively with geneticists and other scientists on the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on African health, disease patterns and wider population ancestry. Temi is committed to facilitating public engagement with history and culture, and seeks to participate in collective efforts towards social change by working with artists, scholars and technology innovators to bring transformative learning solutions to life.