The seminar with Sara Gottschalk has been moved to June 13, at 13.15-15.00

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Berndt Clavier, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, K3.

The title of the talk is:

The End and the Origin: Language as Time in the Speculative Fiction of Gene Wolfe.

The seminar will take place on Wednesday, April 20 at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online. Please join here:

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

Here is an abstract for the talk:

In this paper, I propose to bring Heidegger’s notion of the “origin” of the work of art into dialogue with one of the masterpieces of science fiction, Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun. Heidegger’s approach to art, especially poetry, carries a dimension which is often disregarded by literary theory, namely how literature fuses the anticipation of future meaning with the “here” of the reading present. As Mark Currie argues, literary theory has been much concerned with narrative retrospection and “has paid far less attention to the correlative issue in which the present is experienced in a mode of anticipation” (5). In my close reading of Wolfe’s work, this mode of anticipation is understood through Erich Auerbach’s notion of the figura, which when developed from Christianity into realism and modernism, becomes a mode of interpretation where things predict and confirm other things, making connections that are not causal but rather based on an intellectual energy that in its oscillations back and forth produces ever thicker layers of meaning, or “atmospheres” as Auerbach calls them (see especially Auerbach’s discussion of “atmospheric realism” and “atmospheric historicism,” 473ff). Heidegger provides an analytical framework for the establishment of the atmospheric conditions by suggesting that the artwork is “bringing here into the unconcealed” (81, emphasis in original) something which reveals its nature as the “work-character of the work,” and which, once this is accomplished, might afford “the unconcealedness of that which is as something that is” (79). This “unconcealedness” is the “being of truth in the work” which appears to us as “beauty”—hence the connection between beauty, truth, and art in the Western history of art (79). This combination of “work-character,” “unconcealedness,” “appearance,” “beauty,” and “here” is cumbersome to say the least, but it opens up for a kind of reading where the “atmospheric conditions” of the text appear via minutiae that accumulate into what Heidegger provocatively calls “origin.” This “origin” does not necessarily have to be “truth” or “beauty” if we try to build an analytical framework out of Heidegger’s ideas. However, it does need to “appear” as the “work-character of the work,” and it needs to do so in a here that involves the reader and the “atmospheric conditions” of the text. In this paper, I propose to read Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy with a mind to Heidegger’s notion of “origin.”

The New Sun is set billions of years into the future. The sun is dying and anthropocene is not enough to describe this world, which, as John Clute puts it, is “so impacted with the relics of humanity’s long residence that archaeology and geology have become, in a way, the same science” (1339). The mysterious “G.W.,” “translator” of the manuscript which is The Book of the New Sun, notes in a series of appendices that in his translation into English of “a tongue that has not yet achieved existence,” he has been “forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts by their closest twentieth-century equivalents” and that “Latin is once or twice employed to indicate” what “appears […] obsolete” (ST, 302-3). This planetary language of the past is subsequently folded into the plot to provide a veritable tapestry of analogies, metaphors, symbols, and emblems. Faces, things, and relationships recur and redouble in an often dizzying, spiraling way. The world and the word are thus joined in anticipatory antiquity, a future as past where “those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past” (ST, 148). Nature itself has become like a dictionary, suffused with historical and alien meaning. The novels that comprise the tetralogy fuse this poetic imagery with what in literary theory is referred to as “the anticipation of retrospection,” which normally is understood as the structural condition or logic of narrative itself—that any narrative sequence is told with the sense of its ending in mind (for some, the very definition of the term “plot”). Wolfe’s “translation” into English of a language not yet existent plays with the conventions of this narrative logic, but does so in ways that cannot be easily described in terms of plot, in terms of what is happening or what has happened. Towards the end of his narrative, Wolfe has not revealed anything except perhaps that in his world everything is interconnected. This is unconventional in science fiction, which often includes a moment of denouement, where something hidden becomes progressively revealed.

Here is where I think an imagined dialogue between narratology and Heidegger’s notion of the “work-character of the work” would prove a better framework for Wolfe’s “atmospheric realism.” Wolfe’s work with time as language is a mode of anticipation that functions as an “origin” in his work, and in the process shines a light on what Heidegger argues is the “oldest natural cast of language,” which is to “disclosingly appropriate things into bearing a world” (191, 200).

Next week’s K3 seminar with Per Möller is moved to May 25. The seminar with Mustafa Dikec, originally scheduled for that date, will be given in the fall.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Kate Ferguson, participatory designer, RMIT University, Melbourne .

The title of the talk is:

Agonistic Navigating: Exploring and (Re)configuring Youth Participation in Design

The seminar will take place on Wednesday, April 6 at 10.15-12.00. It will be a hybrid seminar. Please either come to room NiB0501 or join online here:

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

The seminar is a collaboration with the Collaborative Future-Making Platform.

Kate Ferguson has recently completed a PhD at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. With a professional background in architecture, placemaking, public engagement, and community projects, she has a longstanding interest in the way people participate in shaping the built environment.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

This seminar will discuss agonistic navigating as a politically engaged participatory design practice. In recent years there has been interest in the way PD can open up contested and uncertain issues, and promote engagement without the need for consensus. Agonistic navigating articulates the practice I developed to do this over the course of my PhD research in Sydney, Australia. I set out to investigate problems related to youth participation in the design of public spaces such as parks and squares, and I worked with both young people who are often overlooked in participation processes, and local government who run these processes. This entailed an agonistic infrastructuring approach of respecting different views, aligning interests, and working toward the emergence of new practices over time. I will discuss the reflexive work of orienting and anchoring myself in the fieldwork site, and manoeuvring in relations with council to leverage political will and maintain engagement. I developed a project to design and build a “chill space” for a local park with a group of ten-sixteen year olds, and in this I found myself navigating with and between matters of concern such as voice, decision-making, and fun. Here, moments of unsettlement prompted reflection on the way participation had been configured through planning, and opened possibilities for re-configuring participation according to what mattered for participants. Along my PhD journey, I transitioned my design practice: rather than a “solution” to the problems of current youth participation processes, I developed a practice of working with the inevitable politics of participatory design in a conscious and reflexive manner.

The title of the seminar is From Proletariat to Precariat: Precarious Labor in Contemporary Literature. At the seminar Magnus will present a text that he would like to discuss with us. Here are his comments on it:

This text is very much a work in progress.

I’ve been invited to give a talk about working-class literature and the precariat (https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/class). My idea is to write an article, which I can then use as the basis for my talk. The text is a draft version of this article.

I want the seminar to be a discussion about the text (not a presentation of my research interests), and I’m grateful for all kinds of comments. One thing that I would like to get feedback on is whether the text is intelligible for readers who are not familiar with Sweden and Swedish literature.

If you would like to read the text, please mail Magnus magnus.nilsson@mau.se.

The seminar will take place on Wednesday, March 30 at 10.15-12.00. It will be a hybrid seminar. Please either come to room NiB0501 or join online here:

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

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jakob Svensson, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, K3.

The title of the seminar is We are Queer and We are Here. LGBT+ Rights, Visibility, and Sexual Identity among Young Queers in Kampala

It will take place on Wednesday, March 23 at 10.15-12.00. It will be a hybrid seminar. Please either come to room NiB0501 or join online here:

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

Here is an abstract for the seminar:

This research comes out of a project funded by Swedish Research Council in which we investigate visibility pressures connected to international aid cooperation in relation to LGBT+ rights in repressive contexts. The starting point is that queer visibility may constitute a potential danger in countries with homophobic legislation. One of the contexts we set out to study is Uganda, the poster boy of state-sanctioned homophobia since the infamous 2009 legislation, which among other things characterized Uganda as the world’s worst place to be gay in Western media. This has resulted in an explosion of funding for LGBT+ rights and organizations in the country. In this presentation I am  interested in what kinds of sexual identities are being forwarded with this funding mainly coming from the West? Peters (2014: 20) for example hint to that LGBT+ organizations in the country rather organize around a Western-based idea of sexual identity as core to the selfhood with its attached argument of sexual(ity) rights as human (individual) rights. So, while scholars long have underlined that the homo-hetero binary construction of sexuality is not always appropriate in non-Western contexts, several LGBT+ organizations in Africa have drawn on a human (individual) rights discourse (Amory, 1997). During a research trip to Uganda I therefore set out to understand the intersection of LGBT+ organizations, visibility of LGBT+ rights/ individuals/ groups, as well as how (mostly) unaffiliated non-open individuals with same-sex desires identified themselves, also in relation to the cause and the increasing number of organizations in the country.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Margareta Melin, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, K3.

The title of the seminar is Learning Life Itself. Risk and Resilience in Media and Communication Education

It will take place on Wednesday, March 16 at 10.15-12.00. It will be a hybrid seminar. Please either come to room NiB0501 or join online here:

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

Here is an abstract for the seminar:

This seminar will focus on an article I am presently working on. The article argues that media education needs to change in times of substantial changes to the media industry and challenges from society at large. There is however little research within Media and Communication Studies that could guide media educators. If media education should provide society with ethical, democratic, reflexive, competent change agents, risk and resilience should be incorporated into an active media didactic design of courses and modules. Higher education should provide learning for life and learning to live. The article is empirically based on a case study of two media education modules in media production, which runs like a red thread through the first two years of a Swedish Media and Communication bachelor course. The syllabus and course structure, student assessments, and interviews with lectures were analysed theoretically based on risk and resilience models. Results show that when risk, resilience are introduced, both students and lecturers are uncertain, and particularly students are frustrated and even angry at the lack of firm rules to adhere to. By the second year, students are however used to the not-knowing, and embrace the possibilities it gives. The article concludes that resilience is something built over time, for lectures and students alike. Working collaboratively aid this process again for both lecturers and students.

Bernd Clavier’s and Charlotte Asbjørn Sörensen’s k3 seminar will switch dates. This is how they will be given:

Wednesday, April 20 at 10.15-12.00

Berndt Clavier, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, K3

The End and the Origin: Language as Time in the Speculative Fiction of Gene Wolfe

Wednesday, May 4 at 10.15-12.00

Including /Integrating /Involving Adjuncts and Students in Research at K3

Workshop organized by Charlotte Asbjørn Sörensen, Lecturer in Product Design, K3

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.