Welcome to a K3 seminar with Erin Cory, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies and Hugo Boothby, PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies.

The title of the seminar is Picturing home: Sharing memories and building solidarities in Malmö

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, November 25 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/61846446118?pwd=SDJqZnhJNFdPN3k4dWZRQUt5TGwzUT09

Abstract for the seminar:

This seminar presents a current overview of a three-year research project called ‘Performing Integration: Participatory Art and New Publics in Malmö.’ Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the project set out to observe and theorise the role of community arts spaces in developing solidarities between new arrivals and autochthonous Swedes, and in challenging current discourses about what ‘integration’ means.

In this seminar, we present both the story of this ongoing project, as well as a publication under review. In collaboration with local organisation Konstkupan (Art Hive), Erin developed a series of arts workshops designed around ethnomimetic methods (O’Neill 2010), which were all set to go early in 2020, when the pandemic hit. To adapt to this new state of things, she took the workshops online. The transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2007) that grew across multiple platforms illustrates both the unexpected convergences and persistent fault-lines of belonging in a ‘postmigration’ (Petersen & Schramm 2017) context.

As part of this pivot to the digital, Hugo came onboard as an expert in radio broadcasting and, in this instance, podcasting. In the final part of the seminar, Hugo and Erin will present a co-authored piece that came out of the spring’s workshops. In this article, currently under review, we work at the intersection of migration studies and radio studies to examine podcasting’s potential as a practice-based research method. We do this primarily by theorising podcasts as ‘boundary objects’ (Star and Griesemer 1989, Star 2010), which do not demand consensus on the meanings they produce, and so afford space for both synchrony and dissonance in participants’ recorded narratives.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Saskia Gullstrand, Lecturer in Comics, K3.

The title of the seminar is Cinematic storytelling in comics

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, November 18 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/65766558955?pwd=RUNrUGtBNnZWcGtUZUFONGZQM21UUT09

Abstract for the seminar:

Film and comics share one very fundamental storytelling technique – the image montage, which offers the possibility to show the story to the reader through a sequence of images. Through artistic research, I’m investigating what montage strategies artists can use to create a cinematic flow in comics, and the effects it can have on the emotional involvement of the reader of narrative comics.

In this seminar, I’ll discuss what cinematic flow within comics narration can look like, with a focus on grid structure in page layout, the relationship between images and text and the use of dynamic “camera” perspectives and field sizes in the images. By combining my viewpoint as a comics creator and storyteller with academic comics theory, I want to conduct artistic research in comics that exists in dialogue with other forms of comics research, but also serve artists and their practices as storytellers.

This is work in progress. From the seminar, I’d like constructive critique on how to move forward, but also exchange ideas on how to create a dialogue on methods of artistic research between academia and comics artists, as well as an exchange of knowledge and perspectives on comics as an art form.  

Here is a teaser for Marika Hedemyr’s seminar on November 11. You find it here.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Saskia Gullstrand, Lecturer in Comics, K3, Li Jönsson, Associate Senior Lecturer in Design, K3, Kristina Lindström, Senior Lecturer in Product Design, K3, and Åsa Ståhl, Senior Lecturer in Design, Linnaeus University.

The title of the seminar is Un/making pollination through graphical visualisations

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, November 4 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/66498482776?pwd=Nmdja1gxd2g3S0Q2dTVOekpia3dOdz09

Below you will find an abstract and three pictures that it would be good if you had available during the seminar.

Abstract

Reports, observations, predictions and speculation tell us stories about a limited future. In the project Un/Making Pollination we have engaged in one particular prediction of a thin future: the alarming loss of pollinators, and along with that many of our present times fruits, vegetables, berries and more that we take for granted today.

How do these (often) thin predictions and speculations of the future influence the way we act in the present and the here and now? How do they influence how we relate to, prepare for, and intervene into the future?

In this seminar we will discuss these questions through a series of public engagement events that approach these matters of concerns through different material engagements and expressions. This includes enacting appetizer recipes, the making of hand-pollination tools and narration through poetic comics.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Lizette Reitsma, Associate Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design, K3

The title of the seminar is Respectful Design for incorporating indigenous and alternative knowledge

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, October 28 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/67964571115?pwd=a3c5U0dwMFlmbjlKaGlCRGdQa1pFUT09

Below you will find an abstract.

Abstract

Much of my work corresponds to the notion of the pluriverse (as popularized by, for example, Escobar (2018)), in the sense that I try to provide dialogical spaces to support counternarratives to contemporary (Northern) assumptions of the universal and of ‘reality’. 

I have worked with different indigenous communities and other groups, whose knowledges have been considered irrelevant, not ‘true’ as it is not based on ‘science’ or naive. Due to its oral nature of dissemination, especially in indigenous communities, much of the knowledge is disappearing in a rapid pace. Providing space for these kinds of knowledges is, however, of extreme importance.  Not just for the communities’ resilience, but also since it may open up possibilities to find and shape alternative futures. Or, to address unsustainable practices.

In this seminar, I will introduce some of the projects that I have done in collaboration with different communities. Through each of those, ways to include, give space and/or support preservation of other worldviews and knowledges have been explored. In these explorations I reflected on my own practices, role, attitudes and expectations. All with the intention to better learn and practice respectful ways to design with groups that have a different worldview from the one I have. In this, I question how to respectfully design with communities/groups – acknowledging their knowledge system, even though I might not (fully) understand it?

This seminar will be a personal one, as I intend to introduce myself through my work, my research journey and through my personal reflections on who and how I am as a designer/researcher. It will also focus on the process in which I currently am – that of re-understanding where I am at, and where I will go next.

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

The title of the seminar is Media didactics – Searching for a concept and best practices

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, October 14 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/69235138935?pwd=Q0dzNHlpUzRVVk1EN2hVSkhvdnFaZz09

Margareta writes this about the seminar:

I am working on an article for Media Education (possibly) i.e. this is a work-in-progress. From the seminar I would thus like constructive critique of how to move forward and what to change. I will be grateful for all comments.

Abstract:

In times when the media market is undergoing substantial changes, when the practices of media professionals are faced with finding new ways of employment or doing several jobs at the same time (print journalists filming, doing radio and taking photos as well as writing), it is time media education is re-valued and possibly re-thought.

Several concepts have been used for the teaching and learning practices involving media, e.g. media literacy, media education. However, these are more often used within a school context. In higher education this is not the case. In this article I therefore discuss and argue for the concept Media didactic as a potential tool with which to think and do media education. The article consists of two parts, the first is a theoretical discussion of the concept Media didactic and the second is an argumentation through practice, i.e. using some researched examples from media educations in order to emphasise my theoretical discussion.

Media didactics means facilitation of learning processes for a particular subject (here media- and communication studies) and is supposed to form a bridge between this subject on the one end, and a more general pedagogy on the other (Bergström & Ekström, 2015), i.e. it means ways of teaching students to analyse and interpret media, to produce media texts, and how media involvement can strengthen [subject] teaching in general (Toke Gissel, 2016:17).

Theoretically I frame the concept media didactic by theories found in the field of Scholarship of teaching and learning, e.g. relational pedagogy (Aspelin & Persson, 2011), didactic design and multimodal learning (Selander & Kress, 2010), reflective practitioner (Schön, 1987) and of course learning by doing (Dewey, 1916/1999). I am also inspired by Giert Biesta The Beautiful Risk of Education as well as Challenge Based Learning (Christersson et al, 2021).

Through these I will carry an argumentation in order to define media didactic, as well as argue for its necessity in higher media educations, thus bringing Scholarship of teaching and learning into the field of Media and Communication.

In the second part of the paper I will give three examples of researched experienced based best practices to illustrate the concept and to underline my final argument that, in the face of strong structural changes in the media industry, we need to re-think media education so that we are ahead of industry needs, rather than lagging behind. Us, media- and communication educators, need to create critical thinkers and doers, that will challenge the media industry and at the same time find work. This means that we need to acknowledge the spiral movements of learning processes through a series of theoretically driven practices and reflections. Our students (future media workers) need to learn media practices through understanding and reflecting over their structural and cultural contexts. And they should embody theoretical understanding of those media practices through multimodal experience-based learning.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Martin Cathcart Frödén, Lecturer in Creative Writing, K3

The title of the seminar is A circular argument

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, October 7 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/66227663562?pwd=d01HWTRzcjlZbzBNMGVuWXRRbEJWUT09

Martin has just taken up his position as Lecturer in Creative Writing this fall. Below you will find an abstract of his talk and a description of previous work:

The main focus of my talk will be on my forthcoming publication, A Circular Argument (Emerald, Jan 2021). I will also talk a little on my interdisciplinary PhD (Creative Writing, Criminology, Architecture), as well as touching on future research plans.

Abstract:

A Circular Argument / The Out

‘The architects, planners – and businessmen – are seized with dreams of order, and they have become fascinated with scale models and bird’s-eye views. This is a vicarious way to deal with reality, and it is, unhappily, symptomatic of a design philosophy now dominant: buildings come first, for the goal is to remake the city to fit an abstract concept of what, logically, it should be.’ (Jane Jacobs, Downtown is for People, 1958)

Spanning creative writing, criminology and architecture, this work examines some of the ways power and hierarchies can be explored and exploited in space. It is a practice-led study in two parts: one primarily creative non-fiction (A Circular Argument) and the other in the form of a novel (The Out). The two parts will be published in one volume with two entry points, two beginnings.

The novel part is about an imaginary prison. The story revolves around Cecil, an architect who for his own misguided reasons has designed a prison with an inbuilt escape route. A ‘boon’ for someone worthy. Cecil has promised himself that whoever solves his puzzle he will rescue and transport out of the country. One day the phone rings and Frank, the escapee, asks for help. Now Cecil has to make good on his promise and swallow his reluctance as it turns out that Frank has personally affected Cecil’s life. What ensues is largely a road trip where the two men are stuck in a cell on four wheels.

The main focus of the non-fiction part is the obsession with the circular as an architectural gesture and as a concept combining containment and transparency, from the ideal planned city of the Middle Ages, via Bentham’s panopticon, to the all-seeing eye of modern digital society. The creative piece explores how the complications and surprises of human interaction are bound to colour and change the supposedly watertight systems of social control we design as a society – how prison architecture or national road networks might be undermined, or how the power dynamics of the class system might be temporarily suspended in a heightened situation. Forgiveness, desistance and redemption also play a part in the narrative, for both the ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’ parties. Both elements of the work also examine how time moves differently inside from outside of the prison walls, and the limited success of trying to build away social problems.

Methodologically speaking, the work follows certain key features of practice-led research, where the creative outcome constitutes the research in and of itself, rather than existing as a conduit for pre-existing research conclusions. The practice-led approach prioritises the making process, in dialogue with a theoretical framework, although this may not always be visible in the finished work. Again, there are hierarchies at play here, in an epistemological sense, in how knowledge is created, viewed, accessed and consumed. In this sense, the work takes a deliberately outward-looking approach in terms of intended readership, aiming to sit alongside works of fiction as comfortably as academic texts.

On several levels, the work inhabits grey areas and liminal spaces – between the three academic disciplines across which it is situated, between fiction and non-fiction, and between multiple social and spatial hierarchies. This liminality has come to be reflected within the work through exploring non-places, in an explicit sense in the non-fiction work, and implicitly in the creative work – from the limbo of the motorway service station, to the carceral dead space exploited by the prison architect and his escapee. It is also interesting to note that both ‘non-place’ and ‘non-fiction’ are defined by what they are not, rather than what they are. In researching and writing this book I found that the ‘thing’ and its Janus-like twin the ‘non-thing’ were often holding an inherent friction which ultimately proved to be creatively generative.

I have tried to keep the writing centred on the concrete and rebars of the various sites I’ve described. I’ve tried to conduct interviews with silent corridors. Mumbled monologues while walking down pathways, the line painter’s ruler-straight line separating me from the prisoners. I’ve come back on trains, furiously writing in a little notebook, which I couldn’t bring into the prisons. Transcribing an inner, half-remembered harangue of silent questions and slippery answers. It might have looked like I was doing one thing in the prison but I was doing something else – patching together an erratic, fictional ethnography, with a building as the main character.

On writing

Practice as Research is a lovely beast to wrangle. If nothing else, this work has taught me to wear my research lightly, and at the same time to be rigorous in my imaginings. My fictional and non-fictional output have for obvious reasons bled into one another, as they should.

This relationship between fact and fiction has meant that I have had the pleasure of translating concepts and complicated ideas into character, conflict, voice, point of view, tense, and dialogue. That I have been allowed to think about narrative structures as well as real concrete structures. I’ve busied myself with transforming people like one of the prisoners I have talked with, and places like the circular town of Palmanova, into imagined landscapes, townscapes, weather, and into written emotions, which lie somewhere between the real, the unreal and the hyper-real. This porous approach has allowed me to use the structural elements of fiction to represent critical thinking, and architectural critique. To re-use bricks and marble from one kind of structure to make anew, and like all builders past and present, re-imagine an edifice – in this case, a book.

Bio

Martin is the winner of the 2015 Dundee International Book Prize and the 2013 BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines competition. He was the 2017-18 National Trust for Scotland Poet-in-Residence and holds a PhD in Creative Writing, Criminology and Architecture. Swedish by birth, ten years a Glaswegian with his wife and three children, now in Malmö as lecturer in Creative Writing. Previoulsy also in Canada, Israel, Argentina, Haparanda, London, Stockholm.

List of publications

Forthcoming 2021

A Circular Argument: A work of creative non-fiction exploring the circle in carceral architecture and urban planning. This work formed part of my doctoral submission, ‘‘We make spaces and spaces make us – An exploration through Creative Writing of the relationship between literature and carceral spaces’.

2020

The Lamplighter

Ms Adeline (Stories from Home, Garmoran Publishing)

2019

I’m Away Home: Poetry pamphlet written as part of AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded collaborative action research project Distant Voices

2018

Light and Other Observations: A 90-poem collection, the result of a year spent as Poet in Residence with the National Trust for Scotland 2017-2018

Near By: Editor of this collaborative publication between AHRC-funded composer Richy Carey, 8 other sound artists, and Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, exploring the translation and flux between sound, image, object and text

2016

Devil take the Hindmost: My debut novel, which won the Dundee International Book Prize, and was published by Freight Books

2015

Various short stories published including:

Les Joueurs (Inside/Outside magazine)

Boiler plate (Underground anthology)

Finnish for Beginners (Shipwrights Review, Malmö)

March of the Monoliths (Glasgow Review of Books)

2014

Various short stories published including:

A Floating Halfway House (Gutter Magazine)

Japanese Orange (From Glasgow to Saturn)

Ishaq (Octavius)

Golden Wonder (Sub City Radio)

2013

An Underwater Cathedral (Short story, winner of BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines competition for emerging writers, broadcast on Radio 4 several times between 2013 and 2018)

Robert Anderson’s Fires (Novel shortlisted for the Luke Bitmead Award)

Is/land (Shortlisted for the Baker Prize and published in Baker Prize Anthology)

2012

Finnish for Beginners (shortlisted for the Birmingham Book Festival Short Story Award)

Keith Morris is a Royal Plum (longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize)

A Floating Halfway House (shortlisted for the Bridport Prize)

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Johan Farkas on Tuesday, October 6, 10.15-12.00 (note that this is on a Tuesday).

The title is Reporting on ‘Fake News’: Journalistic Portrayals and Reflections on Disinformation in Denmark.

This is Johan’s 50 percent PhD seminar. Aske Kammer, docent in Media Innovation at the Danish School of Media and Journalism, will function as discussant (https://www.askekammer.dk/).

You can join the seminar at https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/62158060741?pwd=UCtaS2RKRWdSMzQ2dW92L1JwLzNodz09  (please note that the link is not the same announced a couple of weeks ago).

All previously recorded seminars can now be found via the “Recorded seminars” headline. There are eight recorded seminars at the moment.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Michael Krona, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, K3

The title of the seminar is The media world of ISIS – Post-caliphate media strategies and digital expansion of terrorism.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, September 30 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/63267841499?pwd=SU9YaE9MVEJRdnlQT05NbDRjajgxdz09 (please note that the link has been changed from previous announcements)

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

Abstract:

Since 2014 and the declaration of the proto-state caliphate in Iraq and Syria, the terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS) has received not only international political- and media attention, but also maintained a strong online presence with the help of devoted supporter networks around the globe. These networks have been and are still essential in ISIS modus operandi, as they amplify the brand, help recruit and further propagate the ideological framework of Salafi-jihadism under which ISIS continues to operate.

In 2018 the caliphate dissolved in its original form, and since then a post-caliphate era has emerged in which ISIS has transformed into a social movement using guerrilla tactics to promote ideology and inspire attacks. A key element in this transformation is the use of encrypted platforms online for galvanised supporters to disseminate propaganda and act as ‘media mujahideen’ in ISIS hybrid warfare.

Strategies on these platforms are vast and innovative, and considering the success of ISIS and its supporters in maintaining such a strong presence and outreach of messaging in online spaces, the aforementioned transformation is interesting to mirror through the lens of propaganda and participatory engagement online by supporters. I will therefore present findings and empirical examples of the role of online spaces and supporters in ISIS current transformation and expansion – as an illustration of the rapid development in how contemporary terrorist organisations deliberately and strategically use media platforms and supporter networks as weapons in information warfare.