17 Sep – 10:00-12:00 – Medea
Dr Temi Odumosu, Post-Doc in Living Archives Project
Inside the Crooked Room: Visual politics of slavery and its legacies

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.

08 Oct – 14:00-16:00 – K3, Room D202
Mahmoud Keshavarz, PhD Candidate in Interaction Design,
DESIGN-POLITICS: Unfolding from and of Undocumentedness – 60% PhD Seminar – Opponent: Prof. Johan Redström, Umeå University

This research in one hand interrogates the forms of politics that produce, target and demarcate certain populations that are asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and stateless refugees by unfolding the material practices involved in such forms of politics. Forms that due to the capabilities of design not only have become possible but also are placed and legitimised within the discourse of progress and innovation. Furthermore, this research also explores other possible forms of politics within the same situations and conditions enacted and performed by asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, activist groups and my own practicing forms in collaboration with others. Thus primarily it confronts the intersection and contradiction, interaction and counter-action of design and politics.

29 Oct – 10:00-12:00 – Medea
Linda Hilfling, Eric Snodgrass, Jacek Smolicki, PhD Candidates at K3
Reflections on Media Ecologies, Archaeology and Archiving

At the seminar we will share reflections from the Spring PhD reading course setup for the three of us, entitled Media Ecologies, Media Archaeology and Archiving. The format for the seminar will be in the style of a “tipspromenad” (the Swedish tradition of a quiz walk), but in this case seminar participants will be asked to carry out various web searches, taking them from one destination to another and with various obstacles placed along the way. Each of the questions/searches will touch on key concepts discovered during our studies for the course. These concepts include Archive, Enclosure, Un-Archive, Materiality, Re-Composition, Power, Responsibility. Our goal for the seminar is to raise and discuss questions such as What is archiving today? What are the implications, risks and potentials of the actions we take on a daily basis while traversing/constructing/contesting the online sphere?

05 Nov – 14:00-16:00 – Medea
John Lennon, Associate Professor, University of South Florida

John Lennon’s 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.

12 Nov – 10:00-12:00 – Medea NOTE! THIS SEMINAR IS CANCELLED!!!
Oscar Hemer, Professor, Anders Høg Hansen, Assistant Professor, Malmö University
Memory on Trial, Media, Citizenship and Social Justice

26 Nov – 10:00-12:00 – Åktersalongen NOTE! THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED to MARCH 2015!!!
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).

10 Dec – 10:00-12:00 – Medea
Amin Parsa, PhD Candidate in International Law, Lund University
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.

17 Dec – 10:00-12:00 – Medea
Erliza Lopez Pedersen, PhD Candidate in Communication for Development, Marco Zoppi, PhD Candidate, Roskilde University. Communication for Development: Reading course summary

The seminar intends to present the two papers for the specific reading course “Diachronic Perspectives and Methodologies”, that has been arranged for the two interregional PhD students (one at K3, Malmö, and CBIT, Roskilde; the other at CUID, Roskilde, and GPS, Malmö). The course focuses on interdisciplinary methodology, comparing historiographical, ethnographic and “mediagraphic” approaches to the global present and the “present past”. Understanding the current global transformational processes requires inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, ranging from studies of global politics and economy, analyses of media and cultural products and practices and up to explorative interventions by artistic and other means. The objective of the course is to provide knowledge and skills in combining and applying different methods for a diachronic analysis of contemporary material. Also, it aims at providing the two interregional PhDs with the tools to put the current transitional dynamics in a (contemporary) historical perspective, with special focus on cultural and political (democratic) agency. During the seminar, the two PhD students will comment on each other’s work, before opening the debate to the audience for Q&A, comments and feedback.