Doctoral thesis/Doktorsavhandlingar/Konstnärliga fakulteten

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Weaving spaces in Nordic cities
(2025-04-24) Tolnov Clausen, Rosa
This thesis explores how free time hand-weaving spaces are organized in urban settings in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. It departs from, and builds on, the author’s artistic practice of creating public spaces for hand-weaving through the Weaving Kiosk project. The study consists of three parts. The first part establishes the research methodology and defines the concrete methods used for inquiry, documentation and analysis. Building on the existing methods of Donna Haraway’s “visiting” (2016), Vikki Bell’s “photo-elicitation” (2012), and Mona Livholts’s “memory work” (2020), the approaches of “having visits,” photo-elicitation, and written memory work are developed. The second part of the thesis discusses four aspects of the study’s context. The first establishes the meaning of “free time” for the context of this thesis, and examines different conceptions of free time craft. The popular conception of free time craft activities as being of socially marginal significance is discussed, and problematized in view to recent scholarship that demonstrates both individual and societal benefits arise from free time craft practices. Secondly, the current situation of hand-weaving in Nordic urban centers is addressed. Findings here indicate that textile craft has been enjoying an increase in popularity, and that craft-related offerings are increasingly varied, appearing in unconventional shapes and adapting to contemporary urban lifestyles. A third contextual aspect is given by the historical development of small, mobile looms which paralleled the processes of industrialization and urbanization in Northern Europe. Their evolution shows that the field of free time hand-weaving has been developing continuously in response to evolving social arrangements since the late 19th century. Lastly, prevalent contemporary organizational models for weaving spaces in Sweden, Denmark and Finland are presented. These models reveal the variety of contemporary offerings and offer examples of relevant support structures for hand-weaving currently available in the three countries. The third part of this study analyzes the practical aspects of the Weaving Kiosk project (February 2017 – present). The eleven iterations of this itinerant hand-weaving workshop are discussed from three perspectives: Space, Craft, and People. The section Space considers the practical development of the Weaving Kiosk in regard to spatial design, choices of location, contextual settings, and accessibility. The practice-led inquiry of the Kiosk is evaluated with consideration of the project’s ambition to create a mobile, urban and technically accessible weaving space. The section Craft describes the main findings from the development and realization of the eleven Weaving Kiosks that relate to the material and technical dimensions of the weaving and sewing processes involved. It shows how material choices have been significant factors for making the experience of the hand-weaving process an accessible and satisfactory introduction. Lastly, the section People reviews observations regarding the Weaving Kiosks’ participant demography and evaluates how these weaving spaces were interpreted differently by young urban adults.
Towards Peasant Cultivation of Abundance
(2024-05-17) Sonjasdotter, Åsa
This research investigates modes of relations in peasant crop cultivation. The enquiry follows traces of such practices through artistic means, seeking to construct a conceptual framework that diverges from the capitalist paradigm of cultivation. In place of the paradoxical focus on both unlimited growth (of profit) and (artificial) scarcity, I propose that peasant crop cultivation can provide a model for ‘relations of abundance’ – that is, the social relations that proceed through and from peasant cultivation practices in contrast to industrial monoculture farming. The research begins with The Order of Potatoes (2009–ongoing), an artistic work based on the recultivation of peasant-bred crops in the highly industrialised farming landscapes of southern Sweden. This artistic undertaking requires a reworking of the concepts through which these practices can be reinstated and renewed. The project employs a twofold approach of (1) recultivation and (2) tracing back through textual, visual, and material archives, including the cultivars themselves, understood as having an archival potential. This methodological framework is articulated with reference to a range of ways of working, including microhistorical survey (Carlo Ginsburg), a historiography of rewinding (Ariella Azoulay), and a strategy of ‘intimate reading’ (Lisa Lowe). Building on the conceptual and practical issues raised by The Order of Potatoes, subsequent artistic works within the framework of this research include Tracing Agricultural Memory – Refiguring Practice and Cultivating Stories – Cultivating Abundance. The work of retracing attends to, assembles, and gives narrative form to both lost and remaining signs of peasant cultivation, such as tools, marks in the landscape, the crops themselves, and the in-kind taxation records of the authorities. A close reading reveals how soil extraction, mainly through taxation, culminated in the collapse of peasant cultivation systems in the late 1700s in the regions studied. An important consideration for this research is the relative neglect of the peasantry as an agent in accounts of modern knowledge production and modern political projects. It also provides an overview of the theoretical positions that explain why peasants have been relegated to the past in these realms. The social and sensory aspects of both peasant and modern relations of cultivation are elaborated by contrasting their respective techniques and priorities within plant breeding. The two modes of relationship – peasant and modern capitalist – are brought into dialogue through the technique of assemblage. This work is also placed in the epistemological context of the global peasant and Indigenous peoples’ movement. The aim of this research is to provide a means to imagine and implement cultivation practices that move away from the capitalist paradigm of growth and scarcity and generate relations of abundance.
Situated Agencies: Mediating Places through the Body
(2024-04-12) S. Fari, Nathalie
At a time when our ways of experiencing and inhabiting places in the city have become increasingly entangled with technology, the Situated Agencies: Mediating places through the Body explores how site-specific performance practice can be addressed through an embodied and documentary approach. By employing the notion of agency, this artistic research project examines how we can enter, access, and uncover the multiple layers of a specific place – its historical connotation, social meaning, cultural value and so forth – to collect and generate a performance and/or documentary material. In this process, a special emphasis is placed on grasping and sort of excavating the hidden narratives of a place which in short, refer to all the potential narratives that are neither representative of a place, nor correspond to certain clichés and expectations, but which may be untold, unmanifested or unexpected. With such an emphasis, a series of performance laboratories were carried out in collaboration with artist researchers from different disciplinary fields. Using approaches from place-based research, posthumanism and performance documentation, these laboratories aimed to explore the relationship between embodiment and audiovisuality. On the one hand, through designing a variety of exercises which focused on enhancing a bodily/environmental awareness and on the other, through experimenting with how the audiovisual traces of a laboratory work can serve both as data and a creative source. The claim that by challenging and expanding the documentary status (or truthful meaning) of such traces, new forms of narrativisation and agency may arise, appears here as an approach to site-oriented screen performance research. As a result, this artistic research project offers a contribution to the exploration of how a specific place, in this case, a public square in Gothenburg and another in Rio de Janeiro, can be (re)framed, (re)performed and especially, rewritten through both an editing and archival process. All this is done with and through the co-presence of different cameras and bodies and thus, through the ways in which the situated agencies emerge and operate within an environment.
Rewinding Internationalism. An Exhibitionary Inquiry on the Political Imaginary
(2023-11-17) Aikens, Nick
‘Rewinding Internationalism: An Exhibitionary Inquiry on the Political Imaginary’ investigates the relationship between exhibition making, processes of inquiry and the political. The project originates from, and takes place through, my own practice as a curator and aims to articulate how this relationship can be understood as mutually generative. It focuses on the affordances of exhibition making, its operations and processes; its spatial, formal and experiential possibilities. As these affordances, it is proposed, can both facilitate inquiry and engage the political, this project seeks to contribute to the relatively limited existing discourse in this area. The broad terrain that these three related frameworks (exhibition, inquiry and the political) demarcate can be loosely understood as a discourse on the curatorial that has emerged since the 1990s in a globalised art system of exhibitions, institutions and biennials. The principal contours of these debates include early claims on the political through the epistemological processes of the curatorial as distinct from the ‘practical tasks’ of exhibition making, the development of the ‘research exhibition’ as genre, through to recent experiments in exhibition making that overtly resist representing ideology. Recently a renewed focus on the exhibition through both discursive registers and specific practices has broadly distinguished between the ‘onto-epistemological’ claims made for exhibition in more generalised terms from the detailed discussion of exhibition’s practical ‘field of operations’. This project takes account of, and sits within, the context of these discussions and practices. It identifies an imbalance within the discourse whereby an overemphasis on the onto-epistemological does not take account of the numerous fields of operations of exhibition making: its strategies of analysis as well as its specific spatial, scenographic and experiential conditions. The central contribution of this project to the field lies in a proposed rebalancing of these two registers – the onto-epistemological and operational – when considering the relationship between exhibitions, processes of inquiry and the political. Through detailing an unfolding practice (specifically the realisation of the travelling museum exhibition Rewinding Internationalism) the project proposes a complex interaction between them, foregrounding how exhibition making enacts and instantiates a process of inquiry while engaging the political.
Techniques of Ecstasy: Rumori - Tracing Sound
(2023-11-03) Järnegard, Esaias
This doctoral thesis proposes the philosophical concept of ontopoetics in relation to an artistic practice of sound (music) and listening. The concept of ontopoetics is used as the backdrop of the developed notion of techniques of ecstasy essentially as an intermediary between listening and language. Ontopoetics becomes the bridge between the archaic and contemporary man. My research is practice-based but nevertheless finds a form of dissemination where the word, the sound and the image work together like a body. Through placing the shaman and the mystic (the ones who originally wield the techniques of ecstasy) as the figure of our present-day artist the thesis offers a more immersive understanding of the artist, and the possibility of imagining how sound, listening and a form-of-life (understood as a way-of-being-in-sound) still can be considered as a way and method of shaping our world. The shaman and the mystic are also a gateway to exploring ontopoetics as a way of understanding sound, listening and communication as something preceding interpreted meaning, yet still producing knowledge. On an equal level of importance, the thesis consists of several musical compositions which extend and materialize what in the thesis is proposed as potentiality and the condition for making music. This interdependence of sound, word, and image (the tracing of sound) is given its own importance in the realization of a strategy of sound. A method, but at the same time not; the strategy gives way to this thesis’s tentative conclusion. Listening is a way of knowledge, through listen ing the world emerges. And this knowledge is accessible through music’s immediacy of expression. Throughout the thesis the work on sound is given predominance. However, a rich material of dialogue partners of both musical, artistic, and philosophical characters is included, most prominently exemplified by the writing of Lotta Lotass where the thesis’s strategy of sound findsa dialogue partner—a dialogue also with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, the ravings of Antonin Artaud and Giorgio Agamben as well as the music of Diamanda Galás, Giacinto Scelsi and Luigi Nono. The author of this work places them in a strange and shared space where the artist and the shaman are brought to a common, wordless end in a music which is as much sound as silence.
I otakt med tiden: En genealogi av svensk musiklärarutbildning
(2023-10-20) Ostendorf, Lena
The aim of this thesis is to contribute to knowledge about how Swedish music teacher education today is governed. The theoretical lens is a Foucauldian genealogical approach according to which the educational context is seen as a discursive practice. Questions are raised concerning what kind of discourses are constitutive for music teacher education today, what kind of subject positions are possible for the education´s agents and what kind of power techniques are at play. Another research question is how music teachers are constructed historically. The study consists of two partial studies, the first being focus group interviews with teachers and students respectively at six institutions for music teacher education all over Sweden. The second partial study is an analysis of historical documents between years 1954-2008, mainly governmental official inquiries. Both studies’ material is analyzed using Foucault´s concepts of discourse, governmentality, power/knowledge, and genealogy. Results from the first partial study show three major discourses that are governing music teacher education today, namely a utility discourse, a bildung discourse and a university discourse. Within these discourses there are several subject positions available for the teachers/students such as, for example, guide, generalist, pragmatic, expert or entrepreneur. In the second partial study, the result of the analysis is presented as six constructions of the music teacher: the music teacher as bridge builder, both intellectual, artist and craftsman, competent, flexible, as folkbildare, and as gardener. In the concluding discussion, several discursive discontinuities, as they show themselves in the empirical material, are discussed. Those discontinuities describe discursive breaking points, the first one illustrating the music teachers role shifting from being responsible for cultural and societal wellbeing to becoming an entrepreneur, serving the market. The second breaking point is about the shift in how music education is seen as a mean for bildung towards a utility-discourse and back. The third describes the change in norms and expectations regarding genre and musical context, shifting from orchestra towards pop-band. And lastly, a discontinuity can be detected relating to epistemological aspects: music teachers have moved from being mainly practicians towards becoming more intellectual. Today a practician-discourse can be seen again, mainly concerning a classroom practice.
Cuts and Continuities: Caste-subaltern imaginations of the Bengal famine of 1943
(2023-10-10) Ranjan, Ram Krishna
The Bengal famine of 1943, in which nearly three million people died, was man-made. A multitude of factors led to the famine, including British colonial policies, war, hoarding and profiteering by local elites and businesses, and existing faultlines of caste, class and gender. In recent years, scholars have focused on scrutinising the famine from an anti-colonial perspective. Still, a gap exists in exploring the intersectionality of caste-related subalternities and the famine. However, the immediate concern with filling this gap is ethical-methodological: even from the lens of caste-subaltern consciousness, how does one arrive at and share stories of the famine, and can they ever be ‘recovered’ and ‘represented’? This dilemma and tension animate this PhD in Artistic Practice. The main starting research question is – how can film practice, both as methodology and outcome of the inquiry, be mobilised to explore negotiated imaginations of the Bengal famine from a caste-subaltern perspective? Taking the Gramscian notion of subalterns as people/groups on the margins of history, subaltern studies, especially in India, have consistently focused on the need to write history from below. On the one hand, scholars and historians have looked at archival materials for erasures of subaltern history and foregrounded them. On the other hand, they have mobilised methods such as oral history to recuperate the subaltern histories. In a limited sense, this research adheres to this tradition. It looks at existing films on the Bengal famine and makes critical interventions in them to foreground the caste question, and it also aims to create ‘new’ material through collaborative fieldwork-filming and workshops. However, this PhD also departs from the tradition as it is not a recuperative historical project. It focuses on the creative, collaborative, and negotiated processes of imagining and engaging with that history. Through an iterative, collaborative and reflective film practice, this research suggests that filmmaking can foreground subaltern epistemologies and ontologies when it is not merely seen as product-oriented but also as a knowledge activity. Moreover, it can foreground an ethos of active and continuous negotiation and enable the emergence of multiple, contested and layered narratives. Lastly, this research proposes a shift away from ‘recovery’ and ‘representation’ of the ‘authentic’ caste-subaltern experiences of the famine and toward negotiated imagination.
”Sketch and Talk”, Drawing lines between incarcerated humans, the interior, and “stuff”. Design methodologies for (well)-being in prisons, youth homes and psychiatric hospitals
(2023-08-31) James, Franz
With increasing global and local incarceration, the demand for prison beds is rapidly growing. The Swedish government’s plans for implementing youth prisons and amending laws regarding young people’s sentences risk increasing the already high numbers of mental health problems. Although security is an inherent element of institutions for care and incarceration (ICI), the present focus on reinforcing security is similarly jeopardizing the health of inmates, patients, and youths in prisons, forensic psychiatric hospitals, and youth homes. Moreover, the rapid production of beds will likely lead to issues with staff security and work environment. The field of research for design in correctional institutions and behavioral health is limited. Although there is an increased interest in evidence-based design, EBD cannot be said to extend to all design aspects for vulnerable people in ICIs. However, this dissertation critically discusses the dichotomies, meanings, and connecting lines between incarcerated humans, the interior, and stuff, and it looks primarily at the design of institutions in Scandinavia. Moreover, ICIs are understood in this dissertation as an existential and ethical dichotomy with well-being on the one hand and the losses that incarceration brings on the other. The tension between punishment and (re)habilitation manifests through materiality, design, and high-security measures. However, the question for design is not whether it is possible to hinder the pain and losses that come with incarceration but how design can mitigate these losses, alleviate pain, foster well-being, and assist staff through a safe and supportive work environment. Part of this doctoral project has been conducted within a multidisciplinary research project aimed at creating knowledge about youths’ experience of the physical environment in Sweden’s youth homes (SiS). Two of this dissertation’s five papers were written as part of this research project (IV, V). The other three papers discuss the early method development of Sketch and Talk (II), the narrative of patients’ experience of the physical environment in forensic care (I), and the design of prison cells through the narratives of three women (III). The theoretical underpinning of this dissertation is inspired by phenomenology and ethnography. It therefore advocates for a design research methodology that brings the researcher closer to the phenomenon and into the node of peoples’ experiences. Hence, one of this dissertation’s contributions is the Sketch and Talk method, which uses sketching and talking when meeting a participant in their cell or room as a way of creating a space for mutual observation and understanding of the interior. Moreover, as ethical awareness is paramount in research with vulnerable groups, the method has been valuable through its transparency and open approach. Design for ICIs can be seen as a “wicked problem” and is as much an ethical and ideological matter as a design-related problem. This dissertation identifies a “wickedness” in how design processes primarily take their point of departure in previous products and seek to improve them. Therefore, when penal ideology is saturating the previous product (ICI) the ideology has pertained to the new ICI as carceral design heritage. Identifying carceral design is in itself a first step in designing for well-being. This presents a wide-open opportunity to reform and rethink – an opportunity we must take, particularly in light of planned investments and expansion. This dissertation suggests that future research can contribute with more knowledge on how an interior can promote well-being through design for autonomy, dwelling, and movement and as a result can open up new horizons of change and hope.
Slöjdundervisning med nyanlända elever – om multimodal interaktion och kommunikation i slöjdklassrum
(2023-05-17) Gyllerfelt, Emma
This thesis aims to identify and describe sloyd teachers and newly arrived students’ multimodal interaction and communication, and how this is expressed in sloyd teaching and the learning environment of the sloyd classroom. The study uses an ethnographic methodology and the empirical material is analysed at a micro and macro level, and a handheld camera is used to document sloyd teaching with newly arrived students at two elementary schools in Years 8–9, during one semester. Through video documentation, it is possible to capture the complexity of the sloyd teaching and learning environment. The thesis consists of four articles. The thesis uses a sociocultural and multimodal theoretical framework, and another premise in the thesis is the use of the theory of community of practice. The theoretical approaches implies focus on participation, interaction, and communication in sloyd teaching where newly arrived students and teachers do not share the same verbal language. Thus, other resources are used for meaning-making. The findings show that sloyd teaching and the learning environment of the sloyd classroom offer newly arrived students rich multimodal possibilites for multimodal communication and interaction in a situated context. The learning environment in sloyd classrooms enables social encounters and participation for newly arrived students, which the students seem to seek and take initiative to. Further, the results show how the sloyd subject content and subject-specific concepts are complex and abstract, however, there is a potential in sloyd teaching with newly arrived students when the students sloyd projects can be set in concrete learning situations. Sloyd teachers and newly arrived students use a variety of multimodal resources to make meaning. When newly arrived students and sloyd teachers do not share the same verbal language, multimodal interaction and communication become central to make meaning. Demonstrating one’s skills multimodally can also create confidence in one’s abilities and the ability to show one’s knowledge beyond words. Finally, it is shown that knowledge of the Swedish language is not decisive for newly arrived students’ participation in sloyd teaching.
Crying Rya: A Practitioner’s Narrative Through Hand Weaving
(2022-09-02) Röndahl, Emelie
This research project examines a repeated focus on time and slowness that I have experienced over years in connection with my hand-weaving practice using the Scandinavian technique of rya. Research through my own studio practice has led me to question a public image of weaving as time-consuming or slow and why temporality is attributed to the finished object, while I claim that it is only experienced in the making process. The claim of weaving as slow does not consider the body that weaves. I have wanted to highlight the myth of slowness in crafts and handweaving that does not always match my experience of the bodily knowledge of weaving. The aim is to use myself and my own practice as a hand-weaving artist to explore what is beyond these recurring concepts. My knowledge includes conditions such as frustration, boredom, irritation, as well as joy, curiosity and fascination. This research is thus motivated by what I see as incomplete knowledge, where my contribution consists of understanding my own practice, with transparency through my own knowledge development that I hope is useful more generally to future craft research. I have combined my writing with several rya projects made in recent years (2016–2022) structured from a personal perspective around my interest in reflection on artistic practices, my body in making and the figurative rya weaves I create. My research offers an example of how the connection between claims about weaving as slow and time-consuming collide with the experience of the development in the studio, as well as with my own body, in a hand-making practice.
Den klingande verklighetens föränderlighet: Mot ett vidgat gestaltningsutrymme
(2022-05-06) Löndahl, Tomas
For artists, the impact of the symbols in a score on interpretational positions may on some occasions be experienced as problematic. This is especially the case for artists, experiencing the classical musical tradition to have an inhibitory influence on their performances. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate – within the field of notated western art music – the performing artist’s potential space for interpretation and its possibilities to expand. One prerequisite for the investigation is to explore how this space can be expanded through a relativization of the correlations between the musical work, the symbols of the score, and the sounding music. Different views on work concepts and on symbols are discussed and problematized, resulting in a formulated new approach to the score. Two series of experiments with works by the Swedish composer Ludvig Norman (1831–1885) were preceded by research on the context of the works, as well as by analyses of the notated musical parameters of the scores. The outcomes from these investigations, together with the new approaches towards the work concept and the notated symbols, formed the premisses for an artistically informed freedom during the interpretational explorations. These explorations included deliberately amended or recomposed versions of the music, and parametrical improvisations based on artistic investigations beyond the original notations. At times musical material not emanating from the notated symbols were also added. This intertwining of thorough research and analysis with an experimental approach, changed the preconditions for the interpretational solutions. Within the widened and flexible space for interpretation, the musical parameters – through the intentional and open-ended reconfigurations of them – were allowed to acquire new properties and new relationships with each other. New sounding realities and new artistic insights were thereby developed, as well as unconventional and cross-boundary ways of interpretational realisations. My articulated method to combine an acquired artistically informed freedom with a new permissive view on the work concept thus displayed sounding solutions, where exploring and expanding interpretative spaces could unleash new and unexpected expressions. In that sense this dissertation contributes to the field of musical interpretation far beyond the music of Norman.
The Objectivity Laboratory: Propositions on Documentary Photography
(2022-03-21) Hamilton, Kerstin
At a moment in history when “post-truth” and “alternative facts” epitomize a political and media landscape that feeds on the circulation of doubt and distrust, The Objectivity Laboratory: Propositions on Documentary Photography addresses ethical dilemmas that emerge when artists’ approach the realities and experiences of others. Prominent photography criticism in the 1970s and 1980s brought a heightened awareness to the politics of representation, resulting in the emergence of a “documentary distrust.” My main objective in this research is to articulate “propositions” that address the documentary blockages that define photography’s framework and possibilities. The propositions—assembled under the headings MONTAGE, INVESTIGATION, RESISTANCE, and NEARBY—seek to contribute to the dynamic dialogue that has evolved in documentary photography in recent years, which has approached photography as an expandable and unfixed practice. Truth and a “situated objectivity” are investigated as radical tools in the artist’s approach of urgent matters in the world. A commitment to credible, rich, situated knowledges with a basis in reality materializes. Through a research project that has aimed to explore and appreciate the possibilities of photography anew, I ultimately suggest that documentary photography has the potential to lead to important knowledges about the world. This potential, I go on to argue, builds on a responsiveness in relation to the violations that photography can inflict. Values of critical reflexivity, ethics, and responsibility unfold as essential documentary attributes. The Objectivity Laboratory has been formulated as a search for considered and considerate procedures in the documentary engagement with the world. In the pursuit of reliable knowledges and counter-narratives, transformation, reflection, and contestation emerge as integral aspects of reliability and credibility. The research is anchored in practice; developed in dialogue with artists and artworks, it is led by the primary research methods of artistic and curatorial practice. The natural sciences—the setting for my artistic practice—has inspired the theoretical outlooks and overall focus of the research and particularly Karen Barad and Donna Haraway’s perspectives, developed within feminist science studies, have acted as a catalyst in the quest for productive takes on contemporary documentary photography.
Geo-Aesthetical Discontent: Svalbard, the Guide and Post-Future Essayism
(2022-02-04) la Cour, Eva
Propelled by the acute ecological crisis, Geo- Aesthetical Discontent: Svalbard, the Guide and Post-Future Essayism moves between artistic affinities and academic disciplines to craft an intervention into the imaginary of an Arctic place. Designed as an iterative set of artistic practice experiments with live editing, the aim is to demonstrate a geo-aesthetical discontent upon terrains with colonial history for visual production. By subverting the historically monolithic and singular narrative of the Arctic, the artistic research explicitly attends to the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard as a site of- and for image-making that has historical effects on cultural imaginations of the future of the planet and its political and ecological systems. However, as evidenced by the current attention to the term “mediation”, image-making cannot be fully grasped through representational discourses and the traditional exemplars of the artist and the scientist. Rather, this dissertation mobilizes the guide as a figure that embodies how skilled practicing – and hence affect, sensibility and care – are intrinsic to questions of mediation, when understood as a process or milieu that is never foreclosed. Representations (in all their varied forms) are part of the relational configurations that emerge from considering mediation as a geographical event. This is the geo-aesthetical condition. Meanwhile, the research is practice-based in exploring all this through a meta-reflexive (and political) experimentation that addresses questions of technology in relation to affective and historical knowledges. Situated between traditions of experimental ethnography and essayistic approaches to film as practice I propose what I term post-future essayism: a precarious filmic methodology and epistemological strategy of the moving image; a fragmentary and momentary compositional effect that seeks to navigate and negotiate the role of film in relation to a historiographic concept of futurity. The dissertation, then, is a response to a discontentment with current portrayals of the Arctic that produce the region as an outside to the global west. At stake is to connect the production of an artistic practice – significantly described in relation to historical image-makers such as Jette Bang, Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson – and the production of the Arctic.
An Operatic Game Changer: The Opera Maker as Game Designer and the Potentials of Ludo-Immersive Opera
(2022-01-28) Jalhed, Hedvig
How can live-performed chamber operas be conceptualized as immersive games with interactive features? This artistic study has resulted in a system model through which degrees of immersion may be generated and analyzed from physical, social, and psychical stimuli. A differentiation of immersive modes has been made possible by the framing of opera-making as game design. The findings indicate that so-called ludo-immersive opera could be developed into operatic chamber opera play for self-reliant participants, constituting an intimate and alternate practice in which dynamic game-masters may replace supervising directors. However, this practice is entangled with the question of future training for operatic practitioners outside the mainstream opera format, and beyond both Wagnerian and Brechtian spectatorship. The shift from the traditional audience/performer relationship to a novel form of immersive interaction requires a new mind-set and training for opera practitioners, to encourage autonomy and active participation by individual visitors. Theoretically, the study connects recent innovations in opera to the aesthetic principles of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and positions ludo-immersive opera in relation the these. The principles bridge immersion, opera, and game-playing, articulated by a reinterpretation of Roger Caillois’ taxonomy of play. The issue of immersion as an artistic aim in opera is highlighted. Moreover, artists’ and visitors’ reciprocal participation in ludo-immersive opera is discussed in regard to its historical context of operatic event-making and forms of presentation. The project explores the detailed consequences of perception and performance in chamber opera with ludic and immersive features, primarily inspired by live-action role playing. The main objective has been to investigate how operatic events can be presented as immersive adventures rather than spectacles, and consequences that the integration of playing visitors in professional opera implies for artistic practice. In four operas created during the period 2016–2020, interventions and encounters between artists and visitors in musically driven situations framed by fictional settings have been staged and studied. The artistic researcher has iteratively been engaged in action as opera singer, librettist, dramaturge, and director. Data from the research cycles include field recordings from the productions and reports from the participants in the form of interviews and surveys.
A Never-Ending Thirst: Artistic Reforms to Neoliberal-Teflon Imperviousness
(2021-10-25) Alves, André
This text is the dissertation element of my artistic research project, A Never-Ending Thirst: Artistic Reforms to Neoliberal-Teflon Imperviousness, developed within the doctoral studies program at HDK-Valand—the Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg (2016-2021). Along with documentation of twelve artistic projects that support my practice-based inquiry, this text is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the Degree of Doctor in the Fine, Applied, and Performing Arts. A Never-Ending Thirst asks how my practice of picture-making and artistic ways of knowing can reform what I call “Neoliberal-Teflon Imperviousness.” The aim of this inquiry is to make suggestions and experiment with the role of artistic research in the recuperation of permeability, imagination, and affectability. The research focuses on the production and capture of subjectivity in postindustrial late capitalism and draws on the construct “Skin-Teflon,” which was introduced by Maria Franco Ferraz in “The Paradoxical Status of Skin and Contemporary Culture: From the Porosity of the Skin to the Teflon-Skin” (2014) to describe the intentional demotion of the quality and complexity of acts of interfacing in contemporary culture. My research observes how artistic research might align with questions to counter, and offer alternatives to, Neoliberal-Teflon impediments to affectability—to alterity, encounter, and knowledge—and its denial of the subject as a nexus of relationality. Turning to art and following the problematization of the engagement of art as politically committed offered by Marina Garcés in “Honesty with the Real” (2012) this research proposes a listening ethics—an encounter with distance that is not founded in separateness but inscription and embodiment—as a guideline for (my) artistic research, with its ways of knowing and ways of intervening in the landscape of Neoliberal-Teflon imperviousness. I ask how (my) artistic ways of doing and knowing can operate as listening reflections and instigate affection in the face of today’s increasingly bunkered and disaffected Neoliberal-Teflon sense of the world. At stake in this thesis is my belief that a truly libertarian society cultivates the lessons of affectability, affection, and imagination, without which there is no learning, transformation, or change.
Designing Together: A Frugal Design Approach. Exploring Participatory Design in a Global North-South Cooperation Context
(2021-09-07) Hansson, Helena
Since the turn of the millennium, participatory designers have increasingly begun to engage in collaborative research processes in the so-called Global South, targeting sustainable development. The quest is to take on the larger challenges through cooperative work, and such a design process is here referred to as Global North–South cooperation. This research explores how participatory design and designers can contribute to sustainable development targeting the UN’s SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals. The transdisciplinary research process has involved multiple and diverse actors, both researchers and practitioners, from Sweden and Kenya. Significant for this research is that a participant belonging to the specific user group in focus, Jua Kali, a local community of practice in Kenya, has been involved in the whole design process, including the reflection phase. Several frugal constraints are challenging the Jua Kali and their practice. The research, which takes an agency-oriented view, aims to make a transformative change for this specific user group by creating agency in terms of capabilities. A central aspect is that the designer acts to support others to act, a catalyst, who in this case supports the Jua Kali practitioners that I acknowledge. The discussion pivots around four design issues—diversity, context, reflexivity, and time—that I have identified as key issues to consider when designing together in such a design context. To grasp and deal with them, I have explored a methodology that contains a set of conflicting elements: actor-network theory (ANT), the capability approach (CA), co-craft (CoC), and co-writing (CoW). While ANT provides an analytical tool for investigating how agency is created, CA acts as a moral compass and framework for discussing what agency should be created in terms of capabilities. While CoC helps contextualize design, creating a linkage to the local design practice, CoW provides a space for shared reflection, giving Jua Kali’s a formal voice. The joint explorations in the frugal context, combined with joint reflection and support from conflicting theories, have helped create a more nuanced understanding of how design contributes to sustainable development. In this way, the research brings new perspectives and vocabularies to participatory design research.
Jazz in Worship and Worship in Jazz: Exploring the musical language of Liturgical, Sacred, and Spiritual Jazz in a Postsecular Age
(2021-05-21) Steinmetz, Uwe
The aim of this dissertation is to identify musical elements that contribute to the generation of religious meaning in jazz performance and to explore how religious experience can inspire jazz composition. In this study, the history of jazz, specifically tailored to the aspects of my inquiry is imbricated with relevant theories and musical interventions from my own artistic practice in composition and performance. In addition to artistic research through my own practice as a performer and composer, the transdisciplinary fields of musicology, music theory, neurology, history of religion, and theology provides further critical tiles in the knowledge-mosaic constructed by this study. Using my own artistic practice as my primary research method, my thesis investigates distinct intrinsic and extra-musical elements that help to create a typology of religiously inspired jazz, grounded in historical reference works. Twenty-five of my own compositions following this typology are submitted with this thesis and are analyzed in the three main chapters. The final chapter (Imagine) summarizes conclusions of the main chapters and includes a brief evaluation of the research process. Conclusions from the thesis include (i) defining six distinct ways of expressing religious belief in jazz, (ii) demonstrating that the extrinsic meaning of religiously inspired jazz changes when placed within a liturgical dramaturgy, and (iii) generating new postsecular perspectives on jazz. Another concrete result of this thesis involves revisiting George Russell ́s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a basis for my own compositions. The practice-based adaption and exploration of Russell ́s theory opens new ways of understanding how his musical philosophy builds a bridge between Western classical sacred music and jazz. Finally, this thesis also raises new areas for further research such as microtonal and twelve-tone tonality in jazz, temporal concepts in jazz composition and improvisation, and the embodiment of Christian faith through music as an extension of the institutional church in society.
Omsorg, välvilja och tystnadskultur – diskursiva dilemman och strategier i lärarutbildningens undervisningspraktik i musik mot yngre åldrar
(2021-03-17) Frick Alexandersson, Monica
The aim of this thesis is to critically scrutinize, identify and problematize discourses in music education within teacher education towards younger ages. The study explores how teaching practice and examinations in music are constructed, and what kind of strategies are used to handle the dilemmas that emerge in music teaching practice. Theoretically, the study is based on social constructionist theory, and the thesis deploys a discourse psychological methodology and approach. The data consist of observational films and field notes, and the material was produced within a period of three years. It included 91 students, 26 student groups and three teacher educators at three Swedish teacher education institutes. The results show two overarching discourses. First, a discourse focusing on care was articulated and legitimized based on an idea that student teachers are scared of express themselves within music education and that they lack confidence in teaching music. This discourse was expressed within a framework of a culture of silence that has a protective function for student teachers lacking self-confidence. Second, a discourse focusing on benevolence was articulated and legitimized based on an idea that a student teacher’s boldness could compensate for their lack of musical skills. This discourse was expressed within a framework of a tolerant and compensatory culture of assessment which has a protective and supportive function for student teachers with a lack of musical skills. To provide a basis for new pedagogical discussions concerning progress and development of quality, the conclusion discusses critical aspects in teaching practice in music within teacher education.
Television Without Frontiers
(2021-02-04) Ejiksson, Andjeas
Television Without Frontiers revolves around a TV experiment titled Eurikon, realized in 1982 in an effort to explore the possibility of developing a public service channel spanning the entirety of Western Europe and the Mediterranean region. The experiment was initiated by the European Broadcast Union and organised as a collaboration between fifteen national public service networks. The outset of the investigation is that Eurikon marks a significant shift in geopolitical media politics, where national boundaries of broadcast media in Europe began to dissolve. Furthermore, the project explores how this shift was part of a complex web of ideological, structural, and material conditions that partly converge in Eurikon. Through a genealogical inquiry, the dissertation seeks to shed light on the significance of public service in contemporary European society. The project consists of two corresponding elements: one is a film that can be described as a documentary performance that follows a tv format; the other is a text which seeks to bring the viewer to light, as well as the relationships and institutional structures which surround the documentary performance and the act of viewing. These two elements converge and diverge as they unfold. There is also a third element, consisting of an enactment which remains only as traces in film and text. The enactment is a complex composition of negotiations and experiences based on both the fictional and the actual. The legitimacy of liberal democracy to a large extent rests on notions of a cohesive public sphere, simultaneity, and a delimited geographical continuum defined by nation, national culture, and common language. Through its critical investigations of translation, community, and the role and status of the spectator, the argument of this dissertation is that changes in these conditions have led to a crisis of legitimacy of European liberal democracy. Eurikon’s attempt to test how these structures and institutional formats can be transferred or transformed into a transnational, European context can be read as an early response to this predicament.
Kommunikation i slöjd och hantverksbaserad undervisning
(2021-01-14) Andersson, Joakim
This thesis aims to explore and analyse the different ways in which handicraft [sloyd] teachers communicate when teaching action-based knowledge, and the consequences for communication of different forms of communication between teacher and student. This dissertation has studied how teachers communicate using video documentation, MP3 recordings, interviews, stimulated recall and focus group interviews. The video-recorded material show that handicraft teachers use eight different forms of communication when giving an instruction. The results show that handicraft teachers use eight different forms of communication when giving an instruction: regular three-dimensional group instruction, verbal, verbal with tools, verbal with body language, tools only, body language only, body to body and intentional silence. Further analysis of the different forms of communication shows that they can be used in different ways in relation to abstract or concrete communication. These are called communicative resources. Abstract communication is an “as if ” action, while concrete communication involves the instructor demonstrating an action. The student’s prior knowledge and the teacher’s chosen form of communication have a central relationship to one another. The follow-up stimulated recall and interviews provided the teachers’ perspectives on why they used a particular form of communication and communicative resource, in addition to what result was intended. The analyses show some variation in the teachers’ degree of awareness of their communication and the consequences of their chosen form of communication when providing instructions for action-based knowledge. A teacher’s awareness of the communication form is significant for didactic planning of how different instructions are to be implemented while learning the handicraft. Awareness of one’s approach is a prerequisite for being able to choose suitable forms of communication for what is to be taught and for who is to be taught. If the same approach is always used, students are not given the opportunity for adapted teaching. Each group of students consists of different individuals with varying prior knowledge and different learning styles, which means the teacher’s communicative choices cannot be based solely on the task and its design but must also be adapted to what the instruction involves and who is receiving it.

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