Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar HDK-Valand

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Reading the Signs—Distinction-Making Nostalgia in Swedish Postwar Suburbs
(2025-10-03) Fanni, Maryam
Undertaken against a background of urban aestheticization processes, this doctoral research explores how Swedish postwar suburbs are imagined and how design is employed through “urban renewal” projects that seek to rebrand urban areas. The research project investigates nostalgia in particular, arguing that its social and political function in this context is to distinguish the studied suburbs from stigmatized and racialized suburbs by rendering them as historically rooted and thus “Swedish.” The central case study is the suburban center of Hökarängen in Stockholm, and the urban renewal project Hållbara Hökarängen, which took place 2011–2015. In addition, the two nearby suburban centers of Bagarmossen and Bandhagen are also studied in relation to the primary case, in order to follow the migration and developments of the concepts and practices embedded in Hållbara Hökarängen. Methodologically, the research proceeds by way of a discourse analysis of: 1) a signage system manual; 2) interviews with representatives of the property ownership and management of the studied suburb centers; and 3) other collected media, documents, and publications that are related to the renewal projects. The discourse analytical study is informed by, tested through, and intertwined with a series of situated artistic/archival interventions framed as “reparative interstices.” A combination of paranoid–reparative (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2003) operational modes, based on a double situatedness as resident– practitioner, stand as central to this methodology. The study shows the importance attributed to micro-practices and sensory and atmospheric qualities when imagining how public spaces in Swedish suburbs could be redesigned. Building on Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of distinction, the study further describes design strategies as “distinction-making,” (Trinch & Snajdr, 2017) a term employed in order to describe how design establishes narratives of an “authentic” and “progressive” character, with connotations of the (idealized) inner-city. This place identity and narrative is constructed and conveyed, inter alia, through the sense of the ‘50s as a central theme and rhetoric, which can be understood as “restorative nostalgia” (Boym, 2001). The study thus challenges the idea of the renewal project in general, and its claims to authenticity and progressiveness in particular, showing that the design practices employed in the field of urban renewal are not innocent: rather, there are powerful social and political implications and exclusionary mechanisms at work in them that need to be attended to. Furthermore, the study offers a renegotiation of the designer’s role and suggests methods for reparative practices based on a “dig-where-you-stand” positionality (Lindqvist, 2023 [1978]).
Transmundane Architecture: Architectural Control Relationships Through the Lens of More-than-Human Onto-Epistemologies, Degrowth Practices and Occulture
(2024-11-21) Gatz, Sebastian
Architecture has traditionally focused on human-centred practices, emphasising control over construction processes and creating internal environments that separate humans from their external surroundings. The growing interest in posthuman theories introduces the concept of nonhuman agency into this predominantly human-centric field. This research seeks to explore the potential tensions between traditional design practices, such as architecture, and the impacts of nonhuman agency on associated design and construction processes. Building on experimental design research at the intersection of art, design and architecture, this research seeks to contribute to posthuman design discourse by critically examining the implications of occultural and degrowth themes through the design of a specific building located in the woods of Småland. The building is a method to explore the emerging design program of the research: human-nonhuman control relationships. The construction of the building allows me to carefully attend to the frictions which arise through architectural production. Different forms of nonhuman agents and agencies are recognised: material-energetic weathering agents, such as rain and snow; embodied agents, such as wasps and snakes; and infrastructural agencies where humans and nonhumans co-create within extensive more-than-human networks. Various design experiments are conducted to create a conglomerate of insights for analysis and reflection. Occultural themes, from theosophical, magical and Buddhist literature, help translate insights from the construction site into ficto-critical and speculative texts. The findings of the research emphasise that buildings and related architectural practices often function as tools for controlling nonhumans, reinforcing human-centric perspectives. To adopt posthuman ideas in architecture, it is essential to rethink traditional boundaries and employ dynamic, responsive design processes that engage with nonhuman agents. This shift fosters more inclusive and environmentally responsible practices. The research findings highlight the importance of identifying project-specific nonhuman agents involved in human-nonhuman control relationships within architecture, as well as recognising the types of agencies that are present. Furthermore, acknowledging the roles of the human subjects involved in more-than-human design networks is crucial. The research concludes with a redefined design program centred around the leitmotifs of control, care and adaptation, which can serve as a foundation for future architectural research exploring posthuman concepts in architecture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vem vittnar för vittnet? - Det litterära verket som vittnesmål och översättning
(2020-11-06) Naderehvandi, Khashayar
Two brothers are riding the subway in Toronto. They have been spending some time in the city as guests of their family – aunts and cousins. Everyone is originally from Iran, but the brothers have lived most of their lives in Sweden. As the train rushes through the greater metropolitan area, the exasperation they feel, augmented by the sticky summer heat, starts consuming them, until they start speaking with each other. The one brother is annoyed by the way the other speaks Persian with their family. Little by little, the conversation evolves into an argument, and finally into a full-blown verbal conflict. Suddenly, they notice the other passengers are staring at them, and with a flash of shame they realize that the curiosity of the perplexed faces staring at them is because their animated argument has been conducted in Swedish – a language that sounds nothing like what would have been expected from two Middle Eastern men. The point of departure for this inquiry is the brothers’ ability and inability to express intimacy and conflict in a language that can only exist as translation. The inquiry attempts to answer the question of how this event can be written, when the context that constitutes the receiving end of the account is shaped by the colonial history of the West – that is, when the potential reader is informed by a colonialist and racist epistemology. The study explores the possibility of decolonial practices embedded in literary and poetic writing. What is found at the heart of the inquiry is the literary construction of the event, not the event itself. By putting language into play, not only as a system of signs used for communication or critical thought but also as a poet and writer’s concrete working material, the study explores what is characteristically literary in texts that are the result of artistic practices, and how such texts operate not only to report an event but to change their readers from spectators of the events to witnesses. In effect, this is an inquiry into the possibility of poetic and literary language to challenge and shift epistemic systems by way of non-symbolic language.
Noun to Verb: an investigation into the micro-politics of publishing through artistic practice
(2020-10-14) Weinmayr, Eva
This practice-based inquiry explores the social and political agency of publishing by investigating the micro-politics of making and sharing knowledges from an intersectional feminist perspective. Whether "bound" or "unbound," there has been much discussion of the political agency of the book as a medium, yet it is often assumed that the book's political potential extends primarily, indeed if not exclusively, in terms of its content. The focus of this inquiry, however, is the potentially radical, political and emancipatory ways and processes by which a publication is made (authored, edited, printed, bound), disseminated (circulated, described, cataloged), and read (used). The five projects at the core of this contribution have been developed collaboratively with different constellations of actors across the UK and Sweden and are comprised of: AND Publishing (2010–ongoing), The Library of Omissions and Inclusions (2016–18), The Piracy Project (2010–15), Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? (2015–16), and Boxing and Unboxing (2018). These five projects explore intersectional feminist publishing strategies and ask: What if we understood publication not as a finite object? What if we gave attention and value to the processes and practices that lead up to a publication? How can collective processes of publishing themselves be a tactic to practically intervene, disrupt and change existing knowledge practices? Located at the intersection of contemporary art, radical education, and institutional analysis, this inquiry critically investigates the presumption that publishing is an outright positive and progressive act, a tool of giving voice and developing emancipatory agency. It identifies the paradoxes, conflicts, and contradictions for collective knowledge practices caused by systems of validation and audit culture, by the stasis of the "finite" object and by the authority these discrete objects produce. The research stretches beyond these points by exploring the coercive mutual reciprocity between authorship, authorization, and authority. At its core, this inquiry aims to expand and test the normative criteria of what constitutes a publication. One of the emergent questions posed was whether publishing may be seen as a verb (a process) rather than a noun (i.e. the finished object). Could practice itself be understood as a form of publishing? A teaching situation, for example – a workshop, seminar, or group dialogue, where knowledge is collectively created and shared at the same time – could this also be considered as publishing? What kinds of publics are necessary or relevant to a publication process? A collaboration, a collective, a scene, a process, a dynamic, a method – can we frame any such situation or process as "publishing"? How fixed or stable does a transmission of knowledges need to be in order to be called a "publication"? And what is the function and effect of such stability? Since the communication of the research findings (in the form of a PhD thesis) itself constitutes a form of publication, I experimented with an open and dialogical mode of publishing in the form of a MediaWiki – developed “in public” from its very beginning. As such, it turns the thesis from constituting an authoritative text into a site for multiple voices with occasions of negotiation, disagreement, and consultation. Direct link to the thesis: https://cutt.ly/noun-to-verb
Designing ‘for' and ‘with' ambiguity: actualising democratic processes in participatory design practices with children
(2020-05-14) Vaneycken, Annelies
In the last thirty years, there has been an increased interest in supporting children’s participation in society, where the results of these practices may or may not have contributed to more democratic outcomes. In this thesis, I focus on the democratic character and potential of the 'processes' driving such practices, and their outcomes, which, to date, have mostly been overlooked. My inquiry is situated within the context of participatory design with children and explores how adult-initiated practices that work on children’s participation in society, can, in addition to producing a democratic outcome only, also be actualised as a democratic process. Here, a 'democratic process' is understood as a process based on child–adult interactions that respect fundamental democratic values such as freedom, equality, and justice. My design practice, in this case, the 'Public Play' project, formed the core of my fieldwork and empirical material. 'Public Play' was a series of five participatory design workshops where groups of children and I worked together on children’s participation in public space in Belgium and Sweden. A new research approach: 'research through design' interventions was developed and used for the exploring of “openness” (Eco, 1989[1962]) as well as the study of its effects by analysing some key workshop situations through a theoretical framework drawn from Gaver et al. (2003). The thesis foregrounds how ambiguity — the quality of being open to the simultaneous coexistence of several meanings — can be a resource for the actualising of a pluralistic democratic process. Exploring ambiguity revealed both the adult designer and the child participants being enabled to express their meanings when defining the content, roles, and agenda of the process, and that the actualising of a democratic process also requires certain ways of negotiating and fulfilling responsibilities. The thesis also highlights the 'particip-actor' role the children can play, as well as new roles for the facilitator when designing 'for' and 'with' ambiguity. Through my inquiry, an 'ambiguity approach' comes into being, which helps designers work with ambiguity in a more controlled way, as well as providing them with a strategic framework informed by learning-by-doing, learning-over-time, and learning-from-peers.

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