PhD and Research Seminar, May 22-24, 2024
Humboldt-Universität, Berlin

Problems of ending, stopping and closing have shaped the public discourse in recent years: Think for example of the multiple ‘ends‘ of the Covid-19-Pandemic, the ongoing discussions about the end of capitalism, history and globalization, or the unsolved environmental and social challenges caused by the inevitable exhaustion of natural resources. New cultural practices like silent quitting, cancelling, or ghosting have received increased attention, for many the idea of ‘leaving society’ became attractive again; to stop flying or eating meat was perceived as a controversial imperative. 
The aesthetic sphere did not remain unaffected by these contemporary ‘senses of endings’: apocalyptic, dystopian, and catastrophic scenarios are flourishing in literature, in exhibitions, in movies and on stage. Furthermore, there are radical forms of ecological art, posthuman theory and Nature Writing dealing with various forms of extermination and extinction in the natural world. Joan Didion’s aphorism “It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends” (Slouching towards Bethlehem, 1968), is still valid today and points to the inherent difficulty of endings, closure, and completion.
It might therefore be productive to turn away from the reckless proclamation of various ends (of art, an era, a trend) and rather look at the cultural, aesthetic, and social practices connected to endings, closure, and determination, trying to map the media specificity and the historical determinants surrounding different forms of endings.

Call for papers

Keynote speakers

• PD Dr. Sandra Fluhrer, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen Nürnberg
• PD Dr. Michael Bies, Freie Universität Berlin
• Prof. Dr. Michael Squire, University of Cambridge

The keynotes will also comment on the PhD students' texts and take part in plenary discussions. 

Narratives. The story of how a literary concept grew interdisciplinary

PhD and Research Seminar

November 22-24, 2023

Venue: Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris (CUNP), Paris

Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes… these are all narrative theorists. As literary theorists, we are used to consider narrative as a narratological term – not least due to Roland Barthes’ “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”, in which he claims that all narratives share structural features brought together in diverse ways. This utterance still holds true; however, the diversity of narratives has increased extensively in recent times, not least due to the uprise of social media where blogs, vlogg, Instagram (Pignangoli 2019) and Tik Tok has enhanced are former understanding of narratives, along with various other interdisciplinary developments. Narratives are still to be found in book-length texts, both fictional and non- fictional. But they are also present as micro-texts like SMS, Facebook-updates or on Twitter-feeds – entitled “small-stories” by Alexandra Georgakopoulou. This narrative turn (Kreiswirth 1992) has developed since the mid-1990s and is still prevalent as the term continues to reflect new technological and societal trends.

Narrative is a crucial concept within literary theory, and one of the most flexible literary phrases – transported into politics, popular culture, media, medicine, sociology, and law, to mention just a few areas. We invite you to reflect on the meaning of narratives today and within your respective fields of research. What do you mean when you write “narrative”, which narratives are prevalent within your field of research, what is the “narrative” of your PhD thesis, what is the relationship between narratives and narratology, what is the common feature of all the narratives we are surrounded by in our present world, and what is the reason behind the attraction of this once technical, and structural, literary concept. 
 

Call for papers

Keynote speakers

• Professor Sylvie Patron. 
• Professor Angela Woods.
• Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen. 

PhD and Research Seminar

May 9-11 2023

Venue: Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen

Cultural goods are today produced, disseminated, and consumed on digital platforms. Music, film, literature, plays, or concerts – or museum collections for that matter – are available wherever and whenever. Distributed in different technical formats, of varying quality, and with wildly differing ambitions, endless streams of aesthetic outputs are consumed 24/7 in a plethora of formats, be it photos on Snapchat, dance stunts on TikTok, interactive electronic poetry, or blog-based creative writing – not to mention the more conventional formats such as music files on Spotify, movies on Netflix, videos on YouTube or novels on Kindle. Devoid of anything resembling what Walter Benjamin called “aura”, and incompatible with the public sphere out of which modern art once emerged, these goods exist by virtue of an algorithmic affect economy without which they would stop generating the surplus value that is their condition of existence.

Call for papers
 

Keynote speakers

• Olga Goriunova, Professor, Royal Holloway University, London
• Nanna Bonde-Thylstrup, Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen

Aesthetic Crossings: Materialities and Conceptualizations

November 16-18, 2022

Venue: Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris, CUNP, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France

Aesthetic crossings are the ordrer of the day. Across media, formats, and techniques, artistic practices are thoroughly marked by adaptations, appropriations and remediations. Whether in the form of TV series, graphic novels, and movies or the more minute operations of lyrical ekphrasis, musical arrangements, video art, or installation art, an aesthetics of re-appropriation is an increasingly noticeable as a feature of the current art scenes, visual, auditive, or literary.

PhD students from TBLR member universities are invited to attend and present their work. In addition, the course will be open to a limited number of students from other universities.
 

Call for papers

Keynote Speakers 

• Prof. Knut Ebeling, Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, tba
• Prof. Ariane Hudelet, Université Paris Cité / LARCA, tba
• Prof. Peter Szendy, Brown University, tba

Programme 

The program will consist of plenary key-note lectures (60-minute presentation, 30-minute discussion) and group work. Participant papers will be presented in a conventional conference setting (15-minute presentation, 15-minute discussion). In addition, there will be text reading sessions. Participants can choose between presenting their own work or a theoretical text form the reading list for a text session.

Working language: English

Credits

Credits:2/5 ECTS. Participation and presentation will result in 2 ECTS, working over and submitting an edited version of the presentation (10-12 pages) after the seminar, will yield an additional 3 ECTS. Signed and authorized course diplomas will upon request be bestowed upon each PhD student participant having completed the course.

Heterochronias

November 23-25, 2021

Venue: Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris, CUNP, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France

“Time is out of joint”. Non-human time is the order of the day, be it the fatal geological time of the Anthropocene or the nanoseconds of the algorithms informing our mediated realities. Beset by temporalities beyond the sensorial and cognitive registers of homo sapiens, the challenges facing the work of culture today echo those of Swift’s proverbial hero – latter-day Gullivers, we are forced to cope with being too fast or too slow, too big or too small.

PhD students from TBLR member universities are invited to attend and present their work. In addition, the course will be open to a limited number of students from other universities.

Call for papers 

Keynote Speakers 

• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Chargé de recherche CNRS, Author (with C. Bonneuil) of The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History and Us, London, Verso, 2016. Title to be announced.
• Frederik Tygstrup, prof. comparative literature, University of Copenhagen, “Money is time”

Programme 

The program will consist of plenary key-note lectures (60-minute presentation, 30-minute discussion) and group work. Participant papers will be presented in a conventional conference setting (15-minute presentation, 15-minute discussion). In addition, there will be text reading sessions. Participants can choose between presenting their own work or a theoretical text form the reading list for a text session.

Working language: English

Credits

Credits:2/5 ECTS. Participation and presentation will result in 2 ECTS, working over and submitting an edited version of the presentation (10-12 pages) after the seminar, will yield an additional 3 ECTS. Signed and authorized course diplomas will upon request be bestowed upon each PhD student participant having completed the course.

Memory and aesthetics

November 11th-13th 2020

Venue: Online

Memory Studies is an important, growing and quickly developing field. This is not only evident in the palpable increase of academic publications dealing with the issue of memory in a variety of subjects, and the rapid growth of international organizations such as the Memory Studies Association, but also contentious public debates surrounding for instance issues of commemoration and collective memory. In the humanities today, Memory Studies is one of the key interdisciplinary meeting places between researchers from different subjects, and part of its cachet stems from its obvious relevance to issues of high public interest. An important strand of the field concerns trauma, both as an individual, diagnostic phenomenon and as a culturally constructed discourse. Increasingly, questions of mediation are coming to the fore within Memory Studies. This concerns for instance the memory of the Holocaust in a time period where primary witnesses are no longer living (postmemory), the mediation of historical events through popular culture (prosthetic memory), and how the memory of new events are constructed in dialogue with memories of past events that are both similar and dissimilar (multidirectional memory).

This seminar will scrutinize the connection between memory and aesthetics. Reflecting the ancient Greek meaning of aesthesis as referring to sense perception, some of the key debates in this imbrication revolve around the connection between memory impressions or traces, on the one hand, and image, sound, touch and the other senses on the other hand. Visual images are prominent conveyors of memory, whether they are mediated by the visual arts or popular media, or analyzed in terms of individual, cognitive experience. Images are also part and parcel of the literary realm. While Memory Studies has to some degree distanced itself from its close connection with post-structuralist literary criticism in the form of the theories developed in the 1990s by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and others, literature remains intrinsically connected to memory. This is for instance evident through literature’s dealings with death and mourning as well as its ever-ongoing process of canon formation and development.

Both critical engagement with fundamental theoretical questions and more specific, empirical issues will be part of the proceedings. Key events such as 9/11 and World War II, the institution of slavery, and other points of convergence of national or international will be addressed, insofar as their commemoration impinges upon the development of relevant theoretical issues. Participants are encouraged to submit paper proposals in any field of research with relevance to the understanding and use of memory in relation to aesthetics. Participants are invited to reflect on questions concerning the who, why and how of memory and how these pertain to their dissertation subjects empirically, analytically or epistemologically.

Keynote speakers:

• Charlotte Klonk, Humboldt University of Berlin
• Laszlo Muntean, Radboud University Nijmegen
• Juliane Prade-Weiss, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

TBLR participants:

• Knut Ove Eliassen, NTNU
• Charles I. Armstrong, University of Agder
• Unni Langås, University of Agder

Credits: 2/5 ECTS. Participation and presentation will result in 2 ECTS, working over and submitting and editing version of the presentation (10--‐12 pages) after the seminar, will yield an additional 3 ECTS. Signed and authorized course diplomas will be bestowed upon each PhD student participant on completion of the course.

Since the event is online, there are no travel or accommodation costs. There will be an option of having lunch while being online with the rest of the participants, but this will be voluntary.

From heterotopias to heterochronias: CANCELLED

Call for Papers

“Time is out of joint”. Non-human time is the order of the day, be it the fatal geological time of the Anthropocene or the nanoseconds of the algorithms informing our mediated realities. Beset by temporalities beyond the sensorial and cognitive bandwidth of humans, the challenges facing the work of culture today echo those of Swift’s proverbial hero – latter-day Gullivers, we are too fast or too slow, too big or too small.

Inextricably linked to the notion of borders and growth, cultures are recognized by the way they shape spaces and finalize the temporal horizons under which they exist – this is the construction of life worlds and communities and the raw material of artistic creation and investigation. In the final account the work of culture is the production and maintenance of forms of space-time continuums, thus literature and the arts provide privileged meta-spaces for the development of tools to map and navigate the chronotopes of cultural time-space.

In “The Time of the World Image” Martin Heidegger famously claimed that the epistemology of modern rationality rested on the principle of representatio – the world was a reality to be measured, mapped and manipulated, and in the final account, objectified through representations. If the homogenization of space and time remains a hallmark of modern thought, the production of heterotopias, “different spaces”, was nevertheless an unavoidable byproduct – places organized under different laws than those of the predominant scientific, political and economic practices.

While the protocols of space and time have always been a matter of content and strife – maps and clocks are technologies for imposing spatial and temporal orders – the present predicament seems to be characterized by two main tendencies: the pervasive and precarious reality of processes beyond the scope of the human (anthropogenic geomorphology and the temporalities of algorithmic governmentality), and the increasing complexities of experienced time. The temporalities that traverse our lives are becoming increasingly more difficult to negotiate.

Literature and art explore, map and experiment with the space in which we move and the time in which we exist. If anything, contemporary art practices bear witness to the polytemporality of the present, the increasing heterogeneity of the timescapes we inhabit.

This provides the backdrop for our seminar as a possible analytical framework for capturing the specificities of the aesthetic experience of late modernity and identifying the matters of concern that mark contemporary art and literature. With these perspectives as a starting point, participants are invited to reflect on notions of the historical complexities of temporal and spatial form and how these pertain to their dissertation subjects empirically, analytically or epistemologically.

PhD students from TBLR member universities are invited to attend and present their work. In addition, the course will be open to a limited number of students from other universities. The number of participants is limited to 18.

Keynote speakers:

• Nicolas Bourriaud 
• Wolfgang Ernst 
• Antoinette Rouvroy 
   

After Fiction 

Call for papers, joint PhD-Seminar, Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies and Text, Image, Sound, Space, Norwegian Researcher School in the Humanities, in collaboration with the University of Chicago.

• November 1-3, 2019, University of Chicago, Hyde Park Campus
• Venues: Nov 1: The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
• Nov 2-3: Cochrane Woods Art Center (Department of Art History)
• Application deadline: Sep. 1, 2019

Call for Papers

After Fiction

“That which, or something that, is imaginatively invented; feigned existence, event, or state of things; invention as opposed to fact.” This is the OED definition of fiction.In modern art studies, this understanding of the divide between the fictional and what is real is essential to a number of fundamental concepts such as representation, imagination, invention, plot, fantasy, and many more. Fiction, indeed, is a fundamental tenet in the basic understanding of what art is – whether as something superior to mere facts, or as something that is dispensed of conforming to the reign of the factual.

This understanding, however, seems to be increasingly challenged in today’s culture. In the realm of art, we are witnessing a rapid growth of works and events that overtly and provocatively use and display non-fictional forms, claims and materials. Documentaries, testimonies and re-mediations of existing visual, aural and textual matter play a predominant role in contemporary art, and the recording, arrangement and re-framing of allegedly “real” materials now often seem more important in art production than imaginative invention. Inversely, the social realms of information, politics and economy are getting still more dependent on forms and ideas that bear more resemblance to “spectacle” (in Guy Debord’s sense of the word) than to actually assignable facts on the ground. Information is becoming instrumental in strategic warfare agendas, political claims address affects of imaginary scenarios, assessment of bonds and stocks becomes relative to a finely tuned set of values, faith professions and expectations, and so on.

In this situation, as the neatly delineated “realms” of the invented and the factual become increasingly entangled and blurred, our perception of fiction also changes. When fiction loses its distinction, either everything becomes fiction, or the idea of fiction itself eventually becomes irrelevant. 

With this seminar, we will address the changing perception of fiction and the fictive from three different angles. We will assess and discuss a number of traditional understandings of fiction and their underpinnings and premises, on theoretical, methodological and analytical levels. Secondly, we will examine a number of recent cultural objects and practices, where the divide between the fictive and the real is contested, negotiated or recast. And finally, we will look at some examples of how the conceptual and institutional outline of fiction have operated in an array of historical discourses and art practices. Participants are encouraged to submit paper proposals in any field of research with relevance to the understanding of fiction and its contemporary transformations.

Taking these perspectives as a starting point, participants are invited to reflect on notions of fiction, fictionality, fact, reality and the real and how these pertain to their dissertation subjects empirically, analytically or epistemologically.

Keynote speakers:

• Patrick Jagoda, University of Chicago
• Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago
• Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois, Chicago

The Afterlife of the Object

European Summer School in Cultural Studies

University of Copenhagen, 18-22 June 2018

Call for papers 

We will view objects, not only loved, but also hated, ignored, collected, thrown away, performed, written, rewritten, translated, lost and found. The “object” of our study will be considered broadly, including but not limited to art, books, collections, fetishes, poems, letters, song, and beyond.

For example, in “The Daughters of the Moon,” Italo Calvino imagines the afterlife of earth’s only permanent natural satellite when she has she become too old and worn to be seen as “full.” Calvino’s story is a troubling allegory on consumerism, ecology, gender, destruction and desire, written in the ripe year of 1968.  

In Slaves and Other Objects (2004), the classicist Page duBois looks at our erasure of slaves as an idealization of the afterlife of ancient Greece, resulting in a collective blind-spot (a de-realization) that has fed and still feeds troubling views on race, including America’s nostalgia for the antebellum South.

Han Kang's 1997 short story "The Fruit of My Woman" takes the afterlife of animals as objects of food as entry into becoming plant.

Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive puts a stop to mortgaging our future through the body of the child in an acceptance of the death drive through the afterlives of Hitchcock’s films.

The summer school week will feature keynote lectures (to be announced) as well as short papers presented by PhD candidates and other young scholars and a series of seminars in which we will closely examine the texts mentioned above, along with other works, including Dan Chaisson’s book of poems, entitled The Afterlife of Objects and Michael Ann Holly’s The Melancholy Art.

PhD students are credited 3,8 ECTS if certain requirements are met. For more information, please contact the organizers.

The ESSCS is an annual network-based event offering interdisciplinary research training in the fields of art and culture. The network comprises the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Copenhagen, University of Giessen, Goldsmiths College, Université de Paris VIII, the Lisbon Consortium, Ljubljana Institute for Humanities, University of Trondheim and Catholic University Rio de Janeiro.

Organizers

Frederik Tygstrup, Rune Gade and Carol Mavor.

Marx revisited: Temporalities of neo-liberalism

Paris, 9. – 11. januar 2019

The 2018 bicentenary of Karl Marx sees a renewed interest in his writings. If the beginning of the new millennium marked a low point in Marxist critical theory’s academic standing – epitomized in Bruno Latour’s highly influential 2001 essay, “Why has critique run out of steam?” –, the shock of the 2008 financial collapse and ensuing debt crises paved the way for an unexpected comeback. Given the dominant neo-liberal paradigm’s inability to provide the tools – in theory as in practice – to cope with the most pressing economic issues of the current crisis, Marx resurfaced as the central theoretical resource for a critical approach to the economic order underpinning and formatting the lived reality of 21st century capitalist society.

Keynotes

Keynote addresses will be delivered by Michel Feher (Goldsmith) and Jacob Lund (Aarhus Universitet).

Program

The program will consist of plenary key-note lectures (45-minute presentation, 45-minute discussion) and group work. Participant papers will be presented in a conventional conference setting (15-minute presentation, 15-minute discussion). In addition, there will be text reading sessions. Participants can choose between presenting their own work or a theoretical text for a text session.

Working language: English.

Credits: 2/5 ECTS. Participation and presentation will result in 2 ECTS, working over and submitting and editing a version of the presentation (12-15 pages) after the seminar, will yield an additional 3 ECTS. Signed and authorized course diplomas will be bestowed upon each PhD student participant on completion of the course.

Call for papers

Situated knowing: The economies of representing/ representations

New York, 8. – 10. mai 2018: 

Venue: The Norwegian Church, 317 East 52nd Street

For Call for papers ta kontakt med knut.ove.eliassen@ntnu.no

Knowledge is situated. In the wake of the critical epistemologies of the 1960s – such as Jürgen Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things or Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions –, it became commonplace to consider that whatever is known is known by ways of representations. Moreover, that these are bound to be relative to where, when, how and who, in other words to specific epistemological economies.

Henceforth, knowing something about something inevitably comes with a caveat introducing both an attentivness and a reflexivity to the specificity of forms and protocols of knowledge and their internal and external dynamics. In order to gauge what might condition, facilitate or impose such knowledge critical attention focuses on howknowledge is known. Critical notions of class, gender and ethnicity have served to provide frameworks for such reflections, making the forms of knowledge less self-evident by mapping it onto larger economic, political and cultural maps. One of the powerful lessons of Critical Theory is the imperative to reflect not only upon the content of knowledge (what we know) or its protocols (how we know it), but also upon its affordances (what does it make possible) and politics (what does it serve).

This reflexive turn has entailed that we consider knowing less in propositional terms, as in traditional epistemology, than in the terms of systems of representations and their specific economies. To know is to partake in an economy of representations where the establishment of epistemological objects cannot be disentangled from the subjective positions they make possible, from where they can be experienced, apprehended, and problematized.

Contemporary cultural analysis has contributed widely to contextualize and historicize forms of knowledge over a broad range of topics, from medicine to law, from religion to economy, from geography to philosophy. It has also, and not less notably, thoroughly elaborated the social and epistemological frameworks underpinning the forms of knowing something about the world inherent in artistic representations produced in literature, art, performance and music. 

In this seminar, we will revisit some of the theoretical and methodological discussions about how to unpack the different aspects of the situatedness of knowledge by analytically constructing the economies of representing formatting and permeating everyday life, scientific discourses and art.

By focusing on representations, we will moreover discuss how to overcome the traditional gap between epistéméand techné, between “knowing what” and “knowing how”, as Ryle had it. We will work with situations of knowledge in both of the two, related, senses: how we can construe the contexts in which knowledge production is situated, and how we analyse the practices through which knowledge emerges from situations where representations are enacted.

Taking these concepts as a starting point, participants are invited to reflect on situations of knowledge pertaining to their dissertation subjects, and on the relationship between contextual situatedness and poetological situations in selected representations.

Keynote speakers:

• Emily Apter
• Devin Fore 
• Ben Kafka 

PhD students from TBLR member universities are invited to attend and present their work. In addition, the course will be open to a limited number of students from other universities. The number of participants is limited to 20.

TBLR participants (confirmed): Knut Ove Eliassen, NTNU; and Frederik Tygstrup, Københavns universitet.

Program

The program will consist of plenary key-note lectures (45-minute presentation, 45-minute discussion) and group work. Participant papers will be presented in a conventional conference setting (15-minute presentation, 15-minute discussion). In addition, there will be text reading sessions. Participants can choose between presenting their own work or a theoretical text for a text session.

• Working language: English.
• Credits: 2/5 ECTS. Participation and presentation will result in 2 ECTS, working over and submitting and editing version of the presentation (10-12 pages) after the seminar, will yield an additional 3 ECTS.
• Signed and authorized course diplomas will be bestowed upon each PhD student participant on completion of the course.
• Hotel: Hotel reservations will be made by the participants themselves. Up to five nights will be reimbursed (up to 200 US$ per night) for students from the institutions participating in TBLR.
• Meals: Lunches all three days are covered by TBLR, so is the dinner of Thursday night.

Forms of life: Vitalisms, bio-politics and new ecologies

Paris, 9.-12. januar 2018

Over the last decades “forms of life” has gained currency as a signature term for exploring changing conceptions and perceptions of “life”. While inevitably drawing on earlier conceptual elaborations (Wittgenstein, Canguilhem, Foucault), from the vantage point of the 21st century, the concept provides a means to articulate a contemporary experience: where the blurring of the nature-culture divide is less a critical position than a characteristic trait of the infrastructure of everyday reality in the Anthropocene.

In 2016, The International Geological Congress received the recommendation to formally designate the current epoch, characterized by increasing levels of greenhouse gases, acidification of the oceans, rapid extinction of biomes, and manmade sediment production exceeding that of other sources, as “The Anthropocene”. In its July 2017 issue, Nature revealed that a team of American researchers had stored a film sequence in a bacteria’s genome using the DNA code’s inheritance units, thus realizing what Rudy Rucker over 25 years ago coined as “wetware”. Under such conditions, all cultural and political issues are necessarily framed by “the question of technology” and “forms of life” cannot but be articulations of the current political economy of living beings.

In various ways, art and artists have responded to the shifting realities and their immediate effects not merely on human life, but on life forms in general. From Eco-criticism, Eco-poetry and Eco-art, to Object-Oriented Ontology, Zoo-poetics, and laboratories for the “new we”, manifestos and charters abound. Thus, art, literature and theory not merely interpret but respond to and intervene in the current situation and its pressing concerns. What we witness are ongoing explorations and negotiations of our notions of what life and community entail, contemplating the outsides and insides of the current life forms and their respective ecologies.

We invite the participants to focus on how literary, aesthetic and cultural studies interact with and respond to the life sciences and pressing issues of ecology. What happens when the distinction between the micro-politics of the biological body and the macro-politics of the community become blurred in a general bio-political economy? What are consequences for “life” when the nature-culture distinction becomes a complex hyper-object, an aggregate where traditional distinctions have ceased to be immediately meaningful? How do we need to revise our notions of communication, when media become elemental, and elements become media? How do literature and the arts respond to anthropology that cannot be conceived independent of an increasingly subcutaneous technology?

To address these and related questions, we suggest the following: forms of life, vitalisms, bio-politics, and new ecologies, as tools to think upon the on-going re-mapping of the human and non-human, matter and mind, people and things, art and life, forms and processes.

Taking these concepts as a starting point, we invite the participants to articulate some of the specific traits of the aesthetic experience of the 21st century and identify and discuss matters of concern that mark contemporary art and literature.

PhD students from TBLR member universities are invited to attend and present their work. In addition, the course will be open to a limited number of students from other universities. The number of participants is limited to 18.

Key-note speakers:

• Cathrine Mallabou, Kingston University, Irvine University
• Jens Hauser, Copenhagen University

Call for papers

Living together

Bergen, 14. – 18. august 2017

TBLR og ESSCS ønsker velkommen til ph.d.-kurs i Bergen 14. – 18. august 2017.

Barthes, med Agamben og Derrida: Sommerkurset tar utgangspunkt i Roland Barthes' forelesningsserie fra 1977, “Comment vivre ensemble? – Sur l’idiorrythmie”, som han holdt på Collège de France.

Se nettside for ph.d.-kurset "Living together"

Call for papers

New York City, 18 – 20 mai 2017: What is Old Media?

Felles ph.d.-seminar, Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies and Tekst, bilde, lyd, rom, Nasjonal forskerskole i humaniora:

Hva er kvalitet? København, 10 – 14 januar 2017

Den nasjonale forskerskolen Tekst, bilde, lyd, rom (TBLR) – Fortolkning og teoriutveksling

Universitetet i Agder | Universitetet i Bergen | NTNU | Universitetet i Oslo | Universitetet i Stavanger | Universitetet i Tromsø

Schæffergården,  Fonden for  dansk-norsk samarbeid

København, 10 – 14 januar, 2017

For Call for papers, ta kontakt med knut.ove.eliassen@ntnu.no

Quality never goes out of style, forkynte i sin tid i reklamene til jeans-produsenten Levi’s. Kan man si det samme om det estetiske kvalitetsbegrepet? Er dette en vurderingskategori som alltid har vært der? Har den alltid hatt den betydning den har i dag? Og hva er i så fall begrepets egentlige gehalt? Hos Levi’s synes dette å være ganske klart: Buksene er robuste, de har kvalitet, og derfor er de paradoksalt nok, alltid på moten. Ett synes iallfall sikkert, i dag er kvalitet på moten. Om det er kunst, helsetjenester, undervisning eller forskning, synes en offentlig konsensus å gjelde: Kvalitetssikring. Forbrukernes daglige liv har forvandlet seg fra mer eller mindre passivt konsum til å bli en løpende dialog med detaljister og produsenter, hvor enhver interaksjon med tilbyder utløser spørsmål om kundens tilfredshet med produktet og salgsprosessen. Samtidig stilles ansatte i undervisningssektor, forskning og kunstverden overfor allehånde krav om prosedyrer for å sikre kvalitet og standarder.

Sett fra de estetiske vitenskapers hold, inviterer kvalitetsbegrepets allestedsnærværelse til flere slags analyser. «Hva er kvalitet?» kan for eksempel brukes til å formulere det gamle spørsmålet om kunstens verdi. Spørsmålet har blitt stilt opp gjennom historien på flere forskjellige måter, skjønt det tidligere var andre begreper som leverte målestokkene – det skjønne, det sanne, det moderne, det oppbyggelige etc. En inndragelse av disse vurderingskriteriene innbyrdes forskjeller vil kunne brukes til å belyse hvilke kriterier som reelt er operative i kvalitetsbegrepet, hvilke ontologiske implikasjoner det har, og dets styrker og svakheter som estetisk, analytisk og vurderende kategori.

Kvalitetsbegrepets aktualitet lar seg spore tilbake til nittitallet og til innføringen av det som ofte omtales som New Public Management. Frem til da ble begrepet kun sporadisk brukt i den estetiske og litterære diskusjonen (eller i kulturforvaltning og skoleverk for den sakens skyld). Derfor kan det være verdt å drøfte hvilke interesser som reflekteres i investeringen i kvalitetsbegrepet? I hvilken grad bidrar disse til å legge føringer på diskusjonen? På hvem som kan delta i den? På dens sannheter? På dens virkninger? Og hvilke følger har denne systeminitierte demokratiseringen av feedback på de tradisjonelle autoritetene i den estetiske debatten, for eksempel kritikerne?

Ettersom «kvalitet» i den grad figurerer på en rekke forskjellige områder, gir det også god grunn til spørre om begrepet har samme innhold i IKEAs formel «hverdagskvalitet», i Røe-Isaksens «kvalitetsmelding» eller i en formel som «kunstneriske kvaliteter». Dette gir i neste omgang anledning til å stille spørsmålet om forholdet mellom tekniske standarder og estetisk kvalitet, og dermed også om hvilke protokoller som legges til grunn for å bestemme hva som til enhver tid gjelder som kvalitet. Dette gjelder ikke minst på universitetet og innenfor den humanistiske forskningen. Disse og andre spørsmål vil danne bakgrunn for TBLRs seminar, «Hva er kvalitet?».

Foredragsholdere: Kjersti Bale Universitetet i Oslo, Ansa Løstrup, Aarhus Universitet, Sidsel Nedlund, Det kongelige danske kunstakademi, Tue Andersen Nexø, litteraturkritiker, København universitet.

Deltagere fra TBLR: Ina Blom, Universitetet i Oslo; Janne Stigen Drangsholt, Universitetet i Stavanger; Knut Ove Eliassen, NTNU; Adriana Margareta Dancus Universitetet I Agder; Lars Sætre, Universitetet i Bergen; og Frederik Tygstrup, Københavns universitet.

Program

Programmet vil bestå av plenumsforelesninger (45 minutter + 30 minutter diskusjon) og seminararbeid fokusert på deltakernes innsendte paper. Forskerskolen begynner med introduksjon og velkomstforelesning på ettermiddagen tirsdag 10. januar og avslutter med en oppsummerende morgensesjon og lunsj den 14. januar.

Ph.D.-studenter fra universitetene som deltar I TBLR-samarbeidet er invitert til å delta. Utover dette vil kurset være åpent for et begrenset antall studenter fra Københavns Universitet og Aarhus Universitet. Antallet deltagere er begrenset til 20 (i tillegg kommer stab og gjesteforelesere, i alt 10).

Ettersom antallet plasser er begrenset må de som ønsker å delta sende inn et søknadsskjema og et kort abstract (300 ords) innen 1. desember. Om antallet skulle overstige 20, vil et utvalg gjøres på bakgrunn av relevans, tidligere deltagelse i TBLRs kurs, hvor langt man har kommet i PhD.-løpet. Utover dette vil tidlige søknader bli prioritert. Søkerne vil få bekreftet deltagelse i løpet av 10 dager.

Innlegg skal sendes inn senest en uke før seminaret, slik at disse på forhånd kan distribueres til de andre deltagerne.

Arbeidsspråk: Gitt emnets på mange måter særlige skandinaviske karakter, vil arbeidsspråket i dette TBLR-kurset være norsk og dansk.

Credits: Deltagelse med innlegg gir 5 ECTS (uten innlegg 2 ECTS). Signerte kursdiplom vil bli tilsendt Ph.d.-studentene etter gjennomført kurs.

Sted: Schæffergården, Jægersborg Allé 166, 2820 Gentofte, Danmark. Schæffergården eies og drives av Fonden for dansk-norsk samarbeid.

Opphold: Fonden for dansk-norsk samarbeid subsidierer oppholdet med 50% og setter således TBLR i stand til å tilby deltagerne et fullfinansiert opphold med full pensjon. Vi har et begrenset antall plasser.  Kunne derfor noen av deltagerne tenke seg å dele et værelse, vil vi være i stand til å tilby flere plass på kurset (det er derfor satt av et eget felt i påmeldingsskjemaet til avkryssing for dem som eventuelt kunne tenke seg å dele værelse).

Reise: Ph.d.-studentene forventes å dekke sine egne reiseutgifter.

Lesemateriale: Vil bli gjort tilgjengelig for deltagerne senest en måned før seminaret.

Avhandlingsformer: Artikkelbasert eller monografi?

TBLR Forskerutdanningskurs i akademisk skriving

UiT Norges arktiske universitet, 29. og 30. september 2016

Doktorgradsstudenter kan i dag selv velge om de vil skrive en monografi, eller en artikkel basert avhandling. Men hva innebærer dette valget, hvilke fordeler og ulemper har de ulike formatene, hvordan motta tilbakemelding innen hver av genrene, og hvordan bli ferdig innen normert tid?

Keynotes: 

• Professor Christine Hamm, Nordisk litteraturvitenskap ved Institutt for lingvistiske, litterære og estetiske studier (LLE) ved Universitetet i Bergen,
• Professor Anne Gjelsvik, ansatt ved Institutt for kunst og medievitenskap ved NTNU,
• Førsteamanuensis Cathinka Dahl Hambro ved English Writing Centre på Institutt for språk og kultur ved UiT Norges arktiske universitet.  

Professor Anne Gjelsvik:

 «Forskning som skriving». Hva betyr forskjellen på en monografi og en artikkelbasert avhandling for hva slags forskning du gjør? I sitt foredrag vil hun diskutere forskjellene mellom monografi og artiklerbaserte avhandlinger fra et epistemologisk utgangspunkt: hva slags kunnskap kan du oppnå i de ulike genrene og hvilke forventninger og krav møtes du med fra forskersamfunnet når du skriver forskning. Hun vil også ta opp forskjellene på en kappe til en artikkelsamling og en innledning til en monografi, med vekt på hva en sammenbindingsartikkel eller kappe er og hvordan den bør tenkes inn i prosjektet som helhet.  

Førsteamanuensis Cathinka Dahl Hambro: 

«Erfaringer knyttet til skriving av monografi». Hva er fordelene og ulempene ved å skrive doktoravhandling som monografi? Cathinka Dahl Hambro er leder for UiTs English Writing Centre og disputerte selv i 2013. I dette innlegget vil hun fortelle om egne erfaringer og utfordringer knyttet til skriving av monografibasert doktoravhandling. Hun vil også forsøke å gi noen råd og tips til hvordan man kan strukturere egen skriveprosess for å komme i mål med avhandlingen innen fastsatt frist.

Professor Christine Hamm:

«Skriving er tenkning: Fra artikkelsamling til avhandling» . Hvordan kan forskning utvikle seg fra usammenhengende detaljobservasjoner til sammenhengende innsikter i estetiske uttrykk. Med utgangspunkt i egne erfaringer og i tråd med et gjennomtenkt syn på litteraturvitenskapelig metode anbefaler hun å konsentrere forskningen om artikler i første omgang, før de skrives om til bok. Men hva er forskjellen mellom en tidsskriftartikkel og et kapittel i en monografi? Hva er de respektive sjangerkravene, hva er forskningsgevinstene? Hamm vil også diskutere ulike strategier til å skrive gode artikler, og med bakgrunn i rollen som redaktør for Edda 2011–2015 fortelle litt om måten redaktører arbeider med innkomne manus på.

Sted: A-3021 ved Fakultet for humaniora, samfunnsvitenskap og lærerutdanning (HSL-fakultetet)

Tid: Torsdag 29. september 2016 09.15-17.00 og fredag 30. september 09.15-15.00.

Studiepoeng: Kurset gir 5 stp. med paper, og 2 uten.

Tekstbidrag: Et abstract på 500 ord skal sendes inn senest 10. september fra hver av deltakerne. Studentene skal så sende inn et 10-15 sider langt utdrag fra doktorgradsarbeidet. For de som nylig har begynt på stipendperioden, er det mulig å levere inn en utvidet prosjektbeskrivelse. Både abstract og paperet vil bli distribuert til alle som har meldt seg på kurset. Alle forventes å ha lest abstract, paper og pensumlitteraturen til kurset.

Kursform: Kurset vil innledes med foredrag av keynotes. Deretter vil ph.d.-studentene få anledning til å gi en 20 minutters muntlig presentasjon basert på det innsendte materialet. Det vil deretter bli åpnet for kommentarer og spørsmål fra de øvrige tilstedeværende. 

Hotel: Rom er reservert ved Clarion Hotel The Edge, Kaigata 6 frem til 15. august. Oppgi navn på forskerskolen TBLR ved bestilling av rom.

Konferansemiddag: torsdag 29. september klokka 19.30 på Kystens hus, Stortorget 1.

Utgifter: TBLR dekker lunsj to dager, festmiddag, samt (for tilreisende) hotell m/ frokost to netter. Du må selv betale utgifter knyttet til transport.

Kurset er åpent for ph.d.-studenter i litterære og estetiske fag fra den nasjonale forskerskolen Tekst, bilde, lyd og roms medlemsinstitusjoner (UiB, NTNU, UiA, UiS, UiT, UiO). Kurset ønsker også ph.d.-studentenes veiledere velkommen.

Figura

In cooperation with the Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies TBLR is happy to present a joint PhD-Seminar to be held in New York City May 3-5, 2016.

In the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin prophesized that the increasing amount of writing surrounding us in modern cities would eventually change our mode of reading, from absorption in textual worlds to a distracted recognition of surface values, like reading hieroglyphs rather than texts. Hundred years later, our immersion in signs of all sorts coming towards us on innumerable and ubiquitous surfaces raises the stakes of Benjamin’s intuition: what is the logic of our interaction with the panoply of signifying processes that are becoming still more deeply ingrained with the machineries of social reproduction today?

We have sign processes conveying information, creating meaning, producing reference and visibility, distributing value, processing commodities, and much more. Faced with this saturation, we are compelled to reconsider our understanding of what signs do, to reassess the scope of Saussure’s famous query into “the life of signs in the life of society.” Signs are expressions, emerging from a surface, and we have huge theoretical and methodological resources to gauge the ways in which they confect meaning and construct reference. We still need, however, to develop our understanding of a third modality of sign processes, namely how expressions affect us. To accommodate this need, this seminar will heuristically suggest considering signs as figura, expressions that combine aspects of meaning, reference and affect.

Invited speakers

Claudia Brodsky (Princeton) and D.N. Rodowick (Chicago) - TBC

The seminar will be held at the Norwegian Church in New York.

TBLR will cover up to five hotel nights for PhD students from institutions participating in the TBLR (up to a maximum of 200 US$ per night). Also included is the lunch on the first day of the seminar and the goodbye dinner Thursday evening. There is a limited number of places available (6 for the time being); early applications will be prioritized.

Knut Ove Eliassen and Frederik Tygstrup

What is contemporary?