Research Catalogue

The overall purpose of this thesis is to perform and propose diffractive methodology as a means for exploring, reading, learning, and understanding systematic theological discourses beyond binary and oppositional thinking. This methodology is based on performative strategies and feminist new materialist theory, with a specific focus on Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological agential realism theory; it can also be considered an alternative to a more traditional academic reflexive methodological approach, thus allowing for an infinite number of explorative methods to be developed within its umbrella definition of diffractive methodology. The diffractive analysis in this study is shaped as an intra-active entangled reading of Graham Ward’s Engaged Theology, through Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Performance Aesthetics, and the method I call Voicing-as-Performative-Theology. This thesis is divided into three parts. Part I unfolds relevant terminology. Part II performs the actual diffractive reading analysis. Part III consists of a concluding essay summarizing the outcome of this study’s diffractive reading, as well as opening up suggestions for how diffractive methodology can be applied for developing more performative and diffractive methods as part of future theological research. The thesis will be presented at University College Stockholm (EHS), in January 8 2024.

In this work, I want to show some excerpts from my grandmother's patriarchal resistance. The narrative and the photographs will be at the center. They will clarify Esters Lindberg's attempt to negotiate and renegotiate her position within the usual norm. The narratives and photographs will hopefully give an expanded understanding of what it could be like to live as a woman with a desire for freedom in Sweden during the early 20th century.

With Operative Fiction, we introduce a practice of spatial storytelling driven by the dynamics of prepositions rather than verb-centric narratives. Here, the textual body becomes embedded in the medial spatiality of a printed book, digital interface, or performance space. The physical or virtual site of the text thus becomes integral to the storytelling process. Spatial production methods merge into the texture of the text itself; simultaneously, the text reshapes the unfolding of space, place, and site. The material and procedural qualities of the text actively engage and activate the digital interface as a site of narrative unfolding, intertwining textual and spatial experiences. We begin our first exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s What the Probes Report, transposing the text from the printed page (FLORA, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. The non-human protagonist – emerging through and evolving within the text – disrupts subject-centred narration. It becomes entangled in the linguistic and scenic fabric of its own development, thus, through its procedural logic and function, becoming an active agent in its own staging. A line, speculatively re-enacting the machine's operations, simultaneously traces the topographic texture of the digital landscape. Using a drawing technique typically applied in performance design drafts, we explore the friction between staging and spacing by deploying minimally visible images and textual cues of direction. The operational plasticity of these technical images enables dramaturgical intensities to gather (staging), while also allowing the story to disperse through the digital architecture of the exposition into hyperlinked virtual spaces (spacing). Alongside a linear reading mode, which follows the story’s original chronology, we propose a contingent reading mode activated via time codes. These time codes function both as compositional elements within the drawing and as hypertextual links. They suggest the duration and shape of a staged terrain, occasionally layering multiple time zones within a single topographic entity. In this way, the timelines act as more-than-texts, generating a multiplicity of positions and proximities, and intertwining temporal aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.

The Bachelors’s Programme in Dance Pedagogy at Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden, have gone through a major restructuring leading to an updated program, on demand by students and staff. This exposition gives you an overview of the process of changing the program during the years 2020 - 2023. It guides you through the phases of the change project, highlights documents governing and forming the changes made, and links to research that were conducted during the project period and that deepened the knowledge created through the change process. Our first step was to listen into the field’s concerns and ideas about dance education today. We scanned the field for signals of change and created a collaborative map of dance pedagogical practices in contemporary times. From this map we derived design principles and scenarios for a new BA in Dance Pedagogy. After a workshop series with students of the department, it was decided that the new program should be based on the hybrid research methodology A/R/Tography. A new educational plan and course plans were created for the new BA. Courses corresponding to the positions as artist, researcher, and teacher of A/R/Tography were developed for the program, and dance genre specific courses were also created. All new courses of the program combines theory and practice, and students are prepared for a changing and complex work life combining artistic, teaching and researching practice. This exposition is part of the peer-reviewed article: Østern, T. P., Reppen, C., O’Connell, S., & Daneberg, M. (2025). Choreographer/researcher/teacher: Developing a/r/tography as an approach to dance pedagogy at Stockholm University of the Arts in a professional learning community of teachers. Nordic Journal of Art & Research, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.7577/ar.5460

Here are some examples of outputs of the Solresol Birsong Translator. This forms part of the work presented for a PhD at Newcastle University. A device was built that ‘listens’ to birdsong and translates this into human speech utilising the obscure musical language Solresol (François Sudre, 1866). Birdsong is analysed and converted into musical notes (one octave in the scale of C Major: do-re-me-fa-sol-la-ti). These seven notes are grouped to form four-note ‘words’ that are looked-up in the Solresol-English dictionary. Each note also has a rainbow colour assigned to it. In a variety of configurations, the device can output the birdsong, notes, music, translated words, and colours. Text and MIDI (music) files can both be saved for further output or processing. The software can run in a variety of modes and on a variety of hardware, including PC and Raspberry Pi. It can make use of both live and recorded birdsong.

This project identifies a shortcoming in the range and coherence of the language that musicians use, in particular the Norwegian instrumental traditional music (folk music), when they aim to communicate the craft elements of their practice. The Craftmanship project identifies craft as deep knowledge that is a result of skills based activities that again result in tacit knowledge. This knowledge has traditionally been communicated between practitioners or from master to apprentice through a series of subtle cues, ideas or metaphors, which resist language – it is learned through experience and a form attunement between the participants. The project therefore, proposes to develop a vocabulary, based on and drawn from a practitioner’s perspective, through the “languaging” of keywords, and a critique of scores in order to revitalise the transmission of this knowledge for a new generation of musicians. Furthermore, it proposes that when attunement happens, it facilitates profound moments in performances, where the musician and audience reach a tacit recognition. The project proposes that these moments, colloquially described as ‘Magic Moments’ are the aim of most musicians in performance situations. These moments are often dependent on social situations. The project aims to construct a framework for further investigation of the contexts within which these moments manifest themselves.