Research Catalogue

Armstrong's practice based PhD is a cyborg-feminist study of the forms of knowledge which operate within technoscientific research ecosystems. Adopting an agential realist framework, it observes the ways in which forms of knowledge come into being through the collective imaginaries they are informed by. Situated in CONNECT, Taighde Éireann’s Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications, this project takes a hybrid, transdisciplinary approach, blending creative practice with critical theory from the field of science and technology studies. Sheila Jasanoff’s analytical concept of the sociotechnical imaginary refers to visions of the future moulded by technological trajectories. Via auto-ethnographic engagement with researchers working in the field of Quantum Communications, Armstrong accesses the sociotechnical imaginaries in operation in CONNECT’s quantum-based research network. Using Jasanoff’s co-productionist framework, the project is rooted in an understanding of the entangled and mutually constitutive ordering of scientific knowledge and social order. Through an interview process that draws upon technopaganism, a movement that binds esoteric practices to the digital means, Armstrong taps into her research subjects’ visions and sensibilities towards the world of quantum physics. The practice based aspect of this PhD harnesses para-fictioning, world-building and speculative fiction to build a hybrid multimedia installation that pursues the quantum imaginary. Parafictioning is a process through which fact and fiction are set against each other, their boundaries blurred, both foregrounded as knowledge. This project reinstates othered forms of knowledge that classically operate outside of the technoscientific paradigm; forms of knowledge that rely on instinct, intuition, feeling, belief, imagination and a sense of immanence.

This exposition investigates translation as an ethical and material practice rather than as a transfer of meaning between stable linguistic systems. Working across Hebrew, Portuguese, and Arabic, the project approaches multilingual testimony as a site of friction, asymmetry, and non equivalence. Instead of resolving linguistic difference, it asks how friction can be hosted and sustained. Through a series of typographic video experiments, translation is treated as action. Words are displaced, layered, interrupted, and spatially reorganized. The vertical line, shifts in alignment, and variations in scale become material operations that expose the instability of equivalence. The experiments do not aim to produce accurate translations, but to reveal the ethical implications embedded in every typographic decision. By positioning typography as a performative medium, the exposition proposes that translation can function as a mode of ethical negotiation. Knowledge is generated through practice: through the tension between languages, through visual misalignment, and through the refusal to smooth difference into coherence. The work argues for translation as a space of coexistence without unification.

A collaboration between Anna Björklund, associate professor/docent, Dept. of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering (SEED), KTH and Lina Persson, Researcher, Department of film and media, Stockholm Uniarts. We aim to monitor and evaluate the life cycle climate impact of practices in film and media, in research and education at Stockholm Uniarts on two levels, on an individual researcher’s level and on an organisational level with student’s teams. As a first step, we will monitor and evaluate the impact of these artistic processes and as a second step we will develop new tools and documents that can support students in shifting their productions towards films with smaller climate footprint. The tools will enable the students to carry out performative productions, using their creativity to stay within set sustainability limitations, finding new ways to make films and to let, the story, the experience, of that process accompany them in the coming productions. The joint conclusions of the collaboration will be interwoven with Persson’s research project Climate-Just Worldings where the performativity of fictional story-worlds and how they can interact with an organization’s reality is explored. become part of the climate-just narrative developed within Persson’s project. We also aim to develop an app tool to make the documentation process more intuitive. The documentation of this process will also be continuously available to the public online.

ASSET ARREST is a research project and podcast series that infiltrates and disseminates the exclusive spaces of financialized housing. ASSET ARREST seeks to expose the spatial politics of urban real estate as shaped by speculative investment, gentrification, and the increasing abstraction of housing from use-value to asset-value. In each episode of the podcast, Laura invites a guest to view a property with her, with them both posing as potential buyers. The project functions both as an investigative tool and as a mode of counter-publicity, deploying strategies that "make public" what is structurally hidden. Central to this practice is the production of alternative representations of these sites—images rendered not through the idealized CGI marketing tropes that dominate real estate promotion, but through unscripted conversation and embodied performance. In posing as a prospective buyer, I enact a form of role-play that becomes both method and critique. This performative access enables a rupture in the polished façade of luxury developments, allowing for the insertion of critical discourse into spaces otherwise closed to scrutiny. ASSET ARREST mobilizes a feminist methodology—one that resists objectivity, embraces relationality, and insists on the political significance of lived experience. The project is understood as an act of spatial disobedience: reclaiming the tools of surveillance, storytelling, and spectacle not to reproduce power, but to subvert and redistribute it.

This exposition presents An Fios Dorcha: The Dark Knowing as a case study within the doctoral project An Dorchadas: The Darkness, a practice-led inquiry into Irish–Australian diaspora, archival absence, and colonial entanglement. The 90-card oracle deck and guidebook are presented here as a designed research system through which fragmentary cultural materials are translated into embodied, participatory form. Emerging from genealogical rupture (where my family’s archival trace ends in fire and silence) and from research at the National Folklore Collection (Dúchas.ie) alongside fieldwork in Ireland, the project approaches folklore and language as incomplete datasets rather than stable inheritances. Bilingual titling, thematic structuring, and material design operate as methodological gestures rather than aesthetic embellishments. Generative AI was used experimentally during visual ideation as a secondary design tool, critically contained within the process. The oracle is therefore treated not as an illustrative artefact but as method: a ritualised publication system through which artistic research becomes relational and enacted, transforming diasporic absence into encounter.

(Mini-)Zines waren und sind ein bewährtes Publikationsformat in marginalisierten Personengruppen, in subkulturellen und aktivistischen Milieus sowie in Fancommunitys. In diesem Sinne sind sie ein wichtiges Medium der Selbstermächtigung, was ihren Einsatz unter anderem in Lern- und Lehrkontexten spannend und lohnend macht: Individuell oder kollaborativ gestaltete Mini-Zines bieten viel Raum für Kreativität, partiale Perspektiven und Teilhabe. Der Leitfaden skizziert exemplarisch die Konzeption und Durchführung eines Maker-Tags (bzw. eines praxisorientierten Blockseminars oder eines Workshops) zum Thema „Mini-Zine“ im Umfang von ca. sechs Semesterwochenstunden (SWS). Der Maker-Tag fokussiert das (Mini-)Zine explizit als kulturkritisches Medium und Format. Die (interdisziplinären) Maker-Tage gehen dem ‚practice turn‘ auf den Grund und regen Studierende zum Nachdenken über die Verbindung zwischen Forschung, Theorie und Praxis an. Sie bieten den Studierenden die Gelegenheit, durchs 'Machen', induktiv zu theoretischen (Er-)Kenntnissen zu gelangen, die Relevanz sowohl ‚theoretischer‘ als auch ‚praktischer‘ Ansätze wie Ihre Wechselwirkung zu durchdenken und zu praktizieren. Im Rahmen der Maker-Tage geht es unter anderem um die Reflexion ausgewählter Forschungspraktiken als Medien und kulturelle Phänomene und nicht zuletzt um die Erprobung alternativer Lehr-, Lern- und Prüfungsformate.