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.

Based on ethnographic findings from artistic research conducted with South and Southeast Asian youth in Hong Kong (HK), the paper examines how creative pedagogy intervenes in what Fricker (2007) calls hermeneutical injustice. That is, “when a gap in the collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” (p. 1). In HK’s context, where minoritised ethnic individuals and communities are often expected to present their lives in ways that are legible within its framework of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism, this paper attends to the excess: what happens to the embodied and affective dimensions of our being––ambivalence, anger, in-betweenness, opacity––that remain unsayable because they not fit into the neoliberal language of diversity? Drawing on Black feminist thought, this paper argues that creative pedagogy cultivates dialogical spaces in which “subjugated knowledges,” to borrow Hill Collins’ (2000) formulation of the term, can be articulated beyond commodified and institutionally managed scripts of diversity. It first traces the emergence of diversity governance in HK as one of the structural conditions that produce the hermeneutical gaps which delimit how diverse ethnic groups make sense of their experiences. Then, it positions creative pedagogy as a site of epistemic and political intervention within the broader genealogy of Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how creative pedagogy produces epistemic friction that enables participants to renegotiate or refuse institutional vocabularies of diversity, thus opening up the hermeneutical field. This paper contributes to debates in artistic research by positioning creative pedagogy and artistic research as a mode of theorising that enlarges what can be thought, felt, and spoken within—and against—neoliberal racial governance.

In the late 19th century after conquering Congo, King Leopold II of Belgium, was dreaming of building a railway between his private castle in Brussels and a nearby train station. The project was started but never finished. The works, however, unearthed a source of water that turned the land into a swamp. The purity of that spring water created perfect conditions for a watercress farm that operates until today. What does the watercress dream about, today? In this context of historical toxicity and food production, Pierre Rubio (artist-researcher-dancer) has invited Christina Stadlbauer (artist & researcher) and Roger Fähndrich (artist-musician-performer) to imagine answers in the form of a multi-layered performance.

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