I was invited to give a shared keynote and workshop at the annual Swedish STS conference hosted by the Departments of Technology and Social Change (TEMA T) and Gender Studies (TEMA G) at Linköping University. It was held at the Arbetets Museum (The Museum of Work) in the heart of Norrköping, Sweden.
The theme:
Transmissions, Mediations, Interferences
The theme of the Swedish STS Conference 2024 is Transmissions, Mediations, Interferences. With this theme, we seek to provoke dynamic and reflective engagement with (un)orthodox modes of doing and transmitting scholarly research. Transmissions – of knowledge, messages, questions, materials, artefacts, and research objects – occur at all stages of research, in different forms, forums, and with the involvement of diverse entities. Transmissions make the matter of research vibrant and lively, evolving dynamically across multiple trajectories. At their most generative, transmissions are not an “outcome” at the end of the research process, but a dynamic and transformative encounter from the very beginning (Jungnickel 2020) that press upon norms, boundaries, sensibilities and affects as they mediate and create interferences between multiple social worlds, spaces and temporalities that academic research inhabits.
Inertia, established conventions, and standardised evaluation metrics can encourage scholars to pursue familiar paths in their choices of research media (paper, screen, keyboards), audiences (peers), methods and form (texts). We are keen to discuss transmissions that break with these norms and push scholars into uncertain ground; which bring challenges but also possibilities for imaginative renewal, reinvention and political engagement of, with and through scholarly practice. This conference invites scholars to explore critically the dynamism and social life of both conventional and norm-breaking transmission of research in the broad sense of the term and at all stages of the research process.
We also want to ask what frictions transmissions – as mediations, as interferences, and as transgressions – bring about? What is their generative potential in different contexts, and for different researchers? Which boundaries are affirmed, and which are unsettled through (un)orthodox modes of transmission, (un)conventional media upon which everyday research relies (e.g. paper/a Word program), or the (un)expected and dispersed – dandelion like – afterlives of our research when it is out “in the wild”?
More about the conference here
Two Time Travellers and the Hope they Wear: Transmitting Research Methods across the Centuries
a joint keynote by Kat Jungnickel & Laura Watts
We live in hope. We work in hope. We make the world in hope through our research practice, as two feminist STS scholars. Our hope is not vanity but hard scholarly work and a commitment to the possibility that, through our research practice being otherwise, we can make worlds that are otherwise. This joint keynote is an exploration of our STS methods for world-weaving hope in the midst of anthropogenic climate change and academic institutional transformation. We will sew together our research across the centuries: from the eighteenth century, through the present, into the twenty-second century.
Our journey through time begins in the early 1800s, in the patent archives. Here, Kat Jungnickel studies the attempts by clothing inventors to change the world, stitch by stitch. We then move through the present moment and its crises, to the early 2100s, where Laura Watts collaborates with energy and tech organisations to change the world through speculative fabulation (‘SF’) created through her ethnographic archive. Both patents and SF are instruments of power and erasure, but it is in their gaps and silences, in what is not quite written, that we find hope and possibility: the organisations and individuals we work with reframe, negotiate, and sometimes even remake their socio-political worlds in acts of quiet resistance. They pressed against binaries and conventional boundaries. We can do no less.
Inspired by our collaborators’ persistent acts of hope across the centuries, we two time travelling scholars will weave together alternative research methods to show how we transmit research inside and outside the academy–and how we can wear hope on our scholarly sleeve.
Together we stitch together alternative research methods to show how we transmit research inside and outside the academy.
Laura and I met several times before the event to talk about our research and practice. We paid close attention to our tactics of transmission. This shaped our talk and we took literally the idea of stitching our transmissions together. I printed out various artefacts of our research – for POP this included patents and images of reconstructions and for Laura it was poetry, printed tickets and other writings.
I used special iron-on transfer paper to print our images onto scrap pieces of calico. I then stitched them together with a sewing machine and we showed these short films on the screen behind us as we verbally pieced our talk together at the conference.
Here is an example of some of the footage:
As per the centrality of the material and practice-based methods in our work we both ended up IN our research: I was dressed in a convertible 1930s aviatrix flying suit and Laura ended up wrapped in our collectively stitched keynote.
In addition to the keynote, both Laura and I hosted workshops. Laura ran pre-conference writing workshop for PhD students and early-career scholars and I ran a session based on the Transmissions project (see more below, at the Transmissions website and at MIT Press).
We want to thank the organisers – Julia Velkova, Ericka Johnson and Jelmer Brüggemann – for the invitation and also to everyone involved for their enthusiasm, positive feedback and participation. It was a great event. (And thanks also for the images!)
