Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Nordeuropa-Institut

This seminar will be mainly held in English. 

Human beings are creators, but until now creation has been defined as isolated from academic creation. This is currently changing, and more and more humanities disciplines are turning to the arts and design disciplines to explore practical methods of creation and co-creation as methods of thinking and reflection. In this masterclass, we will meet design researchers who have worked at the intersection of humanities disciplines, art and design – to explore how language, care and emotion can lead to new entry points for action.

The question in focus will be: How can creativity and creating help us to gain new insights and reach self-realisation?

• 16 Nov. 2023: 17.00 – 18.30
  Prof. Dr. Andrew Morrison – Institute of Design, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design
  Language, narrative and relational anticipatory designing
  Abstract:
  The ways we can think, talk about, know and shape futures - between humans and more than humans, environments, places, nature and systems - is crucial for grappling with processes and actions for future planetary survival. The focus in this lecture is on roles of language and narrative in exploring and realising activities of making, learning and knowing in an anticipatory, relational frame. Examples are given from the FUEL4DESIGN project

• 17 Nov. 2023: 17.00 – 18.30
  Prof. Dr. Patricia Ribault – Professor for Performative Design Research at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin
  Trans-making: On Means and Powers of Transformation
  Abstract:
  Between thinking and making, how can we describe and define the various processes at stake in the emergence of forms?
  In German, the term Gestaltung relates to a certain dynamic of forms, whether manufactured or natural, while in Italian, the notion of « Formatività », coined by philosopher Luigi Pareyson, considers all forms—especially art works—as organisms, endowed with a life and an inner law of their own. In French, mathematician and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony has come up with an interesting neologism: « trans-faire », which, in English, can translate into « trans-making » or « trans-doing », stressing the necessary in-betweenness of the act of formation. In this lecture, we will look for words, concepts and gestures that can help us make sense of these immemorial processes of transformation and we will connect them to some contemporary realities and challenges in the world of manufacturing.
  

• 18 Nov. 2023: 13.00 – 14.30
  Prof. Dr.  Laurene Vaughan – School of Design, RMIT
  Curiosity and Care: designing our way into disciplinary collaboration
  Abstract:
  Working with and across disciplines is more challenging than people think. Too often we make assumptions about what others know or do. And we equally think that we know own disciplinary approaches and deny our assumptions. Much is written and spoken about how the challenges of our times can only be addressed, and hopefully resolved, through transdisciplinary responses. This workshop will explore design led approaches to transformative collaborations framed through a practice of care.
  
  

Language: Norwegian and English

In this seminar, perspectives from anthropology, ecocriticism and ecophilosophy will contribute with concepts relevant to thinking about the relationship between critique of cultural production, notions of green democracy and care, in order to fruitfully shape the transformation of human-environment relations.
This seminar will especially focus on the question: How and with what support structures can ecophilosophy help us to develop human characteristics relevant to coping with climate change?

• 23 Nov. 2023: 17.00 – 18.30
  Dr. Katie Ritson – Center for Environment and Society
  Fuelling a Fairytale: Petroculture in Norway
  Abstract:
  In 1969, substantial oil deposits were discovered under the Ekofisk oilfield on the Norwegian continental shelf, launching an industry which continues today. Besides the impact on local industry and landscape, and the economic impact and on Norway as a whole, oil has also seeped into Norwegian culture. Oil is both materially and imaginatively constitutive and thus we find its reflection across films, music, art, theatre and literary texts. In this lecture I will explore how the relationship between oil and culture is being renegotiated in the current moment of ecological crisis.
  
  
• 24 Nov. 2023: 17.00 – 18.30
  Odin Lysaker – University of Agder
  Ecological Democracy: Caring for the Earth in the Anthropocene
  Abstract:
  Today, we live in the age of an ecological crisis, a danger which is acute, existential, and planetary. In this situation, should we perceive nature in other ways than anthropocentric? If so, there are at least two main avenues ahead; biocentrism and ecocentrism. When it comes to democracy, this idea can be understood in different ways. Ecological democracy is one relevant model in the context of the ecological crisis. Is the idea of ecological democracy relevant in the Anthropocene? Given that, would biocentrism or ecocentrism be the most convincing account of nature as the foundation of this model of democracy?
  
  
• 25 Nov. 2023: 13.00 – 14.30
  Lars Risan
  Wolf Children – The Natural History of Culture and Care
  Abstract:
  Understanding culture as part of nature may make it difficult to think of culture as “civilized” and nature as a “struggle for life” as Darwin put it in 1859. Various animals have their own culture. To think of culture as not uniquely human, not opposed to some “wild nature”, but as part of another kind of nature, is to take a position that is sometimes called a break with human exceptionalism. I will exemplify another kind of relationship between human beings and other animals by telling concrete stories – stories about humans and animals.
  

Language: Swedish and English

This Henrik Steffens seminar will explore the possibilities of fiction and design research to create a new understanding of the relationship between human, non-human and more-than-human aspects. In this seminar we will be introduced to an Swedish research project in addition to two German researchers.

The speakers will contribute with research and activities to the question: How can cultural activity and creativity contribute to the reorientation of the human being in the posthumanist worldview?

• 1. Feb. 2024: 17.00 – 18.30
  Design After Progress – research project group HDK-Valand, Umeå Institute of Design, School of Arts and Communication an der Universität Malmö, und Linnaeus Universität, Schweden.
  
  Ideas and ideals of ‘progress’ are embedded in ways of making and knowing the world, for example through technological development, rationality and economic growth. As design researchers, we will start this public lecture by sharing anchor points in history of where and how ‘progress’ was established to create common ground. We will also deliberate on how design has participated in making situations and lives better from certain – human-centered – perspectives, whilst also acknowledging that attention is increasingly directed towards what has been neglected and sacrificed in this progressivist project. The public lecture then moves into a seanse-workshop where we all explore, on location, how ideas and practices of ‘progress' take on a ghostly presence in design, haunting us as we try to find ways of doing and thinking design otherwise. The session strives towards finding ways of being better haunted to make liveable worlds through creative practice.    Lecturers
  
  Maria Göransdotter is associate professor in design history and design theory at the Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, with a PhD in industrial design and a background in the history of science and ideas. She works in the intersections of design historical and practice-oriented design research, exploring transitional design histories as a way of contributing to opening up conceptual spaces for thinking and doing differently in contemporary and emerging design practices. She is part of the research environment Design after Progress: reimagining design histories and futures E-mail: maria.goransdotter@umu.se
  
  Li Jönsson (PhD) is associate senior lecturer at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University and works in the field of science and technology studies (STS), participatory and speculative design. She engages in questions related to how design can open up alternative ways of understanding, intervening, and expanding issues with a focus on contributing to public experience and socio-ecological engagements. She is part of the research environment Design after Progress: reimagining design histories and futures and the project Grief and Hope in Transition.
  
  Kristina Lindström (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in design at Malmö University, working with participatory, speculative, and inventive methods with a focus on designerly public engagement and future-making. She is part of the coordination group of the research platform Collaborative Future-Making at Malmö University where she leads the research project Grief and Hope in Transition. She is also part of the research environment Design after Progress: reimagining design histories and futures.
  
  Åsa Ståhl (PhD) is a design researcher and senior lecturer in design at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her work combines participatory design with feminist technoscience and environmental posthumanities in explorations and speculations of how to make and know liveable worlds. Ståhl currently leads the research project Holding Surplus House and co-leads the research environment Design after Progress: reimagining design histories and futures. Together with Kristina Lindström she runs the Un/Making Studio that is built on two decades of collaborations between the two of them and others. Ståhl is also part of the research team in the Earth Logic Design project.

• 2. Feb. 2024: 17.00 – 18.30
  Dr. Solvejg Nitzke – Technische Universität Dresden
  Ghostly Trees and Evil Plants. The Dark Sides of Literary and Cultural Plant Studies
  
  If we regard plants at all, we rarely give them credit for agency, let alone the capacity to act malevolently. Gardeners might develop ferocious hatred of so-called weeds, but those seem far away from the monsters that populate plant horror fiction. From the triffids and plant aliens of Science Fiction to the real monster-weeds covering entire landscapes, plant horror connects to environmental crises in intriguing and haunting ways. Ghost trees and haunted trees talk of futures past and lost opportunity but they also act as a warning sign that we need to learn how to read and act upon. In this talk I will introduce you to some of the most dangerous plants in fiction and beyond and explore how notions of good and evil, monstrous and natural are blurred in plants and plant fiction. This, I aim to show, serves us as an index for our own haunted and haunting relationships with plants and nonhuman beings. Learning how to communicate with ghosts and acknowledging our own vegetal monstrosity might be one key to future coexistence with our nonhuman others.
  
  
• 3. Feb. 2024: 13.00 – 14.30
  Dr. Dörte Linke – Nordeuropa-Institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  "Nature writing" as World-Making?
  
  In the literary exploration of natural phenomena, it is always an important question how these can be conceptualized and described. It becomes clear that "nature" as such does not exist, but that literary images of nature are narratives and constructs that say less about the object itself and much more about the human beings who create them - their lifeworlds, their cultural values and, not least, their self-image in relation to their own environments. This lecture will therefore explore the phenomenon of so-called "nature writing" - what exactly can it be? And what problems and possibilities does it harbor? This will be examined using texts by the Swedish author Harry Martinsson (1904-1978) and Josefine Klougart (*1985) as examples. In this way, the lecture also ties in with the two previous ones, as it also deals with the question of how literary texts can prevent natural phenomena from being forgotten and how they thereby also connect times, spaces and living beings with each other.