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VR Right to Digital Repair (2023-2026)

This article is an empirical analysis of food waste management and food recycling in Sweden. Currently, across Sweden, attempts are being made to achieve a circular economy whereby food wastes are transformed into resources. Food waste is used to produce biogas and bio fertilizer, and the enactment of food waste as a resource turns the waste into a raw material over which waste management organizations compete. Against this backdrop, the article interferes with research in ‘waste studies’ that highlight transformation of waste into something valuable, and proposes instead to ‘defend’ waste against the CE. The paper contributes to ‘waste studies’ and research on the circular economy by cautioning about the risks involved both in the establishment of a circular economy, and the treatment of waste as valuable. The empirical material used draws on a research project in which interviews were carried out with ‘waste workers’ in Swedish waste management organizations.

Syftet med denna studie är att med hjälp av modeller om medborgarskap undersöka blivande gymnasielärares syn på medborgarskap och politiskt deltagande i förhållande till sig själva och deras framtida elever. Studien berör blivande lärares föreställningar kring fyra områden; politiskt deltagande, medborgarskap, kontroversiella ämnen och politisk aktivism samt undersöker förväntningarna som de har på elever utifrån dessa fyra huvudpunkter. Materialet har samlats in genom kvalitativa samtalsintervjuer med fyra stycken blivande gymnasielärare utifrån en semistrukturerad modell. De har därefter analyserats med hjälp av olika kärnfrågor och de fyra områden – som presenterats ovan – med ursprung från Isin & Turners modeller för medborgarskap. Kärnfrågor i detta fall är de frågor i intervjuguiden (Se Bilaga 2) som baserats på de frågeställningar som studien bygger på. Svaren har sammanfattats och presenterats i en tabell där varje respondents svar har jämförts med varandra för att synliggöra återkommande mönster och föreställningar. Resultatet visar både likheter och skillnader mellan respondenternas och utifrån detta identifieras en idealtyp för hur medborgaren bör se ut baserat på återkommande gemensamma föreställningar. Svaren jämförs även med Isin & Turners (2002) liberal och deras republikanska modell. Svaren kan inte sammankopplas helt till varken liberal eller republikansk modell utan hamnar i ett mellanläge.

In the early 21st century quite a few social scientists and scholars in the humanities are arguing that we should pay more attention to things material. For, as they say, not only humans act but so, too, do materials. Joining this discussion, in this paper we will use the case of omega-3 fatty acids to address the questions of how materials may act; in which ways this is relevant; and what is linked up with it. Hence, we will come to speak about research in prisons where inmates were badly nourished; fish being caught in the Global South for Scandinavian fish pills; and the urgency of shifting from the verb ‘to act’ to a differentiated list of modes of doing. Learning from the natural sciences, we will argue, requires that their methods and concerns be carefully attended to. Taking matters seriously comes with the obligation of tracing where such matters come from and where they go. And talking about ‘action’, finally, demands that, beyond liberal notions of isolated individual actors, it be creatively retheorised.

In a book that explores global transportations and mobilities, food definitely deserves to be included.1 Over the last few decades, the total mileage that food travels across the globe – difficult to imagine, let alone calculate – has not just risen, but also become increasingly contested ( Jackson et al., 2006). Many decry that all in all food travels far too far. But how does it do so? How does it move across the globe? The answer is: in many different ways. It moves out and it moves in. It moves fresh and it moves cooked. It moves as ingredients and as a recipe. The implication is that, more often than not, on any single plate many places come together. Here, we will illustrate the topological complexity of ordinary meals by presenting a mundane but intricate case: that of Pizza Hawaii.

Emerging from the question of how to live together with our planet, more-than-human approaches to interspecies relations have often presented ‘cozy’ versions of conviviality (Whatmore 2002; Haraway 2008; Hinchliffe 2010). This was usually set against a (supposedly) exclusionary politics of nature, in a move that betrayed a still largely humanist ethics. From the focus on friendly companions, to the attention to practices of care or living-together, the notion of companion species and their entanglements with humans has been polarized towards a pleasant and ‘nice’ version of coexistence. But, dealing with composting, it becomes clear that relations with the environment are never so neat and clean. What are, then, the modes of being together with the ‘dirty’ side of the ‘green’? What practices emerge at the mundane interstices of the ‘big picture’ of a functional ecology? Wasting, eating, rotting, consuming, transforming and becoming-with are brought together in a variety of ways in practices of composting-with earthworms. Reporting on our own and others' attempts to ‘live-together’ with earthworms, this paper tracks the non-relations and asymmetries of the transformations of more-than-human materialities inside (and outside) domestic composting bins. We argue that the example of living-together with dung earthworms sheds light on the interplays between attachment and detachment (Candea 2010), shifting the notion of conviviality from a green and comfortable ‘democratic collective’ (Latour 2004) to a messy, yet constantly productive and on-going coexistence.

As of late, claims have been made in social and political theory that agency is neither a property of subjects nor of objects, but is instead an emergent effect of constellations or assemblages – that agency takes place ‘between’ various things. The question that follows is how to then account for what happens and what to make of the ‘betweenness’ of agency. The answer offered by this article is to trace and situate agency empirically through practices. Exploring the happening and non-happening of a particular object – shit – I show that for things to happen, a lot of work has to be done. By evoking three examples of constipated bodies, I show that while the work that has to be done is different, and that the actors involved are diverse, agency is located in practices.

This article analyses conflicting versions of speed and temporal work that are involved in engaging with food. The dominant discourses around fast and slow food are challenged and extended by juxtaposing three kinds of food-related activities: cooking, eating, and digesting. Drawing on a wide range of empirical and theoretical examples and dietary advice, I illustrate how modes of engaging with foods also produce and come with specific “goods” and “bads.” Problematizing these normativities, I use the Swedish word ‘lagom’ to denote a temporal and spatial normativity that is always located in a specific situation.

Recent papers by prominent scholars in science and technology studies (notably John Law and Bruno Latour) have crystallized a fundamental disagreement about the scope and purpose of intervention in actor-network theory or what we here choose to bracket as empirical philosophy. While the precept of agnostic description is taken as a given, the desired eff ects of such descriptions are highly debated: Is the goal to interfere with the singularity of the real through the enactment of multiple and possibly confl icting ontologies? Or is it (also) to craft new and comprehensive common worlds supported by notions of due process and parliamentary procedure? In this paper we think about this disagreement as a question of research strategy (a normative discord about the desirable outcome of an intervention) in order to assess its implications for research tactics (a descriptive accord about the practical crafting of an adequate account). A key point here is to challenge the impermeability of such a division and show how the strategic dispute, if to be taken seriously, invariably spills over to swamp the level of tactics. To illustrate this point, we draw upon materials from our recent doctoral research projects and to facilitate the discussion we make two deliberate caricatures: Firstly, we operate with a simplifi ed history of actor-network theory in which a strategy of epistemological critique has been replaced by two contending agendas for ontological intervention. Secondly, we address these two contending agendas as distinct options which map on to the positions of our two main interlocutors. In doing so, it becomes possible to compare their respective tactical implications as we work through two examples of what might constitute an empiricist intervention.

Förhöjda halter av endotoxin i blodet förekommer ofta vid sjukdomen pyometra hos tik och kan orsaka många av de allmänna symtom som ses vid sjukdomen. Endotoxin Activity Assay (EAA) är en ny, snabb metod för mätning av endotoxinaktivitet i helblod. EAA-metoden är anpassad för humanpatienter, men har testats i forskningsstudier och visats fungera även för hundar och efter viss modifiering också för hästar. Två olika apparaturer från finns att tillgå för EAA (från Spectral Diagnostics Incorporated). Den apparatur som utvärderas i den här studien har aldrig tidigare testats på djurslaget hund. Resultaten som erhållits i denna pilotstudie har dock inte varit lika positiva som förväntat. Inkonsekventa EAA-värden uppmättes hos friska tikar, vilket gör att liten tillit kan sättas till de värden som erhållits hos tikarna med pyometra. Analysen fungerar därmed i dagsläget inte tillförlitligt för djurslaget hund. Dock kan sannolikt metoden modifieras och möjligen därefter fungera även för hundar.

Moving from the ontological question ”what is an image?” to the more performative, or ontogenetic, question “what can an image do?” this paper will discuss how non-representational theory could offer new ways to approach the materialities of the image. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the cinematic image, Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics and Henri Bergson’s writings on duration and memory this paper is interested in how images configure thought. Behind this argument lies the idea that there is more to information and communication than traditional systems of representation suggest. What we will focus on in this paper is some of the practical problems, as well as the benefits, of conceptualising images as something other than representational. The paper will outline a discussion which focuses on three images – screens, brains and bodies. An underlying aim of this paper is to ask the much broader question: what would happen to the hyphen of geo-graphy if we were to take Deleuze’s call to create a thought without an image serious?

Paper presenterat i sessionen Aesthetic Machines vid Nordiska sommaruniversitetet i Estland

The overall aim of the study was to develop a theoretical understanding of how films in general and the photographic image in particular alter the way we conceive of and relate to our environment. Setting of where social constructivism, Cartesian dualism and textualism ends, the essay brings forward an alternative approach to cultural experience and identity construction. With the advent of the moving photographic image, the way we relate to what is real and what is not changed dramatically. In a mediated society where the image is all around us, the distinction between what is fiction and what is not has become more or less dissolved turning real life into an object for scrutiny and disbelief. In this way the implications of the reproducible image is two-folded; it passes on as a force overcoming mental and physical space and distance, and as an alienating force creating fragmentation and increasing divisions between individuals thus altering the subject´s relation to its environment. In essence, the techniques of photographic art, as represented in cinema, has deepened and widened our conception of the outside world and our place in it.

Problemformulering: Den s.k. svarta kulturen har sedan länge varit föremål för framförallt unga, vita mäns intresse och fantasier. I förhållande till den dominerande kulturen upplevs den skillnad som tillskrivs den "svarta kulturen" som mystisk, främmande, sexuell, farlig och primitiv. Den annanhet som uttrycks i och genom exempelvis hiphopkulturen förmedlar stereotypa, rasistiska och sexistiska bilder av svarta och kvinnor. Men i och med att den "svarta kulturen" upplevs just som annorlunda så mäts den inte med samma mått som den dominerande kulturen. Att hiphopens i många fall nedvärderande kvinnosyn eller rasistiska framställningar av svarta inte ifrågasätts är ett tecken på den skillnad som tillskrivs denna s.k. svarta kultur. Syfte: Studiens syfte var att kritiskt granska den diskursiva konstruktionen av "de(t) Andra" utifrån en position inom den dominerande kulturens referensramar. I samband med detta har frågor som etnicitet och genus behandlats. Metod och teoretiskt ramverk: Kritisk diskursanalys användes som teoretiskt och metodologiskt ramverk. Vidare behandlas teorier som berör frågor som identitet och kultur. Den teoretiska diskussionen tar sin utgångspunkt i poststukturalisitiska språkteorier, och betonar identiteters och kulturers instabila karaktär. Material: Det empiriska materialet består av diverse tidningsartiklar som anknyter till ämnet. Vidare har musikvideor av och med artisten 50 Cent använts som empiriskt underlag. Slutsats: Den föreställda skillnaden mellan "svart" och "vit" kultur är resultatet av diskursiva konstruktioner som reproduceras genom olika sociala, kulturella och diskursiva praktiker. Fascinationen över och vurmen för den s.k. svarta kulturen fungerar här som en kraft som accentuerar polariseringen mellan vitt och svart. Men denna skillnad konstrueras inte bara inom den hegemoniska, dominerande diskursen. Skillnaden rekonstrueras och internaliseras även i och genom den s.k. svarta kulturen. Den föreställda skillnaden normalisera

Title: Guys from the suburb and extraordinary robbers from Södermalm. The construction of cultural identity in Swedish hip hopmusic. Aim: The aim of the essay was to investigate how texts from three Swedish Hip Hop artists construct representations of reality. The main focus of the essay was to look at the (re)construction of cultural identity within the Swedish Hip Hop culture. Questions that have been dealt with are: ethnicity, globalisation and different aspects of identity. Material: Besides dealing with literature concerning theories of identity and social theory the empirical part of the essay is based upon texts from three Swedish artists. These are Petter, Ken and The Latin Kings. The texts were chosen were following one criterion: they have all been released as singles. Method: Discourse analysis was used as methodological and theoretical framework. Results:The texts were above all ambiguous in their character. They often contradicted each other in a comparative perspective. Nevertheless, the texts construct identities and social patterns that constitute and reproduce what could be called various Hip Hop-identities/cultures within a Swedish context. These identities are best understood when considering what is specific for the Hip Hop culture in a global perspective. In the analysis, different patterns were found that were to a lesser or a greater degree in common for the three artists. These were: negative and positive representations of the own neighbourhood, the construction of a sense of community between artist and audience, ambiguous representations of women, Hip Hop as resistance, the claim to authentic expressions and identities.