Den här uppsatsen undersöker via interaktionism och materialitetsteorier hur relationernamellan mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörer kommer till uttryck på det svenska museetArkDes. Med hjälp av intervjuer av de anställda på ArkDes och observationer på museetanalyseras vad som sker på dess olika scener, hur man förhåller sig till autenticitet samt vilkaaktörsroller och nätverk som går att finna. Detta för att bättre förstå den övergripande musealaorganiseringen och förhållanden aktörer emellan.

The art series A Sexual Series is based on posthumanist theory and asexual experience. Shapes of performative alter egos materialized from a queer cyborg position of technologically enhanced crip experiences (the strong symbolical constructing process of straightening scoliosis surgery). From the position of a glitch reflecting a postindividualist future, the AI sexbot is a metaphoric, elevated cyborg drag version of the artist to embody asexuality and queer Otherness. Based on multitudes of contradictions to encourage self-reflection, the series explores the complexities of ob/scene and on/scene performances; the position of a sex positive asexual as well as questions of belonging as a naturally artificial rebel. This essay touches upon rituals as well as performative methods of disidentification as a tool to reimagine shame, to ghost the own body and to stop being a pleaser.

‘the habitat’ is a Design+Change project which originates from the will to create positive change in the current situation of climate and ecological emergency. The design project takes the Anthropocene and the materialization of nonhumans as starting point and develops further around the possibilities of forming non-anthropocentric and nonhuman-centered mentalities and world-making processes. It aims to highly emphasize the human dependence on nonhuman existence and well-being. Therefore, the ultimate purpose of the project is to de-center humans and challenge the human exceptionalist mentality. In order to achieve that; practices of making kin with nonhumans are explored and practiced throughout the project. This Design+Change project builds its framework within the theories of posthumanism by Braidotti (2013) (2017) and Barad (2008), the vitality of matter by Bennett (2010) and gets inspiration from multispecies ethnography and design, discusses the possibilities of making kin (Haraway, 2016) with nonhumans. Building on the theoretical framework, my own lived experiences of sharing my domestic environment and my attempts to interact, and interconnect with fungi persons, strive to show interdependencies of life, the assemblages weaved in intertangled lives of humans and nonhumans and to overcome human exceptionalist mindsets and lifestyles. ‘the habitat’ seeks to also question the dichotomies of nature/culture, animate/inanimate. The discussion of the nonhuman agency has also been essential throughout the design project.  ‘the habitat’ displays a journey, an intimate autoethnographic mental expedition, rather than being a monolithic and finished product. It presents my bare attempts and generates discussions from them. At the end of the project, it wraps itself up in the form of an archive, a map, and a record of the journey for the audience to walk through.

Denna licentiatavhandling, Klungan och barndomens sociala rum, diskuterar den samtida heterogena barndomen utifrån analyser av barns informella fotbollsspel på rasten i skolan. Det empiriska exemplet rastfotboll analyseras med begrepp som rum, genus och gränsöverskridande. Rumsanalys av rastfotbollen ger exempel på hur traditionella könshierarkier reproduceras, omformas och utmanas i löst organiserade former av idrott. Perspektiven i studien hämtas från barndomssociologi, idrottsvetenskap, kulturgeografi, filosofi och genusforskning. Barndomens komplexitet skapas av att logiker från olika sociala rum – t.ex. familj, skola och idrott – samexisterar och motsägs. Det tvärvetenskapliga angreppssättet och tillhörigheten till det flerdisciplinära forskningsprojektet Mångkontextuell barndom gör studien till ett exempel på det den avser att beskriva: gränsöverskridanden och flöden i en heterogen verklighet.

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Ongoing scholarship on the impact of speculative fiction demonstrates how science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally concerned with interrogating the socio-political networks that define contemporary life, and in constructing alternative environments that both critique and offer solutions to present-day inequalities. This project contributes to this scholarship by focusing on the ways in which recent speculative fiction re-envisions space—including urban sites, new architectural forms, and natural landscapes—to theorize innovative forms of socio-political organization. This work draws from the spatial turn in cultural studies and critical theory that has gained popularity since the 1970s, and which takes on assumption that space and politics are always intertwined. Drawing predominantly from assemblage theory, assemblage urban theory, and new materialist theory, this project examines how human and nonhuman agents—including space itself—interact to create new spaces and relations that resist hegemonic neoliberal modes of spatial, political, and social organization. Chapter Two analyzes utopian assemblages and spaces in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, deploying Noah De Lissovoy’s concept of “emergency time” and David M. Bell’s theories of place-based and affective utopias. Chapter Three examines place-making tactics in Lauren Beukes’ novel Zoo City through the lens of Abdou-Maliq Simone's concept of people as infrastructure, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of nomadology, and Jane Bennett's theory of “thing power.” Chapter Four uses the work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett to explore the thing power of the non-human and nature in China Mieville’s Kraken and Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In sum, this work attempts to demonstrate how examining speculative spaces through the lens of assemblage theory can illuminate new paths for political resistance. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Overlapping and entangled crises that comprise and propel society require near constant (re)orientation in order to understand, explain, and address the workings of a multiplicitous world. For those invested in education, this means confronting complexity through the prism of teaching and learning. Educational scholars across fields and disciplines have sought to name, describe, and make sense of this complexity. Many do so in ways that recognize the difference between recent events and cycles of change that have come before. In other words, they engage in inquiry with a recognition that a convergence of factors produces this moment as different, and thus requires difference in approach to understanding. Building on recent scholarship in posthumanism and social studies education, this dissertation draws upon foundational texts in posthumanism, poststructuralism, and new materialism to re-orient understanding of how social studies teachers learn in the posthuman convergence. In particular, this inquiry explores what happens when social studies teachers are confronted by potentially destabilizing content during professional learning experiences located in a university setting. Considering how learning unfolds in and through complexity, this study examines how the intersecting, overlapping, and nested contexts of the inquiry, within the broader context of the posthuman convergence, intervene in professional learning experiences and shape the ways in which collective and individual learning (un)/(re)fold. Employing transqualitative methods, this dissertation explores the material-discursive entanglements that constitute social studies teacher professional learning. Transqualitative research is a hybrid of traditional qualitative research design and critical qualitative methods that seeks to disrupt the traditional qualitative focus on the human experience and embrace a posthuman perspective in research design and methodology. Data includes ethnographic participant observation field notes, photographs, artifacts, individual and group interviews, spatial maps, and analytic memos. Resisting settled findings, this project (re)orients understanding through disclosing provocations meant to support thinking differently about how social studies teachers learn in highly complex contexts. As such, this dissertation strives to help map the complicated terrain that teachers are currently navigating, while informing those invested in supporting teacher learning in the current challenging environment.