Doctoral student in Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Culture and Society, the School of Arts and Communication, focusing on storytelling.
Work duties
Those appointed to doctoral studentships shall primarily devote themselves to their studies. Those appointed to doctoral studentships may work to a limited extent with educational tasks, research, artistic research, and administration. However, duties of this kind may not comprise more than 20 per cent of a full-time post (Higher Education Ordinance (HEO) Chapter 5, section 2).
The doctoral education concludes with a doctoral degree and comprises 240 credits, which corresponds to four years of full-time study. The programme consists of courses and an independent research project that is presented in a doctoral thesis. As a doctoral student, you will be expected to play an active part in the research and educational environment and, when applicable, in the research programmes of the Department/School.
The doctoral education is carried out within the academic environment storytelling at the School of Arts and Communication (K3). This environment explores narratives in various forms, with a special focus on what is traditionally described as aesthetic forms of expression and on journalistic/documentary storytelling. The media and art forms that are mainly in focus are literature, film, art, graphic novels and comics, photography, and journalism. Ongoing research projects deal with, among other things, literary representations of class, work, and the relationship between the urban and the rural, creative writing, comics, literary material in the trade-union press and documentary storytelling in various media. The doctoral student’s dissertation project shall contribute to the development of the research environment of storytelling.
The Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures hereby invites for the 4th symposium at Malmö University on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future making. The actual symposium will take place 13-14 May 2025. The 15th of May, we combine with the rest of the centre for a seminar on better stories with Professor Andrea Pető, Central European University and guest professor at Malmö University. We plan to construct a varied program with paper presentations, workshops and spaces for dialogue. For the symposium, we invite a varied group of scholars from disciplines like design studies, leadership and organization studies, communication, comics research, art, architecture, education and urban planning. The theme Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making addresses collaborative responses to making a sustainable and common future within diverse areas mentioned above. A common thread in the symposium is to explore the role that storytelling can have in crafting ethical foundations for work, organization, design, architecture, education and urban development. Storytelling and collaboration for earthly survival mix with questions concerning how to collaborate and organize for human rights.
While the 17 SDGs have been successful in mobilizing attention to questions concerning sustainability and inclusion, the embedded idea of balancing profit, people, and planet in actual strategies and practices seem to be off-track in practicing sustainable and inclusive development. Sustainability and inclusion are more and more at risk of becoming empty signifiers. Therefore, this symposium presents new ideas, concepts and approaches that allows for new understanding of how to work with all aspects of sustainability. The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. These approaches might range from new embodied, relational, and material understandings of storytelling, the problematic and complex relations between small stories and grand narratives, visual narratives/comics, the relations between places, spaces, and stories, post-human, transhuman and storytelling for Gaia, feminist, transgender, or queer storytelling.
We also invite contributions of how to research and write differently in ways in which we take upon us our earthly responsibility. Such contributions may be inspired by engaged scholarship, reflexive inquiry, post-qualitative inquiry, or speculative fabulation. Finally, we also invite new approaches to understand the details how we work and collaborate and how they mix with issues concerning human rights and nature. These might comprise ideas from performative approaches to accounting, logistics, learning, collaboration, and planning. If you want to join us, please submit an abstract of app. 500 words by 16th April 2025 to one of the organizers, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Gunnar Krantz or Per-Anders Hillgren. The event is free of charge. We don’t offer any accommodation, lunch, or dinner. We will make space for social arrangements in Malmö and organize a joint meeting place for dinner for those who are interested. Please send any queries to Kenneth, Gunnar, or Per-Anders using the following emails. The venue for the symposium will be announced later.
Location: Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée and Hoek 38, Brussels, Belgium
Tuesday 24 June – Wednesday 25 June 2025 (online)
Monday 30 June – Friday 4 July 2025 (in-person)ers
The Taste of Comics
Taste is constructed through culture, aesthetics and the senses. What is good taste and bad taste? In the past comics were aligned with trash culture evoking notions of good literature and bad literature, good art and bad art. How and why were these hierarchies constructed? Are they still relevant? Changing tastes can make a topic more appealing or less appealing and inform how we view a place, text, theme, author, or artist. Aesthetic tastes have informed the reception of styles such as the école de Marcinelle or Hergé’s clear line. There are issues of good taste and restraint, bad taste and excess in art movements from the Classical to the Gothic or the architectural taste of the Cités obscures. There are also issues of taste in the consumption of art or fashion as in, for instance, paper cut out dolls and makeover stories.
Speaking more literally, graphic gastronomy is filled with stories about taste and food in in autobiographies like Lucy Knisley’s Relish: My Life in the Kitchen. Food features prominently in manga of cookery and romance are found in manga such as Kitchen Princess by Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi and LGBTQA+ manga such as Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday, or Jarrett Melendez’s Chef’s Kiss. Food features in instruction books like Robin Ha’s Cook Korean!: A Comic Book with Recipes and adventure stories skilfully whisked together with instruction as in Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki’s Oishinbo a la carte #1: Japanese Cuisine. Bakhtinian excess is evoked in characters such as Capitaine Haddock’s drinking, Garfield’s love of Lasagne, and Scooby Doo and Shaggy who will eat anything. Matter-Eater Lad, from the Legion of Superheroes, of course, can eat anything. Eating can also be dis-tasteful in stories such as Chew, a detective who gets psychic impressions from whatever food he eats. And at the opposite end of excess is the tragedy of famine in graphic novels like Red Harvest: A Graphic Novel of the Terror Famine in Soviet Ukraine (Michael Cherkas) or starvation as in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.As always, papers outside of this theme are also welcomed.
We are looking for papers based on, but not limited to, any aspects of taste such as:
· changing tastes in comics and graphic novels – e.g. a franchise or character
· artistic styles such as art nouveau, art deco, ligne clair
· kitsch, punk, anti-taste
· cultural tastes and traditions
· synesthesia – tasting words, colours
· graphic gastronomy, depicting food, recipes
· horror and dis-taste – ghouls, vampires, werewolves, cannibalism
· food and romance
· greed and excess
· feasting, fasting, famine
· appetite and the body
· changing appreciations of art and fashion, makeovers
· places and their gastronomic reputations: Belgium and beyond!
As always, papers outside of this theme are also welcomed.
We invite proposals for single 20-minute papers, 60- or 90-minute participatory workshops or roundtables, or three-paper panels. Please complete the online form at https://forms.office.com/e/cwa9dxQeYW, which includes details such as proposal title, your desired format (paper, workshop, panel, roundtable), co-presenter details, in-person or online, abstract (200 words) and biography (100 words). The online form will close at midnight UK time on 31 January 2025, and we will confirm acceptance by 1 March 2025.
We hope this whets your appetite. Please email TheIGNCC@gmail.com with any queries, and keep an eye on our website www.IGNCC.com for more updates and the latest news.
A symposium on illustration research and practise in relation to notions of womanhood. The School of Design, University of Leeds, UK. Monday 19th May 2024 10am – 5pm.
“When we change the way we see, the things we see also change.” Catherine McCormack
This symposium aims to bring together academics and practitioners to discuss the phenomenon of the illustrated woman – a constructed or drawn image of a woman with a defined purpose to promote, illuminate, educate or entertain. Though designed for dissemination to large audiences, illustration remains an often academically overlooked site of potential power, particularly in the ways in which it covertly or explicitly reflects or challenges ideological positions of womanhood.
To what extent do we actually see illustrated women? Whilst there is a wealth of studies about representation of women in art or photography, this symposium seeks to ask similar and new questions of illustration to uncover a fresh discourse. Such questions include – How do contemporary illustrated “spaces of femininity” or topographies of womanhood operate? Is there a characteristic of the Gen-AI woman that contributes to key debates about visual constructions of femaleness and femininity? What new (and old) theoretical positions may shape our understanding of historical and contemporary illustrations of women? What can our own contemporary illustration practice contribute to our understanding of the illustrated female form? How do different cultural contexts influence the portrayal of women in illustration? Are there cultural variations in the depiction of femininity, and how do they reflect or challenge local ideologies? How have historical shifts in societal attitudes towards women influenced the style and content of illustrated representations? What lessons can be drawn from past illustration that inform contemporary practices?
We welcome proposals addressing (but not limited to) female representation in relation to: specific illustrators/collectives; genres of illustration (editorial, commercial (packaging/advertising), children’s books, comics/graphic novels etc.); race; modes of making; cultural similarity/difference; spaces of femininity; anatomy and physicality; Gen-AI; queer illustration; theoretical frameworks or positions; historical or contemporary perspectives; the gaze; authorial or professional motivations; production or reception regimes; social or commercial contexts; methodological approaches.
Malmö University Comics Hub (MUCH) and K3 Monster Lab In collaboration with activist art group Party of the Dead Invite to K3 Halloween 2024 Exhibition:
The Voices of the Dead
October 29 to November 16 in K3 Open Space, Niagara building Art activism, satire, comics, workshops and calaveras.
Thursday October 31, 14-16
Grand opening with activities in and around K3 Open Space:
Draw your inner critics
Listen to the sound of the monstruous
Make contact with the Dead
Take part of comics and satirical drawings
Join the movement of Late Bloomers
Early November: Monster writing workshops, presentations and standup comedy. Dates not decided (but will be within opening hours of Niagara building)
Malmö University Comics Hub (MUCH) is a platform för research, artistic development and cooperation within the field of comics, hosted by the School of Arts and Communication (K3) at Malmö University. K3 Monster Lab is a research group looking into monsters and the monstruous, hauntology and creative practices, from a feminist and posthuman perspective. Contact: Åsa Harvard Maare asa.harvard@mau.se
The Party of the Dead is an art activist group located in Tbilisi and Cologne, using actions and installations to critique how the dead are used rhetorically in political pro-war discourse in today’s Russia. @partyofthedead @партия мёртвых
much contributed to Ystad Comics Festival with an academic Friday, focusing on fanzines.
For the 4th time much presented an academic day in collaboration with Ystad (formerly Skillinge) Comics Festival. This time the research presented focused on fanzines. Among the presenters were Ýrr Jónasdóttir, head of Ystads Art Museum, who presented the museums huge collection of artist books. Anna Nordenstam, Professor of Literature at the University of Gothenburg, who presented her ongoing research on fanzines, and senior lecturer Anders Høg Hansen, Malmö University, who discussed his recently published book Mix Tape Memories: Movement and Difference in Life Writing in relation to the praxis of fanzine-making. See the full program below:
Dr. Harriet EH Earle. Photo: Sheffield Hallam University
We are happy to announce that Dr Harriet EH Earle FHEA, Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, will present a keynote.
Harriet Earle (Hattie) is a lecturer and researcher in comics and popular culture. Her current research brings fibre arts and needlework into conversation with comics. What connections can we make between these two artistic forms and to what end? If we broaden our working definitions of comics to include narrative needlework, how does our understanding of both fields change – who is included and what is gained? Hattie considers the politics and poetics of the needle as a tool for creating narratives that give voice and power to [previously] silen[ced/t] communities.
Friisgatan 12, 211 46 Malmö, Sweden Längd: 2 h Boksamtal om ”Serier för vuxna” (Lystring). Tisdag 28/5 Klockan 18-20 Rum för serier, Friisgatan 12, Malmö
I 272 sidor storformat berättas ett stycke vild och lätt osannolik litteraturhistoria om serieförlaget Epix med den excentriske förläggaren Horst Schröder i spetsen. Kokain gömt i kopieringsmaskinen, åtal för olaga våldspornografi och en kidnappning av en femåring är endast några av de ämnen som berörs. Men framför allt är det en berättelse om en grupp unga eldsjälar övertygade om att seriekonsten är ämnad för något större.
Robert Aman, bokens författare, samtalar med serietecknaren och tidigare Epix-medarbetaren Gunnar Krantz. Samtalet leds av Fredrik Strömberg.
Boken kommer finnas till försäljning på plats
Mer information om boken: Under 80-talet förändrades den svenska seriekulturen i grunden. Ingen symboliserar denna förändring mer än den excentriske Horst Schröder och hans förlag Epix. I Epix, Pox, Tung Metall och en rad andra tidningar introducerade Schröder svenska läsare till tidens mest betydelsefulla serier från hela världen. Allt tydligt märkt med ”Serier för vuxna” i ena hörnet på omslagen för att markera att det rörde sig om ett innehåll väsensskilt från Kalle Anka eller Fantomen. Under en period på tio år fick Epix uppleva både triumfer och skandaler. Nu berättar alla inblandade för första gången hela historien om det mytomspunna förlaget som var en adrenalinspruta rätt i hjärtat på serie-Sverige.
Robert Aman – kulturskribent och serieforskare – har inte bara intervjuat Schröder och Epix-redaktionens mångtaliga medarbetare, utan även svenska och internationella seriestjärnor som publicerat sig i Epix tidningar, konkurrenter som gått i klinch med Schröder (eller tvärtom), journalister som rapporterat om förlagets förehavanden, kritiker och aktivister som helst av allt önskade att tidningar som Epix och Pox inte existerade. Och många fler.
Serier för vuxna berättar ett stycke vild och lätt osannolik litteraturhistoria. Kokain gömt i kopieringsmaskinen, åtal för olaga våldspornografi och en kidnappning av en femåring är endast några av de ämnen som berörs. Men framför allt är det en berättelse om en grupp unga eldsjälar, övertygade om att seriekonsten är ämnad för något större. Denna bok slungar läsaren tillbaka till 80-talet och innanför väggarna hos redaktionen på Frejgatan 19 i Stockholm, där luften var tjock av stora förhoppningar, brinnande entusiasm, gnisslande konflikter – och svart rök från Horsts pipa.
Boken är rikt illustrerad med omslagsbilder, utdrag från serier, pressklipp och fotografier, varav flera aldrig tidigare har publicerats.
Symposium at Malmö University November 15–16, 2024.
Comics, with their unique blend of text and visualization, offer a rich field for artistic research, particularly in terms of their material components from the techniques used in creating the comic to the tools used to reproduce the comic. As an artistic research symposium, Drawing Connections aims to look at the material aspects of comics creation, exploring how these elements shape storytelling within the medium. While comics are a globally practiced form of storytelling, much remains to explore about the tools, techniques, and tactility that contribute to what makes the story tick.
The symposium will address the role of comics in artistic research to emphasize how practical research in comics can facilitate inquiry and generate knowledge, particularly in understanding and innovating the narrative structures within the medium. To that end, we want to invite reflexive practitioners as well as researchers who make comics to test theories on comics, but also those whose research focus on the materiality of comics production. While we recognize the significance of digital production and publishing in comics, our discussions this time will exclusively explore the materiality and craftsmanship of analog comics.
The symposium will take place at Malmö University and is arranged by MUCH (Malmö University Comics Hub) in collaboration with the Swedish Comics Archive and is designed to showcase how comics serve as a unique platform for narrative innovation, critical inquiry, and interdisciplinary dialogue. MUCH is a platform för research, artistic development, and cooperation within the field of comics, hosted by the School of Arts and Communication (K3) at Malmö University.
We welcome submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Comics as a methodology: Looking at how comics can be used as a method to explore complex ideas about narrative structure.
The aesthetics of comics: Looking at how comics artists can use design and layout to influence the narrative experience.
Exploring production: Looking at how comic book production – including technological and material constraints – has influenced storytelling styles and formats.
Materiality and medium specificity: Looking at the physical aspects of comics (such as material quality, publishing techniques, and formats) and their impact on the development of comics as an art form.
Archival research in comics: Understanding archival materials in the historical context of comic production and how past practices influence current trends.
Future directions: Anticipating new trends, technologies, and methodologies in the creation and study of comics.
Deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts and a short author note (c.150 words): June 30, 2024 to oskar.aspman@mau.se
We hope you will join us in exploring the aesthetic, narrative, and theoretical potential of comics!
Dr. Harriet EH Earle. Photo: Sheffield Hallam University
We are Happy to announce that Dr Harriet EH Earle FHEA, Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, will present a key-note.
Harriet Earle (Hattie) is a lecturer and researcher in comics and popular culture. Her current research brings fibre arts and needlework into conversation with comics. What connections can we make between these two artistic forms and to what end? If we broaden our working definitions of comics to include narrative needlework, how does our understanding of both fields change – who is included and what is gained? Hattie considers the politics and poetics of the needle as a tool for creating narratives that give voice and power to [previously] silen[ced/t] communities.
Författarsamtal med Liv Strömquist om boken Den rödaste rosen slår ut, om romantisk kärlek från de gamla grekerna till reality-tv. Författarsamtalet arrangeras av Kultursamverkan vid Malmö universitet i samarbete med universitetsbiblioteket.
Måndag den 13 maj kl 17:15 – 18:15. Niagara, Hörsal C. Nordenskiöldsgatan 1.
