NORDES; The Nordic Design Research Society Summer School 2018, August 14-17
Linnaeus University, Malmö University and KADK (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation) are organizing a PhD summer school on the topic of care – as a doing and weaving between hope and despair, within us, between all of us multispecies.
What can care do? And what does it mean to care? And how might it relate to design? On a generic level caring can be described as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible (Bernice and Tronto 1990)”.
This summer school focuses on a designerly and speculative approach to care in more than human worlds. These are characterised by interdependencies across actors as well as technoscientific and natureculture entanglements. We will work with tensions between despair and hope in sites that are marked by the aftermath of industrial design practices and where care is enacted in different ways. One field visit will take place in Glasriket (Kingdom of Crystal) which is haunted by pollution as well as multispecies relational becoming (Tsing et al 2017). Another field visit will be at a community supported agriculture that takes the living and dying of many entities into daily account (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). We will explore design and care as an attitude and practice for “staying with the trouble” in such contexts (Haraway 2016). Particularly we will draw on three dimensions of care that Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, p. 5) states are in constant tension: labour/work, affect/affections, ethics/politics.
In times and worlds of interdependent environmental, sociocultural and economical urgencies, slow violence as well as catastrophes are experienced and projected unevenly. Therefore we will care for intersections of powers and how to intervene in them with designerly means, partly with creative and norm critical approaches, towards new materialities, relations, narratives and practices.
This Nordes summer school leads up to the Nordes conference at Aalto University, Helsinki 2019, which will be related to the topic of care.
Programme
The PhD summer school runs for four days, August 14-17, 2018. The course will consist of a combination of lectures, site visits, seminars and group work. There will also be dedicated time for work with the topic of care in relation to your own research projects. The summer school will take place at and around the Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. We will learn together through reading, discussing, observing, designing, making, public interventions.
Participation
We are looking for students with defined research projects in design and adjoining fields, with interesting interfaces to care. In the application for the course, we would like to see you explore how ‘care’ troubles and energises your project. Note that we are looking for a balance of students who are well acquainted with care as well as those who are curious, but don’t necessarily have that much familiarity with the discourse yet.
To apply for the course
To register for participation, you must submit a proposal, including a summary of your defined research project and a statement of how it relates to the topic of care. Proposals should be one A4 page long. Your register and submit your proposal via this link:
English: https://lnu.se/en/course/design-and-care/vaxjo-international-summer/ and university administration :https://www.universityadmissions.se/intl/search?publishers=lnu&period=ST_2018&freeText=S0046
Swedish: https://lnu.se/kurs/design-och-omsorg/vaxjo-internationell-engelska-sommar/ and admissions :https://www.antagning.se/se/search?publishers=lnu&period=ST_2018&freeText=S0046
Here you will also find the formal course syllabus.
If you have any questions, please contact nordessummerschool2018@lnu.se.
The application opens: 15 March, 2018.
The application closes: 15 April, 2018.
Design&Care-summerschoolNotification of acceptance: beginning of May.
Participants will be selected on the basis of quality of proposals, relevance to the theme of care, and diversity of perspectives of the group. Upon notification of acceptance, participants will be given more detailed information about the course and further instructions on how to prepare for and participate in the summer school. The detailed plan for the summer school will take inspiration from the selected participants’ specific interests.
Credits: 5 ECTS.
Registration fee: SEK 1600 (+ VAT 25%, + payment fee) to cover lunches, refreshments and the summer school dinner. The activities are not mandatory, but add to the experience. Participants are expected to book and pay their own travel and accommodation.
Suggested accommodation
Lilla Hotel Värend: http://www.hotellvarend.se (ca 800 SEK / night)
Telestads rumsuthyrning: http://www.telestadsrumsuthyrning.se (ca 400 SEK / night)
Nybygget Nattvilan: http://nattvilan.se (ca 400 SEK / night)
Organizers
Mathilda Tham, Linnaeus University
Åsa Ståhl, Linnaeus University
Li Jönsson, KADK
Kristina Lindström, K3, Malmö University
with the support of other invited researchers and practitioners.
Preparatory reading
Puig De La Bella Casa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tsing, A. et al. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
