Geomedia Speaker Series

GEOMEDIA SPEAKER SERIES SPACES OF (IN)VISIBILITY: PERCEPTION, INFRASTRUCTURE, LANDSCAPE - ONLINE SEMINAR

Crispin Thurlow, University of Bern, Switzerland 
2026 Ander Visiting Professor of Geomedia Studies, Karlstad University

• Karlstad University
• November 20, 2026
• Online
• 13:00-15:00

This two-hour, online panel brings together three different approaches to the question of how people, spaces and material formations are made perceptible or imperceptible, how presences/absences are produced and registered, and what relations of power are involved in these processes. After a short introduction by the host, we will hear from Prof. Dr Don Kulick (Uppsala), then Dr Natalia Volvach (Gothenburg), and then Dr. Alessandro Pellanda (Bern). The panel will close with a short plenary discussion between the invited speakers along with other attendees.

Invited speakers

Don Kulick

People Who Aren’t Really There

Don Kulick will present the theoretical underpinnings of ERC-financed “Out of Sight” project. I will discuss different approaches to social imperceptibility, which hinge on the distinction between willed and unwilled imperceptibility. Unwilled imperceptibility tends to be the focus of academic work, which documents people like refugees and highlights relations of power and oppression. Willed imperceptibility tends to be foregrounded in popular representations of people like fraudsters or imposters. What gets spotlighted there is often creativity, guile, and craftiness. I will argue that these different approaches have important consequences for how we think more generally about social imperceptibility and people Erving Goffman called “non-persons”.

• Don Kulick

Natalia Volvach

Sensing In/visibility: An Ethnography of Ghosts in Qırım-Crimea

This talk attends to spaces of (in)visibility during times of political upheaval as perceived through the researcher’s sensing body. Drawing on an extensive ethnography in Russia’s occupied Qırım-Crimea (Volvach, 2026) – following its occupation in 2014 but prior to the full-scale war in 2022 – I consider how violence reverberates and haunts the place (cf. Navaro et al. 2021). Unpacking the encounters with people, material environments, and lived spaces, the talk illuminates how ghosts reappear as another guise of violence, directing our attention towards the ‘dense site where history and subjectivity make social life’ (Gordon 2008, p. 8). Instances such as yanked-out plaques, overwritten inscriptions, discursive omissions, and material detachments in an occupied landscape are not merely indexing absence. Rather, and following Volvach & Kerfoot (2026), these traces acquire an affective charge: they testify to violent acts of erasure and ideological redesign, affect the researcher, and continue to speak to those who sense them.

• Natalia Volvach

Alessandro Pellanda

Built to be Seen, Designed to Disappear: Toward a Semiotics of Spectacular (In)visibility

In this talk, I introduce the concept of spectacular (in)visibility: an ongoing and active semiotic process in which the hyper-visible performance of order continually generates the invisibility of its own material underpinnings. Grounded in my doctoral dissertation on Swiss waste governance, the concept reveals how seemingly mundane technologies and infrastructures of waste management become key semiotic landscapes (Pellanda, 2025). These landscapes calibrate the organization of visibility, so that Switzerland’s own material reality remains unseen, or displayed only under precise conditions. I trace this calibration across two sites: the waste-to-energy plant, whose architectural visibility is precisely what allows the material process of incineration to remain unseen, and the official, color-coded garbage bag, a smaller but equally deliberate object of design. In both cases, multimodal rhetorical tactics – architectural, discursive, and material – negotiate the visibility and invisibility of waste (Pellanda, 2026). Ultimately, I show how this concept extends well beyond the domain of waste management, offering a way of reading infrastructural governance more broadly.

• Alessandro Pellanda

This event is sponsored by the Center for Geomedia Studies at the University of Karlstad. Access is open to all. For the necessary Zoom link, please send a request to Prof. Dr. Cornelia Brantner

• Cornelia Brantner