Keynotes and invited speakers
Artists and events
WED 17 Sep 2025, 13.15–14.45
Arenan – Karlstad City Library/Stadsbiblioteket
Keynote with Jyoti Mistry
Film Screening Loving in Between and Discussion
Chair: Doris Posch
Passionate Solidarities: From Queer Futurity to Transformative Recognition
Inspired by the possibilities of the “not-yet-here” conceived in queer futurity (José Esteban Muñoz, 2009) this presentation coupled with a screening of Loving In Between (Jyoti Mistry, 2023) seeks to return to the expanded ideas of queer politics. Queer in its connection to passion is neither regulation nor obsession that thwarts political transformation but a quest for worldmaking through collective solidarities. The presentation focuses on the possibilities of new cultural forms and subjectivities conceivable through a politics of recognition, from intimate relationships to political, cultural and legal spheres with the vision to facilitate societal transformation. What is the role of the researcher, scholar and artist in making the world to come? What are the political, environmental and cultural means through which these possibilities may be achieved? Can queer futurity be a politics for transforming recognition through passion, for a shared vision of humanity that exceeds our current condition?
Loving in Between by Jyoti Mistry, Austria/South Africa, 2023, 18 min.
Loving In Between is inspired by the poem Advice by Langston Huhges: “Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.”
Between birth and death, is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. The right to love, is controlled and regulated by how we live. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories in queer expression and a celebration of eros as the power to change our attitudes to life and to allow others to live their lives without judgment or prejudice.
After When I Grow up I Want to be a Black Man (2017) and Cause of Death (2020), Loving In Between is Jyoti Mistry´s last part of her archival trilogy on race, sex and gender. She brings back her collaborators of the two previous films, spoken word artists Kgafela oa Magagodi and Napo Masheane and creates through archival film footage, animation and poetry a visual experimental stream of consciousness. Following the work of Kara Keeling, we can read Jyoti Mistry’s trilogy conclusion as recordings of queer times (past) that use new media and technology to create an exploration of “queer times, Black futures.” In doing so, it opens revitalized futures in which previously unthinkable imaginations can be conjured up.
WED 17 Sep 2025, 15.15–16.15
Arenan – Karlstad City Library/Stadsbiblioteket
Keynote with Denise Ferreira da Silva and Discussion
Title: TBA
Description: TBA
Chair: Doris Posch
WED 17 Sep 2025, 16.45–18.15
Arenan – Karlstad City Library/Stadsbiblioteket
Film Screening Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims followed by a Conversation with the Filmmakers and Artists Arjuna Neuman, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Jyoti Mistry
Chair: Doris Posch
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims by Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Germany/Austria, 2023, 49 min.
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is the latest part of a series called “Elemental Cinema.” Each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four classical elements: earth, water, fire, or air. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point – aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being.
In doing so, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s and Arjuna Neuman’s work undermines ways of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that might seem self-evident to us – such as the interiority of the subject versus the exteriority of its surrounding – underlie a profoundly violent, unequal, racist world. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims turns the spotlight on the persistence, though in altered form, of this modern relation to the Earth in the history of neoliberalism and one of its defining early episodes: Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship.
The experimental essay film was shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert; the wind – air is the classical element taken up in this part of the series – travels from the Sahara to the Amazon and along the Pacific coast. Like the film’s off-screen voices, the composition and movement of material reality tells stories of migration and displacement, but also of another geography drawn by the winds.
By thinking with matter, the artists dig up and experiment with the soil of what supposedly is. Alongside and beyond the critique of, for example, history or politics, they thereby allow to reimagine reality beyond a constitutively violent world.
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. His films and installations have been shown internationally, including the Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, Venice Biennial, Sharjah Biennial and in museums such as Centre Pompidou, Madre Museum, MAAT, MACBA, Kunsthalle Wien, Whitechapel Gallery, Kunsthal Extra City, and Munch Museum.
As a writer he has published works in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Art Voices, LEAP, Hearings Journal, World Records and e- flux.
He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.
Chair: Doris Posch
Doris Posch is Assoc. Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. She is Deputy Head of the Focus Area Society & Sustainability | Contemporary Art and Cultural Production at the Inter-University Organization Arts & Knowledges and Senior Scientist at Paris Lodron University Salzburg and Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria. 2019-2024 Artistic Co-Director and General Manager of the International Film Festival Kaleidoskop in Vienna, Austria. Co-Founder of the curatorial collective of film cultures CineCollective. In her current research, Doris focuses on collective practices and relational agencies in film and visual cultures, and in the arts from a transcultural, intersectional and decolonial perspective.
THU 18 Sep 2025, 14.30-16.00
Geijersalen 12A138, House 12/Hus 12 – Karlstad University
NODE Panel with Stina Bengtsson followed by a Conversation with Karin Fast and Paul Adams
Chair: Henrik Örnebring
Navigare necesse est: What does it mean to (have to) navigate our digital media world?
Navigation is a concept that today is often used to describe media users’ mundane practices and approaches to the contemporary media world. Many articles and books during the last couple of years have used ‘navigation’ to describe what ordinary people do with news, data, algorithms and AI. The idea of navigation is often used as a way of discussing ordinary media practices in relation to the cross-platform, or high-choice, media landscape, as well as media use from a broader everyday life perspective. Brita Ytre-Arne (2023), in her recent book Media Use in Digital Everyday Life puts forward navigation as a metaphor to describe how people use media ‘to orient [themselves] as [they] move through [their] everyday lives’, underlining the routinized dimensions of media use across, and in between, social domains, and the role of digital technologies in this: practically and specifically, but also socially and existentially (2023, pp. 8-9). Other recent publications have use navigation equal to mundane media practices as well as to describe media users’ struggles to curate and make sense of their own media practices. Navigation is a metaphor for how we move spatially in the digital media environment, but also for what living in shifting digital media environments feels like. This presentation takes a closer look at the recent uses within media and communication studies of the concept of navigation and its different variations and discusses what the mundane practices of navigating digital media tells us about the existential experience of living in our contemporary media culture.
Commentators:
Karin Fast, PhD, is Professor of Media and Communication Studies and Research Coordinator at the Centre for Geomedia Studies, Karlstad University. Her books include The Digital Backlash and the Paradoxes of Disconnection (2024), Transmedia Work: Privilege and Precariousness in Digital Modernity (2019), and Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds (2018). She has published her research in journals such as New Media & Society, Communication Theory, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Digital Geography and Society, and Space and Culture. Her current research includes the project Hot Desks in Cool Places: Coworking Spaces as Post-Digital Industry and Movement (Swedish Research Council).
Paul Adams is the Erich W. Zimmermann Regents Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin.
Chair: Henrik Örnebring
Henrik Örnebring is Professor of Media and Communication at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University. He is the author/editor of four books and numerous articles and book chapters on journalism. His main research interests are journalism history, comparative journalism studies, and journalistic work practices and working conditions across time and space. His most recent book (Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept, with Michael Karlsson) won the 2023 Tankard Book Award and the 2024 ICA Journalism Studies Division Book Award.
THU 18 Sep 2025, 19.00
Elite Stadshotellet, Karlstad
Performance by Status Queer
PEEK! Live: A Very Serious Lecture
PEEK! – a jarring coalescence of (re-)intersecting lenses to profoundly perforate the meaning of the space. Or something like that. Here for your delight and disgust we present duo Status Queer as their drag persona(-non grata)s Sinfluencer (Kolbrún Inga Söring) and The Meatbaby (Sam Message). A lecture you won’t forget.
PEEK! Live is a part of Status Queer’s project PEEK! where they explore drag off the stage and into the streets, the gallery and beyond in collaboration with photographer Elsa Groener.
Gothenburg-based artist duo x is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Kolbrún Inga Söring and Sam Message combining performance, social practice and spatial transformation.
FRI 19 Sep 2025
12-torget, House 12/Hus 12 – Karlstad University
Exhibition
Boxes/Booklets/Bonus Contents: Archival Exploration of the Multimodal Rhetoric of Video Game Packaging and Paraphernalia
Welcome to take part of an exhibition of historical video games from the Embracer Games Archive!
The exhibition is part of an ongoing collaboration between the archive and researchers at Karlstad University. Boxes/Booklets/Bonus Contents is a project in development, in which we aim to explore the rhetorical functions, both aesthetic and commercial, of video game packaging and paraphernalia through case studies of commercial, off-the-shelf games from the massive collection housed by the Embracer Games Archive, a unique and world-leading archive of video game materials located in Karlstad.
Video games are complex cultural works that communicate and interact with their players in a great variety of ways across many modalities. Especially in the early days, the physical paratextual materials – such as packaging, manuals, booklets, maps, gadgets, and trinkets – were central to how video games conveyed their aesthetics, themes, and narratives, and manifested their imaginary worlds.
With this exhibition, we try to illustrate some of the dimensions along which video game paratexts carry meaning, build worlds, and stoke and transform passions, focusing on three themes: Transformations over time; transformations across space; and transformations across media.
Joakim Kilman is a Lecturer in English at Karlstad University. He has also worked as a freelance video game journalist and critic for well over a decade. Currently, he teaches a course on the historical development of video game narratives.
Peter Wikström is Associate Professor of English at Karlstad University, Sweden, specialized in digital and multimodal discourse analysis, and a life-long gamer. His main areas of interest include linguistic and metalinguistic aspects of social media communication, language and gender, discourses of race and racism, and – more recently – discursive aspects of video games.
FRI 19 Sep 2025, 14.00–15.30
Geijersalen 12A138, House 12/Hus 12 – Karlstad University
Keynote with Annette Hill
Chair: Georgia Aitaki
Passions Run Deep; an infraordinary of rural communications infrastructures
The focus of this talk is on facets of passion found in rural communications infrastructures. I use an infraordinary perspective, a close up style of observation of felt spaces developed by the French scholar George Perec. The infraordinary enables a deep understanding of the taken for granted elements of infrastructures. The work roams the Silver Road, an older communications infrastructure of gravel roads winding along the Silver Creek in the forests and waterways of Ydre in Sweden. Abandoned infrastructures such as watermills spatially connected local rivers with regional forestry and agricultural work. Now, the remains are home to trees, moss, lichen and wildlife, another kind of organic infrastructure. In the same rural area new infrastructures, such as windfarms and data centres, are developed, driving engagement with streaming, gaming and AI in the political and ecological context of the green transition.
An infraordinary of infrastructures makes visible the small details that make up a bigger picture of exploitation of media and communications and the environment. Digital technologies and energy companies, backed by international investors and green tax breaks from state actors, have encroached on a rural area rich in natural resources but struggling in terms of population and economic growth. To roam the Silver Road highlights the felt experiences of local inhabitants living in a Swedish ‘rust belt’. Passions run deep in daily experiences of development and decay of infrastructures. Along the lines suggested by cultural scholar David Morley, to research the footprints of communications infrastructures suggests a means of regrounding media and communications research.
Chair: Georgia Aitaki
Georgia Aitaki is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies and member of the Centre for Geomedia Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her current research focuses on representations of societal crises, mobilities, as well as on questions pertaining to ethics and compassion, in contemporary popular culture (incl. drama, reality TV, animation, and cultural journalism). Her work has appeared in journals such as International Journal of Communication, NECSUS, VIEW: Journal of European Television History & Culture, Media, Culture and Society, Social Semiotics, Screen, and in a number of international anthologies.
FRI 19 Sep 2025, 16.00-17.30
Geijersalen 12A138, House 12/Hus 12 – Karlstad University
Closing Plenary with Erika Polson, Jenny Sundén, Kaarina Nikunen and Paul Adams
Chair: Cornelia Brantner
The Geomedia Coda: Passion, Place & Media
Marking the 10th anniversary of the Geomedia Conference, this closing panel gathers leading scholars to reflect on the transformative power of passion in shaping media, place, and culture. As a “coda”, the session both concludes the 2025 conference and opens new horizons for the next decade of geomedia research.
Chair: Cornelia Brantner
Cornelia Brantner is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University and coordinator of the Centre for Geomedia Studies; her research spans geomedia, visual and digital communication, digitalized publics, participation, visibility/invisibility, inequality and responsibility in digitized spaces, and the mediatization of space. She leads “Digital infrastructure sovereignty: Towards a public value-based media policy for the datafied Swedish welfare state” (2022–2026), funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant 2022-05392), and is co-Principal Investigator of “From Pixels to Peace: The Role of Visual Communication in Conflict Transformation” (2025–2029), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).