The Anatomy of Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

In this article, we look at the history of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS), its publication record, place in the Scandinavian IS tradition, and future directions. We show how the journal has evolved by looking at its readership, authorship, and publications over the years. We include former editor’s perspectives on SJIS as a basis for outlining the journal’s editorial focus and policy now and in the future. We provide guidance to prospective authors considering submitting their manuscripts to the journal in terms of types of studies and submissions that we welcome

The Anatomy of Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

In this article, we look at the history of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS), its publication record, place in the Scandinavian IS tradition, and future directions. We show how the journal has evolved by looking at its readership, authorship, and publications over the years. We include former editor’s perspectives on SJIS as a basis for outlining the journal’s editorial focus and policy now and in the future. We provide guidance to prospective authors considering submitting their manuscripts to the journal in terms of types of studies and submissions that we welcome.Peer reviewe

Nature as violent and violated : Five essays on the visual culture of the Anthropocene

This dissertation aims to explore the configuration of the relationship between nature and technology in a selection of significant works from contemporary visual culture, that have not previously been subject to a similar ecocritical analysis. I engage with central concepts to the field of visual culture, focusing primarily on the Anthropocene, violence, technology, and visuality. Through deploying and developing this theoretical framework on a heterogenous image material from 1959 to 2015, I find that nature is depicted as violent and violated, a paradoxical condition which also presents itself in the depiction of humanity and its extensions. The dissertation demonstrates the relevance of visual culture analyses to the critical study of the Anthropocene and the academic field of environmental humanities. I approach the main research question through five independent articles. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s concept of mediality, the first article asks how a media ecological analysis may contribute to a discussion on media’s material, physical consequences on the environment today, in a study of the auto-destructive and auto-creative art of Gustav Metzger. The second article describes how Olafur Eliasson’s art installations and photography engage with nature and technology, demonstrating how his projects both epitomize and challenge Jussi Parikka’s notion of a topological media ecology. Exploring the visual construction of authority over the Arctic, the third article explores PR photography accompanying resource extraction by way of tar sand and shale gas installations, carried out by the oil company Statoil (now Equinor). Further exploring the perspectives of visuality and media ecology, the fourth article examines an art installation by Toril Johannessen that researches objects used to uncover the laws of light and vision, displaying the geological foundation of modernity. Finally, in an analysis of the TV series Treme (2010) and the motion picture Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), I identify the visuality of “Mold in the Machine”. This visuality highlights nature’s violent and violated characteristics and their entanglement with technology’s role in the slow violence endured by local communities, demanding that we recognize the material consequences of progressive modernity.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture

In this open access book, seventeen scholars discuss how contemporary Scandinavian art and media have become important arenas to articulate and stage various forms of vulnerability in the Scandinavian welfare states. How do discourses of privilege and vulnerability coexist and interact in Scandinavia? How do the Scandinavian countries respond to vulnerability given increased migration? How is vulnerability distributed in terms of margin and centre, normality and deviance? And how can vulnerability be used to move audiences towards each other and accomplish change? We address these questions in an interdisciplinary study that brings examples from celebrated and provocative fiction and documentary films, TV-series, reality TV, art installations, design, literature, graphic art, radio podcasts and campaigns on social media

Curating the Cinematic Muse: The Role of Programming in the Film Festival Experience - The 40th Toronto International Film Festival

International film festivals are clearly about something beyond the appreciation of cinema; they are forums for the collective exploration and celebration of films, showcasing the newest films, the exotic and forgotten cinematic productions. Within a contemporary context, they represent the ultimate celebration of cinema and films as a collection of creative texts. They engage participants in a celebratory environment that pays homage to film as an artform. The research examines an international film festival with a focus on the role of programming, through the exploration of the understated elements of this multidimensional phenomenon that impacts the festival event. The significance and original contribution of the research is found in its methodological intervention into the burgeoning field of film festival research through a specific investigation of a non-competitive international film festival. The research explores how programming impacts the festival event and the emergent experience. Furthermore, the research is approached from a supply-side perspective with summative insights that provided pathways to conceptualize an international film festival as a field-configuring event, with discourse on the less encompassing areas of organizing, programming and curating the festival event. The conceptual framework positions the research within an interdisciplinary context with theoretical perspectives from institutional theory, field configuring events and film festival studies to offer a broader lens to nuance the gleanings from film festival professionals. The research utilizes the qualitative research strategy of the case study augmented by research methods such as in-depth interviews with participants, textual analysis and secondary research to collect and analyze data to situate this investigation within a contemporary and historical context. The interview gives a distinct focus to the film festival programmers to share perspectives to understand the contexts and settings; how they navigate the programming and the elements that impact the festival event. Textual analysis is used as a corollary to understand and provide meanings from the setting, the related activities, voices and the film festival context. The research is on the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), its diverse programming practices and discursive positioning of films in an inclusive and influential event. The researcher problematizes festival programming to examine the film festival and uncover from festival professionals, their perspectives from an immersive and participatory lens in relation to organizing, programming and curating the festival event that embolden its raison d’etre. The research findings revealed that there are multiple elements to programming an international film festival and curating the festival event and the emergent experience. The participants demonstrated their knowledge and expertise and how as a collective they understood the issues that are significant facets which are central to the film festival’s identity, status and reputation. Additionally, the discourse on the curation of the festival event and the emergent experience revealed characteristics of a field-configuring film festival event through several factors that were primarily connected to the multidimensional nature of the film festival - partnerships, collective sensemaking and information exchange that emerged as plausible and integral aspects both in a local and global context. The overall findings highlighted that there is need for further understanding of film festival as a phenomenon and the multidimensionality of programming; therefore the research suggests additional areas for scholarly investigation that can contribute to our understanding of film festivals and their interconnectedness in relation to our cultures and societies

Feminisms

This collection brings together an exciting group of established and emerging scholars to consider the history of feminist film theory and new developments in the field and in film culture itself. Opening the field up to urgent questions and covering such topics as new experimental film, the digital image, consumerism, activism, and pornography, Feminisms will be essential reading for scholars of both film and feminism

Urban Renewal, Governance and Sustainable Development: More of the Same or New Paths?

The Rio Declaration of 1992 and its agenda for action in the twenty first century—Agenda 21—were bold attempts at steering the nations in the world in the direction of ecologically sustainable development, a direction including social and environmental justice on a global scale. It did not take long, however, when the meaning of the word ’sustainable’ became diluted, sometimes even in the direction of an empty 'sustainababble´. Thus, what we see today is a huge variety of more or less scholarly based ‘sustainability’ imaginaries stating what the major problems facing humanity are represented to be and how they should be acted upon by science, economy, politics, and in everyday life. In other words, 'sustainability' is not enough. To evade the impression that the word may simply encourage the sustaining of an unjust status quo and that everyone has common interests in 'sustainable urban development' research and policy practice have to unmask the real conflicts of interest hidden behind the use of slippery language

Deep Time Iterations: Familiarity, Horizons, and Pattern Among Finland's Nuclear Waste Safety Experts

This ethnography reconsiders nuclear waste risk’s deep time horizons’ often-sensationalized aesthetics of horror, sublimity, and awe. It does so by tracking how Finland’s nuclear energy and waste experts made visions of distant future Finlands appear more intelligible through mundane corporate, regulatory, financial, and technoscientific practices. Each chapter unpacks how informants iterated and reiterated traces of the very familiar to establish shared grounds of continuity for moving forward in time. Chapter 1 explores how Finland’s energy sector’s “mankala” cooperative corporate form was iterated and reiterated to give shape to political and financial time horizons. Chapter 2 explores how workplace role distinctions between recruit/retiree and junior/senior were iterated and reiterated to reckon nuclear personnel successions’ intergenerational horizons. Chapter 3 explores how input/output and part/whole distinctions were iterated and reiterated to help model distant future worlds in a portfolio of “Safety Case” evidence made to demonstrate the Olkiluoto repository’s safety to Finnish nuclear regulator STUK. Chapter 4 explores how Safety Case experts iterated and reiterated memories of a deceased predecessor figure in everyday engagements with deep time. What emerges are three insights about how futures attain discernible features – insights about the “continuity,” “thinkability,” and “extensibility” of expert thought – that, I argue, can help twenty-first century experts better navigate not only deep time, but also unknown futures of nuclear technologies, planetary environment, and expertise itself

Approaches to the Medieval Self: Representations and Conceptualizations of the Self in the Textual and Material Culture of Western Scandinavia, c. 800-1500

The self and how it relates to its surrounding world and history is a main concern of humanities and social sciences. This book addresses the issue by discussing various modes of studying and defining the self, based on a wide span of sources from medieval Western Scandinavia, ca. 800-1500, such as archaeology, art and architecture, documents, literature, and runic inscriptions