Post-Doc position on frictions between data infrastructure and energy grids
We are currently looking to hire a post-doc to join our new project “Megabytes vs Megawatts: Understanding Infrastructural Frictions between Data Centers and Energy Grids for Sustainable Digitalization” funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation.
The project aims to study societal conflicts and sociotechnical imaginaries around “sustainability” that arise at the intersection between energy-intense data infrastructure and energy grids in transition. The project draws upon interdisciplinary perspectives, combining critical studies of media infrastructures; environmental media; anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS). The postdoc is expected to conduct critical qualitative, empirical research, focusing on the interplay between data infrastructure and energy in relation to sustainability. Candidates with a wide variety of backgrounds are eligible for the position, including media studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, sociology, human geography, political science or related fields.
The post-doc position is full time, for 2 years with the possibility of extension up to a total maximum of three years. A certain amount of teaching will be part of the post-doc duties, up to a maximum of 20% of working hours.
KTH advertises for a Ragnar Holm postdoc position within a KTH research group.
Are you into STS, history of technology, or techno-humanities, electrics and contact-making (and contact unmakings, such as corrosion, fritting or friction) – and would want do work with us at The Posthumanities Hub of the Department of Philosophy and History? If so please contact Cecilia Åsberg urgently, cecilia.asberg[at]abe.kth.se to discuss this possibility.
NB deadline is extended to March 13, 2020.
Postdoc scholarship from Fysikern fil dr Ragnar Holms stiftelse i Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (The Physicist Dr. Ragnar Holm’s Foundation). Registration number VT-2020-0015
Application period March 2-13 2020
KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm has grown to become one of Europe’s leading technical and engineering universities, as well as a key centre of intellectual talent and innovation. We are Sweden’s largest technical research and learning institution and home to students, researchers and faculty from around the world. Our research and education covers a wide area including natural sciences and all branches of engineering, as well as architecture, industrial management, urban planning, history and philosophy.
Project description
KTH invites applications for a postdoctoral scholarship in honor of the physicist Ragnar Holm (1879-1970), regarded as the scientific founder of electric contacts and their use, and author of the book “Electric Contacts: Theory and Applications”, Hugo Gerbers Förlag 1946.
Qualifications
A successful candidate should have a PhD-degree, be of any nationality, and is expected to join an existing research group at KTH in a relatively broad field, encompassing Engineering Physics and related subjects, or the History of Science and Technology. Preference is given to areas close to Ragnar Holm’s scientific activities or the history thereof, such as the theory of electric contacts, novel applications of electric phenomena in current constrictions as well as friction, wear, fritting, corrosion and tarnish phenomena on electric contacts and related devices, such electromechanical components including MEMS and NEMS, switching contacts, and micro- or nanoelectronic components. Preference is also given to tunneling effects including the more recent physics of single electronics, and carbon contacts including developments on fullerenes and graphene. Finally, preference is given to historical perspectives on relations between industrial and public research as well as engineering and scientific practices.
The duration of the stay is a minimum of one year and a maximum of two years, starting as soon as possible. Postdoctoral studies must be commenced within six months of the date of the decision. The fellowship amounts to 27 500 SEK per month (travel grants included). The scholarship is tax-free. The recipient will also receive the Ragnar Holm plaque in silver. The candidate must obtain an agreement with a senior contact person at KTH expressing that he/she is welcome as postdoc in the research group.
Candidates must have their PhD degree from outside KTH. The period of post-doctoral fellowship at KTH must be started within five years of graduation.
Application
You are the main responsible to ensure that your application is complete according to the ad. Your complete application must be received at KTH no later than 2020-03-13.
The application must include the following documents:
Curriculum vitae (max 2 pages)
A list of the ten most relevant publications
A description of the research the candidate will take part in at KTH (max 2 pages)
Three letters of recommendations, including one from the contact person at KTH
The candidate should also give the full address, including telephone and e-mail, at which he/she can be reached.About the position
Period: minimum of one year and a maximum of two years
Extent: Full-time
Amount of scholarship: 27 500 SEK per month (travel expenses included)
Location: Stockholm
Start date: According to the agreement
Contact
Professor Mats Göthelid (Applicants within Engineering Physics)
Telefon: +46 8 790 41 54
gothelid[at]kth.se
Professor Nina Wormbs (Applicants within History of Science and Technology)
Telefon: +46 8 790 85 83
nina[at]kth.se
16 Aug 2019, 13:00-16:00 R1 Reactor hall, KTH, Stockholm (Drottning Kristinas väg 51)
In this mixed and postdisciplinary gathering,
with listening sessions and talks by artists and researchers, we will visit the
limits of communication(s) – when our technologies, ideas, languages and
intentions fail us. We will among other things encounter phenomena that
cannot be decoded, interspecies communication experiments, and speculations
about how we can communicate with not only aliens but also inhabitants on
planet Earth in a distant future.
In a society imbued with communication technologies and a
positive belief in the possibilities of accurately
formulating, transmitting, receiving and archiving,
it might be sobering to consider situations where the communicative attempt
takes us elsewhere. Where it derails
our assumptions and intentions and where we admittedly are out of control. What
can be gleaned from these limits and borderlands? What can be unlearned? What
ethico-political considerations do they confront us with?
Participants Cecilia Åsberg (founder and director of the Posthumanities Hub, KTH/Linköping Univ., SE), Marietta Radomska (co-director of the Posthumanities Hub, Linköping Univ., SE/Univ. of Helsinki, FI), Janna Holmstedt (artist, SE), mirko nikolić (artist, SE/FI), Jacek Smolicki, (artist, SE/PL).
Curated by Janna Holmstedt, the Posthumanities Hub, in collaboration with Jacek Smolicki, Fragmentarium Club, at the invitation of the Public Art Agency. The session will take place inside the large-scale art installation “The Interplanetary Species Society (ISS)” by Jonas Staal. ISS is part of the project “Choreograhies of the Social” curated by Edi Muka, the Public Art Agency Sweden (Statens Konstråd). More information and full program for all the events, 13-25 Aug: www.publicartagencysweden.com
Program, 16 Aug, 13:00-16:00 (in no specific order):
Cecilia Åsberg, Planetary Speculation: Cultivating
More-Than-Human Arts
Ursula K Le Guin stated: “The only thing that
makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what
comes next”. Today we have, dare I say, enough science facts and credible
information to convince us that planetary changes like rampant mass species
extinction rates, climate change, glacial melting and sea rise, plastic
pollution and environmental health concerns are a very real part of the
planetary challenges we now face. What we do not have enough of,
perhaps, seem like a sense of belonging to the ecologies of this
planet, or enough of an ecological sense of wonder and curiosity to close the
emotional gap between values and action, and to sway our ways in more
sustainable directions. This is why we need to cultivate the more than human
arts of living on a damaged planet. Art and humanities have a particular role
to play here, and so does the notion of planetarity. In my talk, while
discussing a few unexpected vistas of environmental feminism, I will discuss
what the role and function of planetary speculation might entail for more
careful ways of knowing.
Cecilia Åsberg, PhD, is Guest Professor of STS, Gender
and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm 2018-2020,
and since 2015 Professor of Gender, Nature, Culture at Linköping University.
She is Founding Director of the Posthumanities Hub, and of the Seed Box: An
Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, and associate editor of the journal
Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press). Recent publications:
“Feminist Posthumanities in the Anthropocene: Forays into the Postnatural” in
Journal of Posthuman Studies; Animal Places – Lively 15 Cartographies of
Human-Animal Relations, (Routledge, eds with Jacob Bull and Tora Holmberg), and
A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities (Springer, ed with Rosi Braidotti).
mirko nikolić , lie and
shine: eleven steps of
A listening session, a walk along a narrow boundary of extraction,
presently in the process of negotiation in the semi-periphery of the European
North. Gold, water, arsenic and physical asset currency embody vectors of
interest or disinterest by various power formations. Most of the forces operate
without prior or informed consent, decisions are being largely made in the
absence of the bodies that will experience the material effects. Silent
neighbours are not that silent. Communication waves shimmer with dispersals of
toxicity and gatherings of resilience.
Through performance and critical writing, mirko
nikolić seeks to prefigure more just collaborations among different species and
heterogeneous bodies. In recent projects, mirko has been working on
counter-extractivist ontopolitics, multispecies commoning, performativity of
vegetal touch, and unlearning of anthropocentric and capitalist survival
ideologies. mirko holds a PhD in Arts & Media Practice from the University
of Westminster, London.
Janna Holmstedt, The
Order of the Dolphin
What do we hear when we think we listen? In 1961, a prominent flock of researchers were invited to a semi-secret conference arranged by NASA’s Space Science Board to discuss a subject not yet considered scientifically legitimate: What are the conditions required for establishing contact with other worlds? Could engaging in communication with dolphins prepare us for an encounter with non-human intelligence? At this time, attempts to reach out to intelligent life on other planets happened to coincided with attempts to get inside the minds and bodies of bottlenose dolphins. In this listening session, I’ll move between the human, the synthetic and the beastly while revisiting some of the interspecies communication experiments that were carried out in the 1950s and 60s, partly funded by NASA, where dolphins were supposed to learn to speak English with their blowholes. At the centre of my session are tape recordings from language lessons with dolphins, and a woman, whom during 75 days tried to live under equal conditions with the dolphin Peter in a flooded house.
Janna Holmstedt is an artist and researcher based in
Stockholm. She works across various media, ranging between installation, sonic
fiction, text, drawing, mapping and performance, with a particular interest in
listening, storying and situated practices. Her projects work transversally in order to weave a
web of parasitic relations in an attempt to story more-than-human relations and
less anthropocentric we-formations. She explores entangled
issues such as multispecies relations, interspecies communication, and the
intra-action of bodies, environs and technology. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts
in Visual Arts from Lund University, is affiliated researcher with the
Posthumanities Hub, and currently research engineer at the Division of History
of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH. More: www.jannaholmstedt.com
Marietta Radomska, From Terminal Ecologies to the
Non/Living Earth: Storying an Archive
In
her work on queer ecocriticism, literary scholar Sarah Ensor offers the concept
of ‘terminality’ understood as a state, a practice, an intimate belonging, and
a horizon; in other words, a ‘lifelong’ and shared condition, characterised by
the potential for relations, non-linear temporality, and an ongoing
responsibility for and accountability towards the harmed, the ill, the
perishing, and the dead (environments, ecosystems, organisms, and other
entities). Staying with the trouble of terminality is but one example of a
biophilosophical approach that does not start from a given image of life, but
instead, from a multiplicity of relations, forces, and materialities (that
which transforms and traverses life) encompassing the potentials for both
growth/development and decomposition/decay. Against the backdrop of the current
ecological crisis, this short intervention asks what it means to story(tell) an
archive of ‘terminal ecologies’, what modes of (non)communication it might
entail, and how it matters in an ethico-political sense.
Marietta
Radomska, PhD, is a Postdoc at the Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping
University, SE, and at the Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki, FI.
She is the co-director of The Posthumanities Hub; founder of The Eco- and
Bioart Research Network, co-founder of International Network for ECOcritical
and DECOlonial Studies and a founding member of Queer Death Studies Network.
Her current research focuses on ecologies of death in the context of
contemporary art. She is the author of the monograph Uncontainable Life: A
Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016), and has published in Australian Feminist
Studies, Somatechnics, and Angelaki, among others. More: www.mariettaradomska.com
Jacek Smolicki, Per
Aspera Ad Astra
Per Aspera Ad Astra (from Latin ‘through hardship to the stars’) was a morse-coded sentence launched alongside other sound recordings onboard Voyager space probe sent into space in 1977. Just like many other signals sent by humans to reach extraterrestrial beings, the Voyager message has so far remained unanswered. Per Aspera Ad Astra is an ongoing artistic and media archaeological exploration of our persistent desire to connect with the non-human, and, more specifically, the extraterrestrial. The project takes the form of a performative soundscape composition built successively of archival material and sounds characterizing technologies used historically to establish contact with aliens. The archival recordings include glitches from digitized interviews with UFO witnesses from the Sweden’s Archive for the Unexplained, snippets from the famous Voyager message, radio signals from the outer space, and reenactments of historical messages sent into space. All these are combined with gradually intercepted remediations of Stanislaw Lem’s deliberations on the inherently flawed idea of establishing contact with other-than-human residents of the deep space.
Jacek Smolickiis a cross-media artist, designer,
researcher and “walker” exploring intersections of aesthetics,
technology, memory and everyday life. In his design and art practice, besides
engaging with existing archives and heritage, Smolicki develops new techniques
for recording, experiencing, and para-archiving human and other-than-human
environments. In his research, informed by art practice, philosophy of
technology, and media archaeology, Smolicki explores how transformations of
communication, recording, and computing technologies have been affecting
aesthetic, material, performative, and ethical aspects of archiving and memory
practices (both personal and public), but also everyday life practices at
large. In 2017, he completed his PhD from the School of Arts and Communication
at Malmö University where he was a member of the Living Archives, a research
project funded by the Swedish Research Council. In 2016 Smolicki
founded Fragmentarium Club, an independent initiative uniting enthusiasts
of listening, soundwalking, field recording, and soundscape archiving. More: www.smolicki.com and www.fragmentarium.club
The Kelp Congress at LIAF (Lofoten International Art Festival) 2019 between the 17th and 22nd of September in Svolvær is an event consisting of three parallel workshops that will lead into a weekend public programme. These workshops will harness the recent discourse surrounding seaweed within contexts such as energy, nutrition, agriculture, and medicine, and will shift the focus onto lesser explored artistic and cultural dimensions related to kelp and other macroalgae.
Who can apply?
Artists, scientists, activists, writers, film-makers, researchers, and those working within arts and culture organisations. The Kelp Congress is grounded within a Nordic context, but the call is open to all nationalities.
Conditions:
Food, accommodation, and local transportation will be provided. Travel to and from Lofoten is not included.
How to Apply:
If you are interested in participating, please submit an Application Form.
We aim to contact all applicants by mid-May.
Deadline:
Thursday 2 May, 2019
The Kelp Congress is organised as part of LIAF 2019, in collaboration with Mustarinda, The Department of Seaweed, Posthumanities Hub, ArtLab Gnesta, Skaftfell – Center for Visual Art, and co-produced with Annette Wolfsberger. LIAF 2019 is curated by Hilde Methi, Neal Cahoon, Karolin Tampere, and Torill Østby Haaland.
Ruptured Times: Call for Films to Annals of Crosscuts 2019
CROSSCUTS: Stockholm Environmental Humanities for Film & Text welcomes submissions for Annals of Crosscuts—a new peer-reviewed publication format
for film-based research. Deadline for abstract submissions 22 May 2019.