Category Archives: General

Interdisciplinary conversations

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One of the common outputs from the PASSIM-project is something we call “interdisciplinary conversations.” Up until this time last year, we assumed that these conversations would take place in person, that they would involve a face-to-face dialogue between two scholars coming from different disciplines but sharing interest in a common object, event or phenomenon of relevance to PASSIM. Our first conversation was on microfilm, with PASSIM’s José Bellido and Matts Lindström from Uppsala University. The conversation could be followed live and it was archived on our website www.passim.se. And then the pandemic struck and zoom became the arena for the next dialogue; the discussion between PASSIM’s Ph.D candidate Isabelle Strömstedt and Annika Öhrner, touching on Isabelle’s work on the 50-year anniversary exhibition of the Swedish Patent Office in 1941 and what exhibition studies might bring to our understanding of how the patent office displays and “sells itself” within a museum space.

I’m writing this a few hours before we go online once again, this time to talk about patent agencies and patent offices with colleagues in Madrid (and anybody who wants to join) – a discussion that, once again, was supposed to have taken place IN Madrid last year.

But I also want to promote three upcoming conversations in the next couple of weeks that we organize jointly with ISHTIP, The International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property. We’ll start promoting the first talk via Twitter next week! But please make a note of these dates and join us for an hour of intense and creative discussions!!

22 April: GMT 11am/ CET 12 noon/ Pacific 3am/Atlantic 6am/Australian Eastern 8pm. ‘Commodification of creativity’, Kathy Bowrey in conversation with Martin Fredriksson and Brad Sherman.

May 4: 2am Californian time; 10am London, 11 am CET, 7pm Sydney. ‘Patent Capital in the COVID-19 Pandemic’, Hyo Yoon Kang in conversation with Javier Lezaun and Mario Biagioli.

May 20: GMT 11am/ CET 12 noon/ Pacific 3am/Atlantic 6am/Australian Eastern 8pm. ‘Cultural Heritage and IP’, Fiona Macmillan in conversation with Kathy Bowrey and Jose Bellido.

 

 

 

 

Announcement: PASSIM Postdoc

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Happy to announce that we’re hiring a postdoc to join the PASSIM team for the final stretch of our project. The announcement and all details about the application process can be found here:

English: https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies?rmpage=job&rmjob=15827&rmlang=UK

Swedish: https://liu.se/jobba-pa-liu/lediga-jobb?rmpage=job&rmjob=15799&rmlang=SE

Please get in touch for any and all questions and queries!

Post seminar: Patents on Display and Methods of Exhibition Analysis

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Yesterday PASSIM held a seminar online. PASSIM’s own Isabelle Strömstedt discussed a narrative approach to exhibition analysis that focuses on how documents can be displayed. Isabelle’s dissertation concerns the exhibition “Idé – Patent – Produkt” (Idea – Patent – Product) by the Swedish Patent Office. Annika Öhrner was invited as a guest speaker. Öhrner is Associate Professor in Art History at Södertörn University. She discussed Methods in Exhibition Analysis. Annika opened the seminar with an informative overview of art history and then explored examples of exhibition analysis in recent dissertations.

The seminar was an excellent example of how benefiting interdisciplinary conversations can be. The resonance between the two speakers was crystal clear and I know for a fact that it was greatly inspiring for Isabelle.

PI Eva Hemmungs Wirtén expressed that in less testing times than the current we would have been able to express our gratitude to Annika over a glass of vine or a post seminar dinner. Unfortunately that will have to be rain-checked, but we are grateful.

As Eva concluded in an earlier post here on our blog, the pandemic has meant that we must do things a little bit different if we are to keep momentum throughout these times.

Yesterday’s seminar was an example of at least one upside with online seminars as a handful of scholars joined the seminar from abroad and very much contributed to the discussion after the presentations.

On behalf of the PASSIM team I would like to thank everyone for their participation.

A recording of the seminar will be published on our website shortly:   https://liu.se/en/research/passim

Best,

Mattis Karlsson, PASSIM RA

About writing (and publishing)

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Last week I learned that I had been awarded one of the 2020 Emerald Literati Awards for “How Patents Became Documents, or Dreaming of Technoscientific Order, 1895-1937,” published in Journal of Documentation 75(3), 2019. This came as a complete surprise. But a welcome one, obviously.

So much about scholarly publishing fascinates me. First there’s the enormity of it, the fact that you’re recognized (even read!) for one article in this ever-increasing avalanche or tsunami of publications out there seems like a minor miracle. I remember when I as a Comp Lit Ph.D. candidate at Uppsala University decided to write my thesis in English rather than Swedish: I admit that I had naive idea that because I was writing in English I would automatically have a huge (well, maybe not huge, but certainly bigger than 10 million Swedish-speaking) readership as well. This equation turned out to be slightly more complex and complicated than I thought some 20+ years ago.

But I think one of reasons why this award was so nice to receive was because I have always identified myself as a writer of books rather than articles. I still do. But in PASSIM I produce articles, and this means both writing and thinking differently than with a book. It’s a challenge. For many reasons. Not so much the stylistic side of things, but in terms of the way in which journal publishing has become so “formalistic.” Not sure if it’s the right word, but there is something quite problematic with the way that we decide which journal to write for first, before we decide (or even know) what the contribution of the article actually is. Of course, the entire scholarly ecosystem is now geared towards articles rather than monographs, and there are similar considerations to be made also when it comes to books, but there is something in this structure I find problematic and important to discuss.

But maybe not right now. For the moment, and in this Covid-19 moment, I’m just very pleased and grateful to Journal of Documentation.

 

 

Upcoming Seminar: Patents on Display and Methods of Exhibition Analysis (Tuesday, 1 December 2020 13.15-15.00: CET)

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PASSIM holds seminar on Patents on Display and Methods of Exhibition Analysis, December 1, 2020.

 

About the Seminar:

In this seminar organized by PASSIM we present a broad introduction to exhibition analysis methods and a focused analysis on patents on display. Speakers are Annika Öhrner, Södertörn University and Isabelle Strömstedt, Linköping University.  Online participation open for everyone and free of charge. You will be able to ask our speakers questions in real-time during the seminar. We encourage you to invite friends or colleagues by sharing this information. The seminar is chaired by PASSIM PI Eva Hemmungs Wirtén. For more information and updates see our twitter @passimproject

Analysis of exhibitions has been present in disciplines of cultural history for some time; however, in recent scholarship, it seems to have gained renewed theoretical interest. While curatorial studies has emerged within the art field and higher art education since the 1990s, the nascent theoretical field of exhibition analysis is dealing with critical approaches to history. In these contexts, the exhibition is sometimes viewed as a media. While focusing on matters of method, the seminar intends to inspire further reflections on the exhibition as historical document and research object.

In Methods in Exhibition Analysis Annika Öhrner presents some theoretical voices in the field before exploring examples of exhibition analysis in recent dissertations in Art History and its neighbouring disciplines. The exhibition – the art exhibition and industrial exhibitions, the World Exhibitions, the more or less “permanent” displays at the national and regional history museum, etcetera – offers a rich and dense research object. Instead, as when working with a singular object or artifact, or with the producer and the audience, the scholar studying the exhibition as a spatial unit is offered a more complex and fruitful research object, allowing viewing history from different points of departure.

In Patents on Display Isabelle Strömstedt introduces her thesis about the exhibition Idé – Patent – Produkt (Idea – Patent – Product) by the Swedish Patent Office. She presents a narrative approach to exhibition analysis with a focus on displayed documents. By looking at the patents displayed in the exhibition, it becomes clear how they extended both the exhibition’s story-time and story-space.

From the exhibition Amerikansk popkonst. 106 former av kärlek och förtvivlan, Moderna Museet, 1964. ©Moderna Museet, ill. from, Art in transfer in the Era of Pop. Curatorial Practicies and Transnational Strategies, Södertörn University, 2017.

Speakers:

Annika Öhrner Associate Professor in Art History and Director of Doctoral Studies in Art History at Södertörn University. Her research is directed towards critical historiography, cultural transfer and museum- and exhibitions studies. She is also an exhibition curator.

Isabelle Strömstedt PhD Candidate at the Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University.  She is currently working on her thesis preliminary titled The Patent Office on Display: Intellectual Property in the Public Eye.

When and where: 

This information as pdf: Patents on Display and Methods of Exhibition Analysis

Zoom link: https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/69009983664

Time: Tuesday, 1 December 2020 13.15-15.00: CET

Welcome!