Karl Andersson

Anthropologist

Week 21: 20-26 May 2019

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I continued tweaking my essay for Theory and History during the week. In fact, the first draft needed some major changes. As always, S was invaluable in pointing them out. I finally submitted on Friday, a full week before deadline – as planned, but still!

Sending email
Submitting …

This is the first academic paper I write since being an undergraduate student, but it would actually be fair to call it my first academic paper ever. This is on a whole different level than when I studied at Stockholm University, which was also very long ago. So therefore, I feel extremely proud and accomplished, and the whole process was so satisfactory: To read lots of papers on a certain topic, to summarise existing research and to build on it – adding my own analysis, backed up by what has already been established. The feeling is one of being part of something bigger, of contributing my little piece to the vast body or why not building of knowledge that people are continuously constructing and repairing.

I remember when I was in Rotterdam with S in April last year and we visited the campus of the Erasmus university. Their slogan was something like “Leave your mark”, and S asked me: “Are you ready to leave your mark in academia?” That’s the first time he suggested I should apply for a Master’s programme, apparently having thought about it for a long time but not knowing how to drop the hint in the right way. Well, about a year later my feeling is one of having “left my mark”. A small mark, a contribution to something bigger, and most definitely only the beginning. It’s such a fantastic feeling. So we biked to Tempelhofer Feld and enjoyed the Friday afternoon in the sun, drinking beer and eating strawberries. (Of course I have made many journalistic contributions before, but on a more independent level, and sometimes “dependency” makes all the difference. This time my contribution counts, is the feeling.)

This week’s classes:

  • Monday: Space & Place, unit 3.
  • Tuesday: Media Activism, unit 3.
  • Thursday: Immersive Technologies. With an interesting guest lecturer.
  • Friday: Research Proposal. First session.

Because I was so focused on my essay this week I had not read all the mandatory readings for Space & Place and Media Activism. It was the first time that happened in this programme, and it was exactly as bad as I had assumed: I couldn’t engage in the discussions and didn’t get as much out of the class as I usually do. I haven’t caught up yet, since I rather started the readings for next week’s unit 4 of those courses right away – plus one from unit 6 of Media Activism since I will present then.

Today I voted in the European Parliament elections.

Tomorrow I will drop off my Macbook Pro to Apple, so that it can be repaired while we’re at Freiburger Filmforum.

Study

Space and Place

Unit 4: Applied Methods: I – Maps from Switzerland / Indonesia. Weakness and Limitations of Mapping.

  • Bartley, Brendan (2012): Chapter 1: Introducing Theory. In Continuum Studies in Medieval History: Thinking Geographically, pp. 3-21.

Media Activism

Unit 4: Practice, Agency & Change

  • Postill, J. (2010). Introduction: Theorising media and practice. In B. Bräuchler & J. Postill (Eds.), Theorising media and practice, pp. 1-32.

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

  • Barassi, V. (2015). The ethnography of digital activism. In V. Barassi, Activism on the web: Everyday struggles against digital capitalism, pp. 17-48. New York: Routledge.

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