Karl Andersson

Anthropologist

Uncategorized

PhD week 0: The pre-week

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Tomorrow is the official start of my PhD programme, so this week I have spent days and hours browsing the university’s website, trying to get some overview and structure.

  • I’ve set up my university email account and subscribed to various mailing lists.
  • I’ve scheduled a first meeting with my supervisors for next week.
  • I’ve connected the Orcid account I registered when submitting to my first journal a month ago (still “under review”) to the university library.
  • I found a mandatory course called Research integrity, which I’m taking online and am halfway through. It’s really interesting and important. I’m learning things that I think should be part of the basic education for all postgraduate students at all universities.
  • I’ve signed up for various seminars, mainly in October 2021.

My thoughts before I begin

I’m very confused. I don’t know what it will mean to be a PhD student. Should I sign up for courses? Where do I find them? What are the “training programmes” that it’s my responsibility to attend? Or will it from day one only be about reading a lot and doing my own research? These are the questions I need to ask my supervisors, and maybe the separately assigned advisor, which I guess I will be informed about.

Note: There will also be induction events next week. So things will get clearer. But I wanted to record my honest feelings at the moment.

Other stuff

On Tuesday I had Indonesian dinner at Mabuhay with M&B, and my friend O.

On Wednesday I visited my classmate and friend A and had my first yoga/breathing exercise/mantra chanting. And then we talked. Walked home, 7 km, just before the rain started pouring down.

On Thursday night I had a walk and dinner at Paolo Pinkel with A: We had delicious Bibimbap from their Korean kitchen (they have three kitchens, so we’re coming back). And then we also talked.

On Thursday and Friday I participated as a listener, and quite selectively, in the Enqa workshop 2021.

On Saturday I had my first insect burger with friends and neighbours at H/O’s place. Not too bad! I guess I’m now an ento-vegetarian. Earlier in the day I spontaneously ran a bit in the park where I usually walk:

And today I had a walk in the same park with my friend A. It was 16 degrees and chilly – I need to dress warmer when I’m not alone and can adjust the temperature by my walking pace.

In the mornings I watch Japanese news – it’s exciting now with the candidature to LDP leader – and in the evenings I’m watching Macross: Tonight will be episode 9. I like it very much.

PhD and university related

My Manchester News:

SALC Academic Advising Community:

  • Making the most of now and planning for the future

SALC PGR Handbook

Subject specific

ENQA Workshop 2021: Futures beyond Crises

16–17 September 2021.

Nothing of direct relevance to me but I like Enqa and it’s interesting to hear about various queer research projects. Although Zoom presentations are very hard for me to follow, as noted earlier. One block per day will have to suffice.

  • Keynote address: Omar Kasmani (Freie Universität Berlin)
  • Panel: Crises, refusals and insurgencies chaired by Tunay Altay
    • Suparna Roy: Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation: A Reflection on Indian Politics for a Future ‘Beyond Crisis’
    • Maya El Helou: In the verge of something, anything, Maybe nothing and maybe life or the lack of thereof: Queer and Feminist insurgencies in Urban Beirut
    • A. Berkem Yanıkcan: Queering the Administration Crisis at Boğaziçi University: Sexual Politics and the Public University in Turkey
    • Manuel Bolz: Queering Revenge: Medicalization and psychologization of emotions and affects of crisis

Articles

Video

Today I summarised my impressions of my favourite Japanese study book 真日本語 500問 N2.

Let the new adventure begin!

Week 2: 7-13 January 2019

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It was a very active and study-focused week.

I’m quite excited about phenomenology, which was the theme of this week’s unit in Qualitative Methods. In the always perfectly curated window display of The Berlin Book Nook I found Robert Anton Wilson’s Reality Is What You Can Get Away With from 1993/1996. I didn’t know that book of his, but have read many of his other works. Since the theme of phenomenology is that reality is always subjective, it was a nobrainer to grab it (God has a plan for you!) despite its relatively hefty price of 36 euro, apparently it’s a rarity.

Digital Anthropology Unit 8 had an art focus and included a discussion on works by Hito Steyerl. Incidentally she would have a talk at HKW this very week, so I went there to see her. Berlin delivers. The whole event was like a mini-Re:publica full of interesting talks and an interested audience – the auditorium was full.

For Digital Anthropology Unit 9 next week we got an assignment which I loved, it played right into where I was in my research right now and the lecturer’s attitude made me very inspired. I therefore started working on it immediately and was finished the next day, but I will post it in next week’s study diary since it belongs to Unit 9. I was also quite taken by Brian Larkin’s text, which was dense and hard to get through, but at the same time gave me a totally new perspective on the concept of infrastructure.

Ethnographic Film Unit 8 was about observational cinema and Frederick Wiseman’s first film Titicut Follies from 1967. By accident I checked the calendar of Arsenal Cinema and saw that they screened his latest film Monrovia, Indiana from 2018 this week, as part of an American independent film festival. I didn’t know the guy was still alive. He’s 89 now. The film was brilliant in many ways, mainly in its idea: Here is finally a guy who treats Americans in the same way that American anthropologists have treated people from various places in Africa. Again, Berlin delivers. I was excited to have found two amazing complements to this week’s studies.

I finished the first season of Dogs of Berlin. The series feels groundbreaking in a way, although I don’t watch many TV series. It feels like a turn driven by new technology. I can’t speficy exactly what it is, but the series feels so fresh, the feeling is like “so this is how it can be done”. The Netflix era. I had a similar feeling when I first watched 24: Not the idea of making each episode an actual hour (minus commercials) – that I considered mainly a gimmick – but the dramaturgy of having important characters suddenly turn on you, be revealed to be traitors. And then turn again. That trope was used extensively over the next decade or so until we viewers couldn’t care less. So something new had to be done. Dogs of Berlin is one of those things. It’s local, brutal and as exaggerated as a comic. Perfect entertainment. The letterbox on my 16:9 TV made me read up on the 2:1 (or 18:9) aspect ratio that Dogs of Berlin and several other high profile TV series are apparently filmed in.

I’m also rewatching season 2 of Mr Robot, which also felt groundbreaking now that I think of it. Maybe it’s just that I’m not used to watching TV series and they’re always this good nowadays! But Mr Robot also makes use of spectacular camera work which breaks the traditional cinematic rules in order to convey the feelings of Elliot. I’m watching on Amazon Prime on my old PS3 since I got Prime for free for a year as a student.

I finally reviewed WordPress’ new Gutenberg editor, which I must admit I hate. If anything looks strange, especially in terms of extra space where there should be no extra space – stuff like that – Gutenberg is to blame:

Study

Digital Anthropology Unit 8

Artistic Practice in the Virtual Age // Post-internet Art

Digital Anthropology Unit 9

Aesthetics of Infrastructure : Practise-led-(Re)Search between the Virtual and Material Worlds

  • Larkin, Brian (2013): The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. In Annual Review of Anthropology 42, pp. 327-349.
  • Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2014): Visualising the Anthropocene. In Public Culture, pp. 213-232.

Other

HKW: Stop Making Sense

  • The Language of Broken Glass. Hito Steyerl (filmmaker), Bernd Scherer
  • Language is a Slippery Thing. Luc Steels (AI scientist and opera composer)
  • Language Agents. Luc Steels in conversation with Giulia Bruno (artist) and Armin Linke (artist) 
  • If Everything is True—Knowledge and Manipulation. Felix Stalder (media and cultural theorist)
  • Datafication of Science. Kate Crawford (Distinguished AI Scholar) and Trevor Paglen (artist)

Articles

Film & video

  • Frederick Wiseman: Monrovia, Indiana (2018, 143 min)
  • Kevin Fret – Soy Asi
  • Netflix: Dogs of Berlin
  • Amazon Prime: Mr Robot

Week 1: 1-6 January 2019

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I mostly relaxed this week, and started reading the texts for the next units of Ethnographic Film and Digital Anthropology.

Next week school will start again, and I’m also super excited to do some proper work as well. That feeling of January, start of the year and all. Yes, the days are dark and Berlin is miserable. But I see it as just another reason to increase my screentime.

Study

Ethnographic Film Unit 8

Observational Film and Beyond

  • Young, Colin (1974): Observational Cinema. In Hockings, Paul, ed. (2003): ​Principles of Visual Anthropology​, pp. 99-113.
  • MacDougall, David (1974, 1994): Beyond Observational Cinema. In Hockings, Paul, ed. (2003): ​Principles of Visual Anthropology​, pp. 115-132.

Digital Anthropology Unit 8

Artistic Practice in the Virtual Age // Post-internet Art

Other

Book

  • Roberto Saviano: La paranza dei bambini (2016, 367 pages, in Swedish translation: “Blodsleken”)

Articles

Film & video

Podcast

Week 52: 24-30 December 2018

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And so it’s the last week of the year. I’ve spent it on La Palma, hiking in the mountains and reading Roberto Saviano’s La paranza dei bambini (in Swedish translation) by the pool. It’s great!

Like the last two years, I recorded a summary of the books I read during the year:

2018 was an important year for me. It was the year when I decided to get back to studying, applied for a few master’s programmes and eventually started the Visual and Media Anthropology programme in Berlin. I’m loving every minute of it. Not that the programme is perfect in itself, but it does provide the possibility to make the most out of it, something that I’m determined to do. We’re still at the stage where we’re building the foundation of our anthropological knowledge, which will then come to use when we start focusing on our own research projects.

One more week of free time before the studies start again.

Study

Digital Anthropology Unit 8

Artistic Practice in the Virtual Age // Post-internet Art

  • Quaranta, Domenico (2015): Situating Post-Internet Art. In Catricalà, Valentino: Media Art: Towards a New Definition of Art in the Age of Technology, pp. 121-134.
  • Cornell, Lauren and Halter, Ed, eds. (2015): Hard Reboot: An Introduction to Mass Effect. In Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, pp. xv-xxxiii (15-33).

Week 51: 17-23 December 2018

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Last week of school this year! Almost three months of intense studies lie behind me: This week we finished unit 7 of both Classics and Varieties of Ethnographic Film and Digital Anthropology, where I was one of the presenters:

Presentation on microcelebrities.

Study

Ethnographic Film Unit 7

Towards a shared Anthropology: Jean Rouch and Cinéma-Vérité

  • Rouch, Jean (2003): The Camera and Man. In ​Paul Hockings (ed.): Principles of Visual Anthropology, pp.79-98.
  • Grimshaw, Anna (2001): The anthropological cinema of Jean Rouch. In ​The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of seeing in Modern Anthropology, pp. 112-120.

Films to this unit:

  • Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx: Les Raquetteurs​ (1958, 15 min.)
  • Jean Rouch: Chronicle of a Summer​ (1961, 87 min.)

Digital Anthropology Unit 7

Online Celebrities: Social media as a marketing tool.

  • Seaver, Nick (2017): Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. In Big Data & Society 4, no. 2, pp. 1-12.
  • Related film: The American Meme (2018, 98 min)

Other

Articles

Film & video

Week 50: 10-16 December 2018

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First of all, the weeks pass incredibly fast. It feels like it’s always Sunday again and I’m wrapping up another one of these weekly study diary posts.

Again, I didn’t read all texts for Digital Anthropology Unit 6 on Thursday, despite interesting subjects. The presentation of the SD card article was so interesting that I read the text afterwards though. And I suppose I will get back to the other ones as well. Apparently the purpose with Unit 6 was to see how the authors wrap their findings in an appropriate theory, sort of. And that was super interesting, since I had some criticism regarding that for one of the texts, which I vented in class.

And we had another class in Qualitative Methods on Wednesday that demanded some fast reading due to confusion (not just me) about dates.

Ethnographic Film Unit 6 on Tuesday was on Jean Rouch part 1.

I’ve read up on internet celebrities during the week and started putting together my presentation this weekend. I will present on Thursday next week, so I’m quite focused on that now.

What more? I bought a Nintendo Switch and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate! Plus tried out streaming my first game of Paladins to Twitch:

At least I didn’t kill my team mates.

Study

Qualitative Methods

  • Kohler Riessman, C. (2008): Chapter 2: Constructing Narratives for Inquiry. In Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences, pp. 21-51.
  • Kohler Riessman, C. (2008): Chapter 3: Thematic Analysis. Ibid, pp. 53-77.
  • Related video: Rethinking Wellbeing – Professor Catherine Kohler Riessman. (Summary: On applied linguistics in health; “narrative research that looks at language”, as opposed to grounded theory and qualitative research in general, which generally focuses more on the themes that can be found behind the language, they want to look through the language.)

Ethnographic Film Unit 6

  • Russell, Catherine (1999): Ecstatic Ethnography: Filming Possession Rituals. In Experimental Ethnography, pp.193-237. (Continued with the two last sections: Bill Viola: Existentialism, Technology, and the Other and Group Fantasies and Simulated Subjectivites = 229-237. Still haven’t read the sections on Mead and Deren = 199-218.)

Digital Anthropology Unit 6

Mobile Media Practices: Texts, Technologies and Online Subjectivities on
the Move.

Digital Anthropology Unit 7

Online Celebrities: Social media as a marketing tool.

Other

Articles

Video