Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies

08/06/2026

Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar on the 10th of June, with Claudio Paolucci, Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bologna.

“Semiotic lifeworlds. A confrontation between Husserl's phenomenology and Peirce's phaneroscopy”.

If we think of cognition and experience from the enactivist idea of a structural coupling between organism and environment, we see that this environment is first and foremost a semiotic environment, crowded with objects, norms, habits, institutions, and artefacts that shape our minds and represent the background of our perception of the world. This semiotic environment, which goes far beyond the opposition between nature and culture, (See Paolucci 2021. Cognitive semiotics: Integrating signs, minds, meaning, and cognition. Berlin: Springer: ch. 1.) is a semiotic lifeworld that is important to compare with the classic idea of lifeworld coming from phenomenology. In this paper, (i) we will first start with a comparison of the semiotic Lebenswelt and the phenomenological Lebenswelt; (ii) we will follow the construction of the semiotic lifeworld coming from Peirce’s Anti-Cartesian essays; (iii) we will make a deep comparison between the phenomenology coming from Peirce (phaneroscopy) and the phenomenology coming from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty; (iv) we will show how these very same principles also ground structuralism; (v) we will show how this new semiotic lifeworld grounded on phaneroscopy is neither pre-logical nor pre-categorial. Rather, it is founded on the primacy of “telling” over “showing,” and on the primacy of discourse over perception.

To attend the seminar online, please email [email protected]

11/05/2026

Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar on the 13th of May, 10.15-12.00!

What are media borders?

Media boundaries, intermedial relationships and the qualifying aspects of media types.

About the seminar:
Intermedial studies explore relations between different media forms and therefore require concepts to define similarities and differences among media types. One such concept is that of media borders or media boundaries, which is central to intermedial research but also poses conceptual and analytical challenges. One the one hand, the crossing of conventional media borders lies at the core of intermedial relations, and we readily perceive differences between what we label literature, visual art, film, journalism, or video games. On the other hand, these distinctions often blur on closer inspection. In digital, networked communication, formerly distinct media types converge in hybrid media products that combine text, image, and sound in related but still different ways, depending on communicative aims. For instance, not every media product that looks and sound like ‘news’ is produced according to the professional journalistic standards. In the area of ecomedia, what looks like trustworthy media products may on closer inspection be part of climate science denial material.



Intermedial phenomena thus highlight established media boundaries while simultaneously transgressing them and questioning whether such borders exist at all. How do we deal with these elusive borders? How do media borders relate to convergence and hybridity? How can we analyse relationships between different but related media products without getting trapped in essential claims or boundary struggles? To address these issues, we revisit Lars Elleström’s discussion of media types and media borders (2021, pp. 54–73). Using ecomedia and news media as example, we explore what happens when analysis moves from drawing boundaries to qualifying media conventions and expectations. Yet, as usual in the “What is…”-workshop series, we invite you to contribute cases you want to discuss or conceptual or analytical approaches that you want to explore.

To attend online, please email [email protected]

20/04/2026

Dear all,
welcome to this week’s IMS seminar with Sabrina Vellucci!

The IMS seminar will take place on Wednesday, the 22nd of April, at 10.15-12.00, in Dacke and on zoom. Please email [email protected] for the link.

Guest: Prof. Sabrina Vellucci: “Bending the Code”: Adapting Tennessee Williams’s South for the Screen”
Chair: Niklas Salmose

Starting from the mid-1940s, Tennessee Williams’s experiments and poetic innovations on the stage would shape a peculiar transnational/transcultural South that became the privileged setting and subject of his cinematic imagination. This presentation will focus on two of Williams’s adaptations, The Rose Tattoo (1955) and Baby Doll (1956), and explore how, revising dominant Hollywood types, the protagonists become self-fashioning characters whose outspoken desires question the patriarchal and racial hierarchies of the culture they inhabit. The process of adaptation from stage to screen, as well as Williams’s reworkings of his previous versions of the texts, testify to the disruptive potential of his “steamy Southern Gothic,” while also exposing – through the negotiations between playwright directors and producers, and the plots’ ambivalent endings – the contradictions and hypocrisies of postwar racial and gendered discourses

08/04/2026

Art, ecology, community: The HULT residency projects 2026
Click the link for the seminar’s homepage: https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/events/2026/ims-seminar-vt2611/

Ingela Johansson: A Labyrinth of Sorrow, Strength, and Healing
Ingela’s plans for the residency. I am interested in the intersection: memory politics, care-work, ancient knowledge, organic farming as cultural landscape heritage, and feminism. Through my project A Labyrinth of Sorrow, Strength, and Healing, I aim to explore feminist resistance to central authority, accumulation, extraction and how it has materialized or been socialized across disciplines. Much of my concept for HULT is based on Silvia Federici’s work on reproduction of labor and witch hunts as a form of social control. Additionally, I’m having a great pleasure of reading Elin Wägners 1000 år i Småland.

My work will pick up various threads. Take the legend of Blenda that has, in a real sense, served to strengthen collectivist and feminist ideals in Småland—a fictional legend that led to actual political change, such as equal inheritance rights. This legend is mentioned by Wägner, has been the inspirational source for many, for example recently the “Blenda project” in 2018. I am interested in monastic life with an emphasis on cultivation in relation to environmental transition, ecofeminism, and the commons. There is little written record on these gardens, but Nydala Abbey maintains cultivation as part of the green cultural heritage. This interest in the 1600-1700 century may also involve examples from peasant culture and the use of witchcraft. Who were the marginalized and free-thinking individuals who challenged the norm? I’ve looked a bit into Nydala Monastery and St. Sigfrid Mental Hospital, how can one compare these confined environments—one chosen and one imposed? The Småland Museum archives contain interesting leads, such as the 1960 Poverty Exhibition, Furthermore there are also examples within the art-design context of Småland with lots of silent knowledge. This will likely result in various dialectical treads, a montage-style work with different focal points.
Leandro Ferre Caetano: Methodologies for long-distance intimacy
Leandro’s plans for the residency “My curatorial approach focuses on creating conditions for collective processes of listening and co-learning, treating rural contexts as active sites of knowledge production where climate urgencies circulate between local and global spheres. I'm particularly interested in exploring how artistic practices can engage with the specific ecological and cultural landscapes of Kronoberg, developing methodologies that value non-academic knowledge and cultivate "long-distance intimacy" between rural territories and broader networks of thinking. My presentation will be dedicated to my practice-based research which informs my curatorial approach, followed by how this has evolved to consider the specificities of Kronoberg's local 'ecologies.'
The HULT residency program explores the interaction between humans and nature, capturing contemporary, complex issues around climate emergency and societal transformation. The starting point is Kronoberg's rural context where many different types of actors and interests take place. This includes cultural organizations, activists, community actors, municipalities and academic partners. The basis is a strong desire to promote the development of new ways of thinking and collective living as a response to the most pressing challenges of our time.

About the presenters
Ingela Johansson is a writer and artist based in Stockholm. Mainly working with video, installation, narrative film, textile and text, Johans son’s practice engage in topics such as social history and memory – she is known for her work around individual and collective experiences of history writing: poetics of solidarity, microhistories and archives on the labor organization. More recently she has taken an interest in the practices of care, mourning and healing, herstories, storytelling that is intersecting eco-feminism and cosmologies.
Johanssons most recent exhibitions, screenings and projects includes: Kin, Center for Contemporary Art, Kiruna (2025), Umeå Konsthall (2024), Havremagasinet, Boden: Liljevalchs, Stockholm: Modem, Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, Hungary(2023), Bröhan Museum, Berlin (2022), Södertälje Konsthall, Luleåbiennialen (2021), Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, Stockholm, Göteborgs Konsthall (2020) among others.
Ingela Johansson

Leandro Ferre Caetano, born in Mogi das Cruzes, Tietê River territory in Brazil, is a curator and researcher based in Copenhagen, working between the Nordic region and South America. His curatorial practice is grounded in art-based research and cultural mediation, with a strong interest in postcritical and decolonial approaches in artistic practices.
Leandro is a curator, researcher and project manager at ARIEL – Feminisms in the Aesthetics and has previously collaborated with institutions such as SESC (BR), the São Paulo Biennial, Videobrasil (BR), Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki), and Skēnē (Malmö). Leandro holds an MA in Visual Studies and Art Education (Aalborg University & Aalto University). Recent projects focus on socially engaged projects, ecological practices, and collaborative methodologies, developing projects that connect artists and researchers across Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Brazil.
https://arielfeminisms.dk/

We welcome Ingela Johansson and curator Leandro Ferre Caetano, fellows for the HULT residency in Kronoberg 2026 . The residency provides curators and artists with the opportunity to explore the relationship between humans and to connect art, climate change and community development. IMS looks forwar...

17/03/2026

This week, on the 18th of March, from 10.15-12.00 we are welcoming back Alice Jedličková, Charles University, Prague.

Swapping perspectives. Intermediality as a tool for teaching literature to multimedia digital natives.

"In my contribution, I would like to present examples of the application of intermedial phenomena and categories in teaching literary theory. I am working on the assumption that the generation of students I refer to as multimedia digital natives prioritizes audiovisual information and multimodal text over purely verbal text; thus, the representation patterns that they conceive of as standard may differ from those acquired by previous generations. Realizing this change and confronting traditional representational schemes with the current ones (e. g. frontal portrait with the typical perspective of a selfie) as well as recognizing techniques employed in digital media may help to cultivate students´ capacity to behold, and provide them with a set of prisms for observing various media products, verbal text included."

Bio:
Alice Jedličková is a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, CZ; Associate professor at the Technical University Liberec, CZ. Research interests: intermediality (literature and illustration, theatre and multimedia projects, cultural tradition); intermedial interventions in public space; narratology, historical poetics of fiction.

To attend the seminar online, send an email to [email protected]

09/02/2026

Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar 11/2, 10:15-12 CEST with Anna Foka, professor in digital humanities at Uppsala University, who will hold the talk titled: " AI and Image: Challenges and Opportunities"

About the seminar
This talk will address the latest developments on AI and Image, particularly the complexity that arises with Computer Vision applied in historical and Heritage collections.

Short bio
Anna Foka is a full Professor in Digital Humanities at Uppsala University and the founder and director of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. Anna is currently involved as a PI in the following research project: AI Futures of Culture and Memory (WASP-HS), Digital Periegesis and its Public Interface (The Swedish Research Council), AI, Authenticity and the Archives (WASP-HS), and Synthetic Pasts (Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation). Anna is also the director for DASH Graduate School Network (The Swedish Research Council)

How to attend
This seminar can be attended in person in room Dacke or on Zoom by emailing [email protected]

02/12/2025

Welcome to this week’s IMS seminar, where we welcome our guest Jarkko Toikkanen, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Adjunct Professor in English at Tampere University, Finland.

The seminar is on the 3rd of December, from 10.15-12.00 in room Dacke, Växjö and on Zoom. Email [email protected] for the Zoom link.

Experience Technological Analysis:
I am participating in the development of Experience Technological Analysis (ETA) for close reading the effects of storytelling and user interaction to examine how media items of all kinds materially engage with the senses, either physically or through imagination, and give rise to perceptions in medium specific ways in different media environments. ETA demonstrates how subjective responses of individuals and communities are based on the shared objective conditions belonging to the purposive design of a media item, and the results gained from the method are about how the item succeeds or fails in employing the material relevant techniques.

The theory behind ETA concerns the difference between reading as semiotic interpretation and reading as phenomenological experience, drawing on a tradition from Hegel and Husserl to Paul de Man. My understanding of intermediality is that, to become aware of an environment, the awareness must be mediated. Awareness of something is, by definition, a mediated awareness. In 2017, I launched the three-tier model of mediality to study how mediating can occur. The model defines three tiers of media – senses, ways of presenting, and ideas – that function together to produce intermedial experience. The new development with ETA is to bring the aspects of design and agency into the method.

At the IMS seminar, I will discuss Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934, from Ideas of Order, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43431/the-idea-of-order-at-key-west) to introduce ETA and inspire discussion on the relevant concepts. I published an article on the poem last year (https://jcla.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/JCLA-47.2_Summer-2024_Jarkko-Toikkanen.pdf) but at that point, my thinking on design and agency had only started. Since then, I and my colleague have been working on a revised concept of technology we are taking further in an EU Horizon project (https://www.newworktech.eu/) involving new work technologies and disability studies.

Seminar participants can prepare by reading Key West and consider how interpreting the meaning of the poem is different from experiencing the poem, if at all. I will start with theory and methodology to open the talks, observing how poetry as a technology, through designed effects of storytelling and user interaction, unsettles agentive identifications between the poem as object and reader as subject while doubling down on them in a way whose implications ETA is geared to solve.

Bio note:
Jarkko Toikkanen is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Adjunct Professor in English at Tampere University, Finland. He has launched a three-tier model of mediality to study the intermedial experience of non-digital and digital medial environments including literature and television, with articles on Lovecraft, Poe and paranormal reality television shows, among other materials. He contributed an article on medium specificity in the Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (2023) and co-edited the anthology Shaping the North through Multimodal and Intermedial Interaction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In sensory studies, he has explored the range of the traditional senses and gone beyond them towards cutting-edge investigations in proprioception and interoception and is now conducting research in the EU Horizon project NewWorkTech (https://www.newworktech.eu/).

25/11/2025

Exciting news!
VR Grants SEK 5 Million for TikTok Journalism Research tied to IMS

In its call for research on the societal consequences of digitalization, the Swedish Research Council has awarded SEK 5 million to the project “TACTik: The Transformation and Consequences of News on TikTok.” The project is led by the University of Gothenburg, and is a collaboration with Linnaeus University, and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. Researchers Beate Schirrmacher and Kristoffer Holt are participating through the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS).

Read a short interview with the researchers here:

In its call for research on the societal consequences of digitalization, the Swedish Research Council has awarded SEK 5 million to the project “TACTik: The Transformation and Consequences of News on TikTok.” The project is led by the University of Gothenburg, and is a collaboration with Linnaeus...

20/11/2025

Today, we celebrate our doctoral candidate, Matilda Davidsson, who has officially posted her dissertation "Animal Encounters in Play: Multimodal Configurations, Nonhuman Agency, and Interspecies Ethics in Digital Games".

The dissertation can be found here: https://bit.ly/3X8GN2d

If you would like to learn more about her research, you can listen to a short podcast episode here: https://humpodd.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/djur-datorspel-och-doktorand/ (in Swedish).

11/11/2025

Vad händer när desinformation sprids snabbare än sanningen och hoten mot journalister blir allt mer komplexa?

Medieinstitutet Fojos Kunskapsvecka 10–14 november samlar experter från hela världen för att diskutera bland annat faktagranskning, AI inom journalistiken och hur redaktioner kan stötta kollegor som utsätts för hat och trakasserier.

– Vi har bjudit in flera fantastiska experter från redaktioner, akademin, techvärlden och inom medieutveckling. Det blir en riktigt spännande blandning, säger Paul Rapacioli, verksamhetschef på Medieinstitutet Fojo vid Linnéuniversitetet och nämner Glenn Kessler, faktagranskaren från Washington Post, som ett utmärkt exempel.

Fojos Kunskapsvecka hålls 10–14 november med evenemang i Stockholm, Malmö, Kalmar och online. Läs mer och anmäl dig: https://fojo.se/kunskapsveckan/