European Researchers’ Night: Fifty shades of modern media

Emma Tornborg

Can Donald Trump help you express your feelings? GIFs in social media
GIFs have in later years become a very popular means of expressing oneself online and in text messaging. We let celebrities and politicians act out our feelings for us. How do reaction GIFs affect conversations with strangers on social media platforms?

Emma Tornborg is a post doctoral researcher at the Linnaeus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies

Pedro Atã

How can a word surprise you?
Language can communicate surprising ideas, and this happens often in poetry. However, for an international poetry movement of 1950’, the concrete poets, we shouldn’t be surprised by the ideas of a poem, but by the words themselves, by their materiality. But how many ways are there for a word to be material? This intriguing view of poetic communication makes us think differently about language and our relation to it.

Pedro Atã is a Ph.D. student at the Linnaeus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. He explores the idea that our processes of meaning can be understood as negotiations between familiarity and surprise. Most of his examples are connected to poetry, investigated as a tool for experiencing, communicating, and creating surprise.

Gilbert Ambrazaitis

Say it with your eyes! What can children’s eye movements tell us about how they acquire speech melody?
Can a three year old child understand the difference between "a RED flower" and "a red FLOWER"? How and when do children learn to put the focus on the "right" word in an utterance? And does the language or dialect play any role here? We are currently trying to answer these questions in a research project using eye tracking technology. 

Gilbert Ambrazaitis is a senior lecturer in Swedish as a second language with a PhD in phonetics from Lund University (2010). His research has ever since had a strong focus on prosody – the melody and rhythm of speech. In his current research he is studying, among others, how bodily gestures interact with speech prosody and how children acquire the capacity to use speech melody for information structuring.

Mike Classon Frangos

Is Black Panther art? Can we read comics from an academic perspective, and what makes them so popular now more than ever?
Comics and graphic novels seem to be everywhere, from the Hollywood mainstream to the underground. Superheroes, autobiographies, humor and satire are only some of the genres in today's graphic novels. How can we read comics from an academic perspective, and what makes them so popular now more than ever?

Mike Classon Frangos is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Linnaeus University and has a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research is on comics and popular culture, gender studies, and modern literature in English and Swedish. 

Linus Johansson

“Who are the world?” What’s the connection between the MTV and the Cold War?
Contrary to common views of MTV as a superficial, materialistic forum, rising from the mainstream cultural industries during the 1980s, some commonly featured artists showed sincere interest in contemporary politics. This presentation focuses on charity projects associated with starvation in Africa, such as Band Aid's "Do they know it's Christmas?", and USA for Africa's "We are the World". As pop stars united for a common cause, these projects articulated a collective concern in humanitarian issues, while also adding an ideological layer to their individual artistic image. 

Linus Johansson holds a position as lecturer at the Department for Music and Arts. His main area of research covers popular culture, youth, gender, and ethnicity. 

Beate Schirrmacher

Why does Hannibal Lecter listen to classical music? Music and violence in film and literature
Should we be disturbed by the fact that classical music often connects to violence in literature and film? What do music and violence communicate when they appear together?

Beate Schirrmacher is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Department for Film and Literature at Linnaeus University. Her research is on relationships between literature and music, and more recently on witnessing, trials in literature and other media.

Access to fresh water around the globe is for many considered a natural matter, something we don't even think about. But not everyone is so lucky, and in the future, the global access to fresh water is likely to be severely threatened by climate changes. The digital art installation 'deSALinatiON' puts focus on water in a general sense, encourages us to interact, react, and to think of water and our relationship to it. 'deSALinatiON' also refers to the more and more important act of purifying salt water into drinkable fresh water.

The installation is created by Cristina Pop-Tiron and Signe Kjaer Jensen.

Cristina Pop-Tiron is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Theater and Television of the Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, within the Department of Theater and Performing Arts. She has a background in Fine Arts and her PhD research involves a practical approach to interactive spectatorship in digital performance art. For the 2018 European Researchers' Night event in Växjö, Sweden, ‘50 Shades of Modern Media’, she co-designed the interactive art-installation ‘Aurora – Connecting Senses’.

Signe Kjaer Jensen is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University. She has a background in Musicology, and her research interests centre on music and sound as parts of different media constellations, with her PhD project focusing on music in animated features and children’s responses to it. She is also co-designer on the interactive art-installation ‘Aurora – Connecting Senses’, presented at the European Researchers' Night event ‘50 Shades of Modern Media’ 2018.