Guest seminar: Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen

This week the IMS seminar will host Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen, Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, who will present: “Reading Between Media”.

About the seminar

Despite several decades of profound digitalization of almost every aspect of media production and consumption, notions of what constitutes literary reading are still marred by simplified or reductive statements, in research as well as more broadly in cultural debates. Lamentations over the lack of reading particularly among young people fail to recognize the polymediated nature of how experiences of stories happen, which today includes a multitude of genres and media forms as well as social media platforms (Baron, 2015, Bolter 2019). This multitude correlates with media that call upon a plenitude of senses, which leads to an expansion of the concept of reading, i.e., through commonplace tactile app-formats or mobile audio reading. This presentation is based on the results from a 4-year project focused on “reading between media,” which multisensory reading, theoretically and empirically exploring the activity and concept of reading and, developed multisensory reading strategies and tools for school children in order to heighten their digital competencies. Our research shows how digital literacies need to be further understood as part of addressing the cultural bias towards unsubstantiated claims about the superiority of particular media supports for reading. Our paper will address how this extended notion of digital reading practices may qualitatively change the notions of everyday reading practices.

Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is Associate Professor at Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University. Head of Research Program “Arts, Aesthetics, Communities”. Editor of the international peer-reviewed online journal SoundEffects, co-author of Digital Audiobooks – New Media, Users, and Experiences (Routledge 2016), and The Digital Reading Condition, (Routledge 2023). She has published articles in leading international journals on rhythm, the voice, aesthetics, digital reading, and meaning theory in the interrelationship between literature and music.

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen