I post brief updates once in a while in this space.
[May 1, 2024]
I am currently getting to the final stages of two major writing projects! I am also working on a piece on the “aspirational humanities”, which I hope to submit before the summer (about 80% finished).
[October 1, 2023]
I finally submitted my monograph on Humane Infrastructures this past summer. I am now working on a piece on “emerging humanities” (environmental, digital, ice, urban etc., sometimes discussed under rubrics such as integrative and experimental humanities), primarily regarding how they negotiate the landscape of societal challenges, wicked problem and missions.
[December 20, 2022]
This past year I had a great spring seemster as a fellow at SCAS in Uppsala. I also focused on infrastructure and academic events research as well as on considering models for building capacity to mobilize humane and humanistic capacity to respond collaboratively to societal challanges and complex problems. I also co-curated an event on such capacity building at Arizona State University in early May and have continued the dialogue aorund an ‘infrastructure clinic’. I am also in the process of finishing a book manuscript on infrastructure.
[September 1, 2021]
I am still in Sweden finhsing up some big projects before spending a semester at the Swedish Collegeium for Advanced Study in the spring of 2022. I have not hosted any physical or zoom-based events this year, but started to work on a different format earlier this year, a kind of “anti-zoom” asynchronous, text-based, cuarated conversation. This will be a series of conversations on “Humane Infrastructures”, and the first one is on “Inside and Outside: Shifting Socio-Technological Systems” with five participants including Marie Louise Juul (Oslo School of Architecture and Design) and Matt Ratto (University of Toronto) – wehave almost finished one -and a second one on “Changing Ourselves – Climate, Carbon and Concepts”.
[July 7, 2020]
I am still at UCLA as a Visiting Professor, but temporarily in Sweden because of COVID-19. Before leaving, I organized the Humane Infrastructures workshop at UCLA with the support of Francesca Albrezzi and a number of people and organizations. It was an important event, and there were all kinds of threads coming from and leading through the workshop. In the meantime I am still working on the Humane Infrastructures book and gearing up my research on academic events (which started earlier with a piece on “Some Thoughts on Making Academic Events with Particular Attention to the Mid-Sized Event”).
[May 30, 2019]
Back in LA after several European visits, including doing a lecture in Luxemburg, participating in the Dariah-EU Scientific Board meeting in Warzaw, organizing a Humanities Tech KTH conversation on crowds and curating the third Digital Humanities Stockholm event on May 21. Our report on Humanistic Infrastructure (in Swedish) was published by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in May.
[Feb 12, 2019]
I am back in LA after two weeks in Sweden. We ran a large digital humanities event (Digital Humanities Stockholm) on Jan 29 at the National Library and a series of Humanities Tech events on Jan 30 at KTH. Lots of new contacts, lots to think about. Excited about the future! We also submitted two substantial proposals. And yes, I have a contract now for my new book on Human/istic Infrastructure.
[Nov 2, 2018]
The last couple of weeks have been very intense and rewarding. I spent most of this time in Stockholm organizing two fairly large events and having a series of meetings. The two events were quite different, and exciting, rich and challenging in different ways. Now I am back in Los Angeles, where I am trying to shift focus to finishing a report (with a working group on humanistic infrastructure), continuing my own infrastructure writing and doing a couple of talks – the next one on Human/istic Infrastructure at UCLA on November 15.
[Aug 5, 2018]
I enjoyed speaking at the first symposium at Cambridge Digital Humanities on July 11. I am still working on my book on infrastructure (very excited about this project). In terms of upcoming events, I am involved in organizing two events in Stockholm in October: a mostly national workshop on humanistic infrastructure (Oct 18) and an international workshop “Making Change through the Humanities: Institutes, Ideas and Infrastructures” (Oct 22-23).
[May 26, 2018]
I just got back from more than a week in Sweden (Stockholm, Örebro and Umeå) and I should now have some time to be at UCLA and get some solid writing done. Over the past two months I have done a lot of traveling and apart from really useful scientific board meetings in Ireland and Denmark and some infrastructure policy work, I was happy to be invited to talk at a Swedish parliament seminar and also at the national Humanities deans’ conference in Sweden. My next speaking engagement is at University of Cambridge on July 11.
[March 1, 2018]
We are mid semester now (still thinking in terms of semester although on a quarter system now), and apart from my own research and considering a new book project, I am spending time this spring on a couple of large funding proposals including a proposal for a six-year research program on radical infrastructures and a project proposal on “Transformative Humanities: The Humanities as an Actor of Promise for Building Sustainable Societies”. I am also involved in several “strategy writing” projects and infrastructure policy discussions (fun stuff!). I will do two separate European trips in March-April (Sweden, Denmark, Ireland).
[December 13, 2017]
I am writing this from a cold morning (by SoCal standards at least) in Stockholm after having had a week of project work and proposal planning, a talk at Malmö University and another one at Örebro University. Still much work on infrastructure, but also more broadly on the humanities and what may be called active or interventionist humanities. And very happy about receiving the Mahoney Prize for 2017 together with Erica Robles-Anderson for our article on PowerPoint “‘One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech” (published in Computational Culture in 2016).
[November 1, 2017]
I am still struggling with infrastructure writing, but happy about and got good feedback when I gave a talk at UC Irvine on October 20 (recorded video here). And next week I will go to San Diego and San Diego State University to do the inaugural lecture in their new Digital Humanities Center (November 8, Facebook information page here). I am really looking forward to this and learning from the San Diego digital humanities community (that does great work). And November 2-3 we will have Shannon Mattern, whose work and person I greatly admire, at UCLA. Thursday and Friday will be fun and hectic. Several talks, round table meeting about infrastructure, and more.
[October 1, 2017]
The September 15 workshop on data driven research in the humanities at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), which I organized with Pelle Snickars, worked out really well and was meaningful and constructive on multiple levels (see here for some reflections on “data driven” and more, in Swedish). The Humanities Infrastructure article is almost finished, and it seems like this fall will continue to be somewhat infrastructural. My next talk will be on October 20 at UC irvine on “Critiquing, Imagining and Designing Infrastructure in and through the Humanities” (program here) – very happy to come back to UCI – and I am also very excited to visit San Diego State University (and San Diego, where there is so much exciting work going on) to do a talk on November 8 on “Why Should Humanists Care About Infrastructure” (more information here).
[February 18, 2017]
I am back in (stormy) Southern California after a brief and rewarding trip to Europe and a great visit to Arizona State University. This coming week I will do a keynote at the UCLA Infrastructure Symposium 2017 – looking forward to this! Reading about standards and infrastructure mostly, but also working on a couple of other projects. I am currently also thinking a lot about different ways of framing humanties – not least in contemporary policy discussions.
[April 25, 2017]
I am currently working on an article on humanistic infrastructure, which I hope to have ready in a first draft by mid-May. My sense is that there is a window for humanistic infrastructure thinking, and I think it is important to be part of that conversation. Another piece I am trying to get together is concerned with scholarly communication looking forward and backward (this one is a struggle, but I hope to get it together). I have now been in Southern California for several weeks without any major travel, which has been beneficial to writing and institutional work. My next trip is to London mid-May for a round-table discussion about the digital humanities. Looking forward to this!