Duration: 10:00 to 12:00
WHERE: IAC Red room, Bergsgatan 31, Malmö (for enrolment location please e-mail the administrator)
ONLINE: for enrolment online please e-mail the administrator
This seminar organised by Malmö Theatre Academy presents an overview of a three-year research project called ‘Performing Integration: Participatory Art and New Publics in Malmö.’ Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the project set out to observe and theorise the role of participatory arts spaces in developing solidarities between new arrivals and autochthonous Swedes, and in challenging current discourses about what ‘integration’ means.
In this seminar, Cory will present both the story of this project, as well as two recent publications. In collaboration with local organisation Konstkupan (Art Hive), Cory developed a series of arts workshops designed around ethnomimetic methods (O’Neill 2010), which were all set to go early in 2020, when the pandemic hit. To adapt to this new state of things, she held the workshops online. The transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2007) that grew across multiple platforms illustrates both the unexpected convergences and persistent fault-lines of belonging in a ‘postmigration’ (Petersen & Schramm 2017) context. As part of this pivot to the digital, PhD student Hugo Boothby came onboard as an expert in radio broadcasting and, in this instance, podcasting.
Cory will present a piece co-authored with Hugo that came out of the workshops. In this article, published in The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media (2021) they theorised podcasts as ‘boundary objects’ (Star and Griesemer 1989; Star 2010), which do not demand consensus on the meanings they produce, and so afford space for both synchrony and dissonance in participants’ recorded narratives. Cory will also present a forthcoming chapter that takes this thinking further by attending to the ‘liminoid space’ of podcasting as an avenue to addressing the ethics of voice and silence in storytelling and podcast practice.
Erin Cory, PhD, is a media scholar committed to arts-oriented activist media praxis. She has taught and researched in the US/Mexico border region, Denmark, Sweden, and Lebanon. She earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, in 2015. After completing a postdoc in Media Studies and Refugee Migration at Malmö University, she received a grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the solo research project, Performing Integration: Participatory Art and New Publics in Malmö. Her most recent work related to this project included a transmedia storytelling project. With her interlocutors from Konstkupan Malmö and the surrounding community, she facilitated a series of online arts workshops during the COVID-19 pandemic, and produced a podcast, which you can listen to here – soundcloud.com/picturinghome.
Apart from continuing her RJ grant-related research, she has since 2021 partnered with The Cultural Avenue Uganda to carry out a digital storytelling project for refugee and host communities, which has been funded by seed money from Svenska Institutet’s Creative Force Initiative. She is currently publishing work on podcasting as a community-building and research practice.
Read more about Erin Cory as PhD student at Malmö University – mau.se