Research group Aesthetic and Cultural Studies

After Precarity,Polarization, and Populism: Figurations for the 21st Century takes as its starting point aesthetic thinking as critical thinking. The project theorizes “microutopian imaginaries” as sites of resistance to homogenizing discourse and political resignation, asking among other, How can we work through and past a time where precarity (uncertainty, short-termism), polarization and populism dominate? What characterizes imaginings of the future which fuel engagement, strengthen political agency, or increase democratic participation?

After Precarity,Polarization, and Populism: Figurations for the 21st Century takes as its starting point aesthetic thinking as critical thinking. The project theorizes “microutopian imaginaries” as sites of resistance to homogenizing discourse and political resignation, asking among other: How can we work through and past a time where precarity (uncertainty, short-termism), polarization and populism dominate? What characterizes imaginings of the future which fuel engagement, strengthen political agency, or increase democratic participation? Starting from the assumption that, in order to create a better future, we have to be able to imagine it, the project thus explores how such imaginings increasingly seem to take place as and in everyday- or microutopias. They can be approached as spatially and temporally demarcated moments in thought or deed which open up for spaces of possibilities. Among the long term goals the project pursues are 1) strengthening inter-facultary and interdisciplinary research, 2) strengthening the Humanities’ involvement in critical societal challenges and our understanding of the practical use of the Humanities, and 3) contributing to strengthen teacher education and respond to the needs for lifelong learning.

The above advance the critical significance of aesthetics and cultural studies in the encounter with societal challenges, thus underscoring the humanities’ central function to understanding our contemporary.

The project gathers senior and junior scholars from several departments at the University of Bergen and will in the course of 2024 have three research seminars in Bergen and York where also external participants from other universities in Norway, England, India, and Denmark join the conversations. The research group Aesthetics and Cultural Studies will in in addition to the seminars also host Work in Progress sessions and other events throughout the year.

The project "Aesthetic Imaginaries" gathers scholars from a wide range of fields – including literature, film, cultural studies, anthropology, creative writing, curating – to think and write about how and what, and when, aesthetic imaginaries mean as they work alongside, against, and with the realities from which they invariably transpire. If the social imaginary can be understood as "an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents (Gaonkar 2002), the aesthetic imaginary raises questions about the figures and forms such enabling and imagining give life to.

About "Aesthetic Imaginaries"

The idea of the imaginary circulates in various constellations, most frequently, perhaps, in the company of the social and the political (e.g. C. Taylor, P. Gaonkar, B. Anderson). The co-constitutive complex of the social imaginary’s enabling and enabled matrix must however find its outlet in arrangements less tangible than those institutionalized and formalized, and herein reside the promises of aesthetics. Its function and potential in conjunction with the imaginary is not well explored, but one of the few, if not the only formulation of what is at stake in aesthetic imaginaries is the following by Ranjan Ghosh. Aesthetic imaginaries, he says,

aggregate around dwellings in culture, social practice, characters of imaginative reconstruction, affiliations to religious and spiritual denominations and preferences. An aesthetic imaginary is built inside the borders of a nation, a culture, a society, a tradition or an inheritance, but it disaggregates and reconstructs itself when exposed to the callings and constraints of cross-border epistemic and cultural circulations. Aesthetic imaginaries then are entangled figurations bearing out the promise of ‘shared realities’ and what Toni Morrison calls ‘shareable imaginative worlds’ [1992, xii]. (2015, 134)

Taking our cue from this description, “Aesthetic Imaginaries” gathers scholars working in different areas (including but not limited to literature, film, cultural studies, anthropology, creative writing, curating), to think further about how and what, and when, aesthetic imaginaries mean as they work alongside, against, and with the realities from which they invariably transpire. To think through “aesthetic imaginaries” consequently means emphasizing aesthetics as creation and figuration, field and practice, affective expression and experience, form and function. Works cited:

Ghosh, Ranjan. "The Figure That Robert Frost’s Poetics Make." In Singularity and Transnational Poetics, 134-54. 1st ed. Routledge, 2015.

This project aims to bring together the concepts of transnationality and aesthetics based on literary depictions of individual, ordinary transnational lives and interpersonal connections. The notions that have the potential to unify the various aspects of this project are liminality, home and (diasporic) intimacy. The current and future insights from this project hold promise of valuable contributions not only to the studies of transnational literature in its own right, but also to the studies of the transnational in American literature.

Ongoing Research

"Contemporary Literary Negotiations: The Aesthetic Spaces of the Transnational" - PhD dissertation project by Tijana Przulj

The dissertation seeks to identify what can be termed a transnational aesthetic, and explore how this aesthetic manifests itself across varied works of transnational literature - two novels, a film, and a few poems. These texts also encompass varied transnational spaces as their protagonists navigate Nigerian American, Polish British, Polish American and Jamaican British experiences. The theoretical framework is based on the notions of memory, need and community-making agency, while also addressing aesthetic ties between literary works and the world outside of them.

Publication

"Transnational Literature in America: Where Do We Stand Twenty Years After Fishkin’s Transnational Turn?"

Special issue of American Studies in Scandinavia
Editor: Tijana Przulj

Call for papers: https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/assc/article/view/7181/7471 (pp. 84-85)

Collaborations

IMER (International Migration and Ethnic Relations) is an interdisciplinary research network associated with the University of Bergen, Chr Michelsen Institute and NORCE Research AS. Tijana Przulj is the coordinator for the IMER junior scholar network.

Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment. Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Lene Johannessen. Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 2022. 

• Financed by UiB's såkornmidler
• Transdisciplinary and inter-faculty collaboration
• Developed from ongoing work in 2 research groups: "Media Aesthetics" (Infomedia) and "Aesthetic Imaginaries"
• Particular focus on the relation between polarization and anxiety

This edited collection examines the effects that macrosystems have on the figuration of our everyday—of microdystopias—and argues that microdystopic narratives are part of a genre that has emerged in contract to classic dystopic manifestations of world-shattering events. From different methodological and theoretical positions in fieldworks ranging from literary works and young adult series to concrete places and games, the contributors in Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment sound the depths of an existential sense of shrinking horizons – spatially, temporally, emotionally, and politically. The everyday encroachment on our sense of spatial orientation that gradually and discreetly shrinks the horizons of possibilities is demonstrated by examining what the form of the microdystopic look like when they are aesthetically configured. Contributors analyze the aesthetics that play a particularly central and complex role in mediating, as well as disrupting, the parameters of dystopian emergences and emergencies, reflecting an increasingly uneasy relationship between the fictional, the cautionary, and the real. Scholars of media studies, sociology, and philosophy will find this book of particular interest.

“Have we become exhausted by mass culture’s indulgence in exorbitant spectacles of apocalyptic destruction and civilizational collapse, and turned instead to more modest and nuanced portrayals of the on-going “microdystopias” of everyday life? This scintillating collection of essays by a team of astute Norwegian cultural critics makes a strong case for the transition from fearing the world will end with a bang to experiencing it as an endless series of desperate whimpers."
— Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silence and Absence in False Familiarities. Edited by Jena Habegger-Conti and Lene Johannessen. Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, "Transforming Literary Studies, 2021. 

• Financed with support from UH-nett Vest
• Developed with participation of junior and senior researchers from the University of Bergen, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Volda University College and the University of Stavanger
• Key terms from this project contibute to the visibility of the role that the humanities have in discourses and debates about the emergence of cultural and societal polarizations

 Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities is a scholarly conversation about encounters between habitual customs of reading and seeing and their ruptures and ossifications. In closely connected discourses, the thirteen essays collected here set out to carefully probe the ways our aesthetic immersions are obfuscated by deep-seated epistemological and ideological apprehensions by focusing on how the tropology carried by silence, absence, and false familarity crystallize to define the gaps that open up. As they figure in the subtitle of this volume, the tropes may seem straightforward enough, but a closer examination of their function in relation to social, cultural, and political assumptions and gestalts reveal troubling oversights. Aesthetic Apprehensions comes to name the attempt at capturing the outlier meanings residing in habituated receptions as well as the uneasy relations that result from aesthetic practices already in place, emphasizing the kinds of thresholds of sense and sensation which occasion rupture and creativity. Such, after all, is the promise of the threshold, of the liminal: to encourage our leap into otherness, for then to find ourselves and our sensing again, and anew in novel comprehensions.

Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries. Edited by Lene Johannessen and Mark Ledbetter. Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, "Transforming Literary Studies," 2018.

"Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries considers aesthetic imaginaries as they constitute and are constituted by and in our shared realities. With contributions from twelve scholars working in the fields of literary studies, visual studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and digital culture, this book takes a multidisciplinary approach to “aesthetic imaginaries,” which tests the conceptual potential from an array of perspectives and methodologies. It probes into the continuous creation and re-creation of figures for the future that invariably nod to their pasts, whether with a spirit of respect, disgust, hope, or play. It is particularly in the intersections between ideas and formations of “shared realities” and what Ranjan Ghosh has called “entangled figurations” that the full and intricate promise of the aesthetic imaginary as analytic and conceptual prism comes into its own. As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, “knots” of various aesthetic imaginaries disseminate and manifest variously across place and time, to weave and interweave again, and to offer themselves in each instance as contours-so-far of cultural and aesthetic histories."