Course Sandbjerg Seminar - Methods and Materials

Course description

‘What’s your method?’ is a scary question for many researchers in the humanities, perhaps especially researchers of aesthetic phenomena or practice-based researchers. The question may imply that you don’t have a method, at least not one that’s clearly recognizable and meaningful for the questioner, and it has as its obvious consequence that you must describe, explain, account for, and thus justify your methodology, the how of your research. 
‘What are your materials?’ is typically a safer question, as it allows for talking about the specific things one is working with. But this question can also be followed up by trickier queries regarding motivations and delimitations of the materials in question: Why these matters and not those? While it can be easy to describe the objects of research – such as novels, photos, performances, poems, archives, authors, artists, periods, genres, concepts, or one’s own artistic practice – it can be more challenging to explain why these materials and practices are important enough to warrant writing a whole PhD project about them. The question of “why” is thus always lurking underneath the what and how, as the motivation for engaging with a specific set of materials is central to what kind of approach you have. 

This year’s Sandbjerg Seminar, “Methods and Materials”, invites grappling with these basic questions of humanistic inquiry in a cross-aesthetic and interdisciplinary setting. Questions of methodology and materials have assumed new urgency in the humanities in recent years, in response to a variety of economical, political, technological, ecological, and historical factors. For instance: Debates around new digital methods and uses of AI in research have challenged traditions of close reading and historical analyses, creating new interest in quantitative methods, observations, and large datasets. Human-induced climate change has urged scholars to engage with the ecology of research in new ways, with attention to human-object relations, vibrant materiality, and ethics of care. Researchers engaged with questions of social justice – including queer, feminist, Black, decolonial, indigenous perspectives – have argued for the importance of narrative justice and the value of self-determination, raising questions about the affordances of for instance (auto)ethnography, qualitative interviews, collective knowledge building, and co-production. Scholars invested in the aesthetic, emotional, and experiential dimensions of art have challenged traditions of “hermeneutics of suspicion” with “post-critical” and new formalist strategies centered on affect, affirmation, and engagement. Researchers engaged with the relation between artworks and their institutional and social setting have re-emphasized the conditions of production, distribution, and reception through analyses of infrastructures. In short, while the scholarly orientations towards new materials inspire new methodologies, new methodologies activate materials and materialities in different ways. 

The seminar “Methods and Materials” seeks to make questions of methods and materials less scary and abstract by creating a forum for discussing and reflecting on the relationship between what, how, and why we research. We welcome paper proposals on all aspects related to the tricky interplay of materials (the what of our study: pigment? parchment? performance? etc) and methods (the how of our study: textual and material analysis [close, distant, surface, ‘just’, reparative, critical, paranoid reading], observation, interview, survey, ethnography, extrinsic/intrinsic, etc), and relationship between materials, methods, and praxis. We especially encourage attempts to think beyond what has been customary, to dare ask the blue sky questions of methodology in the humanities. The main goal is to create a space to critically reflect and broaden the understanding of the remarkable diversity of approaches in present-day humanities inquiry into art and aesthetics as far as possible combinations and reflections on the relationship of method and material is concerned.

Aim

The PhD students will be offered the opportunity to present a work in progress and will get substantial feed-back from junior and senior colleagues. In reading sessions and workshops they will be able to discuss their work and current approaches to the topic and they will meet future colleagues from different Danish and Scandinavian universities.

Target group/Participants

PhD scholars at all stages, primarily from the three organizing universities (AU, KU, SDU)

Language 

English

Form

• Lectures by international scholars in the field.
• Reading sessions chaired by leading scholars.
• Sessions with presentations by PhD students.
• Workshops.

ECTS-credits

5

Lecturers

• Tine Damsholt, Etnologi, Saxo-Instituttet KU
• Dennis Yi Tenen, Literary Theory for Robots
• Martha Fleming, lektor på PASS: Center for Practice Based Art Studies/KU

Venue

Sandbjerg Gods

Course organisers

• Laura Katrine Skinnebach - lks@cc.au.dk
• Peter Simonsen - petsim@sdu.dk
• Mathias Danbolt - danbolt@hum.ku.dk

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