Writing Critiques

Type of activity: PhD course

Title: WRITING CRITIQUES

Organizer(s): 
Associate Professor Anna Vallgårda (ITU) & Associate Professor Ylva Fernaeus (Umeå Institute of Design)

Course advertisement: 
Advertised by PhD support and emails

Lecturer(s):
1. Anna Vallgårda, Associate Professor at ITU
2. Ylva Fernaeus, Associate Professor at Umeå Institute of Design

Date(s) of the course:
17.12.2024 (online) and 27.01.2025 - 29.01.2025 (on-site in Hasslaröd, Sweden)

Time: Three full days

Room: Online day one and in Summerhouse in Hasslaröd, Sweden 27.01.2025 - 29.01.2025.

Course description:
We invite you to join us in an intensive writing course aimed at structuring and writing critiques for HCI and Design. During this PhD course, we will guide your development of a critique for publication at Aarhus Decennial (Deadline: February 25) or venues. 

Critiques are meant to critically dissect, provoke, or inspire. Critiques are a genre of research that reflects how technology and design are always political and always in conversation with their worlds.   

Critiques can zoom in on specific types of design or technologies (i.e., self-tracking, drones), be in conversation with a particular academic discourse (i.e., Feminist HCI, more-than-human design, AI), or relate to larger-scale issues (climate change, global or gender inequalities, capitalism). 

Critiques can take various forms: essays, poetry, manifestos, fabulations, pictorials, comics, and visual artworks. It can be in the form of designs or technologies that in themselves are critiques (i.e., interactive prototypes, apps, websites, computer games, audio-visual art, generative and/or critical code).

To participate, you must submit an abstract of a critique (max three pages) by December 9th, 2024, and be able to participate on the scheduled dates. We can admit up to six participants. 

December 17 online: 

9-10.30: Analyzing three published critiques (papers) - we will distribute them in advance

11-12.30: Five minutes pitch per participant with questions and feedback from everyone

13.30-XX: approx 30 min individual feedback from Ylva & Anna

January 28-29: writing retreat in Hasslaröd, Sweden (arrival on Jan 27 is possible):
Day 1: 

Individual plans for writing (developing the argument) in conversation with Ylva & Anna 

Paring of writing partners

Writing sessions

Feedback sessions in pairs

Individual feedback (w/Ylva & Anna) on drafts preparing a writing plan for day 2

Day 2:

Writing sessions

Feedback sessions in pairs

Individual feedback (w/Ylva & Anna) on drafts and plan for paper completion

Reading list of critiques:

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3).

Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical inquiry, 30(2), 225-248.

de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social studies of science, 41(1), 85-106.

Ingold, T. (2014). That’s enough about ethnography! Hau: Journal of ethnographic theory, 4(1), 383-395.

Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus, Henriette Cramer, and Sara Ljungblad. 2013. Crafting against robotic fakelore: on the critical practice of artbot artists. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2019–2028. https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468719

Williams, K. (2015). An Anxious Alliance. Proceedings from Proceedings of The Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference on Critical Alternatives, Aarhus N Aarhus, Denmark.

Helms, K., & Fernaeus, Y. (2021). Troubling Care: Four Orientations for Wickedness in Design Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021.

Vallgårda, A. (2024). Attuning to Care Technologies. Human-Computer Interaction, 1-12.

Fritsch, J., & Gad, C. (2024). UDREDNING: an Extended Reality Artwork for Affectively Engaging with Diagnosing Processes. Proceedings from 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Adjunct, New York, NY, USA Uppsala, Sweden.

Yann Seznec. 2024. Three Ways to Destroy a Sound. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI '24 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 71, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3677045.3685496

Programme: See above

Prerequisites:
PhD students at all levels and with all backgrounds can participate. However, the course is most relevant for those who have done some empirical or theoretical work that puts them in a position to formulate a critique.

Exam:
Participants will submit a finished critique after the course.

Credits:
3 ECTS

Amount of hours the student is expected to use on the course:
Participation: 24 hours
Preparation: 100 hours (reading/writing before and after)

Participants:
Maximum 6 PhD students from different universities. If more than six students apply, priority is given to students later in their PhD career.

How to sign up:
Submit an abstract of a critique max three pages (as a Word or PDF) to Anna Vallgårda (akav@itu.dk)