Critical-Connective Tissue: Making Worlds with the Humanities
Workshop, June 27-28, 2025, Malmö University

Welcome to Malmö and Malmö University for the next installation in the Critical-Connective Tissue initiative, which has anchorage at Arizona University and other North American institutions as well as at Swedish institutions including Malmö University. Please see the description for the overall framing and for a presentation of the objectives. The workshop extends and focuses earlier efforts, including a productive two-hour session (Preview Meeting) on March 21,2025. Notes from the March meeting will be posted by the second week of June.

See below for information about registering or visit the registration page.

The workshop will engage with the following charge (from the landing page) constructively, creatively and critically:

The world is facing urgent challenges–some would say it is on fire–and humanistic knowledge (broadly speaking) can help, but only if we build close working relations with other disciplines and forms of knowledge without losing sight of our own unique contributions. How can we best implement such work “on the floor” and in terms of robust and responsible outward-facing capacity to respond collaboratively to societal challenges and complex problems? What role could academia play in addressing the complex challenges facing the world?

A basic presumption is that the humanities have important domain knowledge (historical, cultural, critical etc.) but also challenging, creative and convening powers. The humanities in this context include the institutional humanities, but are not restricted to them. On the contrary, there is a special interest in what lies on the fringe or outside, including liminal fields (or parts of those fields) such as urban humanities, disability studies, critical theory, and information studies, but also art, design, sociology and related areas. Moreover, the critical-connective tissue addresses the coming together of this expansive version of the humanistic and critical with the rest of the university (including engineering, architecture and computer science) and the outside world (including civic society, NGOs, corporations etc.). The particulars of this tissue or interface matter as well as the often effortful processes and negotiations leading to critically grounded forward-oriented work. Such work is contemplative, critical, collective, imaginative, frame-shifting, and material. It is engaged with the future (imagining, envisioning, projecting, building as well as with inflections etc.) but also with multiple lineages, the here and now, situated experience, and previously closed-off trajectories or lines.

Structure and format

The deliberations will be loosely structured around five questions:

1. How can the powers of the humanistic/critical be instrumentalized?
   [agency, being at the table, curricula, agency, toolboxes, epistemic repertoire, modes of engagement, critical making, policy, frames]

2. What are the mechanics and techniques associated with making critically grounded change?
   [transversal knowledge production, curation, design and artistic practice, accumulated experience, difficulties]

3. How can we mobilize critical-constructive capacity beyond individual initiatives/issues with critical edge and imagining-building things?
   [at scale, generic, truly outward-facing, policy, frame shifting, scholarly, building on what is out there, sustainable and just capacity]

4. How can we learn from and build on a set of meaningful tensions?
   [situated-general, academic-civic-corporate, engaged-disengaged, individual-collective, human-more than human, “free”-instrumentalized, bottom-up-curated-top-down, inside-outside, slow-fast]

5. What does the above mean for the university moving forward?
   [trust, framing, infrastructure, convening power, potential, business models etc.]

The workshop will feature a set of curated conversations (e.g. “pair conversations”, thematic blocks, and round table sessions), case studies, critique sessions, video interview collages and generally speaking, a mix of formats and modalities adapted to the questions at hand. These will reflect a critical-constructive ethos and be experimental but also grounded and informal. Participants will have an opportunity to gather around specific challenges, issues, and techniques.

Grounding and curation

The workshop aims to bring into contact multiple lineages, sets of experience, and strands of previous collective work. A basic assumption is that achieving high-level impact moving forward to a large degree depends on what is already there and what is emergent. What configuring, convening, curating, critiquing, and constructing is needed to take on major challenges and problems? What are the important intangibles (such as humility, curiosity and generosity)? How do we frame ourselves and others to allow uncertain, unknown and sometimes uncomfortable collaboration? What is the critical-constructive tissue needed?

Curatorially, the workshop draws on three models: The small conference as described by Margaret Mead (intense, conversational, curated, infrastructurally deliberate), the Nobel Symposium (the presumed gravity of a topic, a certain degree of grandeur and delight in the venue and context, but without much of the associated pretentiousness), and an interactional, spatially aware, infrastructurally experimental, people-centered, contact-zone style model. Or, to put it more directly, the workshop will try to make the most of the grave issues at hand, the marvelous group of invited and registered participants, the dynamic city of Malmö against the backdrop of the Öresund region at the height of summer just as the university is closing down, and an emphasis on grounded, intellectual, outward-facing, multi-faceted and action-oriented conversation and deliberation. Informal, sharp, generous. Intense but not overwhelming.

Place and context

Malmö University and the broader Öresund region - which extends to Copenhagen - provide a dynamic, diverse environment for this kind of convening. Malmö is “new” university whose vision statement is about contributing to “a more sustainable and equal society through research-based knowledge, critical reflection and readiness to act”. It will make up a case study, just like Arizona State University, which is a large, comprehensive university with a structural commitment to humanistic and critical knowledge in multi-disciplinary and outward-facing work, as well as a series of initiatives and underlying ideas (such as “innovation,” “planetary health,” and the “New American University”) that lend themselves to critical and constructive engagement. One key question for the case studies are more broadly is: What can we do together?). One among several juxtapositions will be the Swedish context, as representatives from at lesat five Swedish universities will participate.

Expected deliverables

Key outcomes include:

1. A collection of tensions/productive contradictions.

2. A toolbox of critical-constructive techniques and strategies for transversal knowledge production.

3. Accounts of three-four case studies.

4. A charter moving forward, including a conception of how to build aggregrated capacity for mobilizing humanistic/critical knowledge at universities and in the world.

5. An outline of a possible long-term research program on “arenas for transversal knowledge production” (for future collaboration, proposals etc.).

6. Publication opportunities, including a possible international journal special issue.

Process and organization

It is hoped that the setup will be conducive to sharpness, generosity, exchange, sharing, reflection, and concrete results. Although the exact format and shape of the workshop will emerge through the curatorial process, it is certain to be semi-structured, dynamic, and not organized around “papers” or institutional pitches but through conversation and “making”. The focus is on long-term capacity building and initiating research, grounded in dialogues both within and beyond the participant group—before, during, and after the workshop—while not being limited to these interactions. Curator/moderator: Patrik Svensson.

The workshop has received generous support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and also from Malmö University and Arizona State University. The workshop is the result of a collaboration with and support by Sally Kitch, ASU, Sha Xin Wei, ASU, Joni Adamson, ASU, Ron Broglio, ASU, and Matt Ratto, University of Toronto. Principal organizers for the June workshop: Patrik Svensson and Maria Engberg, Malmö University (Engberg is also an invited participant). The workshop is a key component of a research initiation effort (PI: Patrik Svensson).

Attempts will be made to document the workshop in different ways, including ones mentioned above, but also through a possible live stream, online forum, and brief interviews during and after the event.

Please check back for updates!