Research Projects
The members of the research group for Visual Studies are involved with a number of research projects and networks. The projects are both locally based and international in reach, and concern diverse questions regarding the audiovisual dimensitons of a variety of media expressions.
Hilde Arntsen: Cyber Satire and the Quest for Alternative Communicative Spaces: New Media in Zimbabwean Diasporas
Arntsen's postdoctoral project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Arntsen aims to study how diasporic communities of Zimbabweans in exile make creative use of new means of communication, particularly social media, in their quest to establish communicative spaces for themselves as well as maintain close ties to their country of origin. The project challenges the national and Western focus that so far has characterised much research on social media and communication, and contributes to challenge the predominance of news and news deliberations in research into diasporic communication networks.
Henrik Gustafsson: Ruin and Resurrection: The Afterlife of Landscape
Gustafsson's postdoctoral project explores ethical and ontological claims about the image in relation to site-specificity, memory work and geopolitics. Departing from discourses about the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, the study revolves around the discrepancy between what we see and what we imagine, with special regard to the pervasive rhetoric of image prohibition and violation. Drawing from various sources of fiction- and non-fiction film, installation and video art, photography, painting and photojournalism, the project is an interdisciplinary effort to examine how images act across geographical and historical scales.
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NomadikonSmall images:
Nomadikon is a transdisciplinary research group and center for image studies and visual aesthetics at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. The center launched in the fall of 2008 with the project New Ecologies of the Image (2008-2012), and consists of a core team of six locally based scholars, international affiliates, and a global network of visual culture studies researchers.
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Synnøve Marie VikSmall images:
Avhandlingen, med arbeidstittel «Controversial Landscaping: The Politics of Nature in Contemporary Visual Culture», er en undersøkelse av hvordan vår samtidige visuelle kultur former og påvirker vårt syn på natur og klimaendringer. Hovedmaterialet er fotografier og kunstinstallasjoner som visualiserer natur, det være seg idyllisert natur, naturkatastrofer og klimaendringer. Hvilket kritisk potensiale ligger i bilder?
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Tonje Haugland SørensenSmall images:
Sørensen's doctoral thesis “Remembering a Different Norway – Norwegian war films and questions of mediated remembrance,” is centered on the corpus of Norwegian films chronicling World War II. As the title implies, the focus of this study will be the relationship between remembrance and war films within a Norwegian perspective.
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Pauline Ann HoathSmall images:
In her project "When Domestic Space Meets Imperial Space" Pauline Ann Hoath will be exploring interacting histories of photography, culture and politics. Despite challenges made in the 1970s, particularly within French history writing, to include different kinds of sources when writing histories, little has changed since then.
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Rolf E.S. HalseSmall images:
The objective of Rolf Halse’s PhD project is to examine the representation of Muslim characters in the US television serial 24, and to investigate how different interpretative communities read and perceive Muslim characters. Hereunder, Halse studies how the portrayal of Muslims changes from the early to the latter seasons of 24.