Petra Lilja 90% Doctoral Seminar

Respondent: Nina Lykke

Language: English

PhD-Advisor: Martín Ávila, Meike Schalk and Ola Ståhl

NOTE: Please email Mathew Gregory for materials: mathew.gregory@konstfack.se

PhD Working Title: Mineral Matterings, Diffractive Practices of Design
Focus of seminar and thesis description: Engaging with research through design, Petra’s research maps out a range of relational ontologies of matter-material, focusing the attention on minerals and the shared ‘mineralness’ of humans and other-than-humans which connects the biotic and abiotic realms. Scrutinizing her own extractivist mindset as a designer who took for granted a wide range of materials to be at her disposal, she links this personally situated starting point to more abstract levels of ongoing extractivism on a global scale. The 90% seminar will focus on the critical feminist posthumanities where Petra draws most of the theoretical framework from, and how Karen Barad’s posthuman performativity is enacted and activated through Petra’s two design projects Mineral Walk and Critical Clay. Diffractive practices of design becomes a tactic for situated practice, making explicit intra-active relations and the performativity of, in this case, human-mineral entanglements, on different scales of spatiality and temporality.

Petra Lilja is an industrial designer and researcher drawing from both art and science in her work. She is affiliated researcher at The Posthumanities Hub and member of Design + Posthumanism Network, engaging with critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism via her de-sign practice, research and teaching. She previously worked as design lecturer and program di-rector of the Design + Change Programs at Linnaeus University. For four years she ran an eponymous galley in Malmö displaying art, design and research. She is a member of the jury of the annual Swedish Design award UNG and its equivalent in South Korea. Recently published work included the chapter ‘Attentive Walking: Encountering Mineralness’ in the book Movement Heritage and Path Dependence, White Horse Press and the book chapter ‘An Emerging Posthumanist Design Landscape’, co-written with Å. Ståhl, K. Lindström, T. Laurien, L. Jönsson and E. Sandelin in Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism.

Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. She participated in the building of Feminist Studies in Scandinavia and Europe more broadly for many years. She is also a poet and writer and has recently co-founded an international network for Queer Death Studies. She is author of numerous books such as Cosmodolphins (2000), Feminist Studies (2010), Vibrant Death (2022), and Feminist Reconfigurations of Alien Encounters (with Katja Aglert and Line Henriksen 2024). She has recently published in journals such as Australian Feminist Studies; NORA; Catalyst; Environmental Humanities; Social Identities; and Lambda Nordica.