Medea Vox

Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt is professor in media and communication studies, but she is also the mother of a child with CHARGE syndrome. In this episode, we discuss digital parenting and how social media platforms can be spaces for pushing the boundaries of being normal.

Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year 2016 was post-truth. Together with “fake news”, this is one of the most widely discussed digital phenomena in recent years. Why should we care, and can we do anything about it? In this episode, media scholars Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt and Johan Farkas discuss fake news and post-truth in relation to democracy.

Comics have been around for more than a hundred years. For a long time, comics were mainly viewed as light entertainment for kids, but today they can also be seen as an aesthetically ambitious art form. But are comics also a politically significant medium? In this episode, comics artist Daria Bogdanska and professor Magnus Nilsson talk about comics and politics.

In this episode we discuss degrowth. How can we build societies where economic growth is no longer important? With Miriam Lang, Ruth Kinna and Alicia Smedberg.

In this Medea Vox episode, Hugo Boothby and Erin Cory discuss the project “Music for Universities.” The project is based around generative music, which is music that is produced by a system in which degrees of randomization are defined by the composer. Central issues that are explored include audio imperfections and the narrative of technological sonic progress.

Fiction holds the ability of imagining alternative futures. Through comics, novels and videogames, we can explore social and technical “What If’s.” In this Medea Vox episode, we discuss how fiction can contribute to our thinking about the future in ways which other schools of thought – such as the scientific – cannot.

In recent years, the effects of digitalization are starting to appear. Sensor data and algorithms recognize who you are and then open the apartment door and turn on the lights. Data-driven AI helps you find what you want on Google, Amazon and Netflix. Datafication is everywhere. In this Medea Vox episode, Sarah Pink and Maria Engberg discuss the pitfalls of data-driven decision making, ethical data futures, and how people – of course – will tinker with the algorithms in their autonomous vehicles.

Sustainability is a wicked problem. The wickedness lies in that the problems related to sustainability can't be solved in isolation from one another—and not with toolkits that take little consideration of the context in which the problem occurs. In this Medea Vox episode, Tim May and Magnus Johansson discuss sustainability from the viewpoint of learning, co-production, and how "knowing" things not always solve everything.

Nigeria is a nation of paradoxes. Crime and corruption, Boko Haram and Niger Delta militants. But Nigeria also has one of the largest movie-producing industries in the world, Nollywood, and Nigerian culture is spreading all over the world. Nigeria's glass is half empty, half full, as today's guest Eromo Egbejule describes it. In this Medea Vox episode, senior lecturer Tobias Denskus and Nigerian journalist Eromo Egbejule discuss contemporary Nigeria and how the representations and media images of Africa are changing. Old stereotypes are challenged only to be replaced by new ones.

The idea of commons describes practices that rely on sharing and collaboration. But how do you make commons work in practice, and not just in theory? A discussion between design researchers Anna Seravalli and Bianca Elzenbaumer.