Archive for Teaching

Semiotic basics

October 8, 2010 Teaching, Trips No comments

Yesterday afternoon, I gave a lecture for the course “Researching Society” at Trinity College. Due to a shortage of rooms, a previous student’s commons room in Regent House has been transformed into a lecture hall. This was right on top of the main entrance to Trinity, overlooking the Campanile, so this was a textbook example of what one would guess that it feels like to teach in this place. A nice contrast to the rather murky and obscure rooms that I have taught my other stuff at Trinity in (even though they were also good experiences).


I lectured on the basics of semiotics to a class of around fifty students. These are a couple of excerpts (mp3 files):


The notion of the active reader within cultural studies (05:13)
The social construction of a piano (02:09)


Evening teaching

October 6, 2010 Talks, Teaching, Trips No comments

Evening teaching, originally uploaded by Simon Lindgren.

I finished off this day at Trinity College doing a late afternoon session on text analysis with the Sociology Dissertation Seminar. Not knowing anything about their backgrounds, I felt I needed to be quite basic and gave them a runthrough of entry-level semiotics and social constructionism. One of my Trinity colleagues said during lunch: “Simon! They’re gonna love you!”. Well, I don’t know about that, but at least a few of them seemed interested, others more neutral. The morning talk about my own research went really well, and a lunch meeting got me invited to an event 30 metres from my apartment where I was promised to meet all of Dublin’s scene of young internet activists.


In Dublin

October 2, 2010 Talks, Teaching, Trips No comments

Department of Sociology, originally uploaded by Simon Lindgren.

I am now in Dublin for three weeks as visiting professor at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College. I will be doing a presentation based on my own research (“Mapping Online Movements: Linguistic and Social Exchange in Digital Activism”) in the Arts Building (AB3051) on Wednesday, as part of the Sociology Research Seminar Series. Apart from that I will teach the Dissertation Seminar as well as the Researching Society course for two weeks each. On both of these, I will be covering digital semiotics and discourse analysis. The abstract for my Wednesday presentation follows.


The talk is about social interaction and mobilization in online contexts, with a focus on analyzing patterns of how people interact and organize through digital tools and platforms. I am interested in how patterns of organization, knowledge exchange and informal learning taking place within the domain of popular culture are translated (or not) into the political arena. The talk is based on two case studies; one of a movie pirate community, and one of Twitter activity using the #WikiLeaks hashtag. The aim is to analyze the potential of elusive web spaces as sites of mobilization. Looking at linguistic and social aspects, the main questions are: Is there a common discursive code?; is there a social order?; and is there commitment over time? Methods used are semantic, social network, and discourse analysis. I am interested in discussing if and how collective action within audiences of popular culture is can be translated into political action.


Umeå University commercials running on MTV

March 25, 2009 Teaching No comments

Starting this week, four commercial spots for Umeå University, featuring me, will start running on MTV’s Swedish site. Two of the spots are of a more general character, and will appear before various shows. In the first one, I say a few words about reality television as a research subject. The second one is about the fact that one can actually make a career out of analyzing popular culture. The third one will appear before episodes of The Hills, and represents an ultra brief reflection on identity work and beauty culture. The fourth and final one will air before episodes of Life of Ryan, and gives an equally brief analysis of changing ideals of masculinity.