The Politics and Aesthetics of Hyper-Scales

Dr. Kerry Guinan invites researchers, practitioners, and students to participate in a recurring online research seminar, ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Hyper-Scales’, to support and expand upon her postdoctoral project within CAPim. The project explores how perceptions of scale structure and limit political imaginaries, aiming to develop artistic methodologies that can potentially reorganise spatio-temporal experience, and analysing how such strategies may affect ethico-political sensibilities of responsibility, causality, and agency

Building upon this investigation, this seminar series will examine a vast range of topics that challenge anthro-phenomenal projections of space and time, expanding critical thought to the reach of cosmic and planetary politics and probing the potential political implications of, for instance, microbial ecologies and subatomic processes. It will address the politics of timescales ranging from the digitally instant to the geologically incremental, while questioning the very structuring of time and space by capitalist and colonial regimes.

The seminar is open to researchers, practitioners and students from all fields and disciplines who have a research interest, or a developing curiosity, in the intersection of politics and beyond-human spatial and temporal scales, from the micro to the macro. The seminar participants are invited to share and develop their own research within its framework. Each seminar has a pre-established topic and the specific content for each topic will be collectively determined by the group.

The current suggested content is merely a guide to indicate the current scholarship of the research project; no prior familiarity with the listed theorists is required and it is intended that cross-disciplinary content will be selected by seminar participants.

30 January 2026
15:30 – 17:30 CET 

Topic:
Issues of Scale in Politics

Content:
Micro and macro politics (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), the universal and the local (Anna Tsing), hyper-objects and multi-scale worlds (Timothy Morton), time-space compression (David Harvey, Doreen Massey) 

27 March 2026
15:30 – 17:30 CET

Topic:
Hyper-Scales in Contemporary Art

Content:
The political sublime (Michael Shapiro), infrastructural critique (Marina Vishmid, Paul O’Neill), durational art (Harun Farocki, Allan Sekula), deep time materialities (Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson), international, real-time media art (Kerry Guinan). 

29 May 2026
15:30 – 17:30 CET

Topic:
Macro-Space

Content:
Cosmic politics (Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Trevor Paglen), planetary thinking (Dipesh Chakrabarty), Gaia theory (Bruno Latour), ethnography of global connection (Anna Tsing).

24 July 2026
15:30 – 17:30 CET

Topic:
Micro-Space

Content:
Quantum political models (Karen Barad, Theodore Becker), microontologies (Nigel Clark and Myra Hird), microbiopolitics (Stephanie Fishel, Avril Corroon), the bioeconomy (Melinda Cooper).

18 September 2026
15:30 – 17:30 CET

Topic:
Macro-Time

Content:
Chronopolitics (George Wallis), the politics of deep time (Frederic Hanusch), the Anthropocene (Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff), coloniality and time (Mark Rifkin, Walter Mignolo), slow violence (Rob Nixon, Amar Kanwar).

27 November 2026
15:30 – 17:30 CET

Topic:
Micro-Time

Content:
Dromology (Paul Virilio, Ryoji Ikeda), social acceleration (Hartmut Rosa), affect theory and digital temporality (Anna Munseter), messianic time (Walter Benjamin), abstract time (Karl Marx, Silvia Federici).

22 January 2027
15:30 – 17:30 CET

Topic:
Time, Space and the Imagination

Content:
Space and time as a priori intuition (Immanuel Kant), the poetic instant (Gaston Bachelard), imagined geographies (Edward Said, Benedict Anderson), speculative imaginaries (the Otolith Group, Black Quantum Futurism).

Admission by email to Kerry.guinan@gu.se with subject line ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Hyper-Scales’ by 14th January 2026.

Participation is free. No credits awarded.