It is with great pleasure that we announce Jill Walker Rettberg, Annette Markham and Kim Christian Schrøder as the keynote speakers for the upcoming NordMedia25 conference in Odense. “We are beyond excited to have this outstanding trio delivering the keynotes, and can´t wait to see their take on the conference theme“ say Susana Tosca and Lene Heiselberg, co-chairs of the conference.
The opening keynote will take the form of a dialogue between Jill Walker Rettberg and Annette Markham, offering a thoughtful exchange to kick off the conference. Kim Schrøder will deliver the closing keynote.
Take a moment to get to know all the speakers. Details of the talks will be announced later this semester.
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. She leads the project AI STORIES: Narrative Archetypes of Artificial Intelligence, which is funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. From 2017-2024 she led an ERC Consolidator project on Machine Vision, looking at how it is represented and used in video games, digital art, movies and novels. Jill’s books include Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World (Polity 2023) and Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (2014).
Annette Markham is Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement in the department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She holds a PhD in organizational theory (Purdue University, 1997), with special emphasis on interpretive qualitative methods. She has been researching the impact of digitalization on identity and organizing practices since 1995 and now holds specializations in the lived experience of human/machine interactions, impact of datafication and algorithmic logics on social practices, and critical approaches to digital and algorithmic identity. She also studies research methodologies to devise ethical models for speculative, mixed-method, ethnographic, and multi-entity research design. Methods specializations include guided digital autoethnography, critical pedagogy, arts-based interventions, citizen social science, digital and data literacy through critical pedagogy, and digital ethnography.
Annette co- founded and directed the international Masters degree program in Digital Living at Aarhus University from 2013-2020 and was co-director of Aarhus University’s Digital Living Research Centre. She created and directed the Future Making Research Consortium, a collaboratory to bring together scholars, artists, and activists, particularly early career researchers, to study the intersection of digital technology, ways of being in the world, and future possible meanings, practices, and social structures. She regularly hosts post-graduate workshops, an annual Skagen Institute Conference on Transgressive Methods, PhD summer schools, and special interest seminars and symposia in the area of digital culture, ethical decision making in automated and algorithmic society, citizen social science research methods, and participatory models for scholarly activism.
Kim Christian Schrøder is Professor of Communication, Roskilde University, Denmark. His research interests comprise the multiple aspects of audience uses and experiences of media, with particular reference to the challenges of methodological pluralism. His books in English include Audience transformations: Shifting audience positions in late modernity (2014), and Researching audiences (2003). His recent work explores different methods for mapping news consumption as public connection and includes the Danish part of the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report as well as qualitative studies of repertoires of news consumption. He was a member of The Independent Research Fund Denmark’s Research Council for Culture and Communication 2021-2024.