Welcome back to Adjunct Associate Prof Josepha Wessels (Malmö University)
Adjunct Associate Professor Joshka Wessels of the School of Arts and Communication at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University, Sweden has returned to the ET Lab. She received funding from the Institute for Urban Research at Malmö University to conduct research at the ETLab, Monash University for a month. Joshka’s research stay will give the opportunity to further develop and strengthen ties between Malmö University and Monash University on several cross departmental and faculty levels.
Joshka will continue to explore linkages between visual ethnography and the use and co-creation of immersive VR media as a method for a multi-sited urban ethnography that she carried out within the framework of the Swedish research council funded SIPGI research environment (2019-2026) led by the Centre on Global Migration at the University of Gothenburg . The research stay at the ET Lab will enable her to engage with a cutting edge research environment on emerging technologies, urban planning and visual ethnography, and to finalise her ongoing peer reviewed publications in the pipeline. Using 360-video technology she has co-created immersive experiences together with Syrians residing in Turkey, Jordan and Sweden. The co-created anthropological immersive shorts document personal experiences of flight and social encounters. These stories can be viewed in a Virtual Reality headset as an immersive experience and transport the viewer into the worlds of refugees in urban areas to give a nuanced insight into their daily lives, their homes, everyday encounters and challenges they face as refugees. A Virtual Reality experience feels as if you are actually there and the question is, could this be the solution to create more empathic understanding between people from different cultural and religious backgrounds? With this question, Joshka will also work parallel with the Malmö University Societal Impact Lab during her stay, exploring how the concepts for using cocreated immersive experiences with migrants can create an impact beyond the academic environment, in collaboration with societal actors in urban areas of Sweden such as media platforms, musea and highschools.
Sounds of the Future – establishing collaboration with the Research Centre for Imagining and Co-creating Futures (ICF) at Malmö University
Inspired by the phenomenon and importance of immersive and spatial sound, Joshka will work also together with Sarah Pink and Jordan Lacey of RMIT University’s Industrial Design program to prepare a workshop at Malmö University in 2026 on with seed funding from the newly established Research Centre for Imagining and Cocreating Futures (ICF) at Malmö University This workshop will give the opportunity to develop a research application about the Future of Immersive Sounds, atmosphere and disturbances. Participants will interrogate the soundscapes of future social, urban and environmental conditions. What are the sounds of the future when climate change impact increases on the planet and societies? Which future soundscapes can be co-created using cutting edge immersive audio technology and virtual reality? Making use of emerging technology such as Virtual Reality, this activity will bring together international scholars and sound artists working at the cutting edge of sound production technology such as immersive spatial sound and ‘eco-acoustic’ compositional practice based on deep fieldwork at the margins of our planet.
Email: josepha.wessels@mau.se