Keynote Speakers
Prof. Kristin Asdal, University of Oslo
Kristin is professor of STS and her research focuses on the sociology of knowledge across economics and natural science and on how scientific expertise is partaking in democracy. Her key competence is on the politics of the environment, broadly conceived, and she has executed a series of comprehensive empirical studies on the politics, economy and history of the environment and the bioeconomy. She also investigates democratic procedures as versions of knowledge practices. In 2022, Kristin, together with her co-author Hilde Reinertsen, published the book Doing Document Analysis: A Practice-Oriented Method (Sage Publications). She describes her keynote lecture as follows:
Documents do things. But what do they do, and how can we study them? In this lecture, I will present the method of practice oriented document analysis, and from there argue that we can understand democracy as a social epistemology of grounding, more precisely, grounding in and through what I suggest we call “document things”. In doing this, I will explore what documents do for and within democracy.
The lecture is partly based on the following recent publication: Democracy as a Social Epistemology of Grounding: Document-Things, Little Tools of Democracy, and an Exploration into Their Modes of Grounding
Kristin Asdal’s page at the University of Oslo
Dr. Vidmina Stasiulytė, University of Borås
Vidmina Stasiulytė is a researcher and senior lecturer at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, where she leads the research project Sonic Fashion. Her work pioneers sonic fashion as an experimental and practice-based methodology, investigating sound as a material and relational dimension of dress. She develops alternative design tools and pedagogical approaches that challenge fashion’s predominantly visual frameworks through embodied listening, co-sounding practices, and radical aesthetic inquiry. Stasiulytė received her Ph.D. in 2020; her doctoral thesis, Wearing Sound: Foundations of Sonic Design, examined the dressed body as a temporal and sonic expression.
Listening as Documentation: Sonic Approaches to Fashion
Fashion has traditionally been understood through a visual language, where garments communicate primarily through appearance. This keynote proposes an alternative perspective by approaching dress as a sonic document – one that records, carries, and communicates embodied knowledge through sound, movement, and material interaction. Drawing on the artistic research project Sonic Fashion, Vidmina Stasiulytė presents two complementary documentation practices: the Sonic Fashion Library, an archive that documents garments through their sounds rather than their visual appearance, and Sound to Wear, a collection of wearable sound tools that documents embodied experiences of dress through listening, participation, and performance. Together, these projects expand the notion of textile documents beyond static visual records, positioning sound, the body, and sensory experience as modes of documentation that preserve, generate, and activate knowledge. By reframing fashion as a multisensory document infrastructure, the keynote explores how artistic research can develop more inclusive, embodied, and participatory practices of documenting, interpreting, presenting and experiencing dress.
Watch a video documentation of the research exhibition Sound to Wear
Sonic Fashion Library