Skagen Institute

How might we think differently about our methods to better grapple with the complexity of 21st Century contexts?

The Skagen Institute was launched in 2013 to provide a collaborative infrastructure for scholars to innovate more radically in research methods for social and humanistic research. Conceived as a ‘safe space’ for experimentation, the Skagen Institute is initially geared toward academic scholars. Beyond the Academy, the Institute partners with other arenas where research and design play an important role in the process of understanding the social and human conditions of the 21st Century. The rationale for this Institute is based on the premise that normative definitions and parameters for research methods tend to constrain the creative and flexible adaptation needed to adequately address the complexity of contemporary social contexts. The post internet epoch demands better resonance and fit between qualitative research practices and the complexity of multi-mediated contexts. At the level of theory, researchers can consider some of the epistemological and ideological conditions within which we find ourselves doing inquiry in the 21st Century, which are tied closely to shrinking budgets, greater public scrutiny of academic research, and the push toward ‘big data.’ At the granular level of everyday practice, we can explore the creative everyday activities of good researchers, where curious people find pathways to meaning that both defy traditional conceptions of methods and also extend our understanding of ‘what counts’ as a part of one’s method. The activities and core values of the Institute challenge researchers from academic and non-academic arenas to think differently about how one might frame, conduct, and share social inquiry in the 21st Century.

Skagen Conference 2023

This year’s workshop on Transgressive Methods was held at the Critical Digital Methods Institute in Toronto, Canada, and focused on how research creation has emerged as a valuable way of thinking about the everyday lived practice of inquiry and knowledge production, modes that are not transgressive at all, but might seem so to particular scientific traditions or disciplines. Research Creation is a particularly Canadian concept, building in momentum as a guide for doing creative, art-based, practice-led research. While many terms and practices are associated with Research-Creation, the core element is that it values the knowledge production generated through practice, by practitioners, particularly in the creative arts arenas.

To explore the practices of research-creation, participants spent an intensive three days discussing concepts and practices of research creation. Chair Professor Annette Markham (Utrecht U) led a workshop on methods and ethics with interdisciplinary PhD students, and Associate Professor M.E. Luka (U Toronto) led a workshop on podcasting, resulting in a recorded session for her own podcasting series.

Skagen Conference 2022

The Skagen Institute for Transgressive Methods held its annual convening as a single day workshop November 15, 2022, in Bergen Norway. For this workshop, members of the newly launched Center for Digital Narrative met with Annette Markham to test models for exquisite corpse style collaborative research with generative AI. This creative practice yielded many short creative pieces, both text and visuals, including a report co-constructed by AI and the Transgressive Methods participants, reflecting on 2022 Skagen Institute meeting.

Skagen Conference 2021

As the pandemic slowed us down, it also prompted a shift in format to a shorter timeframe and smaller size. In 2021, we tested this method at with a Transgressive Methods Workshop in Iceland. Over three days in the midwinter darkness of the South Iceland region, researchers gathered to discuss transgressive media and to engage in creative practice around a sense of how we frame places. December 19-21, 2022, faciliated by founder Annette Markham.

Annette facilitated this event, where participants explored multi-modal research practices as a way of breaking out of habitual ways of knowing. Workshops were led by award winning video artist and opera director Laine Rettmer and expert in community co-creation models, Mary Elizabeth Luka.

Performance and photography workshops were led by Laine Rettmer, a North American visual artist and opera director. Their work explores performance, gender, desire, and methods of social control. Rettmer’s work has been presented nationally and internationally at the Vizcaya Museum; Manifesta; MoMA Public, curated by Mel Logan and Jakob Boeskov; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum for the exhibition, Hot Steam; the Illuminus Festival; the Boston Independent Film Festival; the Yuan Art Museum; Yve Yang Gallery; Perkins and Ping; Present Company; NADA NY, NADA Presents; and AREA gallery, among others. Rettmer’s opera productions have been praised as “wickedly smart” and “devastatingly funny” by The New York Times, and “not only profound but also shattering” by the Observer.

Performance workshops were led by Andrea Merkx. In addition to many years of experience as a professional stage performer, Merkx is Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute of Design in New York City and also an artist working in computer animation, traditional and experimental opera, and and video design. She has specialized in building collaborative frameworks for interdisciplinary experimentation in group-exhibition-cum-music-video-set production.

Multi-modal production was faciliated by special guest Mary Elizabeth Luka. M.E. Luka is a long time television producer and Associate Professor of Arts & Media Management at University of Toronto, where she examines modes and meanings of co-creative production, distribution and dissemination in the digital age for the arts, media and civic sectors. Dr. Luka holds a Connaught New Researcher Fellowship examining creative networks in Canada (see https://criticaldigitalmethods.ca/creative-hubs-and-networks-database/). Dr. Luka is a founding member of the Critical Digital Methods Institute at University of Toronto Scarborough.

Skagen Conference 2020

This year’s conference moves to the Great Ocean Road in Australia, where participants will gather to explore methods for studying contemporary digital transformations and data(fied) contexts. The rationale for the workshop emerges from the need to continue to creatively tweak traditional qualitative methods to explore and understand, without oversimplifying, the complexity of contemporary digital phenomena, data-saturated social and decision making contexts, and digitally-transformed practices. By connecting PhD students to methods experts from a range of disciplines, we seek to apply discipline-specific innovations across disciplines. By pushing against normative boundaries of what counts as data, method, and scientific analysis, we hope to enrich and extend the way scientific communities conceptualize and utilize the strength and rigor of qualitative approaches, particularly for the study of entangled yet data-rich phenomena. [cancelled due to a pandemic]

Skagen Conference 2017 (held in 2018)

The Skagen conference is an annual event held in Denmark in November, modeled after the idea of a working retreat where foremost experts join participants to collaboratively practice innovative, ethical, and robust methods for studying complex and digitally-saturated social contexts. During this week-long conference, participants spend intensive time interrogating and applying innovative and creative ways of knowing.

Skagen Conference 2017 was held in early 2018. This week long workshop/meeting/retreat/PhD course was opened to artist-researchers and researcher-artists seeking to learn more about how to cross disciplinary boundaries, transgress their own boundaries, and move their work or mindset to a different level. Along with the founder and primary facilitator, Professor Annette Markham, the Skagen Institute invited guest facilitator Dalida Maria Benfield, who is a professor, artist, and founder of the Institute for (IM)possible Subjects and founder/facilitator of the transnational arts/intervention project Migratory Times. At the Skagen Conference, she will draw attention to how the concept of migration can help us consider the politics, concerns, and possibilities for troubling and transgressing typical knowledge migration. This is particularly useful for PhD students and early career researchers to consider the fundamental purpose of inquiry in what Isabelle Stengers has labeled “Catastrophic Times. The conference was held in March at Klitgaarden Refugium in Skagen, located at the Northern tip of Denmark.

Skagen Conference 2016

The Skagen Conference in 2016 focused on how we might develop ‘transgressive methodology’ as a way to consider complexity of social contexts in  digitally saturated contexts. This workshop/meeting/retreat invited professional researchers seeking to learn more about how to innovate in qualitative methods, particularly as these can be used to shift from description to intervention, or from objects of analysis to flows and layers of meaning through analysis. This is particularly useful for PhD students to learn how alternative approaches can satisfy criteria for rigor and quality across many disciplines.

Skagen Conference 2015

In 2015, the Skagen Conference focused on innovative theories and methods for disseminating or sharing academic knowledge beyond the typical academic writing genre. Guest Professor Katrin Tiidenberg (Estonia) facilitated workshops wherein participants could explore short form writing for social media, or creative and fictional writing in short or long form. Participants considered conceptual and practical frameworks for justifying this type of work and discussed strategies for articulating the credibility of such knowledge production practices to various stakeholders.

Skagen Conference 2014

The inaugural Skagen Conference in 2014 focused on developing ‘transgressive methodology’ as a way to embrace and trouble what we see in the digital age as a significant mismatch between traditional norms and techniques for inquiry and the complexity of the social contexts these methods seek to comprehend.