This paper reflects on participatory design practices within the project TellUs – The Talking Planet, a portable, interactive installation developed by five Swedish science centers. Combining narration, visualization, and conversational interaction, the project aims to make complex scientific content engaging for children while navigating interdisciplinary collaboration across education, design, and research. 

This article extends insights into the discourse on Swedish forests as arenas for experiences by unravelling, making visible, and problematizing how ways of seeing such forests have been constructed over time. This is investigated concerning the Swedish national parks, which have offered tourists experiences of forest milieus since the early 1900s. Representations in the Swedish Tourist Association’s yearbooks published between 1886 and 2013 are analyzed to get hold of ways of seeing. Through the analysis, two ways of seeing are identified: 1) primeval national park forests as arenas for experiences, and 2) scenic national park forests as arenas for experiences. Primeval forests are represented with old, wild, pristine, and inaccessible qualities, offering tourists experiences of forests far away from humanity, where time has remained still. Scenic forests are constructed to have aesthetic, grand, and calming qualities that create feelings among tourists of being in a beautiful, outstanding, and safe place. Both ways of seeing contain traces of romanticism, which indicates that they represent and communicate meanings of the Romantic movement of the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Cet article explore le discours sur les forêts suédoises en tant que lieux d’expériences en éclaircissant, illustrant et nuançant la manière dont ces perceptions se sont construites au fil du temps. L’étude en question porte sur les parcs nationaux suédois, qui offrent aux touristes des expériences en milieu forestier depuis le début des années 1900. L’analyze qui s’y rattache repose sur les annales de l’Association suédoise du tourisme publiées entre 1886 et 2013. Elle met en lumière deux types de perception: 1) forêts vierges des parcs nationaux comme lieux d’expérience, et 2) forêts pittoresques des parcs nationaux comme lieux d’expérience. Les forêts vierges sont représentées par des qualités de nature ancienne, sauvage, originelle et inaccessible, offrant aux touristes des expériences en forêt loin de l’humanité, là où le temps s’est arrêté. Les forêts pittoresques sont illustrées par des qualités esthétiques, grandioses et apaisantes, qui confèrent aux touristes le sentiment d’être dans un endroit magnifique, exceptionnel et sécuritaire.

STEM education has been widely promoted to equip citizens with essential skills for a technology-driven future society and support knowledge-intensive industries. However, hitherto, much of the existing research focuses on male-dominated disciplines and traditional STEM domains, limiting the scope of inquiry. Thus, this paper argues for a broader perspective by examining STEM education through the lens of visual culture. Drawing from Visual Grounded Theory (VGT), this paper suggests a research approach that encompasses the visual aspects of a cultural context, including perceptions, practices, and representation to explores how STEM education is visually constructed and interpreted in different contexts. Two examples are presented to illustrate this approach. The first examines visual representations in Sweden's vocational education and training (VET) programs, revealing that STEM-related activities are present even in non-explicit STEM environments and that their visual discourse is more gender-inclusive than expected. The second investigates how preschool student teachers perceive nature as a space for STEM learning by analysing photographs they took of potential learning sites. Findings suggest that visual representations not only reflect but also shape understandings of STEM education, influencing both research perspectives and teaching practices. In all, this paper highlights the potential of visual methodologies in STEM education research, demonstrating that visual culture studies can uncover aspects of educational practices that risk go unnoticed in text-based analyses. Additionally, engaging educators in the exploration of visual culture may foster reflective and reciprocal knowledge creation implying that visual methodologies may be valuable in teacher training.

This chapter analyses the ways in which (un)sustainability is represented in the Netflix children’s film The Sea Beast (2022) from the perspectives of visual culture and environmental history. First, the film addresses the unsustainable use of sea resources, such as hunting and poaching. However, instead of portraying actual marine species, the film shows enormous fantastic monsters. The authors argue that monsters have been used to embody the non-human world and the concept of “nature” as something both beautiful and dangerous. Second, they demonstrate that the visual aesthetics of The Sea Beast are a recycling project themselves, as they are largely indebted to monsters depicted in Olaus Magnus’s famous Carta Marina created in the sixteenth century. The authors consolidate these two themes by problematising the film’s approach to (un)sustainability. Namely, they examine the ways human–non-human relations are portrayed, with non-humans depicted as needing to earn humans’ compassion. While monsters remain in the focus, the film does not encourage care for other non-human inhabitants and parts of the marine ecosystem. The authors further argue that while the film concludes by encouraging sustainable approaches towards marine environments, it does not provide a feasible answer on how to do so. By portraying a dreamlike universe inhabited by humans and monsters, The Sea Beast ultimately fails to address questions of sustainable approaches towards non-fictional species.

This paper will analyse the ways in which water landscapes and water-borne creatures are represented in Netflix’s film The Sea Beast (2022). First, the film addresses unsustainable use of the sea resources, such as hunting and poaching. However, instead of portraying actual marine species, the film shows enormous fantastic monsters, suggesting that the sea is a liminal space full of dangerous creatures. We are going to argue that the monsters have been used to embody the nonhuman world and the concept of ‘nature’ as something both beautiful and dangerous. Second, we are going to demonstrate that the visual aesthetics and imaginative landscapes of the Sea Beast world are a recycling project, as they are largely indebted to Olaus Magnus’s famous Carta marina created in the sixteenth century. In addition, the film draws inspiration from Lovecraft’s ideas and the Cthulhu aesthetics. We will consolidate these two themes by problematising the film’s approach to human explorations of the water landscapes. Namely, we will examine the ways human-nonhuman relations are portrayed, with nonhumans shown as needing to earn humans’ compassion. While monsters remain in focus, the film does not encourage care for other nonhuman inhabitants and parts of the marine ecosystem. Employing Donna Haraway’s concept of Cthulhucene, we argue that the film does not provide a feasible solution for humans and nonhumans sharing the same water environment. By encouraging humans to stay away from the sea for the fear of ‘Cthulhu’, the film reinforces the image of the sea as a liminal space. 

Tourism in national parks is on the rise and contributes to shaping notions of the non-human world (often depicted as ‘nature’). One country that is currently facing a shift towards an enhanced emphasis on tourism in its national parks is Sweden. This article aims to unravel, illuminate, and problematize ways of seeing the non-human world in tourists’ Instagram posts about Swedish national parks, and also to consider the productive effects these might have on the relationship between humans and the non-human world. In a discursive and visual cultural analysis, representations of the non-human world, how they are situated in historically inherited ways of seeing, and what implications they might have for how humans approach and understand the non-human world are traced and reflected upon. These representations construct ways of seeing the non-human world as a sublime, desolate, and physically challenging treasury of unique character. In this way, a romantic tourist gaze is constructed, which approaches the national parks as isolated enclaves and commodified havens that offer tourists an escape from humanity, grand views, and seclusion. The main implication of this tourist gaze is a sustaining of the approach to the human world and the non-human world as separated.

Swedish national parks face a shift, transforming them from spaces where tourism is a sub-interest into spaces where tourism is a primary focus. Through the establishment of new instructive installations, the intention is to make these parks Europe’s most popular nature-based tourism destinations. Such installations construct the non-human world, often depicted as nature, and contribute to shaping human understandings of nature. In this article, I seek to trace, make visible, and problematize how knowledge of nature is put to work and how power operates through these installations, but also how the non-human world is produced visually, and how all of this produces specific ways of seeing it. This is enabled by a discourse analysis with visual ethnographic influences, in which I focus on representations with an emphasis on design, content, and posed rationality. The analysis is designed in a reflexive explorative manner, where the empirical context leads the analytical direction while the research process and its steps are presented systematically. Through this analysis, I arguet hat the national parks are transformed into museological organisations similar to the modernist museum, centred around educating visitors by displaying ‘real nature,’ and that this has implications for how the non-human world is understood. The most prominent of these is that a distance is promoted between the tourists and the non-human world.

Stories about humans visiting the realms of fairies, trolls, and other supernatural creatures have been present in the folklore for millennia. Recently, Nationalmuseum Jamtli in Östersund, Sweden, has put on display 110 works of art representing Nordic mythology in an attempt to create a similar experience for its visitors. The exhibition includes works by artists such as Elsa Beskow, Carl Larsson, John Bauer, and Ivar Arosenius. Created during the 19thand early 20th centuries, before the advent of modern cinema, these works were made with a largely narrative purpose. Their role was to communicate Nordic culture and heritage to the next generations of Swedes. The proposed paper will provide a twofold analysis of the exhibition. First, we will explore how artists in the 19th and 20th centuries engaged in medievalism and represented the imaginative landscapes of Nordic mythology and sagas. We will also address how these works of art create an image of collective imagined realities of the past generations. Second, we will discuss how the exhibition itself, through its displays, becomes a landscape. While the art represents imaginative landscapes, the exhibition is a material milieu. By analysing the exhibition’s ways of display and the visual storytelling created by the museum, we will contribute to the understanding of how material landscapes can help modern individuals interact with the imaginative landscapes of the past.

Denna presentation kommer att bjuda in er till odjurens värld via Netflixs nya barnfilm Havsmonstret. Vi kommer att diskutera hur filmen tar upp viktiga miljöproblem så som tjuvjakt och förlust av biologisk mångfald genom dess porträttering av havsmonster. Dessutom kommer vi att belysa hur relationen mellan det mänskliga och det icke-mänskliga framställs och förkroppsligas genom monstren och deras jägare.