A Peer Reviewed Newspaper About Research Refusal

This publication presents the outcome of an online workshop (organized by Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University; Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University; and transmediale festival, Berlin) with the participation of nine different groups located at different geographical locations, some inside and some outside the academy. Each group was selected on the basis of an open call and has taken part in a shared mailing list, creating a common list of references, and discussing strategies of refusal, and how these might relate to practices of research and its infrastructures: what might be refused, and in what ways; how might academic autonomy be preserved in the context of capitalist tech development, especially perhaps in the present context of online delivery and the need for alternatives to corporate platforms (e.g. Zoom, Teams, Skype, and the like); and how to refuse research itself, in its instrumental form?

Following the workshop, each group has been asked to produce a section of this newspaper that in different ways represents the group’s abstractions on the subject. The design has been developed by Open Source Publishing, a collective renowned for a practice that questions the influence and affordance of digital tools in graphic design, and who works exclusively with free and open source software. The intention behind this publication has, in this way, been to explore the expanded possibilities of acting, sharing, and making, differently - beyond the normative production of research and its dissemination. Importantly, it has also been a means to allow emerging researchers to present their ideas to the wider community of the transmediale festival in an accessible form.

The newspaper will be distributed at the festival’s various physical events in Berlin in the coming weeks, and is available for download here and over on the Digital Aesthetics Research Center website .

You can also find extended versions of the participants research in APRJA , an open-access research journal that addresses digital culture.