Per Israelson

My approach to academic work and knowledge production in the humanities proceeds from the ecologically and cybernetically oriented posthumanism found in the work of Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway and Mark Hansen, among others, with an emphasis on complexity, process and relations within open systems. As a scholar of literature and media, my research has focused on participatory processes and collective co-creation — between people, but also between people and technical media systems.

Central to my work is the notion of agency and subjectivity as distributed processes. A posthumanist understanding of subjectivity is today crucial for confronting and critiquing the apparatus of capture and control now being refined by the machine learning of surveillance capitalism. Faced with this apparatus, and equipped with a posthumanist understanding of distributed affect and cognition, traditional humanistic competencies — close reading and attention to the particular and the specific in the structures of feeling of the cultural object — become potential acts of resistance. This is what I develop in my research and in my work as a teacher.

Teaching

I teach primarily on the master's programme in Media, Democracy and Human Rights, as well as within our Media Entrepreneurship programme.

Research

My research has focused on a range of different cultural objects and contexts. In my doctoral work I applied posthumanist media ecology to theorise and analyse the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic. This involved formulating a theoretical framework for analysing co-creation and embodied participation, examining a wide variety of cultural objects and their media-ecological relations, and focusing on the entanglement of technologies with fantasy and the imagination. Both this framework and the research method I employed have been developed further in my subsequent research.

My postdoctoral project examined contemporary postdigital comics culture, primarily from a Swedish and Norwegian context, focusing on creative milieus and on how digitalisation has created new conditions for creative processes and for forms of distribution and consumption within comics culture.

My research in recent years has addressed how technical systems, such as franchise structures and language models, organise knowledge, fantasy and creativity — among other things in American superhero comics and AI-generated manga.

From January 2026 I am, together with three other researchers, working on the three-year project "Synthetic Pasts", which examines historicity and historical understanding in relation to language models and machine learning. The project is funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation. I also participate, as a representative of Linnaeus University, in the research cluster AI Futures of Culture and Memory within WASP-HS, which concerns AI and cultural memory and creativity.

During 2026 I am also running the project "Speculative Media Archaeology: Creative Historicity in the Age of Datafication", which, in a series of two workshops, examines and experiments with the new conditions for the co-creation of cultural memory brought about by machine learning models. The aim of the project is to formulate a robust posthumanist critique of datafication and technological acceleration, grounded in technical co-creation. The project is funded by Linnaeus University's excellence funding for 2026.

Commissions

Alongside my research, I have held and currently hold editorial positions at academic journals such as Culture Unbound, Sensorium and Imagining the Impossible. I have also been a guest editor for the art and poetry journal OEI.

Since 2005 I have worked as a critic and writer, writing primarily on popular culture, comics, and children's and young adult literature. I have also worked at various times for the Swedish Arts Council, on reading promotion initiatives and as a member of both the working group for children's and young adult literature and the working group for visual works.

Since 2025 I have been Linnaeus University's representative in Humtank.