Website analytics from Google and other platforms has become the key performance indicators for communication practitioners. The omnipresence of different metrics, mediated through data dashboards, has an important impact on the world of communication. However, little is known of the imaginaries inscribed in these platforms, yet these imaginaries also govern the understanding of digital communication as a professional activity. We work with the theoretical idea of sociotechnical imaginaries, that is, a set of visions sustained by infrastructures, practices, and more or less shared meanings of social life (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Similarly, the technical imaginaire (Flichy, 2007), algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017), and data imaginaries (Tupasela et al., 2020) are emerging as collectively held understandings of what technology, data and algorithms do.

In our paper, we discuss Google’s switch from the analytics platform Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). We conduct a semiotic analysis of the analytics dashboards and map the related environment of instructional pages, videos and tutorials to uncover the imaginaries. While the surface-level argument claims GA4 to be better, the discontinuation of third-party cookies and change of user-tracking possibilities means that Google will often have to operate with much less data about the audiences than in Universal Analytics. The related environment of instructional pages, videos and tutorials demonstrates a diverse ecosystem of actors who are seeking to capitalise on Google's data collection interest and support the imaginary with their promotional materials directed towards communication practitioners.

The data dashboard is imagined as the one-stop site for an overview of the audiences, their interest and engagement; data is supposed to be precise, immediate, and actionable. However, there is also a clear link to imagining the work of the communication – success or failure in digital communication and reaching the audiences is imagined through the data on the dashboard. The role of AI and algorithms as supporting imaginaries related to audiences confirms the expectation of unlimited digital surveillance but also indicates the limitations of the data collection of the GA4. Communication practitioners in different fields rely on the data from Google and other platform players to help them understand the reach of their messages. But we find that in the ecology of complex relationships, messy data and diversity of actors looking to capitalise on the data provisions, the idea of the audiences is diluted and abstract. The research fills the gap in audience studies, demonstrating that despite the promises and fears Google Analytics is still supporting desperately seeking audiences (Ang, 1991).

This study scrutinises web analytics, specifically Google Analytics, in its capacity to support content creators in understanding user behaviour and improving digital communication. Google, with its different versions of web analytics software, is dominating the market in collecting and analysing web traffic statistics, and has thus become a central part of how digital environments can know their users. We use the concepts of transcoding culture and social imaginaries to show the importance of scrutinising the value propositions ingrained within the web analytics dashboard. Despite the excitement and fear related to Google knowing too much about the people behind the screens, the analysis shows that Google Analytics 4 strug­gles to provide a comprehensive understanding of audi­ences. Focusing on the four value propositions – overview, immediacy, control, and knowing the audience – we argue that Google Analytics overstates its understanding of audiences. It is in the interest of Google to hyperbolise knowledge about the audience, even with potential privacy concerns, as it supports the social imaginary of an all-knowing digital platform. Thus, a critical and nuanced approach to web analytics, considering their impact on society and privacy concerns, is needed to balance the discussions.

Research shows that student reflective writing is a valuable window into student learning, particularly student metacognition; however, our knowledge of the challenges of accessing metacognition to inform curriculum design and assessment practices in the ESL (English as a Second Language) context is less robust. This paper reports two qualitative studies of student reflective writing on an ESL writing course within a teacher education programme. The studies investigate how student metacognition manifests itself in reflective papers and how mapping student metacognition can inform evidence-based curriculum design and assessment. The data comes from several iterations of an ESL writing course and is analysed using directed and conventional content analyses. Our results expose a complex relation between metacognition, curriculum design and assessment practices: 1) unless scaffolded by the curriculum design to use precise terminology, students resort to expressing their understanding of the course content in terms of everyday, vernacular language and 2) student reflective writing not only provides a more nuanced picture of their learning than the final course grades but is invaluable for developing scaffolding and assessment practices. Based on our results, we recommend integrating structured reflection as part of the regular curricula to gauge ESL student metacognition and monitor more precisely their uptake of course content.

Collaborative Future-Making is a research platform at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University that is concerned with how to envision, elaborate and prototype multiple, inclusive, and sustainable futures. The platform gathers around 20 researchers that share a methodological interest in how critical perspectives from the humanities and social sciences can be combined with the constructive and collaborative aspects of making and prototyping in design research.

The research centers around two major themes:

Critical imagination​, which focuses on how basic assumptions, norms and structures can be challenged to widen the perspectives on what can constitute socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable and resilient futures.Collaborative engagements​, which focuses on how we can set up more inclusive collaborations to prototype and discuss alternative futures, engaging not only professionals and policy makers but also citizens and civil society.

During 2019 the research group set out to make a shared glossary for collaborative future-making. The glossary is multiple in purpose and exists in several versions. Hopefully there will be more to come. At first, the making and articulation of the glossary was used within the research group as an exercise to share concepts that we found central to collaborative future-making, coming from different disciplines. This published version of the glossary was assembled to be used during a workshop called ​Imagining Collaborative Future-Making,​ which gathered a group of international researchers from different disciplines.

The collection of concepts reflects the heterogeneous and diverse character of the research group and a strong belief in that plurality regarding ontologies and epistemologies will be crucial to be able to handle the multiple uncertainties and complex challenges we have to face in the future. Some of the concepts are already well established within different research communities, but gain a specific meaning in relation to the research area. Others are more preliminary attempts to advance our understanding or probe into new potential practices within collaborative future-making. In that sense the concepts in the glossary are well situated and grounded in past and ongoing research within this research group, at the same time as they are meant to suggest, propose and point towards practices and approaches yet to come.

The concepts in this glossary are not only meant to be descriptive but also performative. In that sense, assembling and circulating this glossary is part of collaborative future-making. As pointed out by Michelle Westerlaken in her articulation of “Doing Concepts” (see page 15), “...without proposing, critiquing, or working towards a common or uncommon understanding of certain concepts, it becomes impossible to ‘make futures’ in any deliberate fashion.”

In 2015, the Swedish government allocated 130 million SEK to Äga rum ('Taking Place'): a three-year program of arts projects across Sweden to address low voter turnout in certain housing areas, but which, in effect, target the immigrants. We argue-through a short account of Foucault's take on the state, biopolitics, race, and governmentalisation-that this is an example of contemporary state racism, which is best understood as an inextricable part of biopolitical governmentalisation through forms of veridiction. We further analyse a specific governmental program (Äga rum) and a specific project (anonymised) within that program which takes place in two Miljonprogrammet housing areas in Malmö. Although both the program and the project have clear political agendas of empowerment and anti-exclusion, we argue that they nevertheless end up producing racial divisions and what we call a 'racial archipelago.'

Although peer review is a common practice in writing classrooms, there are still few studies that analyze written patterns in students’ peer reviews across multiple institutional contexts. Based on a sample of approximately 50,000 peer reviews written by students at the University of South Florida (USF), Malmö University (MAU), and the University of Tartu (UT), this study examines how students formulate criticism and praise, negotiate power relations, and express authority and expertise in reviewing their peers’ writing. The study specifically focuses on features of affective language, including adjectives, expressions of suggestion, boosters and hedges, cognitive verbs, personal pronouns, and adversative transitions. The results show that across all three contexts, the peer reviews contain a blend of foci, including descriptions and evaluations of peer texts, directives or suggestions for revisions, responses to the writer or the text, and indications of reader interpretations. Across all three contexts, peer reviews also contain more positively glossed responses than negatively glossed responses. By contrast, certain features of affective language pattern idiosyncratically in different contexts; these distinctions can be explained variously according to writer experience, nativeness, and institutional context. The findings carry implications for continued research and for instructional guidance for student peer review.

This paper maps some of the ontological and methodological concerns incurred by the governmentalization of art and culture that has come about in most advanced liberal societies since WWII. The main argument is that cultural policy forms a new historical ontology constituting a transformed relationship between art and the state. This transformed relationship has profound effects on the “art institution,” loosely defined after Peter Bürger as the apparatuses of production and distribution of the art system but also the historical ideas about what art is and what it should be doing. This transformation has produced a new situation for art and for artists: if print capitalism secured the conception of the artist-genius and the contemplative reader, then today we have the emergence of something new. In the wake of the governmentalization of art we have a landscape on the horizon, one that belabors art with economic, social and quantifiable functions. It is in this context that cultural policy has become a “historical ontology.”

The commencement of cultural policy in Sweden is analysed as part of global and networked socio-technical agencements, beginning with the transformation of the political rationalities underlying state support for theatre in the early nineteen-thirties and ending in the current moment, which is described as a phase of cascading metrologies. Using Actor Network Theory as a methodology, the article explores how cultural policy partakes in what Foucault has elaborated as the progressive governmentalization of power relations, whereby art and culture, in this case, is “elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions.” Specific attention is brought to the historical role of UNESCO in the governmentalization of art and culture, and its importance for the first Swedish bill of culture. The article also elaborates on the central role of metrologies in the process of governmentalization, whereby art and culture is subjected to measuring devices, and by extension, concepts and instruments that contribute to the progressive socialization and naturalization of novel art-effects, such as social and economic development.

Cities increasingly use artistic and cultural activities to promote active citizenship and social cohesion. We suggest that city-sponsored cultural and artistic practices in Sweden are finding a new discursive context in migration. In this article, we look at two artistic and cultural institutions in Malmö, Sweden: Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. We develop a typology of governmentalisation based on the work of Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, which allows us to describe the governing activity of Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. What becomes visible is the discrepancy between the moral form of the political rationalities and the technologies of government: even though institutions may harbour ideals and principles of inclusion, they are perfectly capable of sustaining activities that brighten the very boundaries they set out to challenge.

Cultural policies will be analysed as producing what Bruno Latour calls “metrologies”; that is, measuring devices and valuemeters, and by extension, concepts and instruments that contribute to the progressive socialization and naturalization of art effects such as social sustainability, community cohesion, social capital, and innovation. The case analysed will be the art scene of the city of Malmö, its policies and metrological devices, with a focus on one community theatre project as an exemplary case. The metrologies, we claim, are the ways in which the policy apparatus opens up to larger concerns of what Michel Foucault calls dispositifs, linking art policy to other policy changes and societal concerns in general, and making art respond to those concerns in managed ways.