Karl Palmås
Karl Palmås is a researcher at the Division of Science, Technology and Society. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and has worked as associate professor at Chalmers University of Technology since 2012. Karl studies and teaches on the relation between the things we build and the things we think - how technological designs interrelate with social imaginaries. He has published academic articles in design sociology and design theory (in journals such as CoDesign, Design and Culture, the Design Journal, She Ji, and the Swedish Design Research Journal), economic sociology and organisation theory (in journals such as Culture and Organization, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of Enterprising Communities, and Social Enterprise Journal), as well as the sociology of technology and social imaginaries (in journals such as Futures, NanoEthics, Science as Culture, Surveillance & Society, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change). Karl's most recent monograps are The Corruption of Co-Design: Political and Social Conflicts in Participatory Design Thinking (co-authored with Otto von Busch) and The Hambantota Connection: Constructing Landscapes, Contesting Modernity (co-authored Kerstin Hamilton and Jonas Lindberg). With photographer Kalle Sanner, he has produced two research-based essay films: Too Late for History to End (2021) and Vår tids konst ["Art of our Time"] (2024). Karl also writes essays for cultural journals, some of which have been republished in English by Eurozine.
Showing 128 publications
Science theater on stage: Review of the play The Right Way
Engineering Judgment and Education: An Arendtian Account
The Tools of the Trade: Cultures, Devices, and Valuation Practices in Urban Design
Surf's up: Deleuze against the Red Bull sublime
The designification of futures: Emergent practices in the construction of economic fictions
Design in Marketization: The Invention of Car Safety in Automobile Markets
Absent futures in Gothenburg's jubilee architecture
Implicit Values in the Recent Carbon Nanotube Debate
The Corruption of Co-Design: Political and Social Conflicts in Participatory Design Thinking
Peace Piece: On the Machiavellian Moment in Organizational Innovation
Travelling Algorithms | Traveling Ontologies
Den förskräckligt distribuerade hjärnan
Capitalist eschatology: Immediacy, investment, ideology
The Place of Play in Nanotechnoscience Education and Governance
Legitimation crisis in contemporary technoscientific capitalism
Dissonance and diplomacy: coordination of conflicting values in urban co-design
Is there such a thing as a capitalist eschatology?
Between consultancy and advocacy: The politics of anticipating future regulation
Legitimacy and time in technoscientific capitalism
Peace piece: Dissonance and the stabilising of local innovations in urban design
Life in Laboratory Urbanism: Repression, Suspension and the Politics of Innovation
From hacking to simulation: Periodizing digitally-inspired social theory
Laboratory urbanism in Schladming
Social Means Do Not Justify Corruptible Ends: A Realist Perspective of Social Innovation and Design
Digitalisering, innovation och hållbar urbanisering
Designing Consent: Can Design Thinking Manufacture Democratic Capitalism?
Inauthentically Intense: Coveillance and Consumer Culture among Speedsurfers
From criminality to creativity: How studies of surfer subcultures reinvented invention
Quasi-Quisling: co-design and the assembly of collaborateurs
The Hambantota Connection: Constructing landscapes, contesting modernity
Sports matter: The Routledge Handbook of Sports Technology and Engineering
The liability of politicalness: legitimacy and legality in piracy-proximate entrepreneurship
Self-employment and generational inequality
Evenemang som laboratorium: Sporten, staden och sökandet efter innovationskraft
From criminality to creativity: how studies of surfer subcultures reinvented invention
Cultures of consumption within GPS speedsurfing
Station Community Transitions – A Matter of Push or Pull?
Winning the hearts and minds of farmers: Institutionalised innovation diffusion in Sri Lanka
Varför vi misslyckats: Tio års diskussion om socialt entreprenörskap
Den misslyckade välfärdsreformen : Därför floppade aktiebolag med begränsad vinst
Det urbana stationssamhället Forsknings- och praktikeröversikt
Livelihoods or ecopreneurship? Agro-economic experiments in Hambantota, Sri Lanka
Rethinking the MBA: A turn to the field within business education?
The production of chemical worlds: Territory and field science in global agribusiness
Lifestyle sports revitalising capitalism: Surfer communities and the re-invention of invention
Lazzarato's 'political entrepreneur' revisited: the case of Noko Jeans
Engineering the artificially natural: Design for Sport
Rendering urban value(s) visible / What does it mean to say that urban theory is performative?
Re-assessing Schumpeterian assumptions regarding entrepreneurship and the social
Rewriting Capital as Nitrogen: The rise of Nr-ism
The translation of an incubator: the case of the Lighthouse in Bubulo, Uganda
Spatialising social entrepreneurship: Urban social innovation in Berlin
Predicting what you'll do tomorrow: Panspectric surveillance and the contemporary corporation
Exploitative experiments? Organic farming in Sri Lanka
Hambantota är fiskebyn i geopolitikens centrum
Strategies of spreading social innovations: the case of organic farming in Sri Lanka
Helping designers to work outside of hierarchies: Towards a scholarship of "design meshworking"
Habit and territory in the (non‐)spread of organic farming in Sri Lanka
The translation of an incubator
Exploitative experiments? Organic farming in Sri Lanka
What Happens Next? An Appendix on Fashion Stewardship and Social Entrepreneurship
Smitto(nto)logi: Om panspektrocismens politik och estetik.
Lava, kött och memer: Manuel DeLandas flödande materia
Går det att spåra entreprenörers kunskapsmässiga avtryck i samhället?
Cities are flows of urban magma
Socialt entreprenörskap: ny sektor eller rebranding av ideellt arbete?
Hail to the auteur? Why 'aesthetic management' cannot save design management
Towards panspectrocist competitive strategies? A nascent diagram for corporate assemblages
Slime actually. On the real virtuality of male professional networks
From jamming the motor to hacking the computer: The case of Adbusters
Take action! 83 ways to change the world
Excorporating design management: From the molar to the molecular perspective
Deleuze and DeLanda: A new ontology, a new political economy?
CSR in Scandinavia: A turn to the business case?
The Dale sko hack : [a project exploring modes of production and re-form tactics]
The UK Public Interest Company: The idea, its origins, and its relevance for Sweden
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Showing 4 research projects
Mistra Environmental Nanosafety Phase II
Societal Engagement in Science, Mutual learning in Cities (SEiSMiC)