Mittner, Lilli

Job description

Research interests

Ageing and Dementia
Coastal Cultures
Gender Equality and Higher Education
Historiography and Storytelling
Sound and Music

Expertise

Co-Creativity
Citizen Science
Open Research
Research Communication
Research Ethics

Favourite quote

*It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.* (Donna Haraway. Staying with the trouble, 2016, p. 35.)

What I do

I explore gendered expressions and performances in human thoughts, creations, and relations, and what it means to be human at all. I often use qualitative research methods such as archival studies, content analysis, multimodal analysis, aesthetic analysis, diffractive analysis, discourse analysis, policy analysis, qualitative interviews, focus group interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and situated art intervention. With a strong background within the arts & humanities, I have developed close collaborations with social and natural scientists working on artscience, natureculture, and human-more-than-human intra-actions. Empirically, my research is increasingly connected to the Arctic where I have lived since 2014. Since 2023 I am coordinating the Centre for Arctic Humanities at UiT.

Member

Selected Projects

CO-VISION - EU Artistic Digital Archive
Living with the Ocean - Travelling Exhibition
Artful Dementia Research Lab - Citizen Science
RESCAPE - Performative Historiography
Voices of Women in the Arctic and Beyond - ERASMUS+ with Norway, Germany and The Netherlands
Gender Balance in Research Leadership
Gender Balance in Arts Education - Organisational Change

Selected Publications

Rönkä, Anna Reetta, Britt-Inger Keisu, Sofia Kari, Kirsti Lempiäinen, Lilli Mittner, Lena Abrahamsson, and Mervi Heikkinen. 2025. ‘Intersectional Gender Equality Challenges – A Review of Gender Equality Research Conducted in Fennoscandian Arctic Academia’. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, January. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08038740.2024.2446760.
Lotherington, Ann Therese, and Lilli Mittner. 2024. ‘Når Diagnosen Definerer Behovet. En Analyse Av Problemforståelser i Demensplan 2025’. Tidsskrift for Omsorgsforskning 10 (3): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.18261/tfo.10.3.5.
Lukić, Dragana and Lilli Mittner. 2023. Diffracting Dementia: Co-Creative Experiments with Agential Realism and Multisensoriality in a Residential Care Home in Northern Norway. In E. Just, M. Udén, V. Weetzel, & C. Åsberg (Eds.), Voices from Gender Studies: Negotiating the terms of academic production, epistemology, and the logics and contents of identity. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Voices-from-Gender-Studies-Negotiating-the-Terms-of-Academic-Production/Just-Udn-Weetzel-sberg/p/book/9781032415826
Mittner, Lilli, and Rikke Gürgens Gjærum. 2022. Research Innovation: Advancing Arts-Based Research Methods to Make Sense of Micro-Moments Framed by Dementia. Nordic Journal of Art and Research 11 (1). https://doi.org/10.7577/information.5065.
Haselmann, Lena, Janke Klok, and Lilli Mittner. 2021. Autumn Talk and Ocean Songs. Dramatic Assemblage – Methods and Relevance of Performative Historiography. In: Musikgeschichte auf der Bühne - Performing Music History, edited by Anna Langenbruch, Daniel Samaga, and Clémence Schupp-Maurer, 375–98. transcript Verlag. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839457467-021/html.
Mittner, Lilli. 2021. Resonating Moments: Exploring Socio-Material Connectivity through Artistic Encounters with People Living with Dementia. Dementia, 14713012211039816. https://doi.org/10.1177/14713012211039816.
Maxwell, Kate, Lilli Mittner, and Hanne Hammer Stien. 2020. Conceptualizing the North. Nordlit, nr. 46: 1–11. https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/nordlit/issue/view/399
Maxwell, Kate and Lilli Mittner. 2018. Multimodal Aesthetics and Gender in Beck’s Song Reader. In E. S. Tønnessen & F. Forsgren (Eds.), Multimodality and Aesthetics. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315102665
Mittner, Lilli. 2018. "Students Can Have a Really Powerful Role…". Understanding Curriculum Transformation Within the Framework of Canon Critique and Critical Pedagogy. Journal for Research in Arts and Sports Education (2). https://doi.org/10.23865/jased.v2.928.

Research interests

Ageing and Dementia
Coastal Cultures
Gender and Gender Equality
Historiography and Storytelling
Sound and Music

Expertise

Co-creativity
Citizen Science
Open Research
Research Communication
Research Ethics

What I do

I apply feminist theories to explore human thoughts, creations, and relations, and what it means to be human at all. I often use qualitative and arts-based research methods such as archival studies, content analysis, multimodal analysis, aesthetic analysis, diffractive analysis, discourse analysis, policy analysis, qualitative interviews, focus group interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and situated art intervention.

With a strong background within the arts & humanities, I have developed close collaborations with social and natural scientists working on artscience, natureculture, and human-more-than-human intra-actions. Theoretically, my work is inspired by feminist posthumanism and new materialism. Empirically, my research is increasingly connected to the Arctic where I have lived since 2014.