Who Cares? Larp Festivals as Playful Counterpublics and Democratic Intimacies.

with Hanne Grasmo

This presentation examines Nordic larp festivals as democratic spaces that foreground care, play, and alternative temporalities rather than deliberation, representation, or procedural participation. Drawing on fieldwork at three Nordic larp festivals, I argue that these events can function as playful counterpublics in which democracy is practiced not primarily through talk, debate, or decision-making, but through co-creative participation, speculative worldbuilding, and networks of care. Understanding larp festivals through a model of democracy as care (Tronto 2013) foregrounds the specific affordances larp festivals can offer of embodied and playful resistance when it comes to producing democracy, and open space for what might be called democratic intimacies.

Speaker Bio

Hanne Grasmo is a Norwegian doctoral researcher at the Tampere University, CoE GameCULT and Game research lab. Her PhD research centres around embodied role-play and sexual emotions, both in Nordic larp and in BDSM communities. Focus areas are world-changing, role-play design, immersion, queer resistance and democratic spaces. She holds a MA in sociology, and has additional background from sexology, education, theatre and larp design. Grasmo has discussed and written about larp for more than 30 years, founded the Knutepunkt larp conferences, wrote the first book about Nordic larp (Laiv, levende rollespill, 1998) and has published academic articles about erotic larps, queer heterotopia, neurodivergence and role-play, and crip theory for educators. As well as The Just a Little Lovin larp script: ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1959-3072

Time

Monday September 21st at 15:00 CEST over zoom.

To attend

Contact annika.waern@im.uu.se to receive the Zoom invitation.