Between 2020 and 2025, the Swedish Research Council has financed 62 artistic research projects that together have cost taxpayers around 250 million SEK. A review of these shows that seven out of ten projects contain elements of activism.

In posts on Instagram from the Stockholm University of the Arts, a part of Stockholm University, which attracted attention, a series of short video clips were published in which PhD students talk about their projects. One of these was named the Afrorocket, or Afrostar Galactica, and was part of the PhD student’s research project FutureBrownSpace.

The PhD student explains that “Blackness is in the driver’s seat and no longer in the passenger seat” and the vessel takes the passenger into space where “the white gaze” is erased. The Afrorocket will become a stage performance, and there, passengers will have to check in their whiteness before boarding. Excessive levels of whiteness are considered a terrorist threat, and those who cannot rid themselves of it are encouraged to put it in airplane mode.

Jesper Andersson at Kvartal became curious and examined the project more closely and found that the PhD student had received three million SEK from the Swedish Research Council.

But – doesn’t this sound more like activism than research?

The Afrorocket is not the only expensive research project with elements of activism; millions have been disbursed over recent years. Of the 62 reviewed projects from 2020 to 2025, 17 are classified as clearly activist, and a further 27 as containing clear activist elements. These involve things like climate action, anti-racism, decolonization, and other attempts to change society.

The absurd projects pile up. Another example is the claim that monsters in film and fairy tales represent immigrants and minorities, and that “it is becoming increasingly important to find new ways to understand each other.” Only 18 appeared to be reasonably pure research projects.

Political Scientist: Ridiculous

Bo Rothstein, political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, has criticized the field of research and argued that it should instead be called developmental work.

– Your analysis shows that the whole thing turns into mostly comedy. There can be no artistic research; it’s just made up. There can be artistic development work. I am a big fan of conducting that. But it becomes ridiculous when you’re supposed to defend a dissertation based on an artwork, he says to Kvartal.

The dominant theories within artistic research, according to Rothstein, belong to left-oriented perspectives, such as Marxist theories, and are highly politicized and lack any form of empirical knowledge. He notes that they have become popular but are just “mumbo jumbo” and are more activism than anything else.

At the Swedish Research Council, Nevra Biltekin Hjorthén, coordinator for artistic research, says that artistic research is a “broad and varied field of knowledge” based on artistic and experience-based practices.

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