Research

Researchers working on Mind the Gut are leading a stream on bacteria at the 10th European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference (SLSA EU) in Stockholm next summer (June 14-17, 2016). Mind the Gut researchers Adam Bencard and Jens Hauser are organizing a stream for the SLSA conference in 2016 related to the […]

Many of the objects held by museums of science and medicine are significant because they have been used in the production of knowledge and scientific enquiry. This blog post discusses how we might display such objects in ways that draw on their potential to generate scientific knowledge as well as their cultural history and materiality. […]

As part of her Velux professorship in Copenhagen in September and October 2014, Professor Annemarie Mol will be offering a series of master classes on ‘Material semiotic explorations’ in conjunction with the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Health and Society (Center for Sundhed og Samfund – CSS). Below is information on the master classes and how […]

This week Medical Museion is the venue for an international workshop on quantitative studies of major historic epidemic diseases. The workshop is organised within the framwork of the RAPIDD program (Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Dept. Homeland Security, hosted at Fogarty NIH and Princeton University).

On May 21st, I will defend my PhD dissertation in the nice old auditorium at Medical Museion. The title of the dissertation is “Unsettling successful ageing: A history and queering of the concept of successful ageing in ageing research”, and the event lasts from 1 PM (sharp!) to 4 PM, followed by a small reception. […]

In the recent issue of Curator there is an interesting and empirically well-founded paper on visitor experience of exhibitions, entitled IPOP: A Theory of Experience Preference. It lays out a typology called IPOP of what draws people to exhibitions – Ideas, People, Objects and Physical. The authors claim that an individual’s relative attraction to the […]

In 2012, Adam Bencard and I attended the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The conference was full of energy, curiousity-driven conversation, a perhaps unsurprising amount of great vegetarian food given all the animal studies scholars, and interdisciplinary in the manner of a delicious banquet rather than a fragmented […]

On of the (many) issues when trying to think about object agency (as I’m trying to do at the moment – read more here, here and also here and here) is that it necessitates thinking about what consciousness and intentionality are and that leads down a rabbit hole of philosophical debates spanning decades, multiple traditions […]

After a hectic few days preparation – from surveying artists who’ve worked at Medical Museion to cutting out 150 playing card sized images of art-science collaborations – I’m very much looking forward to the kick-off of The Future of Art Science Collaborations workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden tomorrow. You can read a workshop […]

In 2010, Thomas and I wrote a paper titled ’Do Things Talk?’, published in Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Christian Sichau, Helmuth Trischler (eds.), The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship (the volume is available as a .pdf here). In the paper, we discussed the problems and pitfalls surrounding the still current ‘things that talk’ rhetoric. Our […]

I am currently in the process of formulating some thoughts on objects in collections (read more here and here) which I hope will coalesce into a proposal for an object-oriented exhibition.  While thinking and reading about what happens when objects are put in exhibitions, I came across a useful concept from film theory: The Kuleshov […]

This post was originally published on the official blog of the International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, held in Manchester 22-28 July, as an appetiser for the paper “Understanding social media in STEM museums: the lessons from establishing a bio-hacking laboratory” that I co-authored with Karin Tybjerg and which Karin presented in the […]