Louise Whiteley

Lektor og kurator

I’m an Associate Professor in Medical Science Communication at Medical Museion and CBMR. My position involves research, teaching, and museum work, emphasizing the dialogue between the three.

My core research interests include how biomedical research that implicates the mind affects peoples’ understandings of themselves, in part through popular culture. A second core research interest is how museum exhibitions, artworks, and performance can illuminate the relationship between science and the subjective experiences it invokes, acting as a form of public research that allows different disciplinary practices to ‘make something together’. In both these areas, I have a methodological focus on the role of communication in working across different knowledge practices; including an interest in images, metaphors, and the generative possibilities that lie in the failures of translation and representation. I also take this attention to communication – and the importance of sharing ethos and purpose as well as knowledge – into my teaching and supervision.

My current projects include developing the Sensing Holobiont performance installation with artist duo Baum & Leahy, Josh Evans, Kim Wejendorp and others; studying practices to improve scientific research culture with PhD fellow Annika Klæmintsdóttir Olsen; and developing a project with Dr Tine Friis and the reNEW research center to understand how patient’s imaginations of the futures of stem cell treatments shape their present ways of living with their bodies.

My earlier work includes leading a research group project called Microbes on the Mind from 2019-2023, funded by the Velux Foundation, and was part of the team producing the exhibition and public engagement project The World is in You from 2020-2022. I was also part of the curatorial team for The Living Room project led by Martin Grünfeld, My previous exhibition project with Adam Bencard, Mind the Gut, was supported by the Bikuben Vision prize 2015 and won the UMAC award 2019. Mind the Gut involved a ‘co-curation’ process that invited artists and scientists to join the curatorial team, which we have written about as a strategy for exhibiting complex, contemporary research, and for exploring boundaries between science, art, and cultural history exhibitions.

Podcast: The Sound of Microbes

Louise Whiteley

Since the late 19th century humans have felt like they were at war with microbes. But in recent years we’ve realized that they are important collaborators in health. Not only do they help us preserve food, bake bread and brew beer, but the majority of microbes that live in and on us actually help keep us healthy. With the podcast ‘The Sound of microbes’ we want to explore the many weird and wonderful ways that humans and microbes collaborate.

juni 26, 2023

Sensing Holobiont – Flavourful Rituals for Metabolic Companions

Microbes on the Mind Talks

Louise Whiteley

To celebrate the end of the Microbes on the Mind project at Medical Museion, we are hosting two open lectures in the auditorium, alongside the evening art performance Sensing Holobiont: Flavourful Rituals for Metabolic Companions.

januar 3, 2023

Sensing Holobiont – Flavourful Rituals for Metabolic Companions

Louise Whiteley

Kroppen udforskes som et økosystem, når Medicinsk Museion inviterer til performance i krydsfeltet mellem kunst, mad og videnskab.

december 14, 2022

Online talk by Hannah Landecker on ‘Metabolism and Society’

Louise Whiteley

On March 23rd, 17.15-18.00 CET, Professor Hannah Landecker of UCLA will give an online talk entitled ‘Metabolism and Society: A Short History of Mutual Transformation’. The talk is part of Metabolism Month – a weekly seminar series throughout March 2021, hosted by the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR). You can register […]

marts 9, 2021

Writing from the Gut (Microbes)?

Louise Whiteley

One of the driving questions for the Microbes on the Mind project (click here) is how we can represent a more-than-human body; how we can depict, write, feel, perhaps even hear and smell ourselves as partly microbial. We study how others have approached this communicative puzzle, and experiment with different methods ourselves. Since the project […]

december 2, 2020

Can bacteria perform? Call for papers on microperformativity

Louise Whiteley

The journal Performance Studies has a call out for a special issue on ‘Microperformativity’, edited by Jens Hauser, international curator and researcher at Museion, and Lucie Strecker. The deadline for one-page proposals is September 2nd. CLICK HERE FOR THE CALL What is microperformativity? In simple terms, it invites us to consider what performance means when […]

august 6, 2019

Writing from the Gut – writing workshop

Louise Whiteley

Are our thoughts and feelings really our own? Take part in a creative writing course at Medical Museion to explore how the written word might engage with ‘gut thinking’. Recent research into the human microbiome suggests that the trillions of microbes that inhabit our guts are not just crucial for digestion – they may also […]

juni 19, 2019

Job: postdoc on time, metabolism, and the body

Louise Whiteley

We are advertising a 3 year postdoc position, as part of a new international postdoc program at the NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR). Context: Medical Museion hosts CBMR’s Program for Metabolic Science in Culture, which aims to situate metabolic science in its cultural, historical, and philosophical context, through both interdisciplinary research and public […]

marts 30, 2019

Curator post – application deadline 5th August

Louise Whiteley

We’ve got an opening for a Curator, to be employed in the Section for Science Communication of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, based at Medical Museion and focusing on web and film communication as well as contributing initially to the curation of our upcoming Mind the Gut exhibition. Application deadline is […]

juli 21, 2016

A porous body – update on the Heirloom installation

Louise Whiteley

It’s been an interesting week for ‘Heirloom‘ – the artwork we’re currently exhibiting that grows cell portraits of the artist’s daughters in bioreactor tanks, and then preserves them for display. The cells have grown so successfully that last week the tubes became blocked, causing increased pressure and a leak. Then on Monday we discovered a […]

juni 29, 2016

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