Blog

As one of my colleagues, Claus Emmeche at the Faculty of Science has recently pointed out, the amounts used by Danish universities on branding have tripled since 1999. The global phenomenon of ‘academic capitalism’ (see e.g., Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, 1997) with its increasing competition between more and more business-oriented universities will […]

When I heard the news of Richard Rorty’s death last Friday (“from the same disease that killed Derrida”) I browsed through my copy of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature — and was overwhelmed by memories and associations. I remember how I experienced Rorty’s argument against the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mirroring of a world external […]

You still have another two weeks left to register for what seems to become a very exciting conference on museological issues at the Manchester Museum, viz., “Nature behind glass: historical and theoretical perspectives on natural science collections”, Thursday 6th – Saturday 8th September 2007. This international symposium aims to promote and communicate inter-disciplinary research on historical, theoretical and […]

An unease with the current scientific publishing system was addressed in two open panels at last year’s EASST conference. Now, a new journal has been launched in order to tackle some of the issues discussed at EASST 2006. The Open peer review process of the International Journal of Feminist Technoscience (IJFT) makes use of “an interactive framework to secure quality, relevance, efficiency and democracy in […]

Last Friday we held a reception at Medical Museion to celebrate the completion of the moulage conservation project. Nicole Rehné has meticulously restored our collection of 70 wax models made in the early 20th century for the Niels Finsen Medical Light Institute to demonstrate the symptoms of a various skin diseases, especially skin tuberculosis (Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize […]

Here’s the manuscript for my article to the Medical Museion Yearbook 2007 which is coming out in July. It s an outline of ideas which will be explored in the workshop ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’ and the ‘Art and Biomedicne: Beyond the Body’ conference in late August and early September, organised by Jan Eric Olsén, Stine […]

Last December Koos Boomsma and I organised a symposium on evolutionary medicine (i.e., an evolutionary approach to understanding the origin of disease) here at the medical faculty in Copenhagen, with Randolph Nesse (University of Michigan) and Steve Stearns (Yale University) as keynote speakers, followed by a panel discussion with the audience. It was a well-attended meeting (some 100 students and […]

If you happen to be in Paris on Thursday 26 June you might consider attending a roundtable discussion at the Ensba-Paris Art School in 14 rue Bonaparte on the theme “The art-science-technology relations as seen through the Leonardo Book Series at MIT Press”, occasioned by the launch of a new book, Signs of Life: Bio Art […]

I just discovered a description of Sev Fowles’s “Thing Theory” spring 2007 seminar at Dept of Archaeology, Columbia University. It has an excellent reading list and a clever way of structuring the whole course through the themes of psychologised, sacred, socialised, fetishised, subjectivised and technologised objects. A very inspiring syllabus for a new version (?) of the “Towards a […]

The art gallery White Cube in London has just opened an exhibition of new works by Damien Hirst, called “Beyond Belief“: In this exhibition, Hirst continues to explore the fundamental themes of human existence – life, death, truth, love, immortality and art itself. In two new series of paintings – the Fact Paintings and the […]

Ever wondered what Foucault, Agamben and other interesting philosophers meant by ‘biopolitics‘ and ‘biopower‘? Here’s a concrete case. The Danish Conservative politician Pia Christmas Møller suggests today (Berlingske Tidende, 4 June) that the right to acquire a driver’s license shall depend on whether the license candidate is willing to take a stand on the issue of organ donation or […]

Has anyone come across a study of medical compliance from a public understanding of/engagement with science perspective? Or vice versa? I’m asking, because I think there is an interesting conceptual overlap between medical compliance and public understanding/engagement with medicine. Compliance (or adherance or concordance) is the term used by medical professionals to describe how (if ever) patients follow an advised treatment […]