ageing

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. […]

Have you ever walked into a museum and photographed the shadowy corner of the room rather than the glass case in the middle? Have you ever stopped to look at the seemingly boring medical stuff that surrounds us – from dentures to rollators? And how often do you think about the fragility of the bones […]

On the 27. of April we opened our new exhibition ‘Experiences of Ageing‘ featuring drawings and objects from a 2-year postdoctoral research fellowship by the London artist Lucy Lyons. At the opening seminar Lucy gave a general introduction to her work in artistic research and to the exhibition. Watch this short video from the opening to find out […]

At our next event on Thursday evening, accompanying the opening of new exhibition Experiences of Ageing, we’ll be inviting guests to investigate some of the overlooked aspects of medicine with their pen, lens, and hands. We’ll be exploring the quiet spaces that surround the drama of medical objects, everyday medical devices that are often ignored, […]

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to contribute to a workshop on interdisciplinarity and ageing research, organised by Lene Otto and the humanities section of the Center for Healthy Aging here in Copenhagen on Wednesday 14 December. Why interdisciplinarity? Well, the Center is pretty big — about 150 biomedical scientists, epidemiologists, health service researchers, ethnologists, etc., plus a few communication […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ragnar Granit’s essay on the distinction between discovery and understanding as two separate modes of scientific work, which, he suggested, are differentially distributed throughout a scientist’s life-course — young researchers are impatient to discover something new, whereas older scientists are more interested in getting insight, he suggested. Even more interesting, in […]

Prompted by a recent guest blog post on the Scientific American site, I’ve just revisited an almost 40 year old essay titled “Discovery and understanding” by the Finland-Swedish neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize Winner Ragnar Granit. Growing out of a talk (see video here) that Granit gave at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1972, the essay was published in the Annual Review of Physiology later the same year. I remember dimly having read […]

I am currently researching a piece on rollators. Based on artistic research investigating the aesthetics and materiality of these essential but perhaps under appreciated objects I am struggling with finding some further information. It is generally accepted that the first rollator appeared in the 1970s and was designed by Bernt Leander from Sweden. There is no […]

On Friday 13th May, Adrian Bertoli, Morten Hillgaard Bülow and I attended the University of Copenhagen Center for Healthy Aging (CEHA) retreat day at the DGI Congress Center here in Copenhagen and we have decided to bring our experiences of the day together in one blog post. Lucy says: Everyone involved in each of CEHA’s five programmes was required […]

On my continuing investigation into the aesthetics of rollators I was told about the Danish Queen Ingrid. After falling and breaking her hip, she appeared in the summer of 1998 for the first time publically using a rollator. Photographs and news footage of her shows her dressed in a glamorous couture gown and pushing a […]