knowledge production

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. […]

Over the last month I’ve found myself in a strange vortex of image permission issues. So I thought I’d have a little rant, but also wanted to play around with some possible implications for debates about open access and ownership in academic publishing. The disappearing figure I have a paper close to publication that includes […]

There has been quite of a trend of thinking museums in terms of globalisation. For example, critical museum people are discussing the place of their institutions on the global scene (for a very good take on this, see here), and curators have begun to discuss their work in terms of the transnational nature of collections and acquisitioning (see, for example, […]

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 […]

Many of us here at Medical Museion are fascinated by containers, boxes, flasks etc. in biomedicine — all those kinds of packages that are used for keeping and transporting body parts, cell cultures, chemicals, biobank samples (like the 23andMe box), etc. Such containers are part of the vital infrastructure of both scientific and clinical practice, but […]

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 […]

These are some of the reasons to love museums found on twitter yesterday: Museums help you ask new questions. You get a little knowledge and crave more. Because they make me feel excited, like a child. They open up the world and expose the tiny little bubble we all live in. Museums are for EVERYONE. They […]

Some speak about the perfect storm. Here’s the perfect scientific journal: Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR). It’s all about rejection. The perfect rejection, i.e., universal rejection. In other words, the journal’s policy is to reject all submitted manuscripts, regardless of quality. Here’s their reasons for why you should send your manuscript to them: You can […]

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein’s presentation at the conference on “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month was about the politics of knowledge production, with medical museums as a case study. One of Roger’s arguments was that the museums, by placing their historical objects in new, global contexts, […]