Research

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 […]

A few months ago, I gave a small talk at an internal seminar here at Museion where I presented some thoughts about how to further our engagement with objects and how to take materiality more seriously. Here is the talk: Not just a museum with things, but a museum about thingness – possible strategies for […]

Following my last blog post about a 1yr research job in Leiden looking into relations between bio-art and science communication, more exciting scholarship news… Our neighbours the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication at the University of Copenhagen are currently advertising a PhD scholarship in science communication with a focus on synthetic biology: The student will […]

The Waag Society, Amsterdam, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, and University of Amsterdam, have released a call for applications for a 10 month project exploring the use of Bio-Art as a science communication strategy, potentially leading to a PhD project. The relation between art-science and strategies for public engagement raises some fascinating and underexplored questions about how […]

I’m participating with a paper titled “The material life-course of a scientist” at workshop ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ to be held at Science Museum, London, on 18 July. There are many things I would like to take issue with in this call for papers: Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of […]