Research

For about two years now, a group of us here at the Museion has been running a reading group on materiality. It has been on a hiatus for a while, but we are now getting back into the swing of it. Traditionally, we meet on Monday mornings every 2-3 weeks to get the philosophical juices […]

‘Biomarkers’, i.e., chemical substances that are used as indicators of biological (especially pathological) conditions, is one of these important concepts in contemporary biomedicine that seem to be almost impossible as an exhibition topic — partly because the idea of ‘biomarker’ is so abstract and partly because the involved artefacts and substances don’t have much ‘presence’. Unfortunately, because the […]

As a bit of a brain-fanatic, I was very excited to attend the opening of the new Wellcome Collection exhibition in London, Brains: The Mind as Matter, at the end of March. I was particularly keen to see how the stated aim to focus on the brain as object  would play out: Brains takes the […]

Every time I see a conference call for papers in my field of expertise these days, I’m thinking: could this meeting have been organised on Twitter or Google+ or some other online platform instead? I’d rather participate in an academic discussion on my iPad at home or in a café than sitting in an ugly meeting room in an anonymous hotel somewhere in the […]

Some of us from Medical Museion are going to try a new session format at this year’s Swedish STS-meeting, which takes place at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, 2-4 May. Titled “In Medias Res: The aesthetics of scientific, technological and medical things”, the idea of the session is to present some of […]

Last Thursday we held the first event in our new series Body | Medicine | Object. The inaugural event was entitled Making balance bodies: From leeches to pills (read more in Danish here), and explored different understandings of what it means to be healthy and in balance, and how im-balance is treated. Some 65 people […]

At an internal workshop here at Medical Museion, we recently discussed the problematic aspects of distributing objects from the collection on the web. The web surely poses a great opportunity for museums to get stuff out there and thereby to reach a broader audience – hopefully then inspiring them to an actual museum visit – […]

I first got hooked on using Twitter in- and outside conference rooms when I attended last year’s Artefacts meeting at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. Hopefully the award-winning and refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh also has an acceptable wifi connection when hosting this year’s meeting, 7-9 October. This year’s meeting is thematically focused on scientific and technological museum artefacts against the backdrop of the notion […]

As I wrote the other day, Medical Museion hosts the Graduate Programme of Medical Science and Technology Studies here at the University of Copenhagen. Now we are proud to announce a graduate course titled ‘At the Margins of Life and Death’, to be held 21-23 August 2012. The aim of the course — which is organised by associate professor […]

I’ve been invited by the philosophy of science group in Gothenburg to give a talk to their Theory of Science seminar group on Friday, 3 February — titled ”Mundane Design vs. Fine Sci-Art: Two Realms of Aesthetic Practice in Science Communication”. Here’s the abstract: Sci-art has become an increasingly important dimension of science communication through printed […]

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, […]

It’s reasonably easy to imagine how some features of emerging biotechnologies can be turned into museum installations and exhibits. For example, enhancement technologies like nanoprosthetics and tissue engineering can rather easily be imagined as 3D installations. But other concepts are more difficult to translate from words to space. Like morality, for example. I came to […]