Projectories

Yesterday the first Ph.D. in gender studies (in Sweden?) was awarded to my great
friend Cecilia Åsberg at the Department of Gender Studies at the Tema Institute.
She had Merete Lie from the Nowegian Insitute for Interdisciplinary Culture Studies
in Trondheim as opponent. Cecilia handled the defense elegantly. Her dissertation
is called Genetiska föreställningar: Mellan genus och gener i populär/vetenskapens
visuella kulturer (Genetic representations: Between Gender and Genes in Popular/Scientific
Visual Culture). She uses STS, Culture Studies, Visual Culture, and Intersectional
theories to illuminate how genes are represented. The party afterwards was a blast.
I have rarely been to a party where there were so many tributes. Go Cissi!

I’m back from three days of wonderful conferencing in Norrköping. It was
the Advanced Culture Studies Institute that arranged the conference. I co-arranged
a session on combining actor-network theory with discourse analysis, and it
went splendidly well. It was really inspring having such an intelligent audience
and session. We had arranged for Marianne Winther-Jørgensen to comment
on the papers, and she did a marvelous job of reading and discussing the papers.

I met my fellow STS/blog person Gustav
Holmberg (on the picture) at the conference. We agreed that bloggers are charmingly
interesting people, and discussed if it had to do with communicative writing
as a personality trait. I think it might.

Gustav presented a paper at my fiancée Jenny’s session on the
genealogy of food. It seems that food studies and STS might have a lot of interesting
meeting points. I’m thinking about the discussions that me and Jenny have had,
and also about John Law’s writing about foot and mouth disease in Great
Britain. Inspiring.