Projectories

We’ve been waiting for a new professor in Economy and Technology for several years at our department. Before x-mas the search committee had finally ranked the candidates. The top candidate was Claes Fredrik Helgesson from the Stockholm School of Economics and SCORE. CF Helgesson has a strong interest in economy, medical technology, as well as STS and Actor-Network Theory. He’s going to be a great addition to the department. Now, only the rector and the salary negotiation stand between him and the appointment. If all goes well, he’ll start this summer.

I have for a long time thought about writing about when my colleagues finish their defence, and become PhD’s. Well I seem to have forgotten about that in the thick of battle during the semester. Well, now I’m going to start backblogging.

The last dissertation I wrote about was Petra Jonvallen’s book Testing Pills, Enacting Obesity, the next one written in English from the department is Corinna Kruse’s The Making of Valid Data. People and Machines in Genetic Research Practice, which was defended on the 22 of September 2007.

Corinna’s dissertation is a multisited laboratory ethnography about how ‘samples are turned into data that is considered valid and useful by the research community.’ The dissertation dives into machines, norms, ideals, skills, as well as validity, agency reproducibility.

Theoretically Corinna’s study draws on Bruno Latour’s popular concept of immutable mobiles and Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism to discuss ‘various notions of humanness and machineness which shaped scientists’ practices and made the creation of valid data possible.’

A long-time overdue, Congratulations Corinna!

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I got tired of clicking three times every time I wanted to search our university library so I wrote a couple of open search plugins so that I could do the searches in the search bar in Firefox: one is for Google scholar with advanced search for humanities/social sciences; one is for the Swedish national library system LIBRIS; one is for finding personnel at my university; and the rest are for searching our university library catalog.

You need Firefox 2.0 to be able to use the search plugins. You can download Firefox 2.0 here. (It might work with Internet Explorer 7, but I haven’t tried it.)

Google Scholar Social Sciences Search

LIBRIS (National Swedish Library System)

Link�ping University Library: Catalog

Link�ping University Library: Databases

Link�ping University Library: Journals

Link�ping University Personnel Search

According to the Institute
of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

A new great STS thesis published from the department. Petra Jonvallen passed her
Ph.D. defense today for her dissertation: Testing Pills, Enacting Obesity
– The work of localizing in a clinical trial. Petra investigates how
different tools are localized and discipline practice in order to organize work
and produce reliable data. She uses Annemarie Mol’s concept enactment to understand how obesity is done in different ways in the clinical trial.

I’m trying to get some kind of understanding of academic publishing. How should you go about it? What’s important to succeeding? What journals to submit to?

I found some advice through Google:
Getting Published Guide
Simple advice for academic publishing
Simple Advice for Academic Publishing: A Protege Talks Back

Now I’m trying to find good lists of journals in the STS field. Any tips? Please email me or leave a comment.

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.