- Hvilket forskningsprosjekt jobber du mest med n??
– I have just started work on a large interdisciplinary long-term project “Anthropogenic Soils. Recovering human-soil relationships on a troubled planet”, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and UiO. As one of the PIs, I am responsible for the work package “Decontaminating Soils”. Here, we will do small case studies of areas severely affected by past or ongoing pollution, toxic legacies, mining or smelting operations in Arctic Norway, military legacies and radioactive fallout in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. We are interested in modes of multispecies engineering that mobilize microorganisms in bioremediation experiments to recuperate highly polluted soils. Right now, we invite applications for three PhD research positions, one of which will join the STS group at TIK to work on bioremediation.
- Hva ?nsker du ? finne ut?
– The core questions we ask in the Anthropogenic Soils project are about how we know, experience, and imagine soils in the Anthropocene and how to recover unsustainable human-soil relationships. Continuing my earlier work on nuclear legacies, with “Decontaminating Soils” I want to better understand knowledges and practices of living with the legacies of modernity. Take bioremediation, i.e. the techniques of decontamination using biologic agents, such as plants or fungi, often hyperaccumulators or extremophiles that thrive in those conditions. Bioremediation experiments have a longer history in agricultural land use and environmental engineering, but they belong to the neglected domains of technoscience. Many bioremediation processes are complex, not fully understood, mostly slow and difficult to scale up – and not considered when it is about quick, profitable technofix. Staying with these tensions of technoscience and the politics of recuperative work, we will work with art-science devices, such as a multispecies inventory of remediation critters – our potential collaborators in soil recuperation.
- Hvorfor er dette viktig?
– With irreversible and unevenly distributed anthropogenic transformations of soils though industrial and agricultural land uses, societies need to reimagine knowledge-making and human-soil relations from the ground up. To work toward this, we are bringing together different disciplines – science and technology studies (STS), environmental humanities, social anthropology, microbiology, science fiction studies and the arts. It is important that, as researchers, we rethink and challenge how we know environmental issues, how we envision to repair, mitigate, and recuperate. These also are important societal questions, given the current crisis of soils. Topics of maintenance will also feature in the theme “Disruption and Repair in and beyond STS” of the upcoming Nordic STS conference which we host at TIK in June 2023.
- Hvem 澳门葡京手机版app下载er du med?
– I work together with a broad range of disciplines, within UiO and other Nordic universities, as well as in transnational STS networks, and also with colleagues in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For the Anthropogenic Soils project, we work together with the vibrant Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, with many others on board. There is lots of inspiration for broadening STS work in multispecies studies, human-animal relations, care and infrastructure studies. I also work closely with historians of science – and, not least, with scientists and engineers. I don’t find it difficult to relate to their practices – in fact, I was an environmental scientist and epidemiologist myself, before retraining in sociology and history of science and eventually becoming an STS scholar.
- Hva ser du etter n?r du velger 澳门葡京手机版app下载spartnere?
– I look for what I do not know and what I cannot do alone. For me, key to collaboration is shared curiosity and an interest in inventive approaches across disciplines – and at times to dare and do things differently, with or despite the pressures of academia or funding regimes. In interdisciplinary collaborations, as always, it is important to facilitate non-extractive relations, avoiding that one discipline becomes positioned merely as an informant to another discipline, but enabling to work across and alongside to develop new questions and approaches.
- Hvilke andre forskningsprosjekter er du involvert i?
– I am interested in the social studies of algorithms, datafication, digital modeling, including their material components such as datacenters – so everything that partakes in digital infrastructuring. As a partner in NorwAI, a large SFI centre, I lead the research area “AI in Society”. Here ask questions about the social encoding of AI, its database infrastructures and ongoing regulatory efforts. Studying standardization and measurement is also what I do as a partner in a history of science project “Historicizing IQ. Tests, metrics and the shaping of contemporary society” at UiO’s Museum of University History. Here I am contributing research on how IQ as a metric came to enter neurotoxicity studies in public health. I examine how legacy data and concepts live on as proxy variables, how they come to stand in for something else, and how they continue to encode, amplify, or cut social relations in datafied societies. Last, but not least, I enjoy sticking to some of my own favorite long-term interests. One of those is a group project with colleagues in history of science and environmental history – a study of life and technology at Frankfurt airport and its borderlands. Right now, we are writing a paper on the mixed knowledges of bird strike prevention – about the coexistences, clashes, and responsivities at such a technogenic site like an airport, which yet is full of hybrid ecologies
- Hva synes du er det mest interessante med ? v?re forsker?
– The most rewarding is being in continuous conversation with colleagues and students – to constantly learn new things in seminars, discussions and reading groups. There is lots of interesting ongoing work, for instance in decolonial STS, community technoscience, queer STS, practice-based and artistic research, etc. Key to doing research is less to find out something, but also challenging how we know something – and reimagine and develop that, too. The closer you look at things, the more questions emerge. I also really enjoy discussing and developing STS methodologies, novel formats, collective site visits and research-based teaching.
- Hva er det vanligste sp?rsm?let du f?r om jobben n?r du er i sammenkomster med venner eller ukjente?
– Once people hear about my field, I have lately often been asked: what actually is it that you do there in STS and what is so special about it? Well, I think STS is an invaluable space to work across disciplines and experiment beyond the separations commonly taken for granted – to move beyond modernity’s “grand partage”, as Bruno Latour put it – between nature and culture, society and technology. So, in STS we study these together as sociomaterialities – or to use Donna Haraway’s terms: naturecultures, cyborgs – and these are situated, partial, and always in plural. Having moved through quite some disciplines myself, I really appreciate how this enables researchers to combine asking the big questions while attending to minuscule details of a practice, a technology, a thing.