Our projects

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Alzheimer's Cultures - between laboratory science and popular imagination

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This project engages with the question what Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is, or rather, what AD is continuously becoming in science and society at large, and how we “become with” it. Cecilia Åsberg and Tara Mehrabi For more information, please click here

 

Feminist Engagements with Breathing: Agencies of Embodied Subjectivities 

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Magdalena Górska is a PhD. candidate at Tema Genus and at the Posthumanities Hub. The PhD. project aims for a feminist theorizing of the human as an ‘embodied being of the world’. In order to do so and in order to attend to the specificities of such an interest, the research focuses on breathing. Breathing is understood here as a figuration as well as a phenomenon that opens up possibilities to think about embodiment and subjectivity beyond binaries of nature-culture, material-discursive, nonhuman-human, inside-outside, organic-inorganic. It is through the encounters with lungs, blood, air, dust, slime, veins, capillary, elements, bodily pressures, contractions, diffusion and many other actors, that the project hopes to conceptualize the agentiality of material processes which are constitutive of life and death and which flesh-out the transcorporeal (Stacy Alaimo) character of the human embodiment. As such, the project aims to develop an approach that offers non-anthropocentric, material-discursive understanding of human embodied subjectivities and hence is in conversation with feminist corporeal, poststructuralist and materialist scholarships that challenge neo-liberal, Cartesian and humanist notions of the subject and of embodiment.

 

Information management, gender and organisation

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The project is part of a wider research project for Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB) (The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency) titled “Gender, Rescue Services and Organisation‟ which Katherine Harrison is conducting with six colleagues during the period 2010-2013. The project team aims to engage actively with MSB and its employees in working towards building a more gender-equal organisation, through combining interactive research methodologies with intersectional perspectives. Katherine’s particular subproject focuses on information and communication technologies (ICTs) used by the rescue services. The main research question that this project seeks to answer is: what are the effects of the interaction between gender and ICTs on the processing and sharing of information? As such this study takes into account the effects of both material limitations of technology and user representations in shaping the data that is presented in one particular ICT used by MSB.

 

Meeting Materialities workshop series

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Meting Materialities is a workshop series hosted by The Posthumanities Hub at Tema Genus, Linköping University, and the Posthumanities Network: Next Genderation, financed by the Swedish Research Council.

For more information about the program, please click here

 

 

Passing as human: Reading posthuman bodies in contemporary science fiction

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Ingvil Førland Hellstrand's PhD. project Passing as human: Reading posthuman bodies in contemporary science fiction maps out the shifting boundaries between the human and the non-human in late modern Western popular culture. Asserting that the traditional boundaries between the human and the non-human (machines, animals, objects) have become increasingly difficult to maintain, the project critically explores the ways in which representations of posthuman bodies in contemporary science fiction both sustain, (re)produce and mediate understandings of “the human” in contemporary popular culture, particularly the science fiction genre. The posthuman is here understood as a framework for analysing how traditionally ontological differentiations between human and non-human are complex and problematic to sustain in light of advances in late modern medical science and technology. What is at stake when the posthuman challenge the “human” as a fixed and stable identity category, and how are these challenges made manifest in contemporary popular culture?

 

Prescriptive Prescriptions: pharmaceuticals and ‘healthy’ subjectivities

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This grand-scale project, headed by Dr. Ericka Johnson, in collaboration with Dr. Celia Roberts (Lancaster University) and Dr. Cecilia Åsberg is financed by the European Research Council (ERC). It concerns how our sociocultural understandings of healthy personhood are challenged by new or emerging medical pharmaceuticals. Drugs prescrived to young women as they enter adulthood, like HPV (cervical cancer) vaccine and birth control pills, or to men as they approach old age, sildenafil for erectile concerns or anti-dementia drugs, are telling of our cultural expectations regarding gender and sexuality, age, ability and cognition. In this project we investigate the cultural meanings and expectations attached to four prescription drugs, and compares the policies and practices around their use in two European countries, Sweden and UK.

 

Productions of HPV vaccine users in Sweden

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Lisa Lindén is a PhD student at the Unit of Technology and Social Change at Linköping University since the fall of 2011. Lisa's general research interests concern feminist theory of the body and embodiment, transformations of the public health sector and co-productions and entanglements of technology, gender and sexuality. The PhD project deals with the Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix in Swedish. It is a part of a larger Research project entitled “Prescriptive Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals and ‘Healthy’ Subjectivities”. The HPV vaccine is used to prevent HPV type 16 and 18 which have been estimated to cause 70% of cervical cancer cases per year. In Sweden, it is approved and prescribed for girls aged 10 to 12 years old and will soon be distributed through the Swedish school health system, administrated by school nurses. The PhD project has its focus upon the HPV vaccine as policy, regulatory regime and medical practice. It explores productions of new biomedicalized adolescent girl subjectivities as “ideal users” of the vaccine. The HPV vaccine technology is explored as co-produced and entangled with social categorizations such as sexuality and gender.

 

Sustainable Knowledge in Teacher Education

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Hanna Sjögren is a PhD student at the Unit of Technology and Social Change at Linköping University since the fall of 2010. Hanna’s research interest concerns negations on what counts as valid knowledge in different educational setting, using theoretical tools and ideas fromdifferent feminist andposthumanistscholars. Hanna’s PhD project focuses on what counts as valid knowledge about sustainable development in Swedish teacher education and uses focus group interviews as the method of inquiry.Sustainable development, as an area of knowledge, makes an interesting interdisciplinary case in education with a potential to destabilize clear cuts between nature/culture, public/private, human/non-human, North/South and theory/practice. Issues about how borders and border-crossing in educational practices can be studies, understood, challenged and destabilized are central to this project.

 

The Gender lab

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An experimental equal opportunities project, bringing natural and cultural scholars in close collaboration so to enhance the possibilities of academic careers (for men and women at Linköping university and Stockholm university) guided by gender awareness, critical thinking and creative collaborations. Led by Cecilia Åsberg, together with Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (Stockholm university) and the project secretary Linnea Bodén, this project is financed by the Delegation for Gender Equality (DJ), at the Swedish Ministry for Higher Education. To enroll, please contact Linnea Boden. To learn more about our current activities, please click here