About the project
This research project takes three specific historical-theoretical and methodological challenges as starting points. These are also themes for research courses:
- “To grasp change” explores how we understand, explain and embrace change in historical research and how this has been thematised in historical theory.
- "To read texts” examines the use of different reading strategies and textual interpretation methods in the field of history and related fields which have been concerned with these issues.
- "To write in nature in historical studies” criticises and discusses - with a basis in “environmental history” as its own sub-discipline in the field of history - strategies to study and include “nature” - including natural sciences and medicine - in historical studies. This happens by linking this tradition in connection with discussions in adjacent areas of history together with fields of study in science and technology.
One key empirical focus is an analysis of a little explored topic: The Norwegian Penal Code of 1902, studied from the vantage point of the textual, scientific and transnational relations the Penal Code was formulated through.
Selected publications
Asdal, Kristin, and Gro B. Ween. 2014. Writing Nature. Special issue of Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies 2 (1): 4-10
Asdal, Kristin. 2014. Politisk autoritet versus vitenskapelig kompetanse. Å ominnrede stortingssalen, rettslokalet og laboratorierommet. In Straff, lov, historie: Historiske perspektiver på straffeloven av 1902, edited by G. Heivoll and S. Flaatten. Oslo: Akademisk publisering.
Asdal, Kristin. 2014. Versions of milk and versions of care: The emergence of mother´s milk as an interested object and medicine as a form of dispassionate care .Science in Context 27 (2): 307-331.
Asdal, Kristin, and Christoph Gradmann. 2014. Science, technology, medicine – and the state: The science-state nexus in Scandinavia 1850-1980. Science in Context 27 (2): 177-186.
Asdal, Kristin. 2012. Contexts in Action—And the Future of the Past in STS. Science, Technology & Human Values 37 (4):379-403.
Asdal, Kristin, and Ingunn Moser. 2012. Experiments in Context and Contexting. Science, Technology & Human Values 37 (4):291-306.
Asdal, Kristin. 2008. Subjected to Parliament: The Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and the Animal Body. Social Studies of Science 38 (6): 899- 917.
PhD courses held
2012: Writing nature
2011: Reading texts
2010: Innovations/Transformations
Writing nature 2012
Writing nature 2012
Funding
The Research Council of Norway