Academic interests
Kristin is professor of STS and her research focuses on the sociology of knowledge across economics and natural science and on how scientific expertise is partaking in democracy. Her key competence is on the politics of the environment, broadly conceived, and she has executed a series of comprehensive empirical studies on the politics, economy and history of the environment and the bioeconomy. She also investigates democratic procedures as versions of knowledge practices.
Kristin is currently heading the project ValueThreads (2020-2027) where she and her team investigate the new economic practices that are emerging in efforts to shift the economy towards the green and sustainable. She is interested in how values are created, what values mean in different sectors of society and by different actors and through different techniques. Among the cases in the project are finance and green investments, the ocean economy and economic practices in forestry. Phd-candidates Stine Engen and Marie Stilling work together with Kristin on this project at TIK. In the winter and spring term of 2022 Kristin is visiting professor at CSI-Mines ParisTech where Kristin will be working with project partner Liliana Doganova and post doc. Nassima Abdelghafour.
ValueThreads is a continuation of Kristin’s earlier ERC-grant project, The Good Economy: Biocapitalization and the Little tools of valuation (2016-2020). In this project, Kristin worked with The Good Economy concept to address how to study values in the economy, and ‘little tools of valuation’ to address the many mundane techniques that together make up larger economies. Relations between ‘the good’ and the economy was investigated further by the research team as a whole (published in Biosocieties 2021). In a comprehensive empirical study, Kristin and Tone Huse have carefully ‘followed’ the Atlantic cod into the bodies of politics, field-sites of science and economic arrangements and markets. They use this case to investigate the ocean economy, how nature is turned economic, and to develop analytical approaches that can provide us with the capacity to analyze economic practices without losing sight of the lively nature that works upon, resists, and modifies the economy. A monograph, co-authored with Tone Huse, will be out with MIT in 2023.
Kristin has always taken a keen interest in and published widely on method-issues, and has, in recent years, developed practice-oriented document analysis, inspired by her interdisciplinary background in the humanities and history and many years of STS research and engagement. This year (2022) she published with Hilde Reinertsen a method book with SAGE on practice-oriented document analysis where documents are analyzed as sites, tools, work, texts, issues, and movements and built into a comprehensive method. An earlier Norwegian version of the book was published in 2020.
A study on experimental economics co-authored with Beatrice Cointe where they draw on interviews and document-analysis as an ethnographic method to tease out the making of the lab and the production of objectivity, will be out this year (2022) with Social Studies of Science. Kristin’s research on laboratory knowledge practices continues with the Life Science project COMPARE and ResBod. Together with Tone Druglitrø and Tommas Måløy she is researching working practices in the life sciences, and how scientists across medicine and biology experiment to understand immunology with the Atlantic cod as a non-model organism.
Kristin’s thesis (2004) was on how nature is taken into democratic and bureaucratic practices and analyzed the ‘technologies of politics’ involved in ordering nature into governable objects. She developed this into a broad analysis of Norwegian politics of nature (2011). With Bård Hobæk, she has continued working on this topic through a comprehensive study of whaling. They investigate the different formats of democratic practice through researching how an issue such as whaling enter and is handled in and by parliamentary procedure. They hope to have their book finished by 2023. So far, precursors of their ongoing work om parliaments and democratic practices can be found in Science as Culture (2016) and Social Studies of Science (2020).
Positions held
Kristin is heading the research group Science, Technology and Culture at TIK and is also part of TIK’s leader-group. She is associate editor of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. She was vice-chair of the Board of Directors at CICERO (2016-2019) and is member of the board of the Science Studies Colloquium Series at the University of Oslo. She also headed the research group “Nature and the Natural” as part of the management group of the cross-faculty initiative KULTRANS.
Courses taught
TIK/ESST Master and the specialization course TIK4011 Science and Technology in Politics and Society, the Ph.D. course TIK9011 Science and Technology Studies. She also teaches valuation-studies, document-analysis and politics of nature and the environment.