To understand and meet complex health challenges, more is needed than biomedical perspectives. We also need to understand existential, philosophical, socio-cultural and biopolitical dimensions of illness, suffering, and health. Phenomenology of medicine and critical phenomenology of medicine are philosophical research fields well suited for the inquiry of how illness, loss, suffering, pain, socio-cultural norms, medical diagnoses, and medical technologies help shape our very ways of perceiving and experiencing ourselves, others, and the world we live in.
My academic background is interdisciplinary. I was granted my PhD in 2006 at Tema Health and Society and became Docent in Ethics, particularly Medical Ethics, in 2009. Since then, I have continued to combine qualitative research (methodologically mostly forms of thematic, narrative, or discourse analysis) with philosophy of medicine and medical ethics, sometimes also engaging with sociology of medicine. Combinations of qualitative research and philosophical or ethical analyses are gradually becoming more common and are referred to by several names, such as empirical philosophy, qualitative philosophy, empirical ethics, field philosophy, and qualitative phenomenological philosophy.
Together with Marjolein de Boer, I have developed the approach of Qualitative Critical Phenomenology as a theoretically grounded method in which qualitative research and critical phenomenological philosophy are integrated. The method is well suited to examining how illness, norms, or medical diagnoses can shape and constitute individuals' ways of seeing and experiencing themselves, their own body, others, and the surrounding world.
Critical Technoscience Studies, Phenomenology, and Interdisciplinary Health Research
I have worked at Tema Technology and Social Change since 2015. In addition to continuing to combine philosophy of medicine with insights and methods from sociology of medicine and related fields within medical humanities, I also work at the intersection of feminist and other critical technoscience studies and critical phenomenology. I investigate subjectivity, bodily norms, agency, and knowledge production in health care. I also analyze philosophical and ethical aspects of the development and use of technologies in health care – such as, for example, when AI-based models are implemented into health care practices.
My interdisciplinary work also includes being principal investigator for the project Biomedicine, Clinical Knowledge, and the Humanities in Collaboration: A Novel Epistemology for Radically Interdisciplinary Health Research and Policy Work on Post Covid 19 Syndrome, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2022–2027). Interdisciplinary research that combines medical humanities and biomedicine remains quite rare, but in this project, researchers with very different backgrounds do collaborate.
We investigate and develop methods for combining perspectives and analyses from medical humanities with rehabilitation medicine, neuroradiology, and neurobiology to better understand new illnesses such as Post Covid-19 Condition. For example, we combine qualitative phenomenological analysis of patients’ experiences of extreme fatigue in post Covid syndrome with neuroradiological analysis of MRI images. We also examine epistemological challenges that are integral to this kind of interdisciplinary work.
Pain and Health, Subjectivity, Embodiment and Norms about Bodies
In previous research projects, I have examined ethical, philosophical, and socio cultural aspects of climate change with a focus on how these affect health, reproductive technologies, organ donation, and dementia. The empirical foci have varied, but recurring themes in my research include lived experience of illness, pain, and health; subjectivity and intersubjectivity; embodiment; norms concerning bodies; and agency in health care contexts, as well as how epistemological perspectives and methodological choices in medical humanities and biomedicine shape the knowledge produced.
I have led projects on, for example, norms about parenthood and parents’ experiences of donating a kidney to their child, and on how norms about sexed embodiment can be expressed and enacted within specific medical practices and help to shape decisions about genital surgery when a child is born with intersex anatomy. My research has also examined the role of embodiment in relational autonomy conceptions, conditions for global bioethics, and how pain and illness can shape bodily self-awareness.
