To understand and meet complex health challenges, more is needed than biomedicine. 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 that we live. Further, medical sociology shares an interest in norms about bodies, medical diagnoses, and medical technologies.
My academic background is interdisciplinary, with a focus on philosophy of medicine, medical ethics, empirical philosophy, and to some extent, medical sociology. Qualitative critical phenomenology is one of the methods that I work with, from within the field of empirical philosophy. Qualitative critical phenomenology comprises a combination of methods and perspectives from qualitative research and phenomenological philosophy, and it is apt for the inquiry of how illness, norms or medical technologies can shape subjectivity.
A large part of my research entails interdisciplinary knowledge production. As an example, I combine perspectives and methods from within philosophy of medicine with that of science and technology studies, for the sake of a nuanced understanding of medical practices, discourses, and lived experiences of illnesses – while also inquiring into how these perspectives might be most productively combined. In two on-going book projects, I investigate how critical phenomenology and feminist technoscience studies can be combined in analyses of subjectivity, norms about bodies, agency and knowledge-production practices within health care. From within these perspectives, different questions are asked, and different methods are used, yet they share an interest in subjectivity or subjectivities, norms, values, and the conditions for knowledge production. I also research ethical aspects of the development and use of medical technologies and therapies. This side or part of my research can be described as interdisciplinary medical humanities and bioethics.
Further, together with colleagues, I work with research that combines medical humanities with biomedicine. In this kind of research, researchers with very different academic backgrounds work together. We examine and develop methods for combining perspectives and methods from medical humanities and for example rehabilitation medicine, neuroradiology, and neurobiology – for the sake of a better understanding of new conditions such as the post COVID-19 condition. We also examine epistemological challenges with this kind of interdisciplinary research.
Previous research of mine has explored ethical, philosophical, and socio-cultural issues related to climate change that affects health, reproductive technologies, organ donation, and dementia. The empirical foci have varied, but through-out my research, I examine questions related to lived experiences of illness, pain, and health, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, embodiment, norms about bodies, agency, and how epistemological perspectives and choices of methods within medical humanities and biomedicine impact on the knowledge being 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.
International Experience and Collaborations
I have spent several periods as guest researcher abroad, including one year as Pro Futura Fellow at Cambridge University, UK, (2014/2015) as part of a five-year Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, a post doc and internship at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, (2005), and one year as guest researcher at Cardiff University, UK (2000/2001). Among my central international collaboration partners are colleagues at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University.
