Biomedicine on Display

I found this interesting – consider it in light of museum materialities and aestethics:

“The symposium will also consider why academic and artistic projects are
subject to different degrees of ethical oversight and how the final
outputs of such projects are shaped by their prospective consumption in
the public domain.”

See below for the full call

——————————————————————————————————–

Representing the Contentious:  A Symposium

Dr Bronwyn Parry and Ania Dabrowska, Artist
Mind Over Matter, Wellcome Trust People Award

Call for papers.

14th October, 2011

10 am – 4 pm

Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London, EC1V 9LT

Representing the Contentious is a one-day interdisciplinary symposium
that will examine the complexities of creating and representing work
(whether academic or artistic) that, due to its ethical, political, or
cultural sensitivity, its subject matter or research methodologies, has
the capacity to cause or provoke controversy, offence or condemnation.
The symposium will examine how the production of such work is negotiated
not only through the personal relationships of those involved but also
through formal institutions such as Ethical Review Committees. The
symposium will also consider why academic and artistic projects are
subject to different degrees of ethical oversight and how the final
outputs of such projects are shaped by their prospective consumption in
the public domain. Contributions are welcomed from academics or artists
who wish to take part in this ‘insider’s view’ of representing the
contentious through a mixture of critical discussions and presentations.
The symposium will run in parallel with Mind Over Matter, a Wellcome
Trust funded science/art exhibition about brain donation and the search
for a cure for dementia that will run at the Shoreditch Town Hall, 11-23
October, 2011.

You are invited to submit proposals for presentations of your academic
papers and art projects for consideration.  Proposals should include a
short bio and either an abstract for academic papers or a project
statement for artists with image files (up to 8 JPEGs or PDFs up to 2MB
each). A collected edition of these works is planned for future
publication. Please email proposals to the either of the co-authors of
the Representing the Contentious Symposium and Mind Over Matter Project:
Dr. Bronwyn Parry at b.parry@qmul.ac.uk  or Ania Dabrowska at
aniadabrowska@mac.com

Submission deadline: 15 September, 2011
Participating organisations: Wellcome Trust, Queen Mary University,
London, CFAS, CC75C studies, The University of Cambridge.  For
information about attending the symposium please contact Mind Over
Matter at: aniadabrowska@mac.com  or visit www.ania-dabrowska.co.uk  -
Mind Over Matter.

Just got an email from a certain Faith Swanson titled “The blog morbidanatomy.blogspot.com shares webspace with satanists”:

Did you know that when you host with blogspot, wordpress or many other common hosting providers, you are sharing space with drug pushers, satanists, pornographers and those who practice bestiality?

and suggests that we move hosting site to http://www.hostcovenant.com, a site that ”does not tolerate drug dealers, satanists, and pornographers”.
Deep inside, I sort of always suspected Joanna Ebenstein to be a satanist. Now it’s gone public! Great to have friends out there who can provide decent advice against the forces that darken our minds.

Museum Boerhaave — the famous science museum in Leiden — is threatened. Last Friday, the Dutch Minister of Culture presented budget cuts to the effect that the museum will have to bring in substantial external funding to cover the costs for collections and exhibitions. If the museum cannot do this, it will be closed by the end of next year.

Friends of Museum Boerhaave are encouraged to write letters of support to show that the museum is an important part of the international community of science museums. Send your letters to the museum’s head of collections, Hans Hooijmaijers, hanshooijmaijers@museumboerhaave.nl.

Apropos the first true Twitter-based medical journal club:

(courtesy: Wellcome images)

Apropos Daniel’s blog post the other day about a not-so-well organised conference at the university here in Copenhagen — I’m afraid badly organised academic meetings are the rule rather than the exception.

The usual conference format — a number of plenaries with 20-40 minutes presentations (with powerpoints) in a theatre, followed by a few minutes of questions from the audience, followed by a 20 minutes coffee break in an ugly lobby, followed by another excruciating plenary — is a cognitive, emotional and social killer, and a major reason why I, for one, rarely attend conferences any more.

The entrenched format is rarely transcended. Even “workshops” and “seminars” are often organised in the same traditional way. Few meeting organisers ask the participants for longer predistributed written presentations; few pay attention to the physical space and routinely seat people in a theatre; few consider using other media than powerpoint; almost no organisers utilise social media as a tool to enhance the meeting; and generally there is a deep unwillingness to experiment with new formats, or just break up the monotonous time pattern. Humanities meetings are hardly better than science meetings; and Scandinavian and Dutch meetings are rarely better than German and American.

For sure, I have attended a few conferences that were memorable exceptions to the usual format. Usually they were small meetings of 15-25 people, but occasionally I’ve attended meetings of 50-75 people that were organised in a way that stimulated interaction and engagement. And I guess most of us have positive experiences that stand out as oases in the usual conference desert.

But few of us take the effort to summarise our experiences publicly. This recent report from a workshop on ‘Personhood and Identity in Medicine’  organised by Elselijn Kingma and MM McCabe at King’s College in March this year, is a rare exception:

In order to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion and engagement, attendance had been limited to a maximum of 30 participants. Following the success of this format in the previous workshop, the day was divided into four topics, each of which was briefly introduced by two participants, one with a predominantly medical and one with a predominantly philosophical background. After these introductions followed 45 minutes of chaired group discussion [...].

The aim of facilitating genuine discussion and interaction between people with very different backgrounds was met, and an improvement was noticed in comparison with the previous workshop. Group continuity – which meant many people had experience communicating in this format and knew what to expect – undoubtedly helped, as did explicit instructions to interrupt discussions for clarificatory questions.

It would be great to see more such experiences of good meeting formats published online. I’m looking forward to a blog called “Best practice in conference organisation” or something (maybe there already is one?).

I’ve also discussed with a few colleagues in Denmark and Sweden that we should organise a conference about good conference formats! Let’s get started!

The annual joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy (SEP/FEP) is coming up soon. The call for papers (available here) was held under the title “Philosophy & …” and urged contributors to submit contributions that explore the limits of what can be placed together with, and within, the category of philosophy. Despite the somewhat bleak times for academic philosophy in England (the closing of the philosophy department at Middlesex being the premiere example), the organizers have struck a celebratory and exploratory note in the call for papers:

In a year when the UK has seen devastating cuts in the funding of the arts and humanities, it would be easy to be pessimistic about the future of Continental Philosophy. Yet, while reflection on the challenges ahead is certainly necessary, recent events also offer us the opportunity to respond to those who dismiss European Philosophy, not only with a vigorous defense, but also a demonstration and celebration of the profound impact it has had and continues to have on an enormous range of other disciplines.

So, while this year’s conference follows recent tradition in not having a theme, and thereby welcomes proposals from the broadest range of European philosophical thought, we particularly welcome papers and other contributions that explore the limits of what can be placed together with, and within, the category of philosophy.

Circling the philosophical wagons, so to speak. The conference has keynotes from Joan Copjec, Michéle Le Doeuff and one of my personal favorite philosophers at the moment, Graham Harman. His work under the banner of object-oriented ontology is fresh and stimulating, me thinks. Visit his (incredible active) blog here.

Just a reminder of the Artefacts meeting on ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’, 25-27 September, 2011, in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. The central question is what intellectual and practical approaches should be developed to document, preserve and present the history of recent science and technology? Deadline for proposals is 1 July — read more here.

I have just had a proposal accepted by Nordisk Sommeruniversitet who will be holding their Summer Symposium in Falsterbo, Sweden, July 30th - August 7th, 2011. NSU is organized by a Swedish non-profit organization sponsored by the Nordic Council of Ministers. It focuses on fostering cross-disciplinary research networks in the Nordic countries

There are eight study circles and I will be doing a practical workshop in study circle #7, Artistic research – strategies for embodiment.

The study circle will invite distinguished researchers and artists in the field, who have contributed to this emerging discipline. Building on the experiences from the upcoming anthology of the previous study circle 7, the new study circle will end with a new publication. This publication will focus on sharing methodologies and specific examples of artistic research and dissemination through applying multimedia. The aim is to reach out to our peers and art students interested in the field of Artistic Research.

Researchers and artists from all fields will take part in discussions about development of strategies for embodying and disseminating the experiences drawn from the field of Artistic Research on the theme: Strategies for Embodiment within Artistic Research; questioning and probing ways of embodying and communicating artistic research processes and their outcomes.

Previously I gave a paper at the NSU Winter Symposium held at Arkitektskolen in Aarhus. This unusual and lively three day symposium included choreographers, theatre and dance researchers, sculptors and animators and filmmakers, photographers, philosophers, art historians and drawers from Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, UK, Greece, USA, Germany, Ireland, Portugal and Czech Republic.

A healthy array of PhD candidates presented. Some used the symposium as a platform to ask questions around their own research and others looked for responses and criticism. Elina Saloranta a doctoral student at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts presented her paper ’What does silence sound like?’. This included a video and a script of a conversation between herself and her sound technician Eduardo Abrantes, a PhD student at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, who investigated the phenomenology of voice as a medium for sharing in his presentation ’On the uses of the voice-sharing through resonance and other metaphors’.

Some like Angela Rogers who uses drawing to investigate dialogic interaction, held workshops. Others, like Francis Halsall a lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art Theory at National College of Art and Design, Dublin, were art historians and theorists but not practitioners at all. His paper ’Embodiment and Drawing: De Duve on Robert Morris’ caused lively debate amongst those of us who are academics and also practitioners.

My paper, ’Drawing your way into understanding’ examined how we can come to know something by drawing it. It claims that the relationship that develops between object and viewer that occurs during the process of drawing, is central to the viewer gaining greater understanding of an object. Furthermore, the nature of drawing means this information can be communicated to others offering new insight and knowledge. The use of drawing here is based on a simple but poignant premise: that we do not look at things closely enough. By not looking we don’t see and without seeing we do not gain knowledge. I presented evidence of drawing as a research method based on previous investigations into understanding the experiences of a rare disease, Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva and from data taken from groups of non-artists who have used drawing as a method for investigating medical artefacts.

The NSU Summer Symposium takes place over five days. The first three days will focus on ‘knowledge generation’ and the final two will focus on ‘knowledge sharing’ and issues regarding the often problematic question of the means of dissemination of the knowledge generated through artistic research in the academic context and beyond.

Here is my proposal for the Summer Symposium.

Engaging with the unfamiliar

This is a proposal for a practical participatory workshop. The aim is to bring to the attention of the group, something unfamiliar which they will then have an opportunity to get to know.

Using observational investigative methods, the group will be asked to engage with an object. The journey of how they come to understand the object will be evidenced through the phenomenological activity of drawing. By this I mean the action of moving the tip of a pencil on paper in correspondence to the observational investigation they make. The emphasis is not on the drawing as a noun – a finished artefact, but on the verb – the action of making and experiencing the encounter they have with the object.

The question I will be asking is, where is knowledge embodied? Is it purely in the act of looking, in the act of looking while drawing (looking ‘through’ the tip of the pencil) or is knowledge embodied in the realized outcomes?

I understand knowledge to be embodied within this fugitive collection of experiences that formulate a breadth of understanding through each unique encounter. But I would like to find out where and how participants come to understand an object they encounter. Perhaps they will confirm my theories or maybe they have a whole new perspective on how actively engaging with an object can bring knowledge.

Study circle #7 then aims to publish an anthology in 2013 focusing on communicating methodologies, specific examples of artistic research, and the dissemination of knowledge through various media and multimedia solutions.

Proposals for presentations in various formats were welcomed, ranging from demonstrations and presentations/excerpts of artistic work, to theoretical reflections in the form of short papers and suggestions for panel discussions.

A lot of scientific and non-scientific discoveries are known to have been done by chance or even accident. We all know the story of how Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin when one of his staph bacteria cultures got infected by a fungus. Another example that might not be as well-known is sildenafil, also known as Viagra. Originally developed to treat high blood pressure and angina (chest pains), this drug was quickly discovered to have other more “exciting” uses. Teflon, microwave ovens and LSD are other examples of common-day (well, for some anyway) appliances that were discovered by accident.

Science by chance happens all the time. Researchers looking for answers to one question find themselves answering another. Last week, I went to a seminar entitled “The role of actin cytoskeleton in glucose metabolism and the accumulation of fat” by Professor Peter Gunning from the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is the head of the Oncology Research Unit at the School of Medical Sciences and an expert on the protein tropomyosin (list of publications). Alongside the proteins actin and myosin, these are responsible for the contractile activity of muscle cells. But they also have functions in virtually all other cells in regulating cell structure, motility, division, adhesion and even signaling.

In searching for proteins that could be targeted in cancer treatment, they happened to discover that when mice were genetically engineered to overexpress a specific protein they had visibly increased fat mass in certain areas of the body. Similarly, when the same gene was knocked out (eliminated), the same areas of fat were smaller. Interestingly, and also rather counter-intuitively, the same overexpressing mice showed an increased glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity – parameters that are usually impaired in association with type 2 diabetes. Thus while the mice had more fat and therefore supposed to be more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, these mice showed quite the opposite. So, while looking for cancer target genes, they accidentally came across some very interesting findings that might prove important in a completely different area of research!

I wonder how often such discoveries are made – and do researchers always take the time to share findings that aren’t necessary relevant to their own work? I certainly hope so!

Score one for the usefulness of facebook in science. In January and February, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, assistant professor of fisheries at Oregon State University (OSU), had been conducting the first ichthyological survey on Guyana’s Cuyuni River. The purpose of the study was to find out which species of fish live in the Cuyuni and get a good estimate of their abundance. After two weeks of fishing, the team had more than 5.000 specimens in their nets. But then trouble came:

“In order to get the fish out of the country,” says Bloom, “we needed an accurate count of each species.” The team’s research permit required them to report this information to the Guyanese government. “We couldn’t leave the country until we turned over our data to the authorities.” Time was of the essence, as Sidlauskas, Bloom and OSU graduate student Whit Bronaugh had to return to North America as soon as possible. But how could a handful of people possibly identify 5,000 fish in just a few days?

The answer became facebook. A Ph.D –student suggested uploading the fish to facebook, and within 24 hours the 5.000 fish had been identified with the help of a network of ichthyologically-minded friends.

This story made me think of the points that Andy Clark makes in his book Supersizing the Mind – Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension about the functioning of what he calls the extended mind. Facebook and other social web media has the same potentials as other tools in our cognitive environment -  like pens, smartphones, computers, fingers or calculators – to become part of our extended mind. And a powerful one at that, given the distributed power of a network of that size.  This raises serious questions about how social web media will influence the way our extended minds work. How will it impact scientific production and what new forms of life will it produce? Crowd sourcing certainly opens for scientific experimentation in new and interesting ways – www.fold.it is one of my favourite examples.

Two weeks ago, friends and colleagues alerted me to Horace Freeland Judson’s recent death. I was amazed to hear he had already reached the age of 80. But then again, 20 years have gone since we first met in 1991-92.

Horace had received a major grant from the Mellon Foundation to write a history of immunology, and advertised for postdocs to do the basic research. I had finished my PhD a few years earlier and had just begun the preliminary archival work and interviews for my biography of Niels K. Jerne. What an opportunity to spend a year at Stanford doing research for my next book! I applied for the job and went to Baltimore in July 1991 for an interview at Horace’s homeplace.

I was duly impressed, both of the fact he had won a MacArthur Fellowship a few years earlier and of the magnificent palais he and Penny had bought on University Drive. I also thought quite highly of his magnum opus on the history of early molecular biology, The Eighth Day of Creation (1979), because it was so extremely well written and because he had made extensive interviews with most of the major players. His cosy relationship with Francis Crick loomed large in the book.

I immediately accepted Horace’s offer to spend a postdoc year at Stanford and so did Nic Rasmussen (now at University of New South Wales) and Craig Stillwell (now at Southern Oregon University). But with some trepidation. Most young and ambitious historians of science at the time were put-off by the fact that Horace wasn’t a professional historian of science (he never earned a Phd), but a ‘simple’ journalist with a bachelor’s degree. His had no interest in historical theory and method, he didn’t like philosophy of science and despised all kinds of science studies. We considered him a skilled but atavistic amateur.

When we arrived, we were told that the reason the project was placed at Stanford was that historians of science and medicine at Johns Hopkins hadn’t wished to host Horace, and that Stanford had welcomed him only because of the substantial overhead. I don’t know if this was true, but the Stanford Program in History Science faculty indeed kept him at arm’s length. Partly this was a matter of academic snobbery from the side of Peter Galison and Tim Lenoir and their students, but Horace’s vanity, mannerisms, and habit of addressing people in a magisterial, and sometimes even condescending, voice most probably added to the mutual dislike.

Yet Horace was a MacArthur ‘genius award’ recipient who had rubbed shoulders with almost everyone of importance in early molecular biology. And he wrote damn readable texts, much better than most historians of science could ever dream of. Horace was a very intelligent man, who thought highly of science and quickly absorbed the essentials of molecular biology. He had been a fellow bachelor student with Matthew Meselsohn (of Meselsohn and Stahl experiment fame) in Chicago and had met Max Perutz in England when working for Time Magazine in the late 1960s. Through Perutz he got acquainted with Francis Crick, and that’s how The Eighth Day of Creation started — indeed literally started: the opening lines about how he’s walking down the street with Crick is one of the most famous show-off anecdotes in the history of science.

During our initial discussions, Nic, Craig and I rapidly realised that Horace had received the Mellon grant to follow up on his DNA-story masterpiece with a sequel on the history of contemporary immunology. We knew this was an impossible project. Postwar immunology doesn’t have the same simple storyline as molecular biology. There is no overarching discovery story (like the double helix), no main central actors (like Watson and Crick). Postwar immunology is a historiographical mess, which is complicated even more by the intricate relations between basic immunology and clinical science.

As a consequence, Horace’s magnificent idea ended with a torso. Nic, Craig and I published quite a few papers — but there never came a book from Horace’s hands. His next grand scheme, the Center for History of Recent Science at the George Washington University, received an initial grant for five years but then collapsed because of lack of funding. And his planned book on the Baltimore affair was scooped by Dan Kevles (The Baltimore case, 1998), forcing him to produce a much less spectacular book (The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science, 2004) than originally conceived.

It’s easy to pass over Horace Judson as a vain, pompous, gossipy, self-absorbed person who happened to write one single successful book, followed by decades of barrenness. But those of us who came close to him saw another side. Whereas too many academics are selfish, aspergeric and nasty behind their smiling and convivial personas, Horace was the other way around. Despite his superficial vices, he could be a very generous person: he would spend hours and days reading and commenting on people’s writings and several of my colleagues testified to how much they’ve learned from his writing skills.

Horace was a deeply troubled man, whose bitterness increased after Penny’s much too early sudden death in pneumonia in the mid-1990s, but he could also be quite endearing and empathetic. I’ll never forget how, when my then wife arrived in the winter of 1992, she was neglected by everyone except Horace, who sent over a huge basket with fruit, cakes and a bottle of champagne on the night of her arrival (“she needs it after a 16 hour long transatlantic flight”, he said). He could have added that life needs to be lived with style.

All this is anecdotal history now. The bottom line is that Horace Freeland Judson wrote one of the most readable and insightful books so far published about the history of mid-20th century science. For this he will long be remembered.

(Read also Nathaniel Comfort’s eulogy on Horace Judson here; we discovered by chance yesterday that we were writing in parallell and decided to post simultaneously today).

In the introduction New Materialisms – Ontology, Agency, and Politics, another of the recent anthologies on materialism (you can read about some of the other here and here), editors Diana Coole and Samantha Frost discuss the notion of a ‘critical materialism’. Building on social constructionist arguments, they work to integrate the critical approach of post-structuralists analysis of power with a materialists understanding of the irreducibility of the material realm to culture. In their own words:

For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural. As in new materialist ontologies, the challenge here is to give materiality is due while recognizing its plural dimensions and its complex, contingent modes of appearing.

This view, which is echoed in a lot of ANT and post-ANT studies as well as the growing body of work on biopolitics and biopower, is one of the major stakeholders in the new materialist wave (I hesitate to call it a turn, in order to avoid too much academic spin). Materialism thinking, in this perspective, leads to new critical engagements and analysis of the complex functioning of power and structure. A sort of material networkology, so to speak. For the critical materialists, working with a material approach means resharpening the critical tools and applying it to a new topic.

But it seems to me that thinking materially can also lead to a more existential mode of engagement, which works to restructure the role of the researcher in relation to her field of study (somewhat similar to what I wrote about here). This is represented in, amongst others things, the work of Brian Massumi, Jane Bennett (partly), Kathleen Stewart, Graham Harman, Alphonso Lingis and others. Here, thinking materially leads towards, amongst other things, a material embedded and ultimately experiential founded approach to the world.

This faultline – between a critical materialism that has its eyes intently on the material workings of power structures and an existential material that sees materiality as a way to rework the existential back into the investigation of the world – seems to me to be crucial in understanding the new material literature. Which side are you on (and is it a matter of taking sides)?

The deluge of publications on the material turn and the new materialism continues. I wrote about two anthologies last week, and now Oxford University Press have a new anthology out, The Oxford Companion to Material Studies. The introductory chapter can be read here. Interestingly, the editors Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, take a somewhat cautious approach to the idea of a material turn as such. They note the danger that a material turn, if embraced without cautious deliberation and reflexion, “would simply extend, through a rhetorical inversion, the cultural turn of the 1980s.” Thomas and I have argued something similar in an essay entitled “Do Things Talk?” a few years ago (which can be read here). We wrote in that essay that a new materialism would have to work through some fundamental shifts in how the relationship between the subject and the world and between the researcher and the object of study. The editors of the Oxford Companion conclude along similar lines:

The studies collected in this volume lead towards an appreciation not only of the effects of things, but also of things as the effects of material practices (both vernacular and academic). Material culture does not represent a straightforward object of enquiry, simply requiring new vocabularies for interpretation or abstract theorization. Instead, if we take seriously the critique of any a priori distinction between subject and object, then this must also encompass the academic researcher and her object of enquiry.

Ultimately, the editors suggest that it is through a fundamental reworking of the place of the individual in the world that a ‘true’ material turn would come.

When Bruno Latour talks of flat ontologies, these must extend between researcher and object of enquiry, as well as simply between humans and non-humans. Otherwise, we will simply continue to play back and forth across the categories of the cultural and the material: critiquing, collapsing, relating. Imagining that we represent a world, which we can hold at arm’s length, rather than enacting our knowledge of things. It is in this sense—a sense of the radical partiality of our knowledge of the world, which we might celebrate rather than shy away from—that material culture studies will, as Nigel Thrift suggests in his afterword, come of age.

I’m a sucker for old analytical-philosophical virtues. That is, I like to analyse words and phrases in the light of common experience and ordinary language. I love to ask simple questions, like “What do you actually mean by X”?

My desire for analytical philosophy was triggered again the other day when I recieved the call for a conference titled ‘Bio-objects for Europe?’ organised by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) programme.

The basic idea behind the conference (and the network it is supposed to launch) is “the understanding that whilst the bio-sciences do different things in different places and mean different things to different actors, much can be learnt if we try to assemble these different things—as well as the researchers that conduct research on them”. It’s these assemblages of things and researchers (did someone say ANT?) they call ‘bio-objects’.

And here comes the juicy part that triggered my desire:

In a nutshell, ‘bio-objects’ refer to new living materials that disrupt formerly established boundaries and modes of ordering, as well as to ‘old matters of life’ that are ‘revitalized’ when brought into new spaces. However, rather than a ready-made concept—or even Theory with a capital T—‘bio-objects’ are a new heuristic device – or, in one sense, a boundary object – that is waiting to be filled with meaning. Filling bio-objects with meaning by drawing on empirical research on bio-objects, following their making and stabilization, their movements and circulations, their trajectories and life lines, and their governance and regulation, in different spaces and at different scales, is the ambition of this Action. In doing so, we want to provide both new analytical and policy-relevant contributions towards the understanding and oversight of these troublesome ‘creatures’.

which makes me want to ask some old-school analytical questions, like:

• what’s “new living materials” as opposed to “old living materials”?
• what does it actually mean that “new living materials … disrupt formerly established boundaries”?
• how can “‘old matters of life’” (note the inverted commas) be “‘revitalized’” (note again the inverted commas)
• what’s the difference between “Theory with a capital T” and just ’theory’?
• what’s the difference between “a new heuristic device” and “a ready-made object”?
• “or, in one sense, a boundary object” — which are the other sense(s)?
• one the one hand, ‘bio-objects’ “refer” to “new living materials” (whatever that is). On the other hand ‘bio-objects’ is “a heuristic device … waiting to be filled with meaning” — is there (maybe) a slight contradiction here?
• I’d love to understand what a heuristic device not yet filled with meaning looks like :-) 

And then, of course, there are all the usual buzz-words — objects are ’made’ and ‘stabilized’, they ‘move’ and ‘circulate’, they have ‘trajectories’ and ‘life lines’. ‘Boundaries’ are, of course, always ‘disrupted’ and everything takes place in ’spaces’ (never in places). And don’t forget that objects are always ’ordered’, ’governed’ and ‘regulated’.

“In a nutshell”, sometimes I wonder (inspired by my good friend and former colleague Hanne) if some of these conference announcements are generated by a web-based bullshit generator?

On my continuing investigation into the aesthetics of rollators I was told about the Danish Queen Ingrid. After falling and breaking her hip, she appeared in the summer of 1998 for the first time publically using a rollator. Photographs and news footage of her shows her dressed in a glamorous couture gown and pushing a matching coloured rollator. Going to a gala wearing her prom dress and matching rollator and proudly escorted by her grandson Prince Frederik became a powerful image that encouraged others not to be ashamed of their rollators.

Determined to draw this culturally and historically important artifact I found that there was an exhibition about Queen Ingrid’s life at the Amalienborg Museum.

In the final room many of Queen Ingrid’s clothes were on display and in a long glass display cabinet that filled the entire wall of one room was her famous prom dress and there, peeking out shyly from behind the dress that lumpy, squat rollator lurked.

The accompanying sign reads:

“Rollator. With advanced age Queen Ingrid experienced difficulty in walking. In 1998 she attended a public event for the first time with a rollator-a wheeled walking frame. This had great significance for elderly people in the country, who then, with Queen Ingrid as role model, no longer felt that it was embarrassing to use a rollator”

I was slightly disappointed to find that the rollator was partially hidden as though embarrassed of being on display.

I wrote to ask for permission to draw it and was informed that this was not in fact the Queen’s rollator but an exact replica. In further conversations all was explained. This is not the actual one used by Queen Ingrid because, as happens in the case of every Danish citizen, when she died the original rollator was returned to the commune and once more became the property of the health service. No one will ever know if they are using the same rollator as the Queen Mother once used. The one on display is the same model manufactured at the same time and representative of the one she used. It is an Opal Futura 450 made by Dolomite and manufactured in early 1997 so was an up to the minute model when used by Queen Ingrid. Importantly the colour, which is mint, was not made to match her dress. The material for the dress was found to match the rollator.

The staff at the Amalienborg museum were incredibly helpful. Every morning I would arrive just after 8am and the rollator was carefully removed from its case and placed in the middle of the room for me. I was then left to draw until 11am when the museum opened.

Queen Ingrid’s rollator is not ‘special’, it was not specially designed or commissioned or bespoke made to royal requirements. She used the same rollator as anyone else but chose a bright mint coloured one. And like other users, she probably felt it was ‘her’ rollator and relied on it in the same way as any other user would.