M N Svendsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 27899 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M N Svendsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | M N |
| FAMILY NAME | Svendsen |
| SIGNATURE | SVENDSEN M N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4777-4973 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 271 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Afterword
I'm deeply honored by this special issue and impressed by the analytically richness and ethnographic depth of the five contributions.By taking us into different worlds of bioscience and care, building on years of engagement with specific fields and thick ethnographic descriptions, the papers add important layers to my concepts of nearness and substitution.As Iben M. Gjødsbøl, Mie S. Dam, and Laura E. Navne compellingly outline in the Introduction…
From Prediction to Horizon
Computational methods and tools under the label ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) are increasingly promoted as solutions to the challenges of under‐resourced and understaffed healthcare systems, with predictive modelling positioned as a means to improve efficiency and individualise care. Yet little is known about how predictive algorithms are taken up in the everyday practices of clinical decision‐making. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Danis…
Beyond Preferences
Efforts to involve patients in medical decision-making have led to the development of various models for structuring clinical encounters. Among them, Shared Decision-Making (SDM) is now a cornerstone of contemporary healthcare, based on the ethical imperative to involve patients through the articulation of preferences. However, in practice, SDM often relies on a rationalist model of deliberation that prioritizes autonomy, clarity, and informed ch…
Whole genome, part population
Health Data Saves Lives', But Which Lives
Precision medicine is a field of future promise. Its imaginary is that 'health data saves lives'. But which lives and at what costs? In this position piece, we direct attention to how non-imagination (Prainsack 2022) operates in the field of precision medicine. We argue that central actors in the field, along with social scientists researching it, non-imagine the relevance of environmental collapse to the pursuit of precision medicine, despite it…
Population curation
How do precision medicine initiatives (re)organize relations between individuals and populations? In this article, we investigate how the curation of national genomic populations enacts communities and, in so doing, constructs mutual obligation between individuals and the state. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Danish National Genome Center (DNGC), we show how members of advisory bodies negotiated the inclusion criteria for two different …
From able-bodied soldier to disabled veteran
In this article, we investigate the role of military identity in Danish wounded veterans’ efforts to re-establish identity after trauma and come to terms with a disabled body. Drawing on qualitative interviews with physically wounded male veterans, we explore the two simultaneous transitions of moving from able-bodied to disabled, and from military to civilian life. Focusing on wounded veterans’ existential bodily experiences and moral striving, …
"Belonging in the "Big Picture
What makes recognition of veterans "authentic," and how does authentic recognition shape and establish "war veteranship" among wounded veterans? Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article explores how Danish wounded veterans experience and evaluate official recognition ceremonies. We demonstrate that recognition ceremonies alone do not establish effective recognition. Rather, for recognition to be perceived as authentic, it must …
Curating 'the good story
In this article, we explore the intricacies of veteran care and show how care practices come to incorporate veterans' 'self-performances' to raise political attention and funding for future rehabilitation activities. By bringing into dialogue theories of care and theories of performance and representation, we illustrate how a seemingly classic form of care-veteran rehabilitation-takes the form of representative performance. Drawing on ethnographi…
The fertility of moral ambiguity in precision medicine
Although precision medicine cuts across a large spectrum of professions, interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial moral deliberation has yet to be widely enacted, let alone formalized in this field. In a recent research project on precision medicine, we designed a dialogical forum (i.e. ‘the Ethics Laboratory’) giving interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial stakeholders an opportunity to discuss their moral conundrums in concert. We organized and carr…
Making a case for “Careful storage”
The word “storage” may initially seem antithetical to “good care,” evoking a sense of objectification and spatial othering . And yet, dementia care institutions empirically function as spaces that physically separate, or “store,” their charges as part of the care they provide. In this paper, we propose what we call “careful storage” as a way of analytically engaging with the interrelationship of care and storage in dementia care institutions. Dra…
Pigs, people and politics
Use of tissue and health data
Personalized medicine aims at tailoring treatment to the individual person through the sourcing of multiple health data from the population. The realization of these ambitions rest on the ability to reuse health data. But what does it take to reuse tissue and data collected from individuals in connection with treatment, for future purposes? It takes an “enabling public” consisting of not only people providing tissue and data, but also clinicians,…
Strategies on personalized medicine and the power of the imagined public
Personalized medicine has become a central focus of health and innovation policies in many countries. It is a complex policy field which, in the pursuit of both health and wealth, brings together technology, new data use, and medical care. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the notion of personalized medicine has evolved, and what publics are implied in the political mobilization of the concept. We answer these questions based on a document …
Slowing down decay
This article discusses so-called biological clocks. These technologies, based on aging biomarkers, trace and measure molecular changes in order to monitor individuals' "true" biological age against their chronological age. Drawing on the concept of decay, and building on ethnographic fieldwork in an academic laboratory and a commercial firm, we analyze the implications of the development and commercialization of biological clocks that can identif…
Domesticating data
Data are versatile objects that can travel across contexts. While data's travels have been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the sites from where and to which data flow. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in two connected data-intensive laboratories and the concept of domestication, we explore what it takes to bring data 'home' into the laboratory. As data come and dwell in the home, they are made to follow rituals, and as a re…
Citizen-Person
The genome has become a crucial component in precision medicine aimed at tailoring medical treatment to the individual. To the extent that social science studies of genomics have explored questions related to the individual, these studies have focused on how the governance regarding genomes facilitates individuals' rights, choices, and responsibilities. By contrast, we approach genomic governance by investigating how enactments of the person in p…
Interviewsamtale
Interviewsamtale om medicinsk antropologi
Moral Ambiguities: Fleshy and Digital Substitutes in the Life Sciences
De novo kin
Comparing, sharing, and shielding children's biological and biographical data in genetic databases and on Facebook are central moves when geneticists and families search for diagnoses for children with rare diseases. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, we show that the work of linking children carrying the same genetic mutations forges new sibling-like forms of relatedness between them. With the concept of 'datasociality', we add new laye…
Precision patients
This paper addresses selection practices in a Danish phase 1 unit specialised in precision medicine in the field of oncology. Where precision medicine holds the ambition of selecting genetically fit medicine for the patient, we find that precision medicine in the early trial setting is oriented towards selecting clinically and genetically fit patients for available treatment protocols. Investigating how phase 1 oncologists experience and respond …
Personalised medicine in the Danish welfare state
In this paper, we view health strategies in the field of personalised medicine as performative actions which articulate the development desired for a given society and demonstrate and affirm values and visions for that society. Based on a qualitative study in Denmark, we show how political actors and policy documents articulate visions for personalised medicine through a distinct sociotechnical imaginary. This sociotechnical imaginary mobilises t…
Mouse avatars of human cancers
In search of 'extra data
One of the key features of the contemporary data economy is the widespread circulation of data and its interoperability. Critical data scholars have analysed data repurposing practices and other factors facilitating the travelling of data. While this approach focused on flows provides great potential, in this article we argue that it tends to overlook questions of attachment and belonging. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork within a Danish data-…
Digital phenotyping and data inheritance
Proponents of precision medicine envision that digital phenotyping can enable more individualized strategies to manage current and future health conditions. We problematize the interpretation of digital phenotypes as straightforward representations of individuals through examples of what we call data inheritance. Rather than being a digital copy of a presumed original, digital phenotypes are shaped by larger data collectives that precede and cont…
Potentializing the Research Piglet in Experimental Neonatal Research
This paper explores the socio-moral-material practices by which the piglet is imbued with potential for human health by making it a substitute for the preterm infant in need of treatment. Based on fieldwork in a Danish perinatal pig laboratory, we view the experimental practice as a sacrifice and argue that it is characterized by two forms of exchange: a calculative exchange that defines an absolute moral difference between humanity and animality…
Articulating Potentiality
Life science research is continuously engaged in exploring, measuring, or limiting potentials for life. The concept of potentiality pervades practices surrounding cells, bodies, and technologies. Based on an ethnographic study of how couples in fertility treatment become donors of embryos to human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in Denmark, I explore ways of measuring and talking about the potentiality of embryos in the fertility clinic and i…
A life worth living
Caregiving can be conceptualized as involving practices of substitution, in which doctors, nurses, and health assistants step into the subject positions of their charges in order to sustain their personhood and compensate for their reduced capacities. Fieldwork in Denmark at three sites-a neonatal intensive care unit, a research laboratory using piglets as animal models, and a dementia nursing home-shows that temporality is a key component in sub…
Unpacking the 'Spare Embryo
In 2003 it became legal to carry out human embryonic stem (hES) cell research in Denmark using embryos that are considered `spare' in connection with fertility treatment. The public debate preceding the change of the Fertility Act presented the `spare' embryo as a biological fact and discussed whether it was possible and morally acceptable to connect a given stock of `spare' embryos to the stem cell lab. This paper tells a different story. Based …
Providing solutions-defining problems
Resisting decay
Selective Reproduction
This article employs a multi-species perspective in investigating how life's worth is negotiated in the field of neonatology in Denmark. It does so by comparing decision-making processes about human infants in the Danish neonatal intensive care unit with those associated with piglets who serve as models for the premature infants in research experiments within neonatology. While the comparison is unusual, the article argues that there are parallel…
Time and Personhood across Early and Late-Stage Dementia
How do time and personhood become related when dementia sets in? This article brings together ethnographies from a memory clinic and a dementia nursing home in Copenhagen, Denmark, pursuing how personhood and time become intertwined across early and late-stage dementia. In the memory clinic, the dementia diagnosis is enacted and experienced simultaneously as an indispensable prophecy of discontinuity of personhood and life for the patients, and a…
Between Reproductive and Regenerative Medicine
Careography
In this article, we explore medical doctors' moral experiences of being responsible for decisions on the lives and sometimes deaths of infants in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Drawing on fieldwork, we investigate how clinicians navigate the tension between exercising medical authority and enabling parental involvement in decisions. Introducing the term "careography", we call attention to how the doctors steer this tension through …
The Social Life of Genetic Knowledge
This article explores the social life of genetic knowledge in the context of cancer genetic counselling in Denmark. I focus on a specific case that occurred during my study of the processes through which genetic risk profiles are produced and through which knowledge of genes and kinship comes to appear both meaningful and contestable to counsellees. The analysis illuminates how participants in cancer genetic counselling experience gaps between, o…
In search of 'extra data
One of the key features of the contemporary data economy is the widespread circulation of data and its interoperability. Critical data scholars have analysed data repurposing practices and other factors facilitating the travelling of data. While this approach focused on flows provides great potential, in this article we argue that it tends to overlook questions of attachment and belonging. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork within a Danish data-…
Precision patients
This paper addresses selection practices in a Danish phase 1 unit specialised in precision medicine in the field of oncology. Where precision medicine holds the ambition of selecting genetically fit medicine for the patient, we find that precision medicine in the early trial setting is oriented towards selecting clinically and genetically fit patients for available treatment protocols. Investigating how phase 1 oncologists experience and respond …
In the mood for science
Taming Time
This article explores how incurable cancer patients in the affluent Danish welfare state are recruited to clinical trials. We show that patients' impending death constitutes their potential for being configured as research subjects. To produce valuable data, patients who enroll in trials and health care professionals must engage in daily "time practices" that prolong the threshold between life and death. When death becomes inevitable, the limit o…
The Attachment Imperative
In this article, we explore how parents establish relations with extremely premature infants whose lives and futures are uncertain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we engage recent discussions of the limits of conventional anthropological thinking on social relations and point to the productive aspects of practices of distance and detachment. We show that while the NICU upholds an imperative of a…
Recognizing Dementia
This article investigates how a person with dementia is made up through intersubjective acts of recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish memory clinic, we show that identification of disease requires patients to be substituted by their relatives in constructing believable medical narratives; yet during memory testing, patients are not allowed any substitution to clearly expose cognitive shortcomings. In combining works of theorist…
Mouse avatars of human cancers
Life-and-Death Decisions in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Denmark
In what ways are care and compassion implicated in efforts to establish lives worth living? Drawing on fieldwork in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), in this article we investigate the role of family biographies in conducting life-and-death decisions around premature infants. Guided by a larger literature on citizenship, we view decisions in the NICU as political acts of assigning citizenship. We ask what bodies and biographies can ge…
Translational neonatology research
Negotiating Moral Value
In 2004, twelve capuchin monkeys were moved from the labs of the Danish psychiatric hospital of Sankt Hans to a small private-owned zoo in another part of Denmark in order to be rehabilitated. These monkeys were the last nonhuman primates to be used as research animals in Danish biomedical laboratories. The normal procedure would be to kill research animals after the termination of an experiment; in this case, however, a decision was reached to c…
Digital phenotyping and data inheritance
Proponents of precision medicine envision that digital phenotyping can enable more individualized strategies to manage current and future health conditions. We problematize the interpretation of digital phenotypes as straightforward representations of individuals through examples of what we call data inheritance. Rather than being a digital copy of a presumed original, digital phenotypes are shaped by larger data collectives that precede and cont…
Collaborative intimacies
Pigs and pig organs are frequently used prior to human trials in experimental transplant research into how to optimise human transplantation. But what exactly happens when transplant professionals perform experimental research on pigs? Similarly, what happens when a pig is on the surgical table? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Danish transplant research laboratories, we investigate how pig experiments facilitate 'collaborative intimacies' amon…
Wireless Heart Patients and the Quantified Self
Remote monitoring of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) patients links patients wirelessly to the clinic via a box in their bedroom. The box transmits data from the ICD to a remote database accessible to clinicians without patient involvement. Data travel across time and space; clinicians can monitor patients from a distance and instantly know about cardiac events. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish hospitals, this article ex…
From able-bodied soldier to disabled veteran
In this article, we investigate the role of military identity in Danish wounded veterans’ efforts to re-establish identity after trauma and come to terms with a disabled body. Drawing on qualitative interviews with physically wounded male veterans, we explore the two simultaneous transitions of moving from able-bodied to disabled, and from military to civilian life. Focusing on wounded veterans’ existential bodily experiences and moral striving, …
Fortællinger om slægtskab i cancergenetisk rådgivning
Tilhører gener individet eller familien? Hvad betyder det at være genetisk forbundet? Der bliver stillet skarpt på forståelser af gener, krop og slægtskab, som de kommer til udtryk i forbindelse med cancergenetisk rådgivning og testning
Providing solutions-defining problems
Genetics and prevention
This article explores the process through which the advances of genetic research are incorporated into public health care in Denmark. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in cancer genetic counselling, the implementation of new medical advances is investigated by following the establishment of a policy on informing relatives at risk of hereditary cancer. This case material provides the occasion to examine how policies are shaped in a governmental pr…
The Social Life of Genetic Knowledge
This article explores the social life of genetic knowledge in the context of cancer genetic counselling in Denmark. I focus on a specific case that occurred during my study of the processes through which genetic risk profiles are produced and through which knowledge of genes and kinship comes to appear both meaningful and contestable to counsellees. The analysis illuminates how participants in cancer genetic counselling experience gaps between, o…
Between Reproductive and Regenerative Medicine
Between Neutrality and Engagement
Unpacking the 'Spare Embryo
In 2003 it became legal to carry out human embryonic stem (hES) cell research in Denmark using embryos that are considered `spare' in connection with fertility treatment. The public debate preceding the change of the Fertility Act presented the `spare' embryo as a biological fact and discussed whether it was possible and morally acceptable to connect a given stock of `spare' embryos to the stem cell lab. This paper tells a different story. Based …
How do we collaborate? Social science researchers’ experience of multidisciplinarity in biomedical settings
Articulating Potentiality
Life science research is continuously engaged in exploring, measuring, or limiting potentials for life. The concept of potentiality pervades practices surrounding cells, bodies, and technologies. Based on an ethnographic study of how couples in fertility treatment become donors of embryos to human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in Denmark, I explore ways of measuring and talking about the potentiality of embryos in the fertility clinic and i…
In the mood for science
Better safe than sorry
Breast screening with mammography can be contentious because of its unintended harmful repercussions. A false-positive mammography is one of the most frequent harms and can encompass both short- and long-term psychosocial implications. Based on eight qualitative in-depth interviews with women who reported negative psychosocial consequences following a false-positive mammography, this article explores how women in the study experienced having a fa…
Potentializing the Research Piglet in Experimental Neonatal Research
This paper explores the socio-moral-material practices by which the piglet is imbued with potential for human health by making it a substitute for the preterm infant in need of treatment. Based on fieldwork in a Danish perinatal pig laboratory, we view the experimental practice as a sacrifice and argue that it is characterized by two forms of exchange: a calculative exchange that defines an absolute moral difference between humanity and animality…
Negotiating Moral Value
In 2004, twelve capuchin monkeys were moved from the labs of the Danish psychiatric hospital of Sankt Hans to a small private-owned zoo in another part of Denmark in order to be rehabilitated. These monkeys were the last nonhuman primates to be used as research animals in Danish biomedical laboratories. The normal procedure would be to kill research animals after the termination of an experiment; in this case, however, a decision was reached to c…
Selective Reproduction
This article employs a multi-species perspective in investigating how life's worth is negotiated in the field of neonatology in Denmark. It does so by comparing decision-making processes about human infants in the Danish neonatal intensive care unit with those associated with piglets who serve as models for the premature infants in research experiments within neonatology. While the comparison is unusual, the article argues that there are parallel…
Humanity at the Edge
Pigs in public health
Animals are rare topics in public health science texts and speech despite the fact that animal bodies and lives are woven into the health of human populations, and vice versa. Years of ethnographic and documentary research – following pigs and their humans in and out of biomedical research – made me mindful and watchful of the porous passages between animal and human bodies and environments that do not confine themselves to ‘national health progr…
Resisting decay
Feeding premature neonates
Wireless Heart Patients and the Quantified Self
Remote monitoring of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) patients links patients wirelessly to the clinic via a box in their bedroom. The box transmits data from the ICD to a remote database accessible to clinicians without patient involvement. Data travel across time and space; clinicians can monitor patients from a distance and instantly know about cardiac events. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish hospitals, this article ex…
Treating pigs
Moral negotiations in the clinic
Translational neonatology research
The Attachment Imperative
In this article, we explore how parents establish relations with extremely premature infants whose lives and futures are uncertain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we engage recent discussions of the limits of conventional anthropological thinking on social relations and point to the productive aspects of practices of distance and detachment. We show that while the NICU upholds an imperative of a…
Recognizing Dementia
This article investigates how a person with dementia is made up through intersubjective acts of recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish memory clinic, we show that identification of disease requires patients to be substituted by their relatives in constructing believable medical narratives; yet during memory testing, patients are not allowed any substitution to clearly expose cognitive shortcomings. In combining works of theorist…
A life worth living
Caregiving can be conceptualized as involving practices of substitution, in which doctors, nurses, and health assistants step into the subject positions of their charges in order to sustain their personhood and compensate for their reduced capacities. Fieldwork in Denmark at three sites-a neonatal intensive care unit, a research laboratory using piglets as animal models, and a dementia nursing home-shows that temporality is a key component in sub…
Sociology (38 works) · Medicine (32 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Biology (21 works) · Law (21 works) · Ethics in Clinical Research (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Genetics (15 works)