Eivind Engebretsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 143199 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eivind Engebretsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eivind |
| FAMILY NAME | Engebretsen |
| SIGNATURE | ENGEBRETSEN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9455-110X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Synopsis: Au-delà du chevet : réimaginer la médecine narrative pour la traduction et l’application des connaissances
Synopsis: Beyond the bedside: Re-imagining narrative medicine for knowledge translation
Synopsis: मरीज़-मित्रता से आगे: ज्ञान अनुवाद के लिए कथात्मक-चिकित्सा की पुन: कल्पना
Synopsis: Bortenfor sengekanten: Å nytenke narrativ medisin for kunnskapstranslasjon
Beyond the bedside: Re-imagining narrative medicine for knowledge translation
This article challenges the conventional dichotomy between narrative medicine and translational medicine, arguing that they are not opposites but mutually interdependent frameworks within medical research and practice. I question such binary classifications by exploring the supplementary relationship between the two, arguing that narrative elements are present throughout the translational chain, not just in patient interactions, and are critical …
The (un)targeted gendered vulnerabilities in Norwegian development aid—a corpus‐assisted discourse analysis
Missed SDG targets: From ‘trying harder’ to engaging critically with paradox and conflict
This article explores a radical hypothesis: that our repeated failure to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) signals something inherently paradoxical within the current approach, suggesting that simply doing ‘more of the same’ will not transform the fortunes of the failing SDG mission. We examine four interrelated paradoxes – those of universality, implementation, information, and signification – that characterize the dominant approa…
Educating healthcare students in the Sustainable Development Goals: From translational science to translational humanities
Healthcare courses typically approach Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) education from a 'translational science' perspective. Students are taught about 'evidence-based' interventions, which are developed through scientific research (hence, assumed to be politically neutral), implemented with 'fidelity' (ie, in a standardised way in diverse contexts) and then 'rolled out'. Progress is measured using standardised indicators. We argue for a shift…
How concepts guide policy: An ethnographic study of the meaning making of 'appropriate care' in Dutch healthcare
Concepts, such as value-based healthcare, patient-centered care and integrated care, are used to guide and govern healthcare structures and services. Although prior research has pointed us towards the multiplicity of interpretations of these concepts, there is little understanding of how a concept gets attributed a particular meaning from its various understandings. This paper describes how healthcare actors engage in the meaning-making of the co…
Where to after Covid-19? Systems thinking for a human-centred approach to pandemics
The COVID-19 pandemic was the biggest public health crisis that the world experienced on a global scale in recent history. It exposed systemic weaknesses and fragilities in health, economic, political, environmental and social systems (Haley, Paucar-Caceres, and Schlindwein, 2021 ). Since the early days of the crisis, governments around the world sought evidence-based management strategies, turning to science to inform decisions (Yu et al., 2021 …
Translation and the political: Antagonism and hegemony
Interest in the political dimensions of translation is well established. There has been less focus in translation studies, however, on understanding the nature of the political itself. This leaves the concept fuzzy and limits its analytical power. This article begins to address this gap by drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to offer a precisely articulated understanding of the political. This approach is illustrated through …
Life Science 2.0: Reframing the life science sector for ‘the benefit on mankind’
The COVID-19 pandemic put the life science sector to the test. Vaccines were developed at unprecedented speed, benefiting from decades of fundamental research and now honoured by a Nobel Prize. However, we saw that the fruits of science were inequitably distributed. Most low- and middle-income countries were left behind, deepening the inequalities that the Sustainable Development Goals were set to reduce. We argue that the life science sector mus…
Towards a transformative health humanities approach in teaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The adoption of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) marks a significant shift in global political agendas, emphasising sustainability in various fields, including health. To engage meaningfully with sustainability, a transformative educational approach is essential. Lange's concept of transformative learning encompasses three levels: personal and cognitive change (micro level), changes in our interactions with others and the …
Living happily alone in Plato’s cave? On loneliness, technology and the metaphysics of presence
In a lot of research on loneliness and technology, there is an underlying premise that actual, physical presence is more real than 'virtual' presence. This premise is rarely explicit, yet it implies a hierarchy of reality, where the 'here and now' is always on top. In this theoretical paper, we examine this latent hierarchy and the understandings of presence and mediation it implies. We point towards potential consequences of this understanding f…
Decolonising the Present by Colonising the Past? A Case From the History of Physical Anthropology
Inspired by the current transdisciplinary debate about decolonisation, this article raises the fundamental question of how medicine can manage its own history in a way that safeguards the drive for decolonisation, but without eradicating the traces of previous misconceptions. We will do so by reconsidering a case from the complex records of physical anthropology, more specifically, a selected corpus of texts written by the two Norwegian physician…
Pragmatism and crisis: A response to three commentaries
Stories of Hope: Young People's Personal Narratives About ADHD Put Into Context of Positive Aspects
There is a growing acceptance that ADHD is a multi-dimensional disorder in which not all symptoms are associated with deficits or functional impairments. This article contributes to research on the positive aspects of the diagnosis, specifically understanding the positive aspects of living with ADHD. The empirical data was based on individual interviews and self-narratives of 10 young adults with ADHD. Narrative analysis was implemented when inve…
Care as Intertextuality: From Human Condition to Holistic Device
Since the Roman mythographer Hyginus composed the fable of Cura in the second century AD, it has been cited and reemployed in literary and philosophical texts by authors like Augustin, Herder, Goethe, Heidegger, Blumenberg and Kristeva. These authors all use the tale about the ambiguous figure of Cura (Care) to reflect upon the fundamentals of the human condition. Later, aspects of these philosophies have been translated into the medical humaniti…
Discipline for pleasure: A new governmentality of HIV prevention
This article explores recent HIV prevention campaigns for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), focusing on how they integrate pleasure and desire in their calls for self-discipline through a continual use of pharmaceuticals. This emerging type of health promotion, here represented by ads promoting the preventive use of pharmaceuticals, no longer simply approaches target groups with demands to abstain from harmful substances or practices and thus cont…
Challenging medical knowledge translation: Convergence and divergence of translation across epistemic and cultural boundaries
In this article, and the topical collection accompanying it, we aim to challenge so-called knowledge translation (hereinafter KT) in medicine and healthcare. The abbreviation ‘KT’ refers to a variety of scientific practices and research activities, bound together by the common goal of ‘bridging the gap’ between science in laboratories and clinical application, and, more generally, putting research-based knowledge into policy and practical care. O…
Parents at war: A positioning analysis of how parents negotiate their loss after experiencing child removal by the state
This study explores how parents involved in care order processes in Norway perceive being positioned by Child Welfare Services (CWS) in this process, how they negotiate these positions and whether their loss is perceived as legitimate or illegitimate in the face of societal expectations of parenthood. The data consist of qualitative interviews with 13 parents who have experienced child removals initiated by CWS. Drawing on positioning theory, the…
Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics: Scientific vs Narrative Rationality and Medical Knowledge Practices
The COVID-19 crisis has transformed the highly specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. This book interrogates the assumption that evidence means the same thing to different constituencies and in different contexts. Rather than treating various practices of knowledge as rational or irrational in purely scientific terms, it explains the controversies surrounding COVID-19 by drawing …
Translating Covid-19: From Contagion to Containment
This article tests the hypothesis that all pandemics are inherently translational. We argue that translation and translation theory can be fruitfully used to understand and manage epidemics, as they help us explore concepts of infectivity and immunity in terms of cultural and biological resistance. After examining the linkage between translation and coronavirus disease from three different yet interlinked perspectives—cultural, medical, and biocu…
The science-policy relationship in times of crisis: An urgent call for a pragmatist turn
In this conceptual paper, we argue that at times of crisis, what is sometimes called "evidence-based" or "science-driven" policymaking-establishing scientific truths and then implementing them-must be tempered by a more agile, deliberative and inclusive approach which acknowledges and embraces uncertainty. We offer pragmatism as one potential option, using examples from the UK to illustrate how such an approach might have changed particular crisi…
Epistemologies of evidence-based medicine: A plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities
Evidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process that cannot be illuminated by appealing to the semantics of the modifier evidence-based . The complexit…
The science-policy relationship in times of crisis: An urgent call for a pragmatist turn
In this conceptual paper, we argue that at times of crisis, what is sometimes called "evidence-based" or "science-driven" policymaking-establishing scientific truths and then implementing them-must be tempered by a more agile, deliberative and inclusive approach which acknowledges and embraces uncertainty. We offer pragmatism as one potential option, using examples from the UK to illustrate how such an approach might have changed particular crisi…
Cultural crossings of care: An appeal to the medical humanities
Modern medicine is confronted with cultural crossings in various forms. In facing these challenges, it is not enough to simply increase our insight into the cultural dimensions of health and well-being. We must, more radically, question the conventional distinction between the 'objectivity of science' and the 'subjectivity of culture'. This obligation creates an urgent call for the medical humanities but also for a fundamental rethinking of their…
Towards a translational medical humanities: Introducing the cultural crossings of care
In this introductory essay, we will present a translational medical humanities approach where the humanities are not only an auxiliary to medical science and practice, but also an interdisciplinary space where both medicine and the humanities mutually challenge and inform each other. First, we explore how medicine's attempt to tackle the nature-culture divide is emblematically expressed in the concept and practice of knowledge translation (herein…
Who cares? The lost legacy of Archie Cochrane
Over the last 20 years, the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement has sought to develop standardised approaches to patient treatment by drawing on research results from randomised controlled trials (RCTs). The Cochrane Collaboration and its eponym, Archie Cochrane, have become symbols of this development, and Cochrane's book Effectiveness and Efficiency from 1972 is often referred to as the first sketch of what was to become EBM. In this article…
Clinical guidelines and the pursuit of reducing epistemic uncertainty. An ethnographic study of guideline development panels in three countries
Guideline development panels apply multiple - often conflicting - understandings of knowledge, inference and truth in an attempt to reduce epistemic uncertainty. Guidelines makers, clinicians, scientists and students should engage critically and reflexively with the philosophical assumptions that underpin guideline development and inductive inference to build capability to deal with clinical complexity
Writing the patient down and out: The Construal of the Patient in Medical Certificates of Disability
We analysed a set of medical certificates to investigate howGPs portray patients who seek disability benefits in Norway, focusing on patient centredness, agency and involvement. We performed a qualitative linguistic analysis of 33 medical certificates collected throughout Norway that were strategically selected based on the patients' sex, age and diagnosis. We found that patients were represented as passive carriers of symptoms, in whom agency wa…
Acting by persuasion— values and rhetoric in medical certificates of work incapacity: A qualitative document analysis
When the patient applies for disability benefit in Norway, the general practitioner (GP) is required by the National Insurance Administration (NAV) to confirm that the patient is unfit for work due to disease. Considering the important social role of medical certificates, they have been given surprisingly little attention by the medical critique. They may make essential differences to peoples' lives, legitimise large social costs and, in addition…
Legitimating the illegitimate: How doctors manage their knowledge of the prestige of diseases
Although the sociology of medicine has developed a rich body of research on patients' experiences and how they handle their illnesses, few analyses have examined doctors' concepts of disease. Building on previous research findings that doctors consider some diseases to be more worthy than others, this article focuses on how these differences in disease prestige are articulated and made logical. We presented a focus group panel of doctors a table …
Educating healthcare students in the Sustainable Development Goals: From translational science to translational humanities
Healthcare courses typically approach Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) education from a 'translational science' perspective. Students are taught about 'evidence-based' interventions, which are developed through scientific research (hence, assumed to be politically neutral), implemented with 'fidelity' (ie, in a standardised way in diverse contexts) and then 'rolled out'. Progress is measured using standardised indicators. We argue for a shift…
Stories of Hope: Young People's Personal Narratives About ADHD Put Into Context of Positive Aspects
There is a growing acceptance that ADHD is a multi-dimensional disorder in which not all symptoms are associated with deficits or functional impairments. This article contributes to research on the positive aspects of the diagnosis, specifically understanding the positive aspects of living with ADHD. The empirical data was based on individual interviews and self-narratives of 10 young adults with ADHD. Narrative analysis was implemented when inve…
Governing the liberated child with self-managed family displays
The 1990s witnessed the replacement of psychological perspectives seeing children as 'becomings' to a view of them as 'beings'. This is challenged by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality understood as technologies of self-making actors capable of monitoring and controlling their own behaviour. This concept is central in the present study of so-called teddy-diaries, which are texts written by first graders and their parents and circulated am…
Professional Responsibility and Human Rights at Asylum Reception Centres
Making Sense as a Cultural Practice: Historical Perspectives
The production of sense is a central field of action of cultural and political practice. The articles examine how, in different contexts, the construction of sense and its outcome as a cultural practice
The Catholic Counter-Reformation and the idea of hunger. A close reading of two appeals for alms from the Paris area in the year 1662
Hunger kills. Every day thousands of people die from lack of food. Nevertheless, hunger is not only a biological state and part of the sphere of nature, it is also an idea. Culture and history infl
Governing the liberated child with self-managed family displays
The 1990s witnessed the replacement of psychological perspectives seeing children as 'becomings' to a view of them as 'beings'. This is challenged by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality understood as technologies of self-making actors capable of monitoring and controlling their own behaviour. This concept is central in the present study of so-called teddy-diaries, which are texts written by first graders and their parents and circulated am…
Who cares? The lost legacy of Archie Cochrane
Over the last 20 years, the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement has sought to develop standardised approaches to patient treatment by drawing on research results from randomised controlled trials (RCTs). The Cochrane Collaboration and its eponym, Archie Cochrane, have become symbols of this development, and Cochrane's book Effectiveness and Efficiency from 1972 is often referred to as the first sketch of what was to become EBM. In this article…
Legitimating the illegitimate: How doctors manage their knowledge of the prestige of diseases
Although the sociology of medicine has developed a rich body of research on patients' experiences and how they handle their illnesses, few analyses have examined doctors' concepts of disease. Building on previous research findings that doctors consider some diseases to be more worthy than others, this article focuses on how these differences in disease prestige are articulated and made logical. We presented a focus group panel of doctors a table …
Writing the patient down and out: The Construal of the Patient in Medical Certificates of Disability
We analysed a set of medical certificates to investigate howGPs portray patients who seek disability benefits in Norway, focusing on patient centredness, agency and involvement. We performed a qualitative linguistic analysis of 33 medical certificates collected throughout Norway that were strategically selected based on the patients' sex, age and diagnosis. We found that patients were represented as passive carriers of symptoms, in whom agency wa…
Cultural crossings of care: An appeal to the medical humanities
Modern medicine is confronted with cultural crossings in various forms. In facing these challenges, it is not enough to simply increase our insight into the cultural dimensions of health and well-being. We must, more radically, question the conventional distinction between the 'objectivity of science' and the 'subjectivity of culture'. This obligation creates an urgent call for the medical humanities but also for a fundamental rethinking of their…
Physiotherapists as detectives: Investigating clues and plots in the clinical encounter
This article investigates the clinical reasoning process of physiotherapists working with patients with chronic muscle pain. The article demonstrates how physiotherapists work with clues and weigh up different plots as they seek to build consistent stories about their patient's illness. The material consists of interviews with 10 Norwegian physiotherapists performed after the first clinical encounter with a patient. Using a narrative approach and…
The One or the Many: Quantified Subjectivity and Aggregated Uniqueness in Qualitative Rehabilitation Research
This article aims to identify and critically assess qualitative intervention studies of rehabilitation processes that target young adults. By applying a meta-epistemological approach inspired by the works of Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva, we examine how the included studies present qualitative knowledge and whether they adhere to their own stated principles of qualitative knowledge. Through their stated aims and theoretical framing, the arti…
Acting by persuasion— values and rhetoric in medical certificates of work incapacity: A qualitative document analysis
When the patient applies for disability benefit in Norway, the general practitioner (GP) is required by the National Insurance Administration (NAV) to confirm that the patient is unfit for work due to disease. Considering the important social role of medical certificates, they have been given surprisingly little attention by the medical critique. They may make essential differences to peoples' lives, legitimise large social costs and, in addition…
The singular patient in patient-centred care: Physiotherapists’ accounts of treatment of patients with chronic muscle pain
A patient-centred approach has gained increasing interest in medicine and other health sciences. Whereas there are discussions about the meaning of a patient-centred approach and what the concept entails, little is known about how the patient as a person is understood in patient-centred care. This article investigates understandings of the patient as a self in patient-centred care through physiotherapy of patients with chronic muscle pain. The ma…
Helseprioriteringer i endring: En Retorisk Analyse
In 1987 came the world's first national health priority white paper, and it was Norwegian. The report was followed up by two new reports in 1997 and 2014, respectively. This article analyzes assumptions for prioritization work based on these three reports. A definite change in the NOUs is that the sociological perspective is replaced by an economic utility perspective, and that an ethic-philosophical perspective is replaced by a more individual-o…
Ethnography of texts: A literature review of health and female homosexuality in Brazil
This paper reviews the literature on health and female homosexuality in Brazil and, along the way, outlines an alternative approach to reviewing academic literature. Rather than summarising the contents of previously published papers, we relate to these publications primarily as partakers in the creation of knowledge. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), we apply ethnographic methods to understand the papers as study participants endowed with …
Improvement in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Depression: A Qualitative Study of the Patients’ Perspective
The patient's perspective on improvement in psychotherapy is crucial for tailoring the therapy he or she is receiving. The present study aimed at exploring the factors aiding and the patients' experiences of improvement in time-limited psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with ten adult patients who received up to 28 sessions of manualized psychodynamic psychotherapy in the Norwegian stud…
Towards a translational medical humanities: Introducing the cultural crossings of care
In this introductory essay, we will present a translational medical humanities approach where the humanities are not only an auxiliary to medical science and practice, but also an interdisciplinary space where both medicine and the humanities mutually challenge and inform each other. First, we explore how medicine's attempt to tackle the nature-culture divide is emblematically expressed in the concept and practice of knowledge translation (herein…
Epistemologies of evidence-based medicine: A plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities
Evidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process that cannot be illuminated by appealing to the semantics of the modifier evidence-based . The complexit…
Gendered vulnerabilities and the blind spots of the 2030 Agenda’s ‘leave no one behind’ pledge
Agenda 2030 with the Sustainable Development Goals makes the transformative pledge to ‘leave no one behind.’ This paper asks how Agenda 2030 bring certain gendered vulnerabilities to light and make others invisible, and how this affects that transformative pledge. Through a close reading supported by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory we explore the concept of gender in Agenda 2030 and how it captures gendered vulnerabilities. F…
Clinical guidelines and the pursuit of reducing epistemic uncertainty. An ethnographic study of guideline development panels in three countries
Guideline development panels apply multiple - often conflicting - understandings of knowledge, inference and truth in an attempt to reduce epistemic uncertainty. Guidelines makers, clinicians, scientists and students should engage critically and reflexively with the philosophical assumptions that underpin guideline development and inductive inference to build capability to deal with clinical complexity
Challenging medical knowledge translation: Convergence and divergence of translation across epistemic and cultural boundaries
In this article, and the topical collection accompanying it, we aim to challenge so-called knowledge translation (hereinafter KT) in medicine and healthcare. The abbreviation ‘KT’ refers to a variety of scientific practices and research activities, bound together by the common goal of ‘bridging the gap’ between science in laboratories and clinical application, and, more generally, putting research-based knowledge into policy and practical care. O…
Parents at war: A positioning analysis of how parents negotiate their loss after experiencing child removal by the state
This study explores how parents involved in care order processes in Norway perceive being positioned by Child Welfare Services (CWS) in this process, how they negotiate these positions and whether their loss is perceived as legitimate or illegitimate in the face of societal expectations of parenthood. The data consist of qualitative interviews with 13 parents who have experienced child removals initiated by CWS. Drawing on positioning theory, the…
Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics: Scientific vs Narrative Rationality and Medical Knowledge Practices
The COVID-19 crisis has transformed the highly specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. This book interrogates the assumption that evidence means the same thing to different constituencies and in different contexts. Rather than treating various practices of knowledge as rational or irrational in purely scientific terms, it explains the controversies surrounding COVID-19 by drawing …
Translating Covid-19: From Contagion to Containment
This article tests the hypothesis that all pandemics are inherently translational. We argue that translation and translation theory can be fruitfully used to understand and manage epidemics, as they help us explore concepts of infectivity and immunity in terms of cultural and biological resistance. After examining the linkage between translation and coronavirus disease from three different yet interlinked perspectives—cultural, medical, and biocu…
The science-policy relationship in times of crisis: An urgent call for a pragmatist turn
In this conceptual paper, we argue that at times of crisis, what is sometimes called "evidence-based" or "science-driven" policymaking-establishing scientific truths and then implementing them-must be tempered by a more agile, deliberative and inclusive approach which acknowledges and embraces uncertainty. We offer pragmatism as one potential option, using examples from the UK to illustrate how such an approach might have changed particular crisi…
Care as Intertextuality: From Human Condition to Holistic Device
Since the Roman mythographer Hyginus composed the fable of Cura in the second century AD, it has been cited and reemployed in literary and philosophical texts by authors like Augustin, Herder, Goethe, Heidegger, Blumenberg and Kristeva. These authors all use the tale about the ambiguous figure of Cura (Care) to reflect upon the fundamentals of the human condition. Later, aspects of these philosophies have been translated into the medical humaniti…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (26 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Medicine (16 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Politics (10 works)