Tora Holmberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 157661 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tora Holmberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tora |
| FAMILY NAME | Holmberg |
| SIGNATURE | HOLMBERG T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Uppsala University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0845-1116 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Decay as a mode of biogas production: Digestive assemblages and value creation through microbial work
Decay is usually understood as a process in which things break down, rot, and ruin. At first glance, the idea of decay is rather alien to our understanding of productive activity. In the context of the circular economy, however, the process of decomposition is harnessed as a tool of production through the anaerobic digestion of biowaste. In this process, waste turns into energy and nutritious fertilizer. This article studies decay as a mode of pr…
The sensing eye: Intimate vision in couple dancing
Vision tends to be associated with the mind and theorized as the least bodily sense. Notably, the eye often symbolizes distance. Foregrounding the fleshy embeddedness of the gaze through an analysis of jitterbug, the present article stresses the bodily and intimate significance of vision in dancing. Analyzing ethnographic observation and interview data, we develop a phenomenological approach to dance and gaze that stresses the need to address mul…
Interspecies care, knowledge and ownership: Children’s equestrian cultures in Sweden and Finland
Riding became a widespread leisure activity for children in Sweden and Finland during the post-war decades through the emergence of riding schools.Drawing on books and comics published in Sweden and Finland from the 1960s to the present, together with interviews and observations at contemporary Swedish riding schools, we approach this development with a geographical, historical and sociological focus.We ask how children's equestrian cultures were…
The (in)visibility of sewage management and problematization as strategy for public awareness
Sewage management is crucial to the functioning of cities, yet, in the global North, seldom acknowledged in public. Wastewater infrastructures are mainly hidden underground and human excrement is considered a private matter. However, to make sanitation stay invisible, its dysfunctionality (e.g., leaking pipes, aging wastewater plants) is sometimes in acute need of being highlighted. Moreover, the work essential to keep the infrastructures maintai…
Fettvett, bajsbasket och Edward Blom: Om metaironisk kommunikation i avloppsbranschen
Avloppshantering är en infrastrukturell fråga med avgörande betydelse för såväl vardagsliv som miljön. Men infrastrukturerna är sköra, och människors beteenden kan orsaka att de brakar samman. Medborgarna måste uppfostras, men samtidigt är avföring ett känsligt ämne och toalettbeteenden privata. Hur kan VA-branschen informera om sådant vi inte vill tala om och dessutom styra konsumenters toalettvanor i en tid präglad av det fria valet? Artikeln h…
The circular economy of food waste: Transforming waste to energy through ‘make-up’ work
This article unpacks the neat straightforwardness of the ‘waste regime’ of the circular economy of food waste and its main idea: ‘waste as resource’. It explores the making of circularity by paying detailed attention to what is conceptualized as ‘make-up’ work, i.e. how interruptions and leaks along waste flows are handled in practice. Make-up work capitalizes on its double meaning. First, it highlights the covering of cracks needed in order to t…
Alignment Work: Medical Practice in Managing Antimicrobial Resistance
Policies intended to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics have been promoted as a key to preventing antimicrobial resistance. However, reduction of antibiotic use in health care potentially involves tensions between health of the patient receiving care and the health of the (future) population. An analysis of general practitioners’ talk about everyday medical practice in relation to respiratory tract infections shows how they manage to move betw…
Death Matters: Cultural Sociology of Mortal Life
Death Matters: Cultural Sociology of Mortal Life
Mortmain: Manor Culture and Material Immortality
Sociologiska gångarter: Föredrag från Sociologdagarna 2018
Animal waste work. The case of urban sewage management in Sweden
Urban infrastructures such as wastewater services are essential to the functioning of cities. Through waste work, sewage gets transformed and revalued. Non-humans are potentially unruly agents in the transformation of “dirty” sewage into biogas, a “clean” energy resource in environmental terms. But these values are not given or applied in any simple sense. What goes on under the surface, beneath the street or inside a pile of dirt is the invaluab…
Animal Places: Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations
Sociologförbundet har ordet: Sociologförbundets arbete med ämnes-/gymnasielärarutbildningen
Sociologförbundet har ordet: Osäkerhet och kreativitet: Rapport från Sociologidagarna 2016
Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson. You must carry me now. The cultural lives of endangered species

Imagination Laboratory: Making Sense of Bio-Objects in Contemporary Genetic Art
Public engagement in biotechnology has declined as cloning, genetic engineering and regenerative medicine have become socially and culturally normalized. Zooming in on existing bio-technological debates, this article turns to contemporary genetic art as sites for ethical reflections. Art can be viewed as an 'imagination laboratory', a space through which un-framing and rupturing of contemporary rationalities are facilitated, and, in addition, ena…
Money, Money, Money? Politico-Moral Discourses of Stem Cell Research in a Grant Allocation Process
Concerns have been raised about the marketization of science through the prevailing funding regime. However, the present article will discuss how it comes that the potentially marketable stem cell science is not more commercialized than what is currently the case. We approach this question by analysing discursive pluralism in defining the value of stem cells within a grant allocation process. More specifically, we focus on how the commercial impe…
Sociologförbundet har ordet: Sveriges Sociologförbund i Europa
Sensuous Governance: Assessing Urban Animal Hoarding
This article addresses how professional animal welfare inspectors and police officers produce knowledge about animal hoarding, and how they detect disconcern and come to conclusions about how to act. The specific aim is to contribute to a sociological understanding of the phenomenon of urban animal hoarding assessment by deploying the framework of “sensuous governance”. I will do so by focusing on the ways in which authorities use and record thei…
Stories of Animal Passports: Tracing Disease, Movements, and Identities
Like us, some kinds of animals require passports to enable movements across national borders. Passports tell all kinds of multispecies stories, in which humans and nonhumans are entangled in myriad ways. But what is a passport — human or nonhuman? What kind of symbolic, legal, material, relational identity and not least control and disciplinary work do they “do”? The article departs from autoethnographical notes in a European context, and discuss…
För Sverige i framtiden: Bio-objektifiering av ny medicinsk teknologi
Taking Sweden into the future – Bio-objectification of new medical technologyIn this article, we analyze how contemporary discursive silences around new biotechnologies such as cybrids and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), have been enabled by earlier policy processes in the area, e.g. boundary work around what is human and non-human, living and non-living, subject and object. The analysis of policy processes around xenotransplantations and …
Bringing in the controversy: Re-politicizing the de-politicized strategy of ethics committees
Human/animal relations are potentially controversial and biotechnologically produced animals and animal-like creatures – bio-objects such as transgenics, clones, cybrids and other hybrids – have often created lively political debate since they challenge established social and moral norms. Ethical issues regarding the human/animal relations in biotechnological developments have at times been widely debated in many European countries and beyond. Ho…
Trans-Species Urban Politics: Stories From a Beach
The article investigates the emergence and continuation of a spatial conflict, concerning a “dog beach” in Santa Cruz, California, that led to the creation of local interest organizations and came to involve city and state authorities and regulations, local news and social media, and not least, park visitors (both humans and dogs). Through the debate, positions for and against dogs being off leash were consolidated—however, not necessarily positi…
Colin Jerolmack, The Global Pigeon

Mortal love: Care practices in animal experimentation
This article addresses the embodied nature of laboratory human-animal practices in order to understand the notions of care that take place within an institution of domination - the apparatus of animal experimentation. How is it possible to both love and harm in this context? Building on animal studies and feminist ethics, the theme of emotionality is explored in the section 'loving animals'. Here it is demonstrated that empathy and affection for …
The circular economy of food waste: Transforming waste to energy through ‘make-up’ work
This article unpacks the neat straightforwardness of the ‘waste regime’ of the circular economy of food waste and its main idea: ‘waste as resource’. It explores the making of circularity by paying detailed attention to what is conceptualized as ‘make-up’ work, i.e. how interruptions and leaks along waste flows are handled in practice. Make-up work capitalizes on its double meaning. First, it highlights the covering of cracks needed in order to t…
Trans-Species Urban Politics: Stories From a Beach
The article investigates the emergence and continuation of a spatial conflict, concerning a “dog beach” in Santa Cruz, California, that led to the creation of local interest organizations and came to involve city and state authorities and regulations, local news and social media, and not least, park visitors (both humans and dogs). Through the debate, positions for and against dogs being off leash were consolidated—however, not necessarily positi…
A Feeling for the Animal: On Becoming an Experimentalist
This article deals with questions that arose during a 2-week university course in nonhuman animal laboratory science. Doctoral students and researchers take the course to acquire the knowledge necessary for future independent work with nonhuman animal experimentation. During the course, participants learn to handle animals in the laboratory, both in theory and in practice, and to do so in a humane way with a feeling for the animals. The paper ana…
Animal waste work. The case of urban sewage management in Sweden
Urban infrastructures such as wastewater services are essential to the functioning of cities. Through waste work, sewage gets transformed and revalued. Non-humans are potentially unruly agents in the transformation of “dirty” sewage into biogas, a “clean” energy resource in environmental terms. But these values are not given or applied in any simple sense. What goes on under the surface, beneath the street or inside a pile of dirt is the invaluab…
The sensing eye: Intimate vision in couple dancing
Vision tends to be associated with the mind and theorized as the least bodily sense. Notably, the eye often symbolizes distance. Foregrounding the fleshy embeddedness of the gaze through an analysis of jitterbug, the present article stresses the bodily and intimate significance of vision in dancing. Analyzing ethnographic observation and interview data, we develop a phenomenological approach to dance and gaze that stresses the need to address mul…
Sensuous Governance: Assessing Urban Animal Hoarding
This article addresses how professional animal welfare inspectors and police officers produce knowledge about animal hoarding, and how they detect disconcern and come to conclusions about how to act. The specific aim is to contribute to a sociological understanding of the phenomenon of urban animal hoarding assessment by deploying the framework of “sensuous governance”. I will do so by focusing on the ways in which authorities use and record thei…
Stories of Animal Passports: Tracing Disease, Movements, and Identities
Like us, some kinds of animals require passports to enable movements across national borders. Passports tell all kinds of multispecies stories, in which humans and nonhumans are entangled in myriad ways. But what is a passport — human or nonhuman? What kind of symbolic, legal, material, relational identity and not least control and disciplinary work do they “do”? The article departs from autoethnographical notes in a European context, and discuss…
Questioning ‘the number of the beast’: Constructions of humanness in a Human Genome Project (HGP) narrative
Interspecies care, knowledge and ownership: Children’s equestrian cultures in Sweden and Finland
Riding became a widespread leisure activity for children in Sweden and Finland during the post-war decades through the emergence of riding schools.Drawing on books and comics published in Sweden and Finland from the 1960s to the present, together with interviews and observations at contemporary Swedish riding schools, we approach this development with a geographical, historical and sociological focus.We ask how children's equestrian cultures were…
Alignment Work: Medical Practice in Managing Antimicrobial Resistance
Policies intended to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics have been promoted as a key to preventing antimicrobial resistance. However, reduction of antibiotic use in health care potentially involves tensions between health of the patient receiving care and the health of the (future) population. An analysis of general practitioners’ talk about everyday medical practice in relation to respiratory tract infections shows how they manage to move betw…
Bringing in the controversy: Re-politicizing the de-politicized strategy of ethics committees
Human/animal relations are potentially controversial and biotechnologically produced animals and animal-like creatures – bio-objects such as transgenics, clones, cybrids and other hybrids – have often created lively political debate since they challenge established social and moral norms. Ethical issues regarding the human/animal relations in biotechnological developments have at times been widely debated in many European countries and beyond. Ho…
Unfamiliar biological futurities: Animals in techno-science (an introduction to Sarah Franklin's "Future Mix")

Risken med riskkalkyler: Exemplet Ärftlig Bröstcancer I Sociologisk Belysning
This article addresses risk construction in texts concerning genetic counselling, both in medical and lay contexts. The main focus is how the medical perspective presents genetic risk as being ”objective”, statistically precise and at a high level. Risk is being presented as constituted by two dimensions; probability of impact and age. Furthermore, the discussion includes the labelling of ”at-risk”, a construction of a category of potentially sic…
Questioning ‘the number of the beast’: Constructions of humanness in a Human Genome Project (HGP) narrative
Vetenskapskrig och det goda samtalets retorik - biologer talar om »tokfeminism
In this case study based article, Holmberg analyses a Swedish science based debate from 2002. The debate concerned what came to be labelled "crazy-feminism" ("tokfeminism"). The first aim is to highlight how talk about the "science war" becomes contrasted, and yet intertwined, with talk about the "good conversation". A second aim is to show how, what at a first glance can be interpreted as a hopeless and unfruitful controversy may include a subve…
Hur gör djur? Människor, andra djur och utmaningar för sociologin
This article addresses the issue that even though we can witness a change in attitudes and practices towards animals in contemporary western society, main stream sociology has been reluctant to treat research on human-animal relations seriously. The point made is that such research should be of great interest, not just for empirical reasons, but also because human-animal interaction challenges some of our most common sociological concepts and tra…
A Feeling for the Animal: On Becoming an Experimentalist
This article deals with questions that arose during a 2-week university course in nonhuman animal laboratory science. Doctoral students and researchers take the course to acquire the knowledge necessary for future independent work with nonhuman animal experimentation. During the course, participants learn to handle animals in the laboratory, both in theory and in practice, and to do so in a humane way with a feeling for the animals. The paper ana…
Transgenic Silences: The Rhetoric of Comparisons and Transgenic Mice as ‘Ordinary Treasures’
Tail tales: How researchers handle transgenic dilemmas
This paper sets out to study dilemmas associated with transgenic mice as they appear in research practices. Transgenic mice create certain dilemmas because they are “trans” – both a product and a process – and cross over institutional as well as species boundaries. Furthermore, they transgress cultural boundaries and hybridize categories such as organism and innovation, science and technology, nature and culture. The article demonstrates how the …
Rane Willerslev. Soul hunters. Hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs

Unfamiliar biological futurities: Animals in techno-science (an introduction to Sarah Franklin's "Future Mix")

Mortal love: Care practices in animal experimentation
This article addresses the embodied nature of laboratory human-animal practices in order to understand the notions of care that take place within an institution of domination - the apparatus of animal experimentation. How is it possible to both love and harm in this context? Building on animal studies and feminist ethics, the theme of emotionality is explored in the section 'loving animals'. Here it is demonstrated that empathy and affection for …
Secrets and lies: “Selective Openness” in the Apparatus of Animal Experimentation
Researchers and other (human) actors within the apparatus of animal experimentation find themselves in a tight corner. They rely on public acceptance to promote their legitimacy and to receive funding. At the same time, those working with animal experimentation take risks by going public, fearing that the public will misunderstand their work and animal rights activists may threaten them. The dilemma that emerges between openness and secrecy is fa…
Kathy Rudy, Loving Animals. Toward a New Animal Advocacy

För Sverige i framtiden: Bio-objektifiering av ny medicinsk teknologi
Taking Sweden into the future – Bio-objectification of new medical technologyIn this article, we analyze how contemporary discursive silences around new biotechnologies such as cybrids and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), have been enabled by earlier policy processes in the area, e.g. boundary work around what is human and non-human, living and non-living, subject and object. The analysis of policy processes around xenotransplantations and …
Bringing in the controversy: Re-politicizing the de-politicized strategy of ethics committees
Human/animal relations are potentially controversial and biotechnologically produced animals and animal-like creatures – bio-objects such as transgenics, clones, cybrids and other hybrids – have often created lively political debate since they challenge established social and moral norms. Ethical issues regarding the human/animal relations in biotechnological developments have at times been widely debated in many European countries and beyond. Ho…
Trans-Species Urban Politics: Stories From a Beach
The article investigates the emergence and continuation of a spatial conflict, concerning a “dog beach” in Santa Cruz, California, that led to the creation of local interest organizations and came to involve city and state authorities and regulations, local news and social media, and not least, park visitors (both humans and dogs). Through the debate, positions for and against dogs being off leash were consolidated—however, not necessarily positi…
Colin Jerolmack, The Global Pigeon

Sensuous Governance: Assessing Urban Animal Hoarding
This article addresses how professional animal welfare inspectors and police officers produce knowledge about animal hoarding, and how they detect disconcern and come to conclusions about how to act. The specific aim is to contribute to a sociological understanding of the phenomenon of urban animal hoarding assessment by deploying the framework of “sensuous governance”. I will do so by focusing on the ways in which authorities use and record thei…
Stories of Animal Passports: Tracing Disease, Movements, and Identities
Like us, some kinds of animals require passports to enable movements across national borders. Passports tell all kinds of multispecies stories, in which humans and nonhumans are entangled in myriad ways. But what is a passport — human or nonhuman? What kind of symbolic, legal, material, relational identity and not least control and disciplinary work do they “do”? The article departs from autoethnographical notes in a European context, and discuss…
Money, Money, Money? Politico-Moral Discourses of Stem Cell Research in a Grant Allocation Process
Concerns have been raised about the marketization of science through the prevailing funding regime. However, the present article will discuss how it comes that the potentially marketable stem cell science is not more commercialized than what is currently the case. We approach this question by analysing discursive pluralism in defining the value of stem cells within a grant allocation process. More specifically, we focus on how the commercial impe…
Sociologförbundet har ordet: Sveriges Sociologförbund i Europa
Sociologförbundet har ordet: Osäkerhet och kreativitet: Rapport från Sociologidagarna 2016
Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson. You must carry me now. The cultural lives of endangered species

Imagination Laboratory: Making Sense of Bio-Objects in Contemporary Genetic Art
Public engagement in biotechnology has declined as cloning, genetic engineering and regenerative medicine have become socially and culturally normalized. Zooming in on existing bio-technological debates, this article turns to contemporary genetic art as sites for ethical reflections. Art can be viewed as an 'imagination laboratory', a space through which un-framing and rupturing of contemporary rationalities are facilitated, and, in addition, ena…
Animal Places: Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations
Sociologförbundet har ordet: Sociologförbundets arbete med ämnes-/gymnasielärarutbildningen
Sociology (22 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Biology (10 works) · Environmental ethics (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Psychology (9 works)