Line Hillersdal

Line Hillersdal

Associate Professor

Member of:

  • Web Track 2: Retirement and transitions

 

Primary research areas

The future health care system, welfare ressources, new technologies, personalised medicine, interdisciplinarity, cultures of science, the body in biomedical contexts, prevention and  complex intervention research.

Current research

Sensing old age: Travelling technologies and the configurations of ageing in Denmark and Korea 

The project ‘Sensing Old Age’ examine the embedded assumptions, imagined potentials and concrete practices related to the use of welfare technologies that target an ageing population.Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark and Korea, we explore how assistive living technologies are developed, introduced and used in encounters between the elderly, health professionals and tech industry in these two different contexts. Furthermore, the project examines how such technologies travel and come to mediate the sensory body and care relationships across cultural and institutional contexts, as well as how they configure age, aging and the elderly in the process. The project is a collaborative project and part of The Center for Healthy Aging.

Cancer patients in Experimental Treatment with Personalised Medicine

The project focus is on research subjects in treatments with personalised medicine at a specialized experimental cancer unit in Denmark. The project follows two tracks: One track investigates how patients and staff tackles the ethical issues that arise in conducting experimental treatment. The second track focus on how cancer patients by contributing data and health information take part in a global bioeconomy. Overall, the project contributes to the understanding of how the patient role is changing in the intersection of research participation, experimental treatment, and care for patients with cancer. 

The project is part of the large MeInWe project see: https://meinwe.ku.dk/

 

Screening for Healthy Aging

I this project I follow the develpment of a screening tool for healthy ageing and describe how the healthy aging is conceptualized and materialized within collaborative research teams in the interdisciplinary research project COUNTERSTRIKE -COUNTERacting Sarcopenia with proTeins and exeRcise – Screening the CALM cohort for lIpoprotein biomarKErs.

By combining ethnographic fieldwork and exploratory workshops I analyse how the inclusion of social science and humanities researchers will impact the design process and output.

COUNTERSTRIKE is funded by Danish Innovation Foundation and it is an extension of the CALM project funded by the UCPH Excellence Programme. Read more about CALM calm.ku.dk.

Previous research

My post doc project: Obesities: Exploring and Practicing Interdisciplinarity analysed interdisciplinary knowledge production on obesity with a focus on the cultures of medicine asking how scientific claims are negotiated and interpreted in interdisciplinary settings. Through ethnographic field work I explore how obesity as a phenomena is crafted and handled in interdisciplinary research teams and the diverse ways obesity emerge as an object of intervention are analysed.


Food and Eating through the lived body. 
In my PhD I analysed the complexity of eating experience. Eating is under described and commonsensical to the extent that it transcends ethnographic description. In my research I explored what makes up hunger and fullness across different persons, bodies, techniques and places: Obesity surgery patients, food performance participants and military conscripts.

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