During the height of the lockdown in early 2020, students and colleagues at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences produced a booklet of poetry and images. This beautifully captures a particular moment, as we all came to terms with the new situation. It was also a way of keeping in contact with one another […]
While some colleagues were doing fieldwork for the Making Clinical Sense project, we wrote postcards to each other. They documented observations, ideas, dilemmas, puzzles, and everyday happenings. Of course they are short, capturing moments of observation or questions or a short greeting. But as we have learned in our project, from studying how doctors learn […]
Over the past few years, together with many colleagues, I have been setting up a BA Digital Society at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. It is an interdisciplinary programme. Our graduates will work at the interface of society and digitalisation. I wrote a short article about our aims for the […]
Earlier this year, the corona virus started to take its toll around the world. It affects people’s health and daily lives, and healthcare systems. The economic well-being of individuals, companies, sectors and countries are threatened. This short article draws on input provided by early career researchers involved in the Digital Society Programme (that involves all […]
Together with Andrew Webster (University of York, England), I have edited a book. It is both a celebration of the Health, Technology and Society series (published by Palgrave Macmillan) that we have jointly edited since 2006. In this compilation, we aim to capture examples of the excellent scholarship that the series produced and to reflect […]
In September 2019, while attending the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference in Sydney, Australia, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Joseph Klett, Science History Institute, Philadelphia, for an oral history project about the development of science and technology studies (STS). He had some great questions, including: When did you first […]
I occasionally dabble in other bits of writing, beyond my main academic concerns of things to do with digital technologies. In recent months, I’ve written about the London Library, the injustice of not being able to vote in the Netherlands, the memories contained in a small wooden box, and my life through cervical smears. Memories […]
I attended the conference of the Society for Risk Analysis (Benelux) held in Luxembourg in March 2019. While there, I was interviewed for their podcast series. They have a number of excellent podcasts on a variety of topics, including food, extreme weather and communicating about risk on social media. I appear in an episode called […]
Since the beginning of the 2017-18 academic year, I’ve been writing the occasional column for Observant, the independent newspaper of Maastricht University. It’s fun, reaching out to a different kind of audience – academic, but not necessarily research focused. Sticking to 400 words, and not including copious references and nuanced explanation is a challenge. My […]
On 15 January, I took part in the new year opening of the Brightlands Smart Services campus in Heerlen. Marc Wouters (Adviser to the Brightlands CEO) invited Geert Mul (video and sound artist) and myself to reflect on ‘technology and society’. This was prompted by a position paper Marc wrote earlier in the year to […]