What? This philosophy project investigates the nature of depression. Many researchers believe that rumination is a leading cause of depression. They approach rumination as an attention pattern. This postdoc project employs analytic tools from philosophy of attention to provide novel and needed insights into the role of rumination in depression. Why? WHO estimates that 5% of adults suffer from depression globally. This makes depression one of the biggest contributors to the global disease burden and rates seem to increase in many countries. There is a pressing need for developing current treatment procedures. This project contributes to psychotherapeutic protocols that target attention control and metacognitive dynamics in depression. How? The project investigates four important questions: (1) What exactly does the rumination explanation of depression claim and to what degree does current evidence support this claim? (2) Is the rumination of depression a controlled or an automatic form of attention? (3) Is it always irrational to ruminate? (4) Why do certain societal structures make individuals more prone to depression?

What? In today’s world, social media are ubiquitous; they permeate work, leisure, culture, finance, and politics to an extent that has made leading an offline life increasingly difficult, if not downright impossible. Meanwhile, contemporary literature and art abound with depictions of how our daily lives increasingly unfold online. This project investigates how literary representation helps us understand the effect of new media on friendship and community – an underdeveloped yet promising area of study. Informed by literary theory and philosophy, I will study novels, essays, and poetry that describe online sociality. The project centers on the following research questions: How do contemporary works of literature describe the relation between social media and modern friendship? And how can we – based on literary representation – define the concept of friendship in a world heavily influenced by social media connectivity? The outcome of the project is a better understanding into the concept of friendship in contemporary life and new knowledge about how digital platforms influence modern sociality – themes of utmost relevance to current challenges in mental health. Why? While labeled ‘social’, new media platforms have been criticized for weakening interpersonal connections and hence, for spurring on loneliness and depression. As of late, a large group of Danish psychologists have been proclaiming a national state of emergency in mental health among children and adolescents, and there are reasons to assume that social media contribute to this problem. Literary texts provide rich arenas for parsing the complexities of the conundrum, where platforms designed to connect us may in fact do just the opposite. Novels and poems grant access to private spheres, emotions, and provide poignant reflections on how it is to live in a modern world infused with new ways of staying in and falling out of touch. Recent developments within the humanities suggest that literary works may contribute with significant insight to social and political challenges. On these grounds, it is both timely and relevant to turn to literary texts to study how modern friendship is influenced by social media platforms. How? The project pursues a qualitative and comparative analysis of a range of literary texts. More specifically, I will assemble a collection of Anglophone and Danish contemporary novels, short stories, and poetry collections that depict online sociality with the aim of offering analyses that have international relevance, as well as local significance. More specifically, I will investigate texts by Sally Rooney (Normal People, Beautiful World Where are Thou), Tao Lin (Taipei, Selected Tweets), Patricia Lockwood (No One is Talking About This), Caspar Eric (7/11, Nye Balancer, Vi Kan Gøre Meget), Anna Juul (Penge og Bacon), and Maria Gerhardt (Der Bor Hollywwodstjerner på Vejen, Transfervindue – Historier om de Raskes Fejl). My theoretical endeavors will develop in continuous dialogue with philosophical research into the nature of friendship, as well as literary theory focused on the social dimensions of literary texts. To ensure clarity, I will limit my research to examples of Danish and Anglophone literature from the past fifteen years and define social media as websites and apps that facilitate communication, networking, user-input, and sharing of content.

What? Scientific experts play an increasingly important role in governing our social world. However, they are undergirded by vast technoscientific infrastructures which tend to be far more subtle and invisible. Today these infrastructures are engrained within almost all aspects of daily, social, and ecological lives. Increasingly, these infrastructures have reached the attention of artists. In this project, I therefore turn to art practices, primarily based in the West from the late 1990s to the present, to understand how key technoscientific infrastructures have been explored and publicly contested in alternative art infrastructures: in public labs and the amateur employment of biotechnologies, the construction of an anti-cancer database and toolkit, forensic investigations into satellite imagery and biometrics, and the invention of self-organized universities. Why? The aim of the project is to develop a theoretical terminology to describe how artists have delved into into the material and operating devices behind the public values of science and its authorities, which govern much of daily and social life. It also examines how their art came to manifest changed conditions of artistic production, knowledge, and expertise, engaging in alternative forms of infrastructures and “counter-institutions” seeking to democratize knowledge as a common concern. By examining how aesthetic modes of knowing developed, we confront the crucial question of who has access to and agency over knowledge. How? Combining art historical research with intellectual history and science and technology studies occupied with the social and political nature of science, the project is interdisciplinary in essence and ambition. This choice is in part a consequence of the empirical material: the work of artists who negotiate a line between the artistic and non-artistic, the aesthetic and scientific. Thus, the project will be divided into four case studies: (1) public labs and bioengineering projects, (2) self-organized health and care initiatives, (3) forensic and juridical investigations, and (4) self-organized universities.