Mads Solberg
Mads Solberg
Associate Professor| Deputy Head of Innovation
Department of Health Sciences Ålesund Faculty of Medicine and Health SciencesBackground and activities
Guiding framework
Naturalistic theories of cultural transmission and the toolkit of the cognitive sciences offer exciting avenues for research on how communities of practice create and use knowledge. In particular, I'm exploring how the framework of distributed cognition can help us understand the orchestration of coupled human-technological systems in healthcare, and the practices of the experimental life sciences.
This framework pushes cognitive science toward a view of cognition as a property of systems that are larger than isolated individuals. This extends the reach of cognition to encompass a wider cognitive ecology, which includes people’s interactions with each other, as well as their relationships with technology, and other material resources for thinking and action.
I consider rigorous anthropological research to be crucial for the development of cognitive science. One way anthropologists can capture the fine micro-details of multimodal interaction in activity systems, comprised of humans and their technology, is through systematic analysis of digital video (cognitive ethnography).
Background
My PhD investigated knowledge-making and technological innovation in marine science, by studying how a group of molecular parasitologists designed and developed a novel experimental system to discover tools for managing salmon lice (a persistent threat to salmon farming in Norway). My alma mater is the University of Bergen.
From March 2017 to March 2018, I worked on improving the conditions for local democracy and citizen-participation through novel enabling technologies, in the five municipalities that will constitute the new Ålesund municipal government from 1.1.2020. This work was done in close collaboration with politicians, administrators, and municipal executives.
In 2012, I was as an advisor at the Data Protection Official for Research, at Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD). See: http://www.nsd.uib.no/nsd/english/index.html.
My masters degree from 2011 was on the management and politics of forest conservation through protected areas in post-war Lebanon. I did my first ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon's Shouf Mountains.
Before entering academia, I trained as a chef's apprentice, and worked in the culinary arts for some years as a professional cook.
Courses
- MH2000 - Understanding Technology
- HELA3003 - Methods in Social science
- HELA3900 - Thesis in Health Care Management