Ayo Wahlberg
  • Source: Scopus
20032024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

CV

Current position

2023-ongoing Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2023-ongoing Head of Department, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Previous positions

2016-2023 Professor MSO, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2018-2022 Deputy Head, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2013-2016 Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2009-2013 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Asian Dynamics Initiative, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2007-2009 Research Fellow, BIOS Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science

(2008 Teaching Fellow, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London)

2002-2003 Project Manager, The Copenhagen Centre, Ministry of Employment, Denmark

Education

2003-2006 PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, awarded February 2007

1995-2001 BSc and MSc, Social Science & International Development Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark

Primary fields of research

Member of the researcher groups "Health and Life Conditions" and "Techne".

Google Scholar - ResearchGate - Twitter - Books

Fertility exhaustion - Fertility rates are falling around the world, my current research (2022-ongoing) is exploring how stratified and discriminatory societal forms are generating fertility exhaustion.

Assemblage ethnography - Mapping out historically and ethnographically situated modes of problematisation requires assemblage ethnography if we are to locate sited ethnographies within the broader complexes that are characteristic of a world in which daily lives are constantly (re-)shaped by technoscience, laws, regulations, technocracies, institutions, and forms of expertise.

Selected publication:

Chronic living - More people than ever before are living with disease. Funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2014-STG-639275), the VITAL project (2015-2021) empirically investigated and analysed the making of ‘quality of life’ through five concrete ethnographic studies of how knowledge about living with disease is assembled and mobilised, on the one hand, and how chronic living is negotiated and practiced on the other in Denmark, South Korea, Austria, Turkey and beyond.

Selected publications:

Selective reproduction - Over the last decades, selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) have come to be routinized throughout the world. Such technologies are used to prevent or promote the birth of certain 'kinds of children' (e.g. a child with a 'serious disease', a healthy child, a boy) through the selective fertilisation of gametes, implantation of embryos or abortion of foetuses. Funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (grant no. 10–094341), over a 7 year period (2007-2014) I carried out episodic fieldwork at China's (and the world's) largest fertility clinic and sperm bank. Listen to an interview here.

Selected publications:

Modernizing traditional herbal medicine - My PhD (2003-2007) – Modernisation and Its Side Effects – was a comparative examination of the cotemporaneous revivals of traditional herbal medicine in Vietnam and the United Kingdom since the mid-20th century, funded by the Danish Research Agency (PhD grant no. 645-03-0005). I show how herbal medicine came to be mobilised in very different ways in the two national contexts, albeit within frameworks of modernisation/colonisation critique. Listen to an interview here.

Selected publications:

Current research

My current research is focused on 1) fertility exhaustion around the world amidst falling fertility rates and 2) how knowledge of genetic predisposition has come to shape a preventive health complex as well as the daily lives of families in welfare state Denmark.

Teaching

My teaching has in recent years focused on theory of science, medical anthrpology and global development.

Supervision

I currently supervise in the following thematics/areas:

China, Vietnam, United Kingdom, Denmark, medical anthropology, anthropology of science, science and technology studies, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, reproductive technologies, (in)fertility, quality of life, chronic living, genetic predisposition, clinical trials, vitality, ethics of human subjects research, the social study of (bio)medicine

Keywords

  • Faculty of Social Sciences
  • Quality of life
  • health metrics
  • biomedicine
  • reproductive technologies
  • traditional/alternative medicine

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

Recent external collaboration on country/territory level. Dive into details by clicking on the dots or