The initiative
TIK's professor Kristin Asdal and postdoctoral fellow Tone Druglitrø are this week visiting UC Berkeley for the first workshop of the Olso-Berkeley Initiative on Valuation studies.
The new initiative will consist of a series of scholarly exchanges tied to workshops with senior scholars, post-doc scholars and advanced doctoral candidates in the area of valuation studies at CSTMS and TIK. The goal is to build a community of scholars between the two universities. Eventually, the possibility and structure of further collaborative grant work and other scholarly activities will be discussed. The first stage of the collaboration will also culminate in a collective publication on valuation practices.
What is valuation studies?
From the initiative's project proposal: "Valuation studies” is an emergent field that focuses on the practices and politics whereby various entities (e.g. nature objects, market entities) are modified and ascribed with economic values in relation to markets. This field brings together research traditions that have had limited academic contact and exchange thus far: innovation studies and science and technology studies (STS).
This project fosters the dialogue between these traditions and the consolidation of “valuation studies” through a series of scholarly exchanges and workshops between the University of California’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS) and the TIK centre. Research in valuation studies is particularly dynamic in the Nordic countries at present, and a new journal - Valuation Studies - has recently been launched with participation from scholars both at CSTMS and TIK (Kristin Asdal from TIK and Marion Fourcade from CSTMS are members of the Editorial Board).