Josefine Damgaards Nielsen

Short presentation

I am a trained ethnologist from the University of Copenhagen currently enrolled as a PhD student. In my PhD project I examine how chemotherapy at home unfolds in practice. A new so called medical technology - a programmable infusion pump connected to a permanent catheter in patients’ chests – has made it possible to be treated with chemotherapy at home.

The project is based on ethnographic studies at Rigshospitalet and in patients’ homes. I examine the usage, management and understanding of the pump and the everyday life with cancer treatment at home. I analyse how the pump transforms, challenges and structures patients’ everyday life, body and self. My project lies within the research field of (medical) Science & Technology Studies (STS) and cultural analytical studies of everyday life. I analyse the treatment as a socio-material assemblage consisting of many different elements which somehow work together and create what we come to know of as chemotherapy at home.

My overall research interest lies within cultural analytical studies of health and disease. I understand these as complex social-material phenomena and I am interested in studying how these are practiced, managed, constructed, understood and negotiated in everyday life. Ethnographic research and the making of ethnographies lie at the core of this.