Small Pints at Vetenskapsfestivalen Göteborg - Day 1

Who is to be attended first? And how should such a decision be made? My work ethnographically explores everyday life of one of the thickest places in contemporary societies: the Emergency Room (ER), where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration laws, hospital overcrowding, and life and death, intersect daily. There is more than medical urgency at stake in the ER, where mistrust of medical authority is fueled and violence often sparks. I analyze the making of urgency, named triage, not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference through economies of attention. The Negotiation of Urgency illustrates both the limits of triage, as a medical and social practice, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention of more equitable ways of care delivery.

How does the shape of your glass influence the taste of your drink? Mathematically, we use geometry to describe shapes, and we use partial differential equations to describe many physical processes, including diffusion which is related to the experience of taste, as well as vibrations which create the sounds we hear. My research explores the connections between shapes and physical processes using mathematics, and I'll try to give you a sense of how that works.