Ayo Wahlberg

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Primary fields of research

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

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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:

• Bruun, MH., Wahlberg, A., Douglas-Jones, R., Hasse, C., Hoeyer, K., Kristensen, DB. & Winthereik, BR. (eds.) (2022) The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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:

• Wahlberg, A., Lee, J., Mann, A., Dokumaci, A., Kingod, N., Svensson, M. K., & Heinsen, L. L. (2021). Chronic living: Ethnographic explorations of daily lives swayed by (multiple) medical conditions. Somatosphere Series.
• Heinsen, L. L., Wahlberg, A., & Petersen, H. V. (2021). 'Surveillance life and the shaping of ‘genetically at risk’chronicities in Denmark', Anthropology & Medicine, DOI: 10.1080/13648470.2021.1893654 [download]
  Manderson, L & Wahlberg, A (2020) 'Chronic Living in a Communicable World', Medical Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2020.1761352
• Wahlberg, A. & Rose, N.2015.'The governmentalization of living: Calculating global health'. Economy and Society, 44(1): 60-90 [Download]

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:

• Wahlberg, A., Dong, D., Song, P. & Zhu, J. (2021). The platforming of human embryo editing: prospecting “disease free” futures, New Genetics and Society, DOI: 10.1080/14636778.2021.1997578
• Wahlberg, A. 2018. Good Quality - the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China, Berkley: University of California Press
• Wahlberg, A. & Gammeltoft, T. 2017. Selective Reproduction in the 21st Century, London: Palgrave Macmillan. [Download Introduction]
• Gammeltoft, T. & Wahlberg, A.2014.'Selective Reproductive Technologies'. Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 201-216 [Download]

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:

• Monnais, Laurence, C. Michele Thompson & Ayo Wahlberg (eds). 2012. Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing [Download Introduction]
• Wahlberg, A. 2008.'Above and beyond superstition – western herbal medicine and the decriminalising of placebo'. History of the Human Sciences, 21(1): 77-101 [Download]
• Wahlberg, A. 2008. "Pathways to plausibility: when herbs become pills". BioSocieties 3(1): 37-56 [Download]
• Wahlberg, A. 2007. A quackery with a difference: new medical pluralism and the problem of 'dangerous practitioners' in the United Kingdom. Social Science & Medicine, 65(11): 2307-16 [Download]
• Wahlberg, A.2006.'Bio-politics and the promotion of traditional herbal medicine in Vietnam'. health: an Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 10(2): 123-47 [Download]

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