Gunillocentrism – web diary of a freelance journalist

I’m in Oslo! (For the first time in … 25 years!)

Believe it or not, but I am trying to do some academic work, namely on the concept of Human Security:Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science Studies 2005.

Oslo is nice and cute, but also very small (and ridiculuosly expensive). Like a large village, hehe – just like Stockholm is a small metropol.

The course is actually on PhD level, which is a first for me. I have promised myself to avoid PhD programs by all means, since I realize that given my personality I would never finish any dissertation – but I thought a one-week long program would be OK.

It’s nice to be back in a university environment, although I have to admit I read the course literature very, very sloppily (if at all)!

Tomorrow I am supposed to give a presentation on “states as security threats”, so I have to read at least those texts – but here I am, blogging and eating an excellent fish and seafood bisque at Lorry Restaurant. Not reading the texts at all (yet). I get flashbacks from my student time.

But I hope that the course will at least give me lots of insights that will be useful for my journalistic work. I have already set up an interview with Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen on Thursday, and today he and I had a bizarre conversation on Pakistani immigrants, poison in fish, and myths on Norwegians.

And the course participants will probably be of interest, too! They come from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but also from more exotic countries such as USA, Indonesia, Ghana, Malta… (The Indonesian girl turned out to actually know Puspa, my Jakarta friend who visited me in Stockholm in December.) And I have met a Swedish PhD student who had super-helpful information for my upcoming Greeland trip! She is studying political consequences of global warming.

Back to the bisque!

/Gunilla