As I write this, Dec. 8, in my office some 100 meters from the Aula Magna at the Frescati Campus, Nobel prize laureates are lecturing all day. I may go there in the afternoon to listen to the economists. All lectures are transmitted live on the net.
If you are not interested in this years economists, perhaps Paul Krugman’s lecture is of interest?
Saturday the 10th Dec. is the Nobel day. Prizes will be awarded by the king – now under pressure becasue of supposed contacts with organized king and ‘café cirls’ – and in the evening there will be a gala dinner in the City Hall with a cultural programme in the Blue hall, and dancing in the Golden hall. Swedish public television will broadcast it all.
If you are not invited to the gala dinner the television is one option. Another one is to wait till March 27, that is the reception that Stockholm city will be giving the ilpc2012 in the Blue hall.
Or if you are on Runmarö, the island of the poet Tomas Tranströmer, this years prize for literature, there will be a local gathering for neighbours and friends in the Runmarö Community Center and local museum, with dinner, dance and wide screen projection from the City Hall.
Below, again, a picture I like. I shot it at a poetry reading a summer day on Runmarö a few years. Tomas Tranströmer’s stroke and afasi now prevents him now from reading, but he enjoyed the afternoon with his wife and neighbours.
I often quote a couple of lines from ‘The truth barrier’ (1978): ‘Deep in the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can be reached only by someone who has lost his way’ I think that is part of research, related to serendipity.
While waiting for next summer, have a look at the lectures today, and the City Hall party this Saturday night.
/picture disappered 🙁 searching /
Photo: Aftonbladet
Some five years ago the Center-right government as one of its first acts decided to close down the Arbetslivsinstitutet, the National Institute for Working Life, where both Fredrik Movitz and myself were then working. On the evening of the Nobel prize award ceremony researchers from the NIWL gathered outside the Concert Hall and protested. On the picture you may see among others professors Niklas Bruun (European labour law, now at the Helsinki school of economics) and Casten vont Otter (sociology of public sector organization). Today the 200 researchers are spread out, many have left the field of worklife research, others continue. But the strong milieu for critical research on work and organization has been destroyed, and that was the ambition. The banner in the middle reads: No Nobel prize to the Swedish government.
This text was first publshed earlier today on a site I run with two colleagues as part of our preparations for the 30th Labour process conference in Stockholm next March