Anders Blok is currently a Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Copenhagen University. He was a Visting Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2008-2009. He has previously worked at the Danish National Environmental Research Institute (2004-5), and from 2005-2007, he was research student at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, on a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Science, Technology and Education (Monbukagakusho). Combining an interest in STS with a background in socio-political theory and environmental sociology, his research focuses on the knowledge politics of science in global processes of environmental governance. Theoretically and empirically, it attempts to examine how knowledge claims are authorised, negotiated, stabilized, or contested in situated instances of global nature, using an ethnographic case study methodology. In particular, Anders has written extensively on the knowledge politics of the long-standing conflicts surrounding Japanese whaling. Alongside his PhD thesis, he is currently finishing a critical introductory book (in Danish) on the work of leading STS theorist, Bruno Latour.

Recent Publications

Blok, A. & Jensen, M. (2008) “Pesticides in the Risk Society: The view from everyday life,” CurrentSociology 56(5): 757-78.

Blok, A. (2008) “Contesting Global Norms: Politics of Identity in Japanese Pro-whaling Counter-mobilisation,” Global Environmental Politics 8(2): 39-66.

Blok, A.; Jensen, M. & Kaltoft, P. (2008) “Social identities and risk: expert and lay imaginations on pesticide use,” Public Understanding of Science 17(2): 189-209.

Blok, A. (2007) “Actor-networking ceta-sociality, or: what is sociological about contemporary whales?,” Distinktion, no. 15: 65-89.

Blok, A. (2007) “Experts on Public Trial: On Democratizing Expertise through a Danish Consensus Conference,” Public Understanding of Science 16 (2): 163-182.