Trial lecture
“The role of context in information systems theorizing”
Time and place: May 19th, 2025 11:15 AM. Kristen Nygaards sal (5370), Ole-Johan Dahls hus.
Main research findings
Efforts to digitize the public health sector increasingly presume that access to data will yield timely, evidence-based decisions. Yet data does not act. Its consequences depend on how it is made intelligible, situated within institutional life, and rendered capable of directing attention. This research examines health management information systems as infrastructures of sense-making, shaped by the rhythms, frictions, and judgments of public health organizations. Foregrounding an interpretivist stance, the study conceptualizes actionable intelligence as an epistemic and operational threshold: a space where data, context, and institutional intentionality converge. Intelligence, in this formulation, is not inherent in systems but emergent within patterned engagements between human actors, organizational constraints, and socio-material assemblages.
Instead of privileging system implementation or technical performance, the analysis foregrounds the interpretive labor through which data acquires salience. Effective use becomes visible in the practices that render information both legible and consequential under pressure.
Digital infrastructures are approached not as instruments of automation, but as contingent arenas for reasoned deliberation. The contribution of this thesis lies in its redefinition of information systems as epistemic environments, where informed action is not given, but made possible through situated engagement.
Adjudication committee
- Assistant Professor Ela Klecun, London School of Economics, UK
- Assistant Professor Baltazar Chilundo, Universidade Eduardo Mondade, Mozambique
- Postdoctoral Fellow Dragana Paparova, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
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Associate Professor Silvia Masiero, University of Oslo, Norway
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Associate Professor Johan Ivar Sæbø, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
- Professor Margunn Aanestad, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
Contact information at Department: Mozhdeh Sheibani Harat