معرفی
Thor Olav Iversen serves as a Guest Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (SVT) within the University of Bergen's Faculty of Humanities. He completed his PhD in June 2023 with a thesis titled Making world hunger legible, developing critical frameworks for food security quantification, and currently assists in teaching the interfacultary Master's in Sustainability program and the Theory of Science and Ethics course at the Faculty of Psychology.
His educational foundation centers on his 2023 doctoral work examining how food security measurement methodologies (such as the undernourishment metric tracking 768 million people globally) directly shape aid responses and policy interventions. This research revealed how quantification practices influence the form, targeting, scale, and timing of hunger alleviation efforts in developing countries.
Iversen's research critically analyzes the politics of measurement in global food security and sustainable development, with expanding focus on climate-peace-security interlinkages. His work interrogates how quantification frameworks become embedded in international governance structures, examining tensions between technical measurement standards and political realities in contexts like Yemen's famine and African climate adaptation. He emphasizes the humanities' vital role in deconstructing seemingly neutral metrics to reveal power dynamics in development policy.
His publication trajectory demonstrates consistent evolution from tax compliance studies (2014-2015) toward sophisticated critiques of food security quantification (2023), then expanding into climate-security nexus analysis (2024-2025). Key thematic threads include boundary work between science and policy, historical genealogies of measurement practices, and agency of Global South actors in shaping security frameworks.
Though no formal awards are documented, Iversen actively contributes to academic discourse through teaching and public engagement. He co-founded the 2023 initiative Organisasjonen Ferske Forskere to combat homogeneity in Norwegian academia and regularly moderates high-profile events including Bergen Global discussions on China-Taiwan relations, African conflicts, and hunger crises. His media presence spans Norwegian outlets like Khrono and Bergens Tidende, addressing topics from quantification ethics to academic freedom.
As part of SVT's collaborative ecosystem and through affiliations with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Iversen operates within interdisciplinary networks examining science-society interfaces. His current work emphasizes how critical measurement studies can transform sustainability governance, particularly through recentering marginalized epistemologies in indicator development for the Sustainable Development Goals.
