Holberg prize

Remember the pupils from Glemmen upper secondary school that I've visited a couple of times? Well, one of the groups (those who were researching what media youth use to develop friendships and love-affairs) were picked out as one of three finalists. Which meant I was invited to Bergen with them to attend the school-project prize-ceremony and the big thing: we went to the Holberg-prize party on Tuesday and the gala-dinner yesterday in honour of Jürgen Habermas, the Holberg Prize Laureate 2005. A true academic super-star with an immense influence on modern thought. How strange to meet him, not to mention to observe how interested he appeared to be in the pupils' school-projects. Well I'm shy and I only observed him from a distance (except for the hand-shake before the gala-dinner). However at the Holberg-prize party on Tuesday, Camilla (one of the pupils) had no problems of going over to the Laureate and ask whether she could take a photo of him with her phone (the photo above). Anyway, I had a lovely couple of days with the Glemmen-people.

So who should be nominated for next year? The prize is approx. €575,000/$700,000 and "will be awarded to scholars who have made outstanding, internationally recognised contributions to research in the arts and humanities, social science, law or theology, either within one of these fields or through interdisciplinary work. Through his/her scholarly work, the prizewinner must have had a decisive influence on international research in the field, for instance through the development of new theory, knowledge or insight, through making new use of existing theories or through the methods used."