Education

Ph.D., Sociology, awarded November 4, 2020, Uppsala University, Sweden. Dissertation: “Mining Futures: Predictions and Uncertainty in Swedish Mineral Exploration” Nominated for the Swedish Sociological Association’s Best Thesis Award 2020- 2021

M.Sc., Sociology, Stockholm University, Sweden, 2013

B.Sc., Sociology, Stockholm University, Sweden, 2011

Employment

2025-current: Researcher, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden.

2025: Researcher, SCORE - Stockholm Center for Organisational Research, Stockholm University, Sweden

2024-2025: Adjunct Assistant professor, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden

2021-2024: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden

2020-2021: Researcher, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden

2020-2021: Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden

2014-2015: Head of section/Program director, Folkuniversitetet, Östersund, Sweden

Peer reviewed articles and book chapters

Olofsson, T. (2025) Predictions, uncertainty, and collective epistemic work: How projected futures informed and misinformed enactments of Covid-19, Social Studies of Science, Online first.

Olofsson, T. (2025) Entangled disasters: Relations and vulnerabilities in the transformation and dissolution of Kiruna and Malmberget in Staupe-Delgado, Reidar & Bartoszewicz, Monika (eds.) Disastrous Anticipations, London: Routledge.

Olofsson, T. (2025) Making Mining Good: Tracing the semiotics of justification in mineral exploration and mining, Valuation Studies, 12(1): 119-42.

Olofsson, T., Mulinari, S., Hedström, M., Knaggård, Å., & Vilhelmsson, A. (2022) The making of a Swedish strategy: How organizational culture shaped the Public Health Agency’s pandemic response, SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, 2: 100082

Olofsson, T. (2022) Do commodity prices incentivize exploration permit application? An explorative study of an anecdotal relation, Mineral Economics, 35: 133-141

Fürst, H & Olofsson, T. (2021) Det här är framtiden: Fiktiva förväntningar om e- boken och ljudboken under det tidiga 2000-talet (This is the future: Fictive expectations about e-books and audio books in the early 2000s) in Pennlert, Julia & Ilshammar, Lars (eds.) Från Strindberg till Storytel: Röster om korskopplingar mellan ljud och litteratur, Göteborg: Daidalos: 231-267

Olofsson, T. (2020) Imagined Futures in Mineral Exploration, Journal of Cultural Economy, 13(3): 265-277

Olofsson, T. (2019) “The Death of Place: Exploring Discourse and Materiality in Debates on Rural Development” in Holmberg, Tora et al. (eds.) Death Matters: Cultural Sociology of Mortal Life, London: Palgrave MacMillan: 65-85

Datasets and other

Olofsson, T. & Vilhelmsson, A. (2023) Timeline of government interventions and events regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden December 31, 2019, to May 5, 2023. (Version 2) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7981865

Olofsson, T. & Vilhelmsson, A. (2022) Dataset: COVID-19 Epidemic Policy and Events Timeline (Sweden), Data in Brief, 40, 107698

Olofsson, T., Vilhelmsson, A. Hedlund, M. Knaggård, Å & Mulnari, S (2021) Sweden in Jasanoff. S, Hilgartner, S. Hurlbut, J. B., Özgöde, O & Rayzberg, M (eds.) Comparative Covid Response: Crisis, Knowledge, Politics, Report produced for Schmidt Futures and the Social Science Research Council and the Futures Forum on Preparedness

Invited talks

Olofsson, T. (2025) Uncertainty Management and Tools of Persuasion: Predicted Futures in Mineral Exploration, Expertises Économiques et Actions Environnementales, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, France.

Olofsson, T. (2023) Research Ethics or Ethical Research: Moral tension in artistic research – An interim report on an observation study of the assessment process within artistic research, Konstnärlig forskningsetik – forskning mellan utsatthet och egenmakt, 23 November, The Swedish Research Council, Stockholm, Sweden.

Olofsson, T. & Gerber, A. (2022) Artisanal rankings: Quality and uncertainty in assessments of artistic research, December 2, the Faculty of Humanities Seminar on the Humanities, Theology and Artistic Research, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. 

Gerber, A. & Olofsson, T. (2022) Show & Tell: New kinds of images as evidence, April 26, ForArk - Swedish Forensic-Archeology Network, Lund, Sweden.

Olofsson, T. (2021) Co-creating the future: Predictions and metapredictions in mineral exploration, March 17, Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, Sweden

Conference presentations

Gäddman-Johansson, R. & Olofsson, T. (2025) Tinkering with Care: Digital Tools and the Struggle to Maintain Meaningful Activities for People with Intellectual Disabilities During COVID-19, 7th Nordic STS conference: STS in and out of the Laboratory, June 11-13, Stockholm, Sweden.

Olofsson, T. (2024) Out of Time: Alienated Temporalities in Archaeological Knowledge Production, Swedish STS Conference 2024: Transmissions, Mediations, Interferences, October 3-4, Norrköping, Sweden

Olofsson, T. (2024) Different yet alike: Metrology, interpretation and digitized knowledge across epistemic divides and the 3D revolution in archaeology, EASST/4S 2024: Making and doing transformations, July 16-19, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Olofsson, T. (2024) One Camera but Two Pictures: Epistemic Divides and the 3D Revolution in Archaeology, Sociologidagarna 2024, March 13-15, Gothenburg, Sweden

Olofsson, T. & Gerber, A. (2023) Shared Visions: Assessing Potential in Unsettled Fields, 7th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop, May 31-June 2, Edinburgh, UK.

Olofsson, T. (2022) The present is a knife’s edge: St. Augustine’s philosophical presentism and the politics of expectation, EASST 2022: Politics of technoscientific futures, July 6-9, Madrid, Spain

Olofsson, T. (2022) På ostadig grund: Prediktiva modeller och svensk pandemihantering, Swedish STS Conference 2022, May 4-5, Gothenburg, Sweden

Olofsson, T. (2022) The history and future of the pandemic present: The role of experience and predictions in Sweden’s management of COVID-19, Sociologidagarna 2022, March 16-18, Uppsala, Sweden

Olofsson, T. (2021) Sweden’s Pandemic Management, 4S Conference: Good Relations Practices and Methods in Unequal and Uncertain Worlds, October 6-9, Toronto, Canada/online

Olofsson, T (2021) Making Mining Good: Mineral Exploration and the Justification of Future Mining Operations, 15th Conference of the European Sociological Association, August 31-September 3, Barcelona, Spain/online

Fürst, H. & Olofsson, T. (2021) The Future Book or the Future of the Book, Digital Zoomposium Audiobooks, January 11-12, University of Borås, Borås, Sweden/online

Olofsson, T. (2020) Justifying Mining Futures, EASST/4S Conference: Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds, August 18-21, Prague, Czech Republic/online

Olofsson, T. (2019) Prediction Games: Prediction and metapredictions in Swedish mineral exploration, 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association, August 20-23, Manchester, UK

Olofsson, T. (2018) Forecasting in unruly environments: The case of justifications of mineral extractability, 30th Annual Meeting of The Society for the Advancement of Socio Economics (SASE), June 23 – 25, Kyoto, Japan.

Olofsson, T. (2018) The production of reasonable futures in mineral exploration, Sociologidagarna 2018, March 7-9, Lund, Sweden

Olofsson, T. (2018) Foreknowing Extractability in Unruly Environments: How mineral explorers justify expectations of economic recoverability in Swedish mineral exploration, The 20th Annual Chicago Ethnography Conference, March 17, Chicago, Il., USA

Olofsson, T. (2017) Imagined Futures in Mineral Exploration, Imagining the Future - financial capitalism and the social imagination, July 11, London, UK

Olofsson, T. (2017) Observing from a phenomenological standpoint: Comments on the use of ethnographic observations in a phenomenological study, Kultursociologiskt Symposium, November 19-20, Uppsala, Sweden

Olofsson, T. (2016) Exchanging Perspectives – Revisiting Economic Action, Sociologidagarna 2016, March 10-12, Uppsala, Sweden