Posted on Wednesday, February 01, 2006 3:39 PM
Some terribly sad news. Gunnar Michelsen died during fieldwork in Senegal. I met Gunnar just after I moved to Norway. He helped me to find my way in the Norwegian research community by introducing me to people and supporting my application to the Norwegian Research Council. Gunnar was such a friendly person, committed to his work, and always helpful. This is very sad and so unfair.
Obituary by Gunnar's colleague Einar Braathen:
Gunnar Michelsen (1960 - 2005)
Dr. Gunnar Guddal Michelsen died in a hospital in Dakar on December 25, 2005, only 40 years old. A researcher of the Rokkan Centre, University of Bergen, he was carrying out field work in Senegal. Gunnar was one of the founders of the Norwegian Research Network on ICT and Development. He was a great cross-institutional and cross-national network builder, a committed internationalist and an inspiring academic colleague.
Gunnar grew up in a working class district in Bergen. From his early years throughout his life he was a committed activist, struggling for a more open, inclusive and just society – locally and globally. He spent 2 years in France and obtained a DEA (‘master’) degree at the University of Bordeaux, with the late professor Jean-Francois Médard at the Centre d’Etude d’Afrique Noire (CEAN) as supervisor. Gunnar then took a Norwegian master’s degree at the Department of Administration and Organisation Theory, University of Bergen, with a thesis on telecommunication development in Cote d’Ivoire. In 1995 Gunnar and I obtained a four-year grant from the Research Council of Norway to compare the digital revolution across Africa. For Gunnar this resulted in the doctoral thesis Institutional Legacies at Work in African Telecommunications.
Since 2001 he was primus motor of a project on the role of ICT in the transformation of higher education in Africa, in the context of globalisation, commercialisation and privatisation. His main partners were Prof. Falilou Ndiaye and collegues at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, with whom he built a thriving research seminar. He also prepared a new telecommunications project with Dr. Annie Chéneau-Loquay at CEAN. He generously invited these partners to Norway and let all the participants in the Research Network on ICT and Development benefit from their visits to our conferences.
Gunnar went to hospital with respiratory problems on 17 December. With the help of his friends and colleagues in Dakar, everything was ready for his evacuation to Bergen by air. However, it seems, on the basis of the information obtainable, that his insurance company denied him his right to be flown back alive and, maybe, to recover from the disease. He is survived by two daughters, 4 and 8 years old. Gunnar will be sorely missed.
By Einar Braathen (Einar.braathen@nibr.no )
Here is the link to Gunnar`s homepage.