Senior lecturer and architect of the "isolate the act, name the contest, state the verdict" method, a three-step procedure she has spent a decade defending against the accusation that it is just common sense.
- Affiliation
- Slop University Department of Applied Incivility
- i.halvorsen@slop.university
- Contact
- Office hours by appointment; queueing-etiquette disputes take priority over everything else on the calendar.
Dr. Halvorsen trained as a queueing theorist — a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Oslo, followed by a PhD at ETH Zürich modelling service-time variance in unstructured lines — before redirecting a promising quantitative career toward what she now calls, in grant applications, a “generalisable verdict-formation methodology”: isolate the act, name the contest, state the verdict. She delivered the method’s inaugural keynote to a room she has since described, in three separate retellings, as “standing.”
Her fieldwork catalogues where queues are structurally strong — a single file along a curb — and where they’re structurally ambiguous, like a cluster of customers several deep at a store counter with no marked line at all. She maintains what she calls a “formal taxonomy” of cutting behaviour, running from “excuse me, is this the line” to simply pushing up to the register, and has resisted, on principle, every suggestion that this is simply a list.
She also co-teaches Week 9, where the department applies its own method back onto cases it already built — the elevator, seat-saving, transit space — a synthesis exercise she markets as “rigorous self-audit” and everyone else in the department privately calls “checking our own homework.”