Funding
Erasmus+ KA 220- Cooperative Partnership under agreed project code: 2023-1-CZ01-KA220-HED-000157248
About the project
The project aims at increasing the quality of Chinese language education by sharing know-how and addressing the common need for comprehensible digital learning materials by developing digital Chinese Grammar Platform (ChinGram). The Platform provides grammatical description, interactive exercises and teacher support resources to grammatical points in 6 EU languages (English, German, Danish, Czech, Italian and Polish).
Period
December 2023 – November 2026
Principal Investigators
Chun Zhang
Teaching associate professor at China Studies,
School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Lene Sønderby Bech
External professor at China Studies,
School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Participating Scholars
Michaela Zahradnikova, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech
Yixuan Jandová Chen, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech
Chin-hui LIN, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Henning Klöter, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Luisa Maria Paternico, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy
Qiong YAO, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy
Wisława Szkudlarczyk-Brkić, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Halina Wasilewska, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Zuzanna Wnuk, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Funding
Funded by FKK, the Danish Free Research Council.
About the project
Focusing on community-led infrastructure projects, CO-OC will investigate how transregional relations play out in the everyday lives and social imaginaries of one of the Gujarati Muslim communities residing in the port cities of Mumbai, Dar es Salaam and Dubai. Furnished by monsoon winds, connections of all kinds – economic, religious, material, aesthetics, social, political – have crisscrossed the Indian Ocean for millennia. Today the region has re-emerged as an increasingly important focus of geopolitical strategy. By way of an ethnographically rich analysis of community-led Muslim infrastructural initiatives, CO-OC aims to advance the study of what has been called ‘thick transregionalism’. Studying the social life of infrastructures of a heterogenous religious community in three littoral locations, this project will unpack the links within and between Indian Ocean regions. Aiming to rethink conventional tropes and methods within area studies, the project positions infrastructures as a novel analytical category for studying the Indian Ocean and will produce one of the first simultaneous multi-sited ethnographies of the region.
The core research question of the project is: How do infrastructure projects engineer, assert and transform transregional connections and imaginaries across the Indian Ocean?
Period
August 2021 - June 2025
Principal Investigator
Participating Scholars
Funding
Funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF).
About the project
This research project aims to address these lacunae to contribute with knowledge and theories on China's global engagement to regain its geo-political position during the pandemic. The two research questions we want to address are:
1. What was the nature of China's Twitter diplomacy as reflected in the content of the tweets published during the year of the outbreak of the pandemic (2020)?
2. How was China's Twitter diplomacy reflected in the recognition and amplification in mainstream media in selected European countries?
Period
January 2020 – December 2022
Principal Investigator
Participating scholars
Funding
Funded by Carlsbergfondet.
About the project
Plastic pollution is a pressing global concern, and there is an urgent need for research into the sociocultural dimensions of plastic use and disposal. This research project aims to address that need by exploring what people in urban and rural India, Indonesia, and the Philippines find to be the benefits and risks of using plastic food containers and bottles and what they find to be the advantages, risks, and constraints of different methods of disposing of the resulting plastic wastes, with particular focus on the open burning of wastes.
More details
Carlsbergfondet
Period
September 2021 - August 2024
Principal Investigator
Associated scholars are
Funding
Funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry (FFU).
About the project
PEPP aims to map and improve approaches to Capacity Development for the maritime sector in Ghana in order to enhance the potential of the maritime sector to drive Ghana’s economic growth in a sustainable manner. Engaging with the community at Tema Port and relevant theoretical literature, the PEPP team poses critical questions, share different viewpoints, and conduct research to address the concerns of the people who work in the port. The concerns include digital transformation, national content, labor, corruption, and, most recently, the reactions to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic
More details
https://projects.au.dk/port-efficiency-and-public-private-capacity-in-ghana-pepp/
Period
January 2019 - January 2022
Principal Investigator
Participating scholars
Funding
The European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under agreed no 770248.
About the project
Echoes investigates practices around colonial heritage in a number of cities in Europe and in countries formerly colonized by European powers. Around 30 scholars from six universities in Europe and from Universities in Brazil collaborate in the project. Collaboration also include six museums.
More details
http://projectechoes.eu/consortium/
Principal Investigator
Fundation
Funded by IKS, Aarhus University, Princeton University, Kings College London, University of North Carolina, Cornell University.
About the project
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is increasingly focusing on non-pharmaceutical interventions, and thus emphasize the ability to mobilize pro-social behavior as perhaps the key determinant of the ‘curve’ of the disease. This project will test psychological, social (including mediational) and institutional determinants of pro- and anti-social behavior in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, through an original cross-national survey. The team will publish a working paper on key public-interest findings within 1-2 weeks of data collection. Academic papers and the dataset will be published open-access in due course.
Involved scholars
Funding
The project is funded by: Carnegie Corporation, US Russia Foundation and Indiana University.
About the project
Urban activism is a dynamic component of civil society in the Russian Federation. Unlike in the West, scholars argue that some aspects of civil society under Russia’s managed democracy is closely aligned with state agendas even when actors mobilise against the policies of the regime. The goal of the project is an edited volume based on the contributions of a cross-national research community including many young scholars from Russia.
More details
https://rsw.indiana.edu/workshops-conferences/iu-europe-gateway-conferences-urban-activism.html]
Participating scholars
Funding
Funded by AUFF.
About the project
This comparative politics project uses micro-level study in the form of data collected from Romania and Denmark focussed on street-level bureaucrats in municipal welfare state organisations and their clients.
Laswell’s (1958) definition of politics – ‘who gets what, when and how?’ – takes on a very different meaning if one switches from macro-level concepts, such as (groups in) civil society, political elites and the rules of the (democratic) political game to the micro-level. Here the ‘who?’ becomes citizen, whose main claims on the state are public goods such as order, security, access to infrastructure, as well as welfare in various forms. The ‘whens’ and ‘hows’ of these claims are all channelled through (often municipal or arms-length) bureaucracies. In other words, from a micro-level perspective, politics is much more about interactions with and experiences of street-level bureaucracies and social entitlements than exercising civil and political rights
This begs the question of what the conceptualisation of a unitary, coherent, agentic ‘state’ rests upon; and whether it is a useful analytical construct for any level of analysis. Our study, by situating stateness within everyday encounters, approaches the question of state coherence from a new analytical dimension. The separation between state and society becomes much more complex and fuzzy than most theorists of the state would wish to have it. And the conflicts between ‘the state’ that bureaucrats represent and ‘society’ of claiming citizens are shown to be more diverse and complex than hitherto theorised.
Involved scholars
Funding
Funded by AUFF.
Project description
This project intervenes in debates on contemporary Russia by reversing the usual perspective on political economy - that it is only about ‘big and important things’ (Hobson and Seabrooke 2009: 290). Instead of a top-down, elite-focussed analysis, I propose a bottom-up approach that looks at how Russia as a state and society functions. I do this by engaging with the everyday encounters of people with bureaucracy and the market economy, and the extreme challenges of social reproduction faced since 1991 The goal of the project is an monograph based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, for delivery by 2022.
Participating scholars
Funding
The project is part of NITE, a collaborative research project funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). Other cities in the NITE project include: Amsterdam, Berlin, Cork, Galway, London and Rotterdam.
About the project
The goal of this project is to understand how migrant communities use the city at night, to co-create venues of migrant visibility and to suggest future public policy for the development of more inclusive cities. In many cases, such as in the specific “Moving Walls” project in Aarhus, communities are perceived by the general populace as “migrant” and thus stigmatized as “other” even though they were born in the European country in question, i.e., Denmark.
More details
https://www.nightspace.net/
Participating scholars
Funding
Funded by FKK, the Danish Free Research Council.
About the project
With inspiration from the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, this project explores how the internationalisation processes that took place in the Danish field of higher education in the first part of the 21st century have changed the Danish university landscape and the educational practices associated with it. Drawing on a rich empirical material collected over several years by a collective of scholars the project contributes with new knowledge about internationalisation of universities and with innovative ways to apply Bourdieusian thinking in empirical research.
Principal Investigator
Associated scholars
About the project
The point of departure for this research is a ‘gender gap’ in the literature on populism, since it lacks systematic studies of populism from a gender perspective. This research investigates the relations between populism and gender in EU member states and EU institutions. While mainstream literature on populism, with few exceptions, has neglected gender issues, there is a new body of work on gender and right-wing populism and neo-nationalism. The project discusses what populism means for democracy, gender equality and the future of the EU.
Involved scholars
About the project
Denmark is characterized as ‘a non-quota country’ and as the Nordic exception when it comes to women’s representation at the national parliamentary level. Women’s representation to the Danish parliament has stagnated at 37-39% since 1998.
The project focuses on internal, informal measures to promote gender equality in representation (or the lack thereof) and asks why some parties are the laggards while others have achieved high levels of women’s representation? The focus is ‘everyday democracy’ of political parties (the meso-level), exploring the diversity of practices and strategies for training, visibility and empowerment of women candidates as measures of gender equality/parity. The empirical analysis consists of five parties (both from left and right) in the Danish parliament.
Involved scholars
About the project
This research investigates Danish suffragettes’ transnational engagement in the beginning of the 20th century. Despite the Nordic countries’ early introduction of universal enfranchisement, we know very little about the Danish (and Nordic) engagement in a transnational context. The analysis is based on readings of organizational periodicals of the most influential Danish women’s organizations in the period of 1888-1909 tracing contours of this particular engagement. This project documents that the periodicals offer a window for better understanding the political engagement with the internationalization of feminism and the ways women were framed as empowered political subjects before the actual enfranchisement was introduced.
Involved scholar
About the project
The aim of this project is to spark debate – or have recognised – that energy security experts fail to take the large amount of generated knowledge on social impacts into account in their writing. This knowledge on social impact may indeed change the energy security experts’ understanding of the very concept of energy security.
Involved scholars
About the project
This research investigates the changing policy making environment in three areas of socio-economic development in Latin America: a) greater transparency in national earnings from non-renewables, b) increased channelling of non-renewables into national developmental and poverty alleviation efforts and c) higher levels of popular participation in decisions about the exploitation of non-renewables.
Involved scholar
About the project
This research looks at EBAs as readily available legal tools to assist communities capture some of the benefits derived from resource sector projects and thus ameliorate some of their negative impacts.
Involved scholars
About the project
This project juxtaposes urban theory with ethnographic fiction to demonstrate the politics of African (Senegalese, Malian, Congolese and Angolan) and Haitian migrant presence and urban infrastructure in the new Global South destination point of São Paulo, Brazil. The project emerged from 15 months of fieldwork and explores “black” subjectivities as they relate to residential, cultural, commercial and religious spaces in the city. Due to the precarity of the situation and the existential nature of many consultants’ experiences, I find it intellectually and ethically rewarding to push the boundaries of text, image and sound; fiction and non-fiction, as the politics and geographies of race and belonging converge.
Scholars involved
About the project
This project discusses how the Eurovision Song Contest provides a context for developing transnational conversations about Europe on social media. Drawing on computational and (n)ethnographic methods and focusing on the millions of Tweets that are exchanged between people across Europe, and in fact across the world during the grand final of the Eurovision song contest, the project examines how Twitter users engage with and talk about Europe and European affairs while watching the show.The project was developed as part of the Digital Humanities project at Aarhus University in 2018 https://digitalarts.au.dk/.
Scholars involved
PhD Student
Ai Chung
Funding
VELUX Foundation
About the project
This project aims to discover Taiwan’s essential sound and memories in the early post-war period (1945 to 1955 and beyond) through a series of different resources and approaches. By analyzing documents and sounds as well as interviewing citizens of Taiwan who experienced the war period, this project tries to identify the most important post-WWII sounds as well as their acoustic echoes in people’s cultural memories and thereby focus on the auditory dimension of WWII history and experience.
The project is part of the Sounds of Independence project: https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/projects/sounds-of-independence-the-memory-of-world-war-ii-in-taiwan-east-germany-and-denmark-19452015(9bacea11-f525-4de4-9bcf-a269762c38a8).html), and funded by the Velux foundation.
PhD Student
Naja Morell Hjortshøj
Funding
This project is funded by Aarhus University.
About the project
This PhD-project investigates how innovation and entrepreneurship education is perceived and practiced by teachers and students at higher education institutions in China. In 2015, the Chinese government launched a new education campaign which makes it mandatory that all higher education institutions in China teach innovation and entrepreneurship education. In order to find out how this campaign is implemented in practice, I conduct ethnographic fieldwork by observing innovation and entrepreneurship courses, and I furthermore interview university teachers as well as Chinese students on what meaning they attach to innovation and entrepreneurship.
PhD Student
Meina Jia
About the project
“Daigou” (buying-on-behalf-of) is a business practice in China that emerged in the early 2000s and became prominent during the milk powder scandal in 2008. As a strategy for dealing with food-safety concerns, daigou has turned into a massive global business, a largely unregulated grey market that trades virtually all kinds of consumer goods to China. This business practice reflects the increasing financial power of the middle class in China during the reform period, as well as the vicissitudes of social relationships during the transformation.
Theoretically inspired by the concept of social stratification, commodification, and gender politics, my project examines the development of a particular reselling Chinese network of infant formula, seeking to understand the interaction of the market, relational obligation and women’s empowerment in China and its links to this business practice in Denmark. The project also deals with more subtle questions regarding the entanglements of private networks, global consumerism, social media, and business interests.
This project is connected with the project Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China
https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres-and-projects/moral-economies-of-food-in-contemporary-china/
PhD Student
Anne Sophie Grauslund Kristensen
About the project
This PhD project proposes a novel, empirically-grounded approach to explore social trust and how it relates to the Danish welfare state. Even in established social democracies street-level workers’ discretion can result in unequal outcomes for the citizens, and the personal relation between citizen and street-level worker can thus be of big importance to the outcome of the interactions. By looking at how citizen-state interactions play out between visiting nurses and toddler parents in a medium-sized municipality in East Jutland, Denmark, this project seeks to understand how trust relates to the nature and outcomes of these interactions. The project primarily depends upon data generated over 10 months ethnographic fieldwork. The project is part of the Politics and experience of the State project
https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/projects/auff-starter-grant-observing-social-trust-in-the-everyday-workings-of-welfare-states--romania-and-denmark-compared(92014516-09c7-4fd6-9275-9975a960fe91).html
PhD Student
Jonathan Nilas Puntervold
About the project
This project aims to examine an overlooked chapter in the history of Japanese linguistics, ca. 1900-1950, in which a number of Japanese grammarians began to question the validity of European theories of language and grammar. Instead, they developed their own, original theories that challenged the Western paradigm on several accounts, from basic theoretical categories to fundamental epistemological assumptions. I examine this Japanese “counter-movement” to European linguistics as a type of reaction against Western-imposed modernity. Primary sources are a number of grammar books ranging from 1897 to 1948.
PhD Student
Sophie Schmalenberger
About the project
This project looks at far-right populism in Germany with a focus on memory and affect. In particular, I am interested in how, in re-unified, post-Holocaust Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) utilizes memory elements (symbols, practices, performances etc.) to challenge the hegemonic German self-conception and articulate an alternative account of what it means and what it feels like to be German. In order to do so, I aim to develop a theoretical and analytical frame-work that allows for an affective reading of the AfD’s memory work and will be used to analyze selected texts and audiovisual contents distributed by AfD actors via Social Media.
