Funding:
Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF)
Period:
January 2020 - December 2022
Project Description:
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?
Principal Investigator:
Mette Thunø - Associate Professor of China Studies at School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Participating Scholars:
PhD Scholar:
Meina Jia
Project Description:
“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.
Project Description
The last quarter century of war and economic crisis has revealed many of the limitations of international institutions, ending the era of liberal triumphalism which succeeded the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The period since 2008, characterized by acute economic crisis, the return of apparent great power rivalries, a threat of wider war between nuclear powers, is also accompanied by the historic acceleration of inflation and low growth globally. These developments, alongside a weakening of the liberal democratic order in general, suggest that the process of globalization itself – however illusory its promises for sustained economic dynamism once were – is also now being reversed.
What are the underlying causes of the contemporary breakdown of globalization, flagging growth of the world economy, and the rise in militarism, including the militarization of much of civil society? Do such developments in turn mean that the neoliberal paradigm which informed globalization is likewise undergoing a fundamental change, or that it is itself being superseded? If the latter, by what, and driven by which political forces, deciding among which alternatives?
The present era of historic transformation and crisis raises questions about how nearly all extant international and national institutions, official and civil, will respond and attempt to resolve the many contradictions now besieging them. A semester-long seminar series, one component of a project studying the world beyond neoliberalism, will be a venue for discussions among analysts of recent and contemporary history. The seminar will address a wide range of topics: from the state of international law, economic history, political theory, geopolitics and the interstate balance of power, to transformations in media and the arts.
Principle Investigator
Hagen Schulz-Forberg - Associate Professor of International Studies at School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
PhD Scholar:
Naja Morell Hjortshøj
Funding:
Aarhus University
Project Description:
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.
Funding:
FKK, the Danish Free Research Council
Project description:
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.
Principle Investigator:
Lisanne Wilken - Associate Professor of European Studies at School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Associate Scholars:
Hanne Tang - Aalborg University
Tanja Kanne Wadsholt - Aarhus University
Mette Ginnerskov-Dahlberg - Uppsala University
PhD Scholar:
Jonathan Nilas Puntervold
Project Description:
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.
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.
Period
2019 - 2022
Project Description
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.
Participating Scholars
Derek Pardue - Associate Professor of Brasilian Studies at School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Sara Brandellero (PI) - Leiden University
Ben Campkin - University College London
Ailbhe Kenney - Mary Immaculate College
Manuela Bojadzijev - Leuphana University of Lüneburg
Finansieringskilde:
FKK (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation)
Augustinus Fonden
Knud Højgaards Fond
Projektbeskrivelse:
Projektet tager sit afsæt i Kinas Kommunist Partis (KKP) fejring af Folkerepublikken Kinas 60års dag 1. oktober 2009. De seneste 30 år har Kina gennemført gennemgribende markedsøkonomiske reformer, hvilket har resulteret i landets samtidige rolle som global økonomisk supermagt men også i et nyt og voksende skel mellem rig og fattig. Styret har samtidigt afviklet tidligere tiders omfordelingspolitikker og den socialistiske ideologi er politisk udvandet i et omfang så en ideologisk legitimeringskrise i dag truer KKP, som efter 60 år viderefører sit magtmonopol i et-parti-staten. Projektet analyserer hvordan partiet i dag nytænker kulturelle og ideologiske ressourcer i forsøget på at legitimere dets fortsatte rolle som absolut magthaver. Gennem etnografiske feltstudier blandt to politisk situerede grupper af unge i Beijing, universitetsstuderende og migrantarbejdere, diskuterer projektet hvordan samfundets nye elite og en ny klasse af rettighedsløse arbejdere praktisk møder partiet, hvordan de tilpasser sig samtidens politiske og økonomiske forhold, samt hvordan de vurderer partiets rolle og legitimitet i samfundet.
Funding:
Carlsbergfondet
Period:
September 2021 - August 2024
Project Description:
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.
Principle Investigator:
Gauri Sanjeev Pathak - Associate Professor of India and South Asia Studies at School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Associated Scholars:
Mark Nichter - Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Public Health, and Family Medicine, University of Arizona
Anita Hardon - Professor of Anthropology of Health and Social Care, University of Amsterdam
PhD Scholar:
Sophie Schmalenberger
Project Description:
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.
Funding:
Danish Foreign Ministry (FFU)
Period:
January 2019 - January 2022
Project Description:
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.
Principal Investigator:
Annette Skovsted Hansen - Associate Professor of Japan Studies at School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Participating Scholars:
Funding:
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:
Jeremy Morris - Associate Professor of Russian and Balkan Studies at School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Funding:
Forskingsråd for Kultur og Kommunikation (the Danish Research Council for the Humanities)
Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond (the Aarhus University Research Foundation)
Project Description:
"Islam, Muslims and Danish Schools" is a multidisciplinary collaborative research involving anthropology, the sociology of religion, and Islamology. It is based in the Faculty of Arts at Aarhus University, involving researchers from the Islamic Cultures and Societies Research Unit in the departments of Culture and Society and of Education.
The objective of the project is to investigate the encounter between Muslim children, their families, and the Danish folkeskole (public schools). Existing research and informal observation suggest that this encounter is more complex and far-reaching than is often realized. The project seeks to investigate the encounter and explore how it affects public schooling in Denmark, Danish educational content, the conduct of Muslim minorities in Denmark, interpretations of Islam and the construction of diaspora Islam in Denmark.
PhD Scholar:
Anne Sophie Grauslund Kristensen
Project Description:
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.
PhD Scholar:
Ai Chung
Funding:
VELUX Foundation
Project Description:
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 and funded by the Velux foundation.
