My research focuses on what activists and artists can teach us about the ethics of making space to be in, in everyday life, through relations that are both playful and full of frictions and conflict.  I have called this the arts of living queerly. I look at the praxis and imagining of otherwise possibility and new political formations especially through a queer lens on the ethical dimensions of being in relation when such relations are ridden by political, social and economic conflict. I have also developed innovative approaches to imagistic anthropology, drawing on multimodal approaches to anthropological knowledge-making and dissemination. I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Jordan since 2015, and I therefore combine a strong and unique resource on the Middle East as one of Denmark’s only experts on Jordan, anthropologies of gender and power, ethics and morality and multimodality with a solid regional competence.

Since defending my PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark, in October 2022, I have been awarded a Carlsberg Foundation Internationalization Fellowship (2023-2025), allowing me a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, Canada, working with leading scholars in queer and interspecies anthropology, anthropological work on activism and art, the anthropology of ethics, imagistic/multimodal anthropology, and decolonial and feminist scholarship. I have a book contract with Routledge for my first monograph tentatively called The Arts of Living Queerly in Amman, Jordan: A Staircase Between the Sun and th Moon.

In addition to research, I provide special education support to students with special needs. 

Select publications include: 

Articles

1.     Gamarra, Alonso, Wesley Brunson & Marie Odgaard, eds.  Introduction: Lyrical attunements in-between concept and image. Special Issue on Anthropologists engaging the Lyric Essay. Anthropology & Humanism (in preparation).

2.     Odgaard, Marie. “On Doves and Crows”: Special Issue on Anthropologists engaging the Lyric Essay. Anthropology & Humanism (in preparation).

4.     Odgaard, Marie. “Playful Indifference in a Hyper-engaged Field.” In Method as Play/Play as Method, eds. Anisha Anantpurkar & Pasha Tretyakova. The February Journal. (under revision). Spring 2026.

5.     Odgaard, Marie. "Queering Ordinary Ethics: Cancelled Concerts, Broken Eggs and Artistic Attunement to Ethical Life in Amman, Jordan." Anthropology & Humanism. 2025.

6. Odgaard, Marie. "Tæpper og vægmalerier: Et queer-antropologisk essay." Jordens Folk, vol. 59, no. 2, 2024.

7. Odgaard, Marie. "Fragments of Something Akin to Love: Or a City from Different Perspectives." Collective Research in Anthropology, vol. 2, 2024.

8. Odgaard, Marie. "Kufferter, rygsække og boardingkort: Om queer hjemlighedstaktikker i mellemrummene mellem stabile tilhørsforhold." Jordens Folk, vol. 58, no. 2, 2023.

9. Odgaard, Marie. "Contagious Heartaches: Relational Selfhood and Queer Care in Amman, Jordan." Contemporary Islam, 2021.