Contemporary Cultural Studies (AKS)

Grounded within the tradition of cultural studies, the interdisciplinary research group examines and explores how contemporary cultural theories and analyses may assist us in understanding the intertwined nature of our cultural histories, our contemporary social worlds and the futures that await us. Thus, the questions and themes of the group is guided by urgent contemporary cultural complexities and anxieties as they unfold.

Through a foundation in Gender Studies and feminist epistemologies, the research group aims to understand cultural histories beyond teleological historical exceptionalisms. Rather, AKS is committed to exploring cultural changes, complexities, and anxieties along more complex, ambiguous and unfinished lines, and histories. We do so across disciplines to investigate the cultural studies perspective in Arts, language and discourse, literature, everyday- and pop culture, lived lives, affects, policies, communication, and (digital) media.

AKS emerged amidst global cultural and social changes and anxieties. The group calls for ethical involvement in the world and centralizes studies of social importance and urgency. The group examines how cultural research supply new ethical answers to urgent worldly problems to make the world a safer and more just place. It aims at assembling new frames for understanding the human condition and to reassemble bodies, identities, cultures, arts, collectives, and eco-systems in new and more inclusive ways.

 

Gender, intimacy, and the body

AKS explores gender, intimacy, and the body as sites of cultural change: How are societal demands for flexibility and optimization embedded in notions of self, while technologies, transitions, and protheses expand and transform our bodies? How has human sciences and medicine formed our bodily beings and how does bodies ‘kick’ back and rework technologies and categories?

Racialization, postcolonialism, and (post)national belongings

In the context of new and old, local and global social movements, that oppose and transform historical systems of oppressions (racism and colonialism), AKS is committed to understand the ways ethnicity, race, nationality and citizenship have been historically established and how the work today.

Health, pandemics, and viral diseases

In an age of pandemics, we urgently need to understand viral and epidemic diseases’ cultural histories, signification, and social effects. Through cultural analysis, AKS aims to understand how viral diseases are affectively, discursively, and material embedded in historical, stratified, and colonial structures as well as intimately interwoven to social markers of difference.

LGBT+ and the History of Sexuality

AKS examines the role that sexuality, sexual identities, and transgender identities play in culture and society, with a focus on Nordic culture and history. Rather than understanding sexuality and gender identity as natural or universal phenomena, AKS seeks to historicize and contextualize sexualities and gender identities as phenomena that arise, change, and are maintained in a variety of cultural, linguistic, and scientific contexts.

 

 

 

Researchers

Name Title Phone E-mail
Bissenbakker, Mons Associate Professor +4535335923 E-mail
Eriksen, Camilla Bruun Associate Professor +4535325350 E-mail
Juul, Anton PhD Fellow +4535334581 E-mail
Nebeling Petersen, Michael Associate Professor - Promotion Programme +4535327467 E-mail

Affiliated researchers

  • Femø, Mie
  • Friborg, Nico Miskow 
  • Jelsbak, Torben
  • Karrebæk, Marta
  • Kirilova, Martha
  • Larsen, Anne
  • Madsen, Lian Malai 
  • Maegaard, Marie 
  • Monka, Malene 
  • Mortensen, Kristine Køhler 
  • Petersen, Line Nybro
  • Pharao, Nicolai
  • Quist, Pia 
  • Steentofte, Christian 
  • Thøgersen, Jacob 
  • Vilhjalmsson, Thorstein 

Head of research group

Michael Nebeling Petersen