Research clusters at Saxo
Saxo's research clusters aim to enhance the quality of the everyday research life at the department through inspiring, collective activities.
It is the ambition that the clusters contribute to making the department's research and research activities visible, accessible and inviting. A further objective is to build bridges between disciplines at the department with a view to supporting research interests that cut across the department's degree programmes. The clusters are also intended as a platform for better integration of researchers in fixed-term positions into the Saxo collective as well as an offer of collegial forums for all Saxo researchers.
Difference
The Difference Cluster unites researchers across the different disciplines at the Saxo Institute who share an interest in social, cultural, economic, political, and linguistic modes of differentiation – as well as related and overlapping themes of identity, power, hierarchy, inclusion, and exclusion. We study a variety of historical and contemporary contexts, yet often find common challenges, akin ideas, and new inspiration as we share and discuss our work.
Blending academic exchange with social gatherings, we meet several times each semester over Wondrous Lunches (centered around a common conversational theme) and Hydra events (featuring three brief presentations followed by a debate) to discuss red threads, differences, and new trajectories in our research as well as to share the joys and challenges of research life at the Saxo Institute and beyond. The cluster is continually evolving and is open to anyone interested in joining, participating, or developing formats and topics.
Contact
- Karen Vallgårda: karenva@hum.ku.dk
- Tine Damsholt: tinedam@hum.ku.dk
Global
The Global Cluster brings together a lively community of scholars whose research interests cut across the artificial boundaries of nations, empires, cultures, and civilisations. We explore a variety of methodological approaches including but not limited to examining structural processes of integration and disintegration; making comparisons across time, space, and political boundaries; experimenting with different geographic and temporal scales and lenses in historical and ethnological inquiry; and tracing global connections, entanglements, and patterns.
We meet several times during the semester to present and share our research in a relaxed and supportive environment. In addition to bringing outside speakers to present their work, we also organise skill-building workshops and writing retreats. All are welcome to join this community of scholars.
Contact
- Jessica Hanser: jsha@hum.ku.dk
- Daniel Steinbach: steinbach@hum.ku.dk
Landscapes, senses and ecologies
The Saxo Institute hosts numerous scholars who work on a range of topics revolving around landscapes, senses and ecologies – from the Ice Age through to the present day, and into the imaginaries of future worlds. This cluster welcomes scholars at Saxo and beyond who work with how landscapes and senses come into being as well as the social worlds that emerge in relation to landscapes and sensory experience through practices as diverse as past and contemporary resource extraction, walking as method, architectural approaches to shaping public discourse, multispecies lifeways, cultural heritage, agricultural practices, and climate change mitigation.
This cluster seeks to foster cross-disciplinary exchange across the great variety of interests and approaches to studying bodies-in-motion and landscapes-in-relation. All sorts of engagements are welcome: conceptual or theoretical discussions, methods and methodological approaches, economic and political inquiries, studies relating to ethics and aesthetics, as well as period and area specific studies.
As most activities in the cluster revolve around empirical studies, the cluster tends to host one or two excursions per semester, such as visits to exhibitions, urban or rural venues, as well as an ongoing series of walking seminars with presentations and discussions. We also invite guest speakers to the cluster, host film screenings, offer writing clinics, and cultivate a stimulating and creative collegial environment at The Saxo Institute by sharing in-progress ideas and collaborating on publications and applications.
Contact
- Katy Overstreet: katy.overstreet@hum.ku.dk
- Tim Flohr Sørensen: klq302@hum.ku.dk
Mobilities
The Mobilities Cluster brings together researchers from across the disciplines at the Saxo Institute in exploring movement across space, time, disciplines and methods. Mobility shapes every aspect of the human experience, and members of the Mobilities Cluster explore the complexity and multiplicity of the mobility—the mobilities—of things, people, places and ideas in recent as well as deep history.
While mobility is obviously a central concept in the study of migration, diaspora, infrastructure and more, it also animates studies of class, family, power, art, and politics, among others. Who or what moves (and who or what does not)? Relative to what? What structures this mobility? These are questions that can be productively explored across disciplines to broaden our thinking on mobility as concept and phenomenon.
Mobilities convenes seminars, talks, debates, lectures, screenings and more. Formats are plastic and permutable – mobile! – adapting to the ideas and interests of members.
Contact
- Christian Ammitzbøll Thomsen: cammt@hum.ku.dk
- Zachary Whyte: whyte@hum.ku.dk
Contact
Deputy head of department for research Anne Folke Henningsen