Former strategic research areas

This open research initiative will bring together the different disciplines and research on Islam and Muslims. While it does have a distinctly contemporary focus, the initiative will focus on what the common global challenges are to Muslims and Islamic communities and institutions around in different contexts. The traditions, norms and Muslim practices in the Islamic world are challenged by regional autocracy, identity politics, and global trends, while an increasing number of Muslims now live as minorities in almost every country in the world, but in a diasporic relationship to the countries of their origin.

This initiative uses symbolism in public space as a lens with which to explore the contested intersection between identity, memory, the state and resistance in authoritarian and post-authoritarian national contexts. We look at how the state is narrated, represented, produced, contested and challenged through public symbolism – from monuments to murals to posters to protest repertoires. In doing so we draw on a diverse range of case studies that cross-temporal, geographic and disciplinary boundaries: from antiquity to the modern Middle East, from the Balkans to East Asia.

The initiative is organised around three key themes: elite politics, transitional politics and resistance. How is the contestation of public symbolism used in intra-elite competition? What does the construction of symbolic narratives reveal about elite threat perception, generational turnover and regime maintenance strategies and how do these change over time? What can public symbolism tell us about the political economy of a given national setting? How do transitional states deal with a contested past when constructing public space? How is state-sanctioned public symbolism challenged by counter-hegemonic narratives?

In exploring these and related questions, the initiative aims to stimulate research dialogue across different study areas. We hold regular meetings to discuss current research and possible areas of collaborative comparative research initiatives. Key to our output is the comparative aspect that bridges China, the Middle East, the Balkans and antiquities.

Coordinator: Fanar Haddad

The aim of this initiative is to explore digitalization as a research object and a method at Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS). We will explore the usefulness of digital methods in our research and the implications of the increased digital mediation of our social and cultural world. The main purpose is to bring together existing ToRS research on digitalization and to create a momentum for this kind of research at the departmental level. By creating awareness of and building capacities related to digitalization, we also expect a number of positive spillover effects, such as an increased number of publications on digitalization and research applications involving digital methods as well as an increased use of digital methods and studies of digitalization in teaching. We also aim to make suggestions to ToRS management, ToRS committees and ToRS colleagues regarding the possibilities for integrating digitalization and programming in research and teaching.

Coordinators: Bo Ærenlund Sørensen

Period: January 2021 – December 2022.

Bringing together scholars from several of the department's study areas, in this initiative we wish to approach aesthetic products from an interdisciplinary area-studies perspective, focusing on literature as our primary example of knowledge production imbued with aesthetic significance. Being predicated on a specific area and language proficiency, language-based area studies are concerned with the application of a vast number of theories. Theories pertaining to culture and politics naturally predominate, while the aesthetic aspects of cultural production and products are rarely touched upon explicitly.

Our ambition is to explore and identify a whole range of relevant approaches to literature in language-based area studies, and to focus on works of literature as meaningful beyond their specific historical and cultural contexts, in order to include these existential and transcendent reflections in our understanding of the cultures and languages we study.

Coordinators: Tine Roesen and Anita Pluwak

Period: August 2019 - January 2021

The aim of this open initiative is to bring together researchers, students and external partners in a common exploration of cultural, social, economic and political dynamics of resources. This focus turns our analytical attention towards materials, energy, services, staff, knowledge, or other material and immaterial assets that are creatively transformed to produce benefits and in this process may be utilized, consumed, hoarded, remade, turned scarce or depleted – all with significant consequences for societies, local, regional as well as global.

The initiative wants to investigate how questions and conflicts associated with resource knowledge regimes, infrastructures, development, risk and security etc. are linked to particular imaginaries, and forms of sociality, emotions, ideologies, policies, moral economies, place- and people-making, exploitation practices and entrepreneurship.

Coordinator: Frank Sejersen

Period: August 2019 - January 2021

The Food Matters initiative engages in research of all aspects relating to food, including religious, material, social, political and economic questions.  The different research activities carried out over the course of recent years have already shown the advantage of a cross-disciplinary approach to this particular topic. The themes studied within this initiative will include taste (the growing importance of insects, the cultural change in taste through time as evidenced by ancient recipes), health and nutrition, movement of foods (e.g. chillies, ‘German’ potatoes, Greek symposia and Indian food), the role food plays in identity construction, and negative food (memory and bad taste). Members of the initiative have already been involved in research concerning food origins, the role of commensality, the relation between food and identity, as well as food and its economic and social role.

The humanities should make a more prominent contribution to the study of foods, past and present, since much research has been dominated by scientific approaches that mostly focus on nutritional or health aspects. The humanities, however, highlight the varied cultural influences on food making and consumption that influence food choice and processing. Food Matters adds a wider regional and diachronic perspective as well as more diverse perspective on food. The group is open to more members, who might want to join the initiative for all or only certain activities.

In February 2020 an international workshop with 12 speakers and over 25 participants with the title “Food and Drink in Feasting” was held successfully at the University of Copenhagen.

Coordinators:  Susanne Kerner and Morten Warmind

Period: August 2019 - January 2022.