Forskningsområder

I have a PhD in European ethnology, and I work within the fields of European and border studies. My research is based on qualitative research methods, primarily informed by fieldwork, document analysis and archival research, and I work with ethnological and anthropological theories of culture and society.

My research focus falls into two main categories: European border and migration issues and the role of civil society in the recent development of European liberal democracies.

In my PhD dissertation, “Relocating Europe: border officials and their everyday attempts to stabilise borders (2019), I investigate the standardization of the European Union’s border enforcement measures through an inquiry of border guards and border police on the EU’s internal and external borders. Based on fieldwork among border guards at the borders between Denmark and Germany and Ukraine and Moldova, the dissertation shows the multiplicity of rationales and aspirations that come together in the enforcement of Europe’s strongly politicized and conflictual borders. I have developed these insights further in three peer reviewed articles (2020), while also disseminating results from the PhD dissertation in international research contexts, as well as to a Danish public (2019-2022). Together with Grænseforeningen, I have recently planned and carried out a research-dissemination project which invite students in Danish upper secondary school and high schools to debate the past years’ return of border fences on the Danish-German land border (2023). 

I have also engaged in research into the role of civil society movements in the development of liberal democracies in Europe. In the scope of the European Commission’s Europe for Citizens funding program, I have worked together with the Danish NGO, Nyt Europa, on raising awareness about the role of civil society and popular movements in Europe’s recent history (2019-2020). I have recently turned insights from this work into a research book chapter. The chapter suggests using the philosophies and modes of mobilization of the 1970s and 1980s Eastern European dissident movements as a mirror to understand the current crises of democracy in Europe (2025). As member of the research network Helping Hands. Research Network on the Borderwork of European Citizens (2017-2019), directed by associate professors, Dorte J. Andersen (SDU) and Marie Sandberg (UCPH), I co-organized the closing conference, Europe Trouble: Welcome Culture and the Disruption of the European Border Regime (2019), that brought together international scholars in a discussion about hospitality, civil society, and the European border regime.

I have extensive teaching experience. In 2023, I completed the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Programme (pædagogikum) at University of Copenhagen.

• I have extensive experience with designing and teaching courses in European history and cultural processes, cultural and social theories, and qualitative research methods on BA and MA level
• I have taught international programs with students from different educational and cultural backgrounds (Master in Advanced Migration Studies, UCPH, Master of Applied Cultural Analysis (Universities of Lund and Copenhagen), European Studies, SDU)
• I have experience with project based- and problem-oriented teaching, portfolio exams, student fieldwork and excursions, as well as individual and group supervision. In my future teaching development, I am invested in facilitating a learning by doing setting for students, and I wish to promote research-teaching integration though a framework that embeds student projects into research-praxis projects

Education: 
PhD from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen (2019)
MA in European Ethnology, University of Copenhagen (2013)

Appointments at universities:
Assistant professor, Center for Border Region Studies, SDU, 2025-
Teaching associate professor, Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2023-2024
Teaching assistant professor, Saxo Insitute, University of Copenhagen, 2022-2023
External lecturer/research assistant, Saxo Institute, UCPH, 2019-2022

Periods of leave: 
Parental leave December 2023-November 2024; March 2020-December 2020, June 2016-May 2017