Research Interests

Connie Svabo works at the intersection of environment, experience, and knowing. Her research explores how knowledge and learning take shape through lived experience, mediated relations, and the design of environments as situations for being and becoming.

Across art, research, education, and design, she pursues a long-term, transdisciplinary inquiry into how material arrangements, spatial configurations, media, and practices shape attention, participation, and sense-making. Exhibitions, classrooms, laboratories, and other human–environment systems serve as distinct yet connected settings through which this inquiry unfolds.

Svabo is Professor of STEM Education and Science Communication at the University of Southern Denmark and Founding Director of the STEM Education Research Center FNUG. At FNUG, education and communication scholars collaborate with mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, and other scientists to develop innovative, formative, and experience-based learning environments. The centre works transdisciplinarily to rethink science education in relation to engagement, participation, and societal relevance.

Methodologically, her work is grounded in research-creation, combining scholarly analysis with creative, curatorial, and artistic practice in transdisciplinary knowledge production. She curates situations and formats in which different forms of knowledge, experience, and more-than-human presence can coexist, interact and inform one another.

This inquiry unfolds across multiple scales: from everyday micro-situations and artistic and curatorial practice to large-scale research projects on learning networks, learning environments, and knowledge ecologies.

She is Co–Principal Investigator of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for University Science Education (USE) (DKK 125 million / USD 17.7 million, 2025–2029) and the STEPS Interreg project (EU, DKK 13.2 million / USD 1.86 million, 2025–2027). She is Principal Investigator of the Longitudinal NAFA Knowledge Ecology project (Center for Excellence in Science Education, DKK 4 million / USD 600,000, 2023–2026) and the LabSTEM+ project (Novo Nordisk Foundation, DKK 5 million / USD 750,000, 2023–2025).

Demonstrating sustained innovation in the design of learning and knowledge environments across art–science domains, Svabo’s work builds on an extensive portfolio of concept development and exhibition practice, including collaborations with Stevns Klint UNESCO World Heritage, Museum Sydøstdanmark, Frilandsmuseet, Experimentarium, Amalienborg Museum, the Viking Ship Museum, Naturama, Fjord & Bælt, and the Geopark South Fyn Archipelago.

Svabo is Section Leader of Learning Experience Design at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, part of the founding leadership of the CUHRE Elite Centre for Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment, a member of the advisory board of FabLab Spinderihallerne, and a member of the scientific committee of UNESCO Global Geopark The South Fyn Archipelago. She currently supervises six PhD students and leads a portfolio of doctoral projects focused on experience-based learning environments and science education.

Previously, she co-founded the Center for Basic Education Research (2020–2023), chaired the SDU Research Programme in Science and Mathematics Education and Communication (2021–2025), and served on the executive research committee of the Danish Academy of Natural Science NAFA (2021-2025).

Beyond the university, she works across art, science, and society and consults internationally on curating creative and ecological learning communities.