Selection of previous Asia related projects
Dept. of Anthropology
Cre-debt: Urban poverty, new credit economies and the global war on cash
Atreyee Sen, Dept. of Anthropology
Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS), 2018-2019
Global Europe: Constituting Europe from the outside in through artefacts
Oscar Salemink, Dept. of Anthropology
Danish Research Council for Independent Research, Sapere Aude Advanced Grant, 2015-20
The project explores how the collection, circulation, classification and museum exhibition of objects define Europe from the outside in during Europe’s present loss of global hegemony – especially in relation to Japan and four non-European BRICS countries (Brazil, China, India, South Africa), in comparison with the early modern period of European ascendancy.
HERILIGION – The heritagization of religion and the sacralization of heritage in contemporary Europe
Oscar Salemink, Dept. of Anthropology
HERA – Humanities in the Research Area, 2016-19
The Impact of Violence on Reproductive Health in Tanzania and Vietnam
Tine Gammeltoft, Dept. of Anthropology
FFU (Minstry of Foreign Affairs), 2013-18
Imperial Potentialities - Chinese Infrastructure Projects and Socioeconomic Networks in Mozambique and Mongolia
Contact person: Morten Axel Pedersen, Professor, Dept. of Anthropology
REACH - Strengthening Population & Reproductive Health Research: A Capacity-Building and Interdisciplinary Research Project
The REACH project is part of the Bilateral Programme Enhancement of Research Capacity in Developing Countries (ENRECA) funded by the Danish development agency Danida. It is a partnership arrangement between University of Copenhagen (Dept. of Anthropology and Dept. of International Health, Immunology, and Microbiology) and the Vietnamese Commission for Population, Family and Children (VCPFC).
Contact person at the Dept. of Anthropology: Trine Gammeltoft, Professor
Selective Reproductive Technologies
"Exchanging ‘good’ life – socio-technical imaginaries in a Chinese sperm bank"
funded by the Sapere Aude Young Researcher programme, Danish Council for Independent Research (2011-2013)
Led by Associate Professor Ayo Wahlberg
The Violent Organisation of Political Youth
The programme is co-financed by The Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT). Contact person: Henrik Vigh, Associate Professor, Dept. of Anthropology
VITAL. The Vitality of Disease - Quality of Life in the Making
Ayo Wahlberg, Dept. of Anthropology
ERC Starting Grant, 2015-2020
More people than ever before are living with (especially chronic) diseases. As a consequence, sustained efforts to reduce morbidity and mortality rates have been joined by systematised efforts to improve the lives – the quality of life – of those living with disease in ways that are measurable and auditable. The VITAL project will empirically investigate and analyse the making of ‘quality of life’.
Waterworlds
Natural Environmental Disasters and Social Resilience in Anthropological Perspective
The ambition of the research project is to study local, social responses to environmental disasters related to water, as spurred by the melting of ice in the Arctic and in mountainous glacier areas, the rising of seas that flood islands and coastal communities across the globe, and the drying of lands accelerating desertification in large parts of Africa and elsewhere. The aim is to contribute to a renewed theory of social resilience that builds on the actualities of social life in distinct localities, thus focussing on human agency as the basis for people's quest for certainty in exposed environments.
Research project funded by the European Research Council
PI: Kirsten Hastrup, Professor, Dept. of Anthropology
Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
Alternative Spaces – Cultural awareness and cross-cultural dialogues
The focus of the project is on innovative types of social organisations and communications by which social groups in marginalised positions strive to make an impact upon their own lives and try to develop alternative spaces to which other people have to relate.
Funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research (DSF) as part of its strategic research programme on 'cultural understanding' (2008-2012)
PI: Esther Fihl, Professor, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
Between homogenization and fragmentation: textual practices as strategies of integration and identity maintenance among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China (20th‒21st centuries)
Ildiko Beller Hann, Dept. Of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
Velux Foundation, 2017-20
Using the concepts of homogenization and fragmentation, this interdisciplinary project explores textual strategies employed by Turkic speaking Muslims (nowadays known as the Uyghur) to demarcate and sustain their ethno-religious group identity and negotiate their subjecthood within the Chinese polity in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It emphasizes multiple, cross-cutting loyalties and senses of belonging, indigenous subjectivity, local practice and agency.
Buddhism, Business and Believers
Trine Brox, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
Danish Research Council for Independent Research Ɩ Humanities (FKK) 2015-19 and Carlsberg Foundation, 2015-18
The aim of this research project is to gain novel insights into the manner that Buddhism mediates value within the exchanges of materiality and spirituality, opening up a new field of research approaching the correlation between religion and economics through triangulating the concepts of exchange, value and materiality.
Emerging worlds: Explorations in New South-South Connections
Ravinder Kaur, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
Danish Research Council for Independent Research Ɩ Humanities (FKK), 2014-2018
The ‘Emerging Worlds’ research program embarks upon a collective enquiry into the yet unfolding, and accelerated phenomenon of south-south connections between Asia, Africa and Latin America. Through grounded ethnographies in a number of locations within Asia and Africa, the project seeks to rethink the idea of the Global South and the ways in which it presents itself as a political-economic force in the 21st century.
Escalations: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of Accelerating Change
Lars Højer, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
Danish Research Council for Independent Research Ɩ Humanities (FKK), 2014-18
The project’s aim is to understand and theorize escalating processes from an anthropological perspective. Through a comparison of different ethnographic settings, it will examine the shared features of contemporary escalations, defined as accelerating and unpredictable changes that involve ripple effects, transformations of scale and intense imaginations of past and future.
Nation in Motion: Globalisation, Development and Governance in ‘New India'
(Danish Social Sciences Research Council for the period 2009-2015, Ravinder Kaur)
This interdisciplinary research program concerns the nature, effects and fragilities of India's imminent global ‘rise'.
Religion, migration og globalisering - et kernefelt ved Københavns Universitet
Kernefeltets grundlæggende tese er, at den nuværende omfattende migration – sammen med øvrige træk ved globaliseringen – har ført til en stigende synlighed af religion som politisk faktor rundt om i verden. En af følgevirkningerne er, at der bliver stillet nye spørgsmål til forholdet mellem religion og stat, og at disse spørgsmål stilles både i Europa og i resten af verden, ikke mindst i den islamiske verden. Med globaliseringen har Syd- og Østasien desuden fået stigende politisk og økonomisk vægt, hvorfor dette områdes kulturer og religioner er blevet mere synlige på verdensarenaen.
Tranquebar Initiativet
Internationalt research initiative with around 20 ongoing research projects about cultural exchange - then and now - in the former Danich colony Tranquebar in Tamilnadu, South India.
PI for the entire initiative: Professor, dr.phil. Esther Fihl , Centre for Comaparative Culture Studies, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
Projects within the Tranquebar initiative include:
- Danish colonialism in India: The encounter with Indian commercial and agrarian traditions
- The fishermen in Tranquebar – socio-economic transformation processes
Yiwu - Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities in a Chinese International City
PI Professor Magnus Marsden, University of Sussex; Vera Skvirskaja, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
ERC Advanced Grant
Sub-project on on the activities of Russian and Ukrainian traders in Yiwu, as well as the changing nature of trading structures in their home countries by Vera Skvirskaja
Department of Economics
Globalizing Firms and Workers' Health: A Study Using Danish Matched Worker-Firm Data
Jakob Roland Munch, Dept. of Economics
Danish Council for Independent Research Ɩ Social Sciences (FSE), 2014-17
Human Capital, Education and the Global Economy
Jakob Roland Munch, Dept. of Economics
Danish Council for Independent Research, Social Sciences, 2016-20
The route to improved export for Danish companies
Jakob Roland Munch, Dept. of Economics
The Danish Industry Foundation, 2016-18
Saxo Institute
Natural Goods? Processing Raw Materials in Global Times
Frida Hastrup, Saxo Institute
Danish Council for Independent Research, Sapere Aude Programme
This project generates a comparative ethnography of natural resources. Combining ethnology, anthropology and cultural history, the project explores how people across different times and places process specific and widely distributed raw materials.
Colonial Policing, Law and Penal Practices: Rationalities, Technics and Subjects
Søren Ivarsson, Saxo Institute
The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities (FKK), 2011-
Three interrelated late 19th and early 20th century case-studies in the colonies of Danish West Indies, Greenland, and semi-colonial Siam
NIAS - Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
Creating Non-government Initiated Organizing in the People’s Republic of China – a study of three gender and development organizations
Cecilia Milwertz, senior researcher, NIAS Wang Fengxian, Institute of Sociology, Beijing Academy of Social Sciences
Funding: The Research Council of Norway
Timeframe: 2011-2014
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
ROCA: Robot Culture and Aesthetics
What is a robot, and how do we imagine the future relationship between humans and robots? The ROCA project aims at uniting cultural and aesthetic theories with practice-based insights in order to imagine, theorize, and create new types of human-technology interaction.
Department of Communication
The Peoples' Internet (PIN)
PI Professor Klaus Bruhn Jensen
Semper Ardens Research Project, Carlsberg Foundation, 2016-20
The PIN project compares the current state and future potential of the internet in three centers of the global economy and world politics – China, Europe, and the United States – focusing on the interplay of civil society with the other two key sectors of modern societies: market and state.
Interdisciplinary - Cross-Faculty Projects
Changing Disasters – Understanding Societies through Disasters
(collaborative project, 2013-2016)
The project is organised in three thematic clusters that cut across the traditional grid of scientific disciplines:
(1) Imaginations addresses the social, political, technical, and cultural aspects of interpreting disasters,
(2) Interventions investigates the trans-disciplinary and creative aspects of responding to disaster scenarios, and
(3) Transformations sets out to cover the trans-disciplinary aspects of the technical, institutional and social transformations in societies, initiated by disasters on a short- as well as a long-term basis.