PhD Courses in Denmark

Dates and time: 1 - 5 September 2025 from 9:00 to 16:00

The course introduces and explores theoretical perspectives and analytical strategies within gender theories. The course engages with multiple perspectives from contemporary feminist theories highlighting queer theory, theories of race and racialization, crip theory, affect theory and queer archival strategies. The course is taught by multiple gender studies scholars and focuses on the use of such multiple perspectives in relation to participants projects and analytical practices.

Academic Aim

1. To introduce and discuss queer, affective, crip, and anti-racist ways of analyzing with gender theory
2. To enable students to critically engage with these perspectives in relation to the methodological approach of their respective projects.

Target group
PhD students interested in working with gender, affect, queer, dis/ability or racialization as well as more broadly interested in feminist and queer methodologies and ethics. The students may participate regardless of the level and stage of the project. However, it will be an advantage if they have started to some degree to reflect on methodological perspectives of their project.

Course lecturers

Associate Professor Mons Bissenbakker, NorS
Associate Professor Michael Nebeling Petersen, NorS
Assistant Professor Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø, IKK
Professor, Rikke Andreasen, RUC
Professor Lene Myong, Stavanger University, NO
Professor, Ulrika Dahl, Uppsala Universitet, SE

Course organizer: Associate Professor Camilla Bruun Eriksen, 

Programme:

Monday, September 1st
09.00-12.00: Camilla Bruun Eriksen: Introduction and feminist theory
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-16.00: Mons Bissenbakker: Affect theory

Tuesday, September 2nd
09.00-12.00: Lene Myong: Racism and racialisation
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-16.00: Workshop and papers

Wednesday, September 3rd
09.00-12.00: Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø: Critical disability theory & crip methodology
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-16.00: Workshop and papers

Thursday, September 4th
9.00-12.00: Michael Nebeling Petersen & Rikke Andreasen: Queering the archive
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-16.00: Workshop and papers

Friday, September 5th
09.00-12.00: Ulrika Dahl: Femme-bodied theory as queer theory: Rethinking sex, archives, and affect
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-15.30: Workshop and papers
15.30-16.00: Conclusions & reflections

Language: English

ECTS: 3.9

Max. numbers of participants: 15

Preparation
Students must send an abstract outlining their PhD project (no more than half a page) when they register for the course. The abstract must be sent by e-mail to phd@hrsc.ku.dk. Once admitted and before the course will begin the students must prepare a 20 minute oral presentation based on their project. More information about the presentation will be given once the students have been officially admitted to the course. 

Registration: Please register via the link in the box no later than 31 July 2025.

Further information: For more information about the PhD course, please contact the PhD Administration (phd@hrsc.ku.dk).

Literature:

Introduction to feminist and queer theory

• Nina Lykke (2012): Feminist Studies - A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing (also in Danish under the title Kønsforskning: en guide til feministisk teori, metodologi og skrift)
• Hannah McCann & Whitney Monaghan (2019): Queer Theory Now - From Foundations to Futures

Affect theory

• Sara Ahmed (2004) Introduction: Feel Your Way, in: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge.
• Clare Hemmings (2011) INTRODUCTION, in: Why Stories Matter. The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Duke University Press.
• Brian Massumi (2002) Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t, in: Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press. Download from: https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/700/chapter/133360/IntroductionConcrete-Is-as-Concrete-Doesn-t
• Myong, L & Bissenbakker, M (2021) Attachment as Affective Assimilation: Discourses on Love and Kinship in the Context of Transnational Adoption in Denmark, in: NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. Download from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08038740.2021.1891133

Race and Coloniality in the Nordics

• Hassani, Amani (2023), Racialisation in a “raceless” nation: Muslims navigating Islamophobia in Denmark’s everyday life. In: Adrián Groplopo and Julia Suárez-Krabbe (eds.) Coloniality and Decolonisation in the Nordic Region, 37-50. Routledge.
• Hunter, Elizabeth Löwe (2021). Diasporiske perspektiver på racialiseringens kolonialitet i Danmark, in Periskop no. 25, 89-111. https://tidsskrift.dk/periskop/article/view/128472
• Mendes, Jan-Therese (2020). Black Death, Mourning and the Terror of Black Reproduction: Aborting the Black Muslim Self, Becoming the Assimilated Subject, Souls 22(1), 56-70.
• Mulinari, Diana & Neergaard, Anders (2017). Theorising Racism: Exploring the Swedish Racial Regime. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 7(2), 88-96. DOI: 10.1515/njmr-2017-0016
• Prattes, Riikka & Lene Myong (2025). Colonial Care in the Nordics: Child Removal and the Politics of Disappearance. NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2025.2464546
• Svendsen, Stine H. Bang (2020) Saami Women at the Threshold of Disappearance: Elsa Laula Renberg (1877–1931) and Karin Stenberg’s (1884–1969) Challenges to Nordic Feminism. In: Suvi Keskinen, Pauline Stoltz & Diana Mulinari (eds.) Feminisms in the Nordic Region: Neoliberalism, Nationalism and Decolonial Critique, 155-176. Palgrave Macmillan.

Critical disability theory & crip methodology:

• Chen, M.Y., Kafer, A., Kim, E. & Minich, A. (2023). “Introduction: Crip Genealogies”, In: M.Y. Chen, A. Kafer, E. Kim & A. Minich (eds.), Crip Genealogies. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1-57.
• Christensen-Strynø, M.B. (In press). “Feminist Disability Aesthetics 2.0: Emergent Refigurations of the Disabled Female Body in the Video Art of Luna Scales”. In: K. Greaves & B.T. Vilslev (eds.). Transformative Feminisms: Nordic Art in the Transcultural Present. De Gruyter, n/a.
• Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.NWSA Journal, 14:3, 1-32.
• Price, M. & Kerschbaum, S.L. (2016). Stories of Methodology: Interviewing Sideways, Crooked and Crip. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 5:3, n/a.
• Schalk, S. & Kim, J.B. (2020). Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies.Signs, 46:1, 31-55.

Queering the archive

• Saidiya Hartman. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2: 1–14.
• Wung-Sung, T. de F. (2023). Hvilke historier og hvordan? : Hiv/aids i danske arkiver og biblioteker. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 35(1), 150–158: https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/133795/182462
• Rikke Andreassen. The Story of Miss C.’s Seduction of Young Women. A Methodological Quest into Female Same-Sex Relations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Gender & History, online 2023 / print 2025, Volume37, Issue1, pp. 267-281: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12730)
• Hunter, K. M. (2017). Silence in Noisy Archives: Reflections on Judith Allen’s ‘Evidence and Silence – Feminism and the Limits of History’ (1986) in the Era of Mass Digitisation. Australian Feminist Studies, 32(91–92), 202–212: https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1357009

Femme-bodied theory as queer theory: Rethinking sex, archives, and affect

• Cvetkovich, A. (1995) Recasting Receptivity: Femme Sexualities 125-146. In Lesbian Erotics, Karla Jay, ed. NYU Press. 125-146.
• Rodríguez, J.M. (2007) Gesture and Utterance Fragments from a Butch–Femme Archive, In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies George E. Haggerty, and Molly McGarry, eds. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, pp 282-291.
• Walker, L. (2012). The future of femme: Notes on femininity, aging and gender theory. Sexualities, 15(7), 795–814. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460711417482