PhD Courses in Denmark

PhD programme in Anthropology

Date and time: 27 January 2026 from 10:00 to 13:00

Anthropology has long grappled with how people live towards uncertain futures, yet only recently has futurity emerged as an explicit analytical focus. This PhD course situates contemporary anthropology within a longer concern with social imaginaries, temporal orientation, and the uneven distribution of possibility. It engages broader calls to rethink anthropology’s temporal stance (Pels 2015; Hannerz 2015), arguing that futures are neither abstract scenarios nor speculative projections but lived, narrated, and contested horizons embedded in everyday practice and projected in political imaginaries. The course will be used, thus, to probe the future as an ethnographic object, looking at hope and aspiration as a socially situated orientation rather than merely affective dispositions. Future, in this framing, become relational and political practice through which actors negotiate viability within specifics structures of possibility. The course in this manner aims for the development of an anthropology of the future attentive to asymmetry and uncertainty—one that understands futurity not as anticipation alone, but as a situated struggle over what forms of life can be sustained, imagined, or made viable.

As preparation for the course, participants are asked to reflect on how their own research projects relate to the course’s themes.

Course teachers: Henrik Vigh, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Course organiser:  Nanna Balle Mikkelsen, PhD Student,  Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Language: English

ECTS: 0.5

Max. numbers of participants: 10

Course fee:  The PhD School at the Faculty of Social Sciences participates in Denmark’s national network for PhD courses. This course is free of charge for PhD students enrolled at a one of the participating PhD schools (PhD students enrolled at a Danish University, except from Copenhagen Business School). Other PhD students will be charged a course fee of DKK 1,200 per ECTS for participation in the course (PhD students enrolled at Copenhagen Business School or at a University outside Denmark).

Registration: Please register via the link in the box no later than 19 January 2026

Literature:

Vigh, H. (2006). The colour of destruction: On racialization, geno-globality and the social imaginary in Bissau. Anthropological Theory, 6(4), 481-500.

Pels, P. (2015). Modern times: Seven steps toward an anthropology of the future. Current Anthropology, 56(6), 779-796.

Hannerz, U. (2015). Writing futures: An anthropologist’s view of global scenarios. Current Anthropology, 56(6), 797-818.

Bryant, R., & Knight, D. M. (2019). Introduction: the future of the future in anthropology. In: The anthropology of the future. Cambridge University Press.

van Voorst, R. (2025). Futures thinking as collaborative practice in anthropology. Anthropology Today, 41(2), 15-19.