PhD Courses in Denmark

This course invites PhD students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to explore the role of the senses in culture and society from a critical, cross-disciplinary perspective.

With a focus on contemporary theoretical debates, the course examines how sensory experience shapes subjectivity, social interaction, and political exchange, and how sensory experience is in turn conditioned by cultural, societal, material, technological, and environmental transformations.

Participants engage with interdisciplinary scholarship from cultural studies, aesthetics, anthropology, philosophy, art, media studies, and affect theory, alongside current analytical and empirical approaches to the study of culture and sensory experience, including areas such as sensory ethnography, art-based research, media theory, and environmental humanities.

These themes and perspectives are explored through presentations by the course teachers, reflections on sensory methodologies, and extensive group discussions of selected key texts on three central topics: attention and distraction; aesthetics and capitalism; and environment, mediation, and critical aesthetics.

This work is combined with short presentations by the participants, prepared during the course, which offer an opportunity to develop their own research projects in dialogue with the course’s theoretical and methodological frameworks, and to articulate how sensory, aesthetic, and material conditions shape their specific fields of inquiry.