PhD Courses in Denmark

Dates and time: 17, 18, 19, and 21 August 2026 from 9:00 to 16:00 (one break day for preparing the presentation)

The course connects geopolitical ordering attempts over the last 250 years, to the deep conceptual contestation of modernity and anti-modernity and situates these developments in a semiotic landscape leading up to our current moment of (dis)order. The students will learn about attempts at (dis)ordering the world as deep historical processes as well as a globally connected process with regional idiosyncrasies and transnational entanglements. They will be trained to apply this knowledge for a more global and contextualized analytical understanding of current challenges regarding the geopolitical transition and the crisis of multilateralism.

Academic Aim: 
 - The contemporary geopolitical transition
 - Global History seen from different angles
 - The underlying conflict of Modernity vs. Anti-Modernity
 - Learning to analyse ordering, decentring, scalarity, and applying discourse analysis

Target group: PhD students in the Humanities and Social Sciences in general and Global Studies, International Relations, Area Studies in particular.

Course organisers and lecturers:
Georg Wink, Associate Professor, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen
Haakon Ikonomou, Associate Professor, SAXO-Institute,  University of Copenhagen

Guest lecturers: 
 - TBA

Programme:

Day 1 (Georg) A conceptual frame of the long history of contestation between two epistemologically irreconcilable positions: Those who defend “the order” as eternal, whether its hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, if it grants ontological certainty and those who relativize this order by constructing “progressive” flexible social systems as man-made utopias. These ideologies form various strands of global “anti-modernism” which follow different political goals in particular contexts, but which share the same premises and thereby provoke synergies, today the most evident one being the dissatisfaction with liberal democracy.

Day 2 (Georg, Haakon & guests) A historical decentring of the last 200 years of the classical Eurocentric international history as a chronology of sustained orders (from conception to decay). This gives a global perspective on each presumed turning point in the Eurocentric periodization of events. We offer for example a Latin American perspective on “1815”, a Middle Eastern perspective on “1918”, an African perspective on “1945” and an Asian perspective on “1989/90”. The aim is to explore the premise of “order” by using a decentred approach based on concrete ‘case-studies’.

Day 3 (Haakon) A practice element, which is a framed visit to the UN City in Copenhagen, where each element of the module will be explored through critical engagement with (a) the UN’s textual and visual arena for the articulation of specific ‘modernity utopias’; (b) the UN as a geopolitical arena for contestations of ‘order’; (c) the UN as a digital, physical and semiotic space where subliminal messages of global governance and worldmaking combine.

Day 4 (Haakon & Georg) Group presentations and feedback. Writing of short texts (2000-3000 words) which will be organized as a blog on the HUM:Global Homepage.

Language: English

ECTS: 5 ECTS for participation including preparation and presentation. 

Preparation: A preparatory reading list will introduce the students to the main concepts, theories and findings of (de)globalization and worldmaking, incorporating perspectives from global history, area studies, philosophy, communication, language, and arts.

Max. numbers of participants: 20

Course fee: The PhD School at the Faculty of Humanities participates in Denmark’s national network for PhD courses. This course is free of charge for PhD students enrolled at one of the participating PhD schools (PhD students enrolled at a Danish University, except 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 a University outside Denmark).

Registration:  Please register via the link in the box no later than 18 June 2026

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

Literature: TBA