PhD Courses in Denmark

Course content

This PhD course examines the embodied, affective, and performative dimensions of qualitative and design-oriented fieldwork. It explores how researcher inquiry is co-constituted through researcher subjectivity, bodily experiences, and material encounters.

Drawing on ethnography, phenomenology, feminist studies and design-based research, the course examines fieldwork as situated and materially mediated practice of knowledge production. Participants will critically engage with how emotions, bodily attunement, discomfort, resonance, ambiguity, and care operate as methodological conditions rather than obstacles. Rather than treating fieldwork “messiness” as a methodological deficiency, it is viewed as generative epistemic resource that can open alternative analytical and design trajectories. Through theoretical discussions, shared fieldwork experiences, and reflexive writing exercises, participants will explore first-person and relational approaches to inquiry, including for example, embodied and affective modes of knowing. The course is relevant for PhD students in HCI, CSCW, design research, anthropology, STS, and related interdisciplinary fields conducting empirical or practice-based research.

Core Themes: Researcher Subjectivity, Performative and Affective Entanglement. Situated, embodied, and reflexive knowledge, and affect as relational forces (Haraway, 1988; Barad, 2007; Boulus-Rødje, 2018; Massumi, 2002; Ahmed, 2004, Lindelof & Janssen, 2024). Phenomenology, Ethnography, and First-Person Methods. Lived experience, intercorporeality, and embodied writing (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Ranten et al., 2025; Svanæs & Barkhuus, 2020; Höök, 2018; Pink, 2015; Petitmengin, 2006, Bjørn & Boulus, 2011; Mol 2002; Ellis, 2004). Embodied and Material Practices as Inquiry. Thinking-through-making and affective prototyping in design and artistic research (Ingold, 2011; Ranten, 2025; Loke & Robertson, 2013; Dourish, 2014). Fieldwork as Relational, Infrastructural, and More-than-Human Entanglement. Enacting entanglements of researchers, participants, technologies, and materials (Boulus-Rødje & Bjørn, 2015; Boulus-Rødje 2012, Boulus-Rødje 2023, Suchman, 2007; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Law, 2004; Light, Choi, Tsing, 2013, Houston & Botero, 2024).

Democratically Imagining and Designing for Responsible and Sustainable Futures. Speculative design, futuring studies, democracy and public participation, more-than-human, nature, ecology and social responsibility and justice, and sustainable and just future (Clarke, Heitlinger, Light, Forlano, Foth & DiSalvo, 2019; Light 2021; Barendregt, Bendor, Bregje & Eekelen, 2024; Busboom, Boulus-Rødje & Hertzum, under review)