Since 2012, Dorthe Staunæs has been Professor of Social Psychology, with a particular focus on diversity and pedagogics/leadership. Her research explores how people and worlds come into being through the entanglements of intersectional gender, diversity, affect, power, and materiality – and how these processes of becoming can be organised in more sustainable, regenerative, and thoughtful ways.
Staunæs works with affirmative, critical, and experimental research closely connected to lived life and practice. Concepts such as gender-wise (kønsklog), post-psychology, affective dissonance, diversity work as mood work, interspecies pedagogies, affective pedagogies and pedagogical intervention design have been developed in close engagement with empirical research and experimentation. For Staunæs, concepts are not merely tools for describing the world. They can transform what we notice, the questions we are able to ask, and what we can imagine as possible. Conceptual development thus becomes a way of creating new connections between research and practice, and between possibilities inherited from the past and those yet to come.
A recurring question in her research is how social differentiations come into being and acquire significance in education, pedagogy, leadership, and organisation. How do some become constituted as norms and majorities, while others become constituted as minorities? How do differences circulate through bodies, moods, materials, discourses, and relations? And how can we create conditions in which more ways of being, learning, leading, and living can come into view and have the opportunity to develop?
Another central strand of her research concerns affect: how moods, feelings (like envy, shame, motivation and minor feelings), bodily intensities, and atmospheres move between humans and the more-than-human, and how they shape participation, learning, diversity work, and leadership. She is particularly interested in the minor gestures as well as what is not explicitly articulated, yet is nevertheless present and can be sensed – what haunts the room, what is taboo or ignored, and what draws on both the archives of the past and the possibilities of the future. To analyse the elephant in the room, Staunæs draws on a hauntological perspective to explore how absences, histories, and unacknowledged or unspoken relations continue to operate in and affect the present, for example in encounters with racialised differences.
From here, her research has moved towards affective pedagogies, more-than-human relations, and regenerative forms of organisation and leadership. She investigates how learning and leadership can emerge through bodies, materials, places, species, and atmospheres – and how we might develop greater sensitivity and fairness towards the relations and conditions of life in which we ourselves are embedded.
This work includes experiments with horses as co-creators of pedagogical and leadership processes. Encounters with other species become an opportunity to explore how humans might learn to sense, respond, and relate differently, and how leadership can be understood as a bodily, relational, and more-than-human practice. The horses are therefore not simply objects of research, but co-creators of situations in which other forms of knowledge, attention, and becoming can emerge.
A strand of her current work explores knowledge production as diversity making and how local and Indigenous knowledges find their way into STEM research and new Arctic pedagogies. Through the conceptualisation of the Anthropocene as planetary pedagogy, Staunæs, together with Sverre Raffnsøe, investigates how the Anthropocene can be understood not simply as a crisis that humans must manage and develop psychological coping strategies for, but as a planetary pedagogical situation that already affects us and calls for other ways of teaching and organising – and for local and more-than-human understandings of responsibility, care, and interdependence.
In her current work, Staunæs opens up dis/affection as a possible new problematic for research on affect, diversity, and education. What happens when our relations to people, institutions, knowledge, and worlds shift – when engagement can turn into numbness, motivation into demotivation or ressentiment, care into exhaustion, or attraction into repulsion? How are these processes differentiated in relation to who becomes disaffected, demotivated, or withdraws – for example in relation to the planetary pedagogical situation and other events and pressures for change? These questions extend her longstanding interest in how affective, discursive, and material entanglements participate in producing the different worlds in which we live and learn, while also opening new questions about what draws us towards – or turns us away from – people, animals, places, institutions, and worlds.
For Staunæs, research is therefore not only a matter of understanding the world. It is also a matter of developing the concepts, methodologies, and forms of organisation that enable us to see, sense, and dream about it differently – and to experiment with how other worlds might come into being, often in collaboration with students and practitioners.
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Dorthe Staunæs teaches on the BA and MA programmes in Educational Studies, as well as on Arts’ interdisciplinary programme in Gender Studies. She is also a member of the working group developing a new 75 ECTS Master’s programme in Education, Diversity & Sustainability. DS supervises Master’s theses and PhD projects within her areas of expertise and regularly contributes to PhD courses on topics such as affirmative critical methodologies, affect theory, intersectionality, academic freedom, and self-management. DS has served as main supervisor for 10 PhD-students, co-supervisor for 14 PhD-students (12 completed, 1 in progress). Main supervisor for 2 assistant professors (completed), 3 post docs (completed).
Staunæs chairs the online Transcontinental Lab on Affect, Diversity and Education, a collaboration between researchers from Denmark, UK, South Africa, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Staunæs’ research has been funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, the Villum Foundation, the Aarhus University Research Foundation, Foreningen Fremfærd, the EU Horizon programme, the A.P. Møller Foundation, Utdanningsetaten (UDE/Osloskolen), and the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (Udir).
She has been a visiting researcher at Durham University, Collegium de Lyon, the University of St. Gallen Business School, Columbia University/Teachers College, the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, OISE/Toronto Institute of Education, and the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Staunæs has served as Management committee member i OPEN COST action (CA22121): Rising nationalisms, shifting geopolitics and the future of European higher education and research openness (OPEN) as well as in COST action (IS1307) New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How Matter Comes to Matter.
Bringing other and more just worlds into being often requires other forms of dissemination. Alongside more traditional forms of academic publication in international journals and teaching, Staunæs communicates her research through podcasts, pamphlets, visual formats, and, most recently, a dialogue card game. Throughout her career, she has also undertaken a range of positions of trust and public engagement, including Chair of the Board of KVINFO; member of the Board of the Aarhus University Research Foundation; member of the Niels Klim Committee; member of assessment committees for the Research Council of Norway, the Academy of Finland, and the Swedish Research Council; and consultant and member of working groups for Danish ministries concerned with children and education, integration, and gender equality.
