Cultural Transformations Summer Seminar 2026

• Date: Friday 12 June 2026, 13.00 – 17.30, with following summer buffet and hygge in a garden nearby in walking distance.  
• Venue: Richard Mortensen Stuen, Building 1422-122, Fredrik Nielsens Vej 2-4, 8000 Aarhus C
  Sign up here Registration deadline May 26, 10:00

Contributors:

• Jan Linders, Head of Programme, Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss
• Sara Lei Sparre, Senior Researcher, VIVE Det Nationale Forsknings- og Analysecenter for Velfærd (The Danish Center for Social Science Research)
• Claire French, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow, Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology, Aarhus University & Christian Houge Laursen, independent filmmaker, Copenhagen
• Daniela Agostinho, Associate Professor, Deptartment of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University

What does it mean to care for someone or something? How do we express care, convey care, and cultivate care? What constitutes the technologies of care, or the institutions of care? How is care carried in the languages we use and among groups of people we care with? 

This year’s Cultural Transformations Summer Seminar brings together four talks on Practices of Care from four different places: institutions of cultural prestige beginning to ask new questions; welfare institutions that become sites for negotiating multilingualism and future workforces; multilingual dramaturgies exploring methodological bases for care aesthetics; and curatorial and art practices that insist on caring for those who were not taken care of.

Registration deadline: Tuesday May 26, at 10:00. Please deregister if your personal schedule changes after you have registered, in order to avoid food and drink waste and to ensure availability of participation spaces for everyone. 

Presentations:
Jan Linders, Head of Programme, Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss 
Philosophies of care: Decolonizing Ethnological Museums  with communities, artists and the public

“Colonialism is over, colonialism is all over." (Walter D. Mignolo)

Museums can be described as spaces of care. Ethnological museums may be the most challenged cultural institutions in these interesting and stressful times. After many years of quietly and caringly working on the preservation of world heritage, they suddenly find themselves depicted as the symbol of colonialism, epistemological violence and failed decolonization. They are under public scrutiny, both local, national and international. Places of entertaining exoticization have turned into battlegrounds of and for identities. Through its programme (exhibitions, outreach, events), the newly founded Humboldt Forum in Berlin and its international partners are researching and testing philosophies of care in response: care for cultural belongings, for source communities, for diasporic activists, for the general public and for the museum staff. 

Sara Lei Sparre, Senior Researcher, VIVE Det Nationale Forsknings- og Analysecenter for Velfærd (The Danish Center for Social Science Research) 

Care (mis)match: Multilingualism and training for elderly care in Denmark
My talk focuses on how migrant care work trainees’ struggles with Danish language affect their relationships with older citizens and influence supervisors’ work practices. I show how supervisors arrange “good” care relations by matching multilingual trainees with particular older citizens to support migrants’ training and language learning. This practice fosters some relationships while hindering others, as part of broader efforts to meet care expectations and secure the future workforce in the Danish elderly care.

Claire French, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow, Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology, Aarhus University & Christian Houge Laursen, independent filmmaker, Copenhagen

Inverted indexicality as care aesthetics: Video essays on multilingual dramaturgies
This talk introduces the video essay series Dramaturgies for Languaging (2026), which experiments with the reaction video format to explore inverted indexicality within multilingual dramaturgies. We include multiple sites of indexicality, understood here as moments in which interaction produces social meaning for spectators and researchers, to explore a methodological basis for care aesthetics. We contextualise this basis as especially relevant to fields such as socially engaged and multilingual dramaturgies, where minoritised and racialised subjects are so often placed within the research gaze.

Daniela Agostinho, Associate Professor, Deptartment of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University

Curating in the Afterlife of Colonial Histories: On care, archiving and memorialisation
This talk considers the role of artistic practices and exhibitions in the afterlife of colonial history. Drawing on curatorial practice and readings of artworks dealing with the residue of Danish colonial history, the talk reflects on how art practices offer ways to sense the past in the present, to register embodied knowledge, and to insist on care for those who were not taken care of.