Research

Linda Lapiņa, cand.psych. (University of Copenhagen, 2006-2012), PhD (Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University, 2014- 2017), co-leader of research groups Interkult (2021-present, with Garbi Schmidt) and Environmental Humanities (2022- present, with Kristine Samson).

I am interested in embodiment, affectivity, space and time, approached through the lens of feminist theory. I strive to bring a plurality of ways of knowing into the university, which motivates me to work with collaborative, affective and arts-based methodologies, including auto- and sensory ethnography, dance, images and poetry, with a focus on more-than-human agency. I see research as a practice of listening - to multiple beings, through multiple modalities.

My research areas include:

• Urban nature-cultures, materiality and multi-species encounters. I am interested in nuancing ideas about nature and culture by looking into the role plants, animals and more-than-human matter play in cities. This work aims to co-create and practice more just and less human-centered ways of being in the world, drawing on and contributing to debates in environmental humanities.
• Racialisation, whiteness, intersectionality and everyday bordering. I have written on Danishness, differentiated whiteness and Europeanness, drawing on autoethnography and memory work on shifting migrant positions. I also work on affective citizenship, Eastern- and Western Europeanness and post-Soviet and post-colonial dynamics of race, gender and sexuality.
• Contested urban spaces. I am interested in how diversity and encounters with difference emerge in and shape urban space. I have studied social inclusion and exclusion in Nordvest, a gentrifying district of Copenhagen. I have explored how residents perceive and enact urban change in everyday practices and spaces, including a resident-driven park and an urban gardening association.
• (More-than-human) re-membering and environmental grief. I have worked on emplaced re-membering, taking point of departure in the life story of my grandfather: his exile to Siberia, and subsequent return to Latvia to work on a power plant on the river Daugava. I explore how the re-membering done by the river can inform conceptualisations of memory, agency and temporality. This work continues in my engagement with Utterslev mose, a marsh area in Copenhagen, focusing on more-than-human loss, slow violence environmental grief.
• Food, migration and intergenerational memory. I am interested in the interplay between culinary practices, materiality, mobility and intergenerational memory, in particular in how these play out in contemporary food trends and gastronomic spaces (slow and local food, farmers’ markets).
• Intersectionality and plurality in teaching and knowledge production. Working at Cultural Encounters, I strive to co-create and facilitate learning environments that facilitate plurality in knowledge production. It is important for me to facilitate conversations between different perspectives arising from various backgrounds and lived experiences.