Troels Schultz Larsen

Teaching

Teaching experience

During my years at ISE I have been engaged in a number of different teaching exorcises ranging from project group supervision, planning and participating in workshops, giving lectures to developing whole courses and seminars. Painted with broad strokes my teaching experience fall within five categories:  

• Quantitative and qualitative methodology and research design courses including courses on overcoming the barriers between the quantitative and the qualitative and combining the two, mixed methods, research design to mention a few.
• Lectures on sociological theory, urban theory, political sociology and change, empowerment and public innovation.
• Lectures/courses on New forms of territorial governance, urban politics, policy and interventions in the intersection between the housing market, social policy, safety in the city and labour market policy.
• Lectures/courses on sociological theories of the state and the reorganization of the welfare state especially the challenges to the Nordic model.
• Lectures/courses on social, local and collaborative innovation in the public sector with a specific focus on change processes and the management of these processes.

Project supevision

I have a solid experience in supervising projects within a broad range of topics within the fields of Socialstudies (Socialvidenskab), Politics (PA) and Public Administration (Forvaltning).

Eksempler på projekter (titler) jeg har været vejleder på:

By, Bypolitik og områdebaserede offentlige indsatser inden for det sociale og beskæftigelsesmæssige område mv:

• Arkitektur og knipler- En historisk analyse af feltet for boligsocialt arbejde på indre Nørrebro,
• Udkast til en planlægningsteori - om hvordan en feltanalyse af livsstile i Ørestad kan bidrage til nye tilgange i byplanlægning,
• Mennesker og mursten - En kvalitativ undersøgelse af byfornyelse og gentrificeringsprocesser på Nørrebro i København,
• ”Tænk ikke på en ghetto – En undersøgelse af den politiske ghetto-retoriks sociale konsekvenser”,
• Planlægningen af mødesteder i byens rum,
• ”Områdebaseret sundhedsfremme og social ulighed”
• ”Et spørgsmål om idealer og praksis – et casestudie af den beboerdemokratiske praksis i en almen boligforening”
• ”Gadeoptøjer og minoritetsunge – Fra mediebillede til gadeplan”

Social politik og socialt udsatte:

• Hvor vil jeg bo? En kvalitativ analyse af brugernes indflydelse på deres boligsituation i socialpsykiatrien.
• Mental sundhed – forståelser og praksisser i aktive forebyggelsesindsatser rettet mod socialt udsatte,

3-sektor frivilligt/socialt arbejde

• Hjemmeværnet - en professionel militær frivillig organisation
• Fastholdelse af refleksive frivillige - Et kvalitativt studie af motiver blandt frivillige i StreetMekka

Arbejdsmarked/beskæftigelsespolitik

• At ændre mennesker - en kvantitativ effektundersøgelse af beskæftigelsesindsatsen,
• ”Effektmåling af aktiveringsindsatsen i Københavns kommune”

Sociale relation

• Fængselskultur: Interne relationer og hierarkier
• Strukturel uligevægt og seksuelle præferencer - Et studie i brugen af spørgeskema som undersøgelsesredskab af seksuelle udvekslinger

Forandringsprocesser, Offentlig innovation

• Betingelser og barrierer for innovation: sammenhænge mellem offentlige lederes sociale og professionelle position og subjektive dispositioner og positioneringer omkring innovation,
• Frafald på Kommunale Brugertilfredshedsundersøgelser.

Research

General research interests: 

Personally i lable my position as Historically-Specific Praxis-Theory with inspiration from sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Loic Wacquant, Antonio Gramsci, C. Wright Mills and Max Weber to metion a few.  The fields I have conducted research in range from: 'Internetdating and the structure and dynamics of the matrimonial market', 'The production and reproduction of neglected urban areas (Forsømte boligområder) in Denmark and the field of areabased social integration work' ' and 'Innovation and public management - structure and dynamics of the bureaucrtatic field'

Past and Present research: 

At present I'm involved in a research newtork on advanced urban marginality and territorial stigmatization and I continiue my work in this line of research in various publications.

During my post-doc I was attached to the research project CLIPS - Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector (www.ruc.dk/clips). CLIPS was a major research project with more than 25 researcher from six different institutions collaborating. The main goal of the overall project was to identify drivers and barriers to collaborative innovation and to stimulate new and creative public initiatives. The scientific ambition of the CLIPS project was to shed light on the significance of learning-based cooperation, institutional design and the management of innovative processes in the public sector. Under to overall CLIPS umbrella I was working in the area of Public safety in relation to how the public sector tries to improve public safety in innovative ways. Among other things I collaborated with North Seeland Police Department. Using ethnographic methods I followed NSPD's development and implementation of 'TRYK Politi' a new and innovative way of engaging the citizens in police work concerning crime prevention. Secondly I was working on the profiles and dispositions of the public managers and their perception of collaborative innovation in the public sector.

My Ph.D dissertation related to the production and the reproduction of deprived urban areas in Denmark as a part of the research project Segregation Local Integration and Employment (SLIB). Deprived urban areas in the context of the Danish welfare state are as sociological research objects difficult to get a hold on. The is due to the facts that not only are there multiple themes at stake at the same time (such as place, class and ethnicity) but one must also analytically account for the multiple and overlapping fields (the housing market, the labour market, the educational market, the family etc.) that all have effects on life and practice in these places. The simultaneousness consists in the multiple dominated positions of the residents in the deprived urban areas - that is their simultaneousness in taking the lowest or most dominated social positions in several fields at the same time - which shows up, most clearly as territorial stigmatization and segregation (symbolically as well as materially). In the Danish case this can be observed empirically as the declining social and symbolic position of numerous social housing estates across the country where a significant amount of ethnic minorities, declassified workers have been concentrated over the last 30 years. This research with in this field theoretical approach so far suggests that the causes of the problems of the deprived urban areas are not to be found in the areas themselves but in the (last 30 years continuous reorganization of several core) welfare state institutions such as the housing market, the labour market, the educational market and the family etc. in other words to explain the causes of the problems in the deprived urban areas (as in opposition to (the dominant discourse/research tradition in Denmark at the moment) mealy describing the quantitative reach of the problem i.e. the number of; out of work residents, ethnic minorities, and crimes committed etc. in a given area) one must focus on the social mechanisms reproducing the social conditions and there by the social and spatial distances expressed in symbolic, social and physical space. This implies a multidimensional sociological "model" that facilitates the handling of all these "simultaneities" at the same time. Such a sociological model is what I'm trying to develop as part of my PhD at the moment. The inspiration of the model comes from three places first of all from the long Danish tradition of research in deprived urban areas (Christensen 1956, Kühl and Koch-Nielsen 1969 and 1971, Simonsen 1974, Plovsing 1975, Kristensen et.al. 1993, Skifter Andersen 1999 and 2003, Thor Andersen 2005). Secondly the inspiration comes from the massive collective work 'The weight of the world' which was headed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu et.al. 1999). Lastly the inspiration comes from French American sociologist Loïc Wacquants comparative sociology of advanced marginalization (Wacquant 2007). Put very short this sociological model takes departure in the deprived urban areas understood as fields of contending positions (between the positions of the residents as well as the contending positions between different urban areas) while at the same time relating the urban areas and the residents to their corresponding positions in physical space, social space and symbolic space (Based on Bourdieus notion of homology (Bourdieu 1984:175ff, Bourdieu et.al. 1999:123ff)) while trying to account for the effects from the multiple overlapping fields of cultural production, the economic field, the labour market, the housing market, the educational field, the media and the family.

My candidatum in public administration (cand.scient.adm. eq of a Ma.) related to the structure and the dynamics of the matrimonial market in the wake of the spread of internetdating. That is the main research question was: "if it is true that love is blind and that you can be anyone on the internet - how come it is so rare that Sofie the barrister from Rungsted falls in love with Brian, the auto mechanic from Brøndby?" so the problems tackled in the thesis was how in practice the relations of class was working as selection mechanisms while remaining true to the perception that 'love is blind' and 'it's a matter of chemistry' so as to insure that the 'birds of a feather flock together' i.e. that the class boundaries (and the social distances) are reproduced. 

Sociological insprations at the moment:

Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc Wacquant, Michael B. Katz, William Julius Wilson, Adelmalek Sayad, C. Wright Mills, Antonio Gramschi, Charles Tilly, Max Weber, to mention a few.

*** NB! for vejledning se også ovenstående "ekspertiser" ***

Sincerely

Troels

Curriculum

• 2014 - Associate Professor (Lektor) department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University
• 2009-2014  Assistant professor/Post-Doc (Adjunkt) department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University
• 2005-2009  PhD.fellow department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University.

• 1998-2005 Candidatum in Public Administration (cand.scient.adm.) from Department of Social Science, Roskilde University.