Research

Applied Sociology uses sociological theories and methods to address real-world problems and potential futures. The group works on various questions related to applied sociology, including societal impact, innovation, and social change. The group will focus on the applied sociology tradition, its role and relevance in today’s societies for research, university infrastructure, and education. We meet with a focus on texts, guests, and inspiring initiatives.

Coordinator: Ghita Dragsdahl Lauritzen

Computational text analysis plays an increasingly important role in sociology, offering new ways to study language, meaning, and culture at scale. The Computational Text Analysis Group has several aims: to explore practical aspects of computational text analysis techniques; to discuss state-of-the-art developments in the field; and to examine examples of members’ data through different computational approaches. The group welcomes both newcomers and experienced participants. We meet roughly every third week. Meetings alternate between one-hour paper discussions and longer hands-on workshops, and some sessions feature invited guests.

Coordinator: Christian Borch

The Environmental Sociology Research Group provides a forum for scholars working on the societal dimensions of environmental problems, with a particular focus on climate change and the unequal exposure to environmental hazards like pollution. This entails theoretical work on topics such as environmental justice, the political economy of environmental degradation, and the social drivers of climate change. The group also discusses research designs to measure unequal exposure to pollution, test hypotheses about the causes of environmental inequality, attitudes towards climate policies and sustainable consumption, and analyze the social consequences of climate change. Our primary goal is to foster intellectual exchange and provide rigorous, constructive feedback on work-in-progress for scholars in Environmental Sociology.

Coordinator: Merlin Schaeffer

The group has a twofold mandate: (i) to provide members with feedback on experimental designs and/or pre-registrations before data collection, and (ii) to share and discuss innovative papers and methodological texts of broad relevance to the Experimental Sociology community. The group welcomes both newcomers and experienced experimentalists.

Coordinator: Mathias Wullum Nielsen

The Gender and Sexuality Research Group includes junior and senior scholars who are interested in the construction of gender and sexuality in social interactions and everyday life. The interests of the group span from kinship, class, and violence to care, and climate etc. The group engages in a variety of activities such as reading and discussing theoretical and empirical texts as well as inviting fellow scholars from other institutions to discuss themes and concepts related to gender and sexuality. 

Readings are chosen by group members, focusing specifically on texts that they have not read previously, but which are on members’ reading ‘bucket lists’. Therefore, The Gender and Sexuality Research Group offers an opportunity to read and discuss texts that a busy academic life may not otherwise provide time for. Furthermore, the group provides members with the opportunity to share work in progress and get feedback from a diverse group of scholars.

The group is built on an interactive format, meaning that presentations are not normally part of group meetings, but rather that members are expected to read beforehand and show up ready to discuss.

Meetings: Once a month for an hour, usually Monday afternoons.

Coordinator: Sidsel Kirstine Harder

Social inequality and stratification lie at the heart of sociology. In this group, we engage with recent research published in leading sociological journals, share and refine early ideas for papers or project applications, and occasionally host junior scholars from around the world to present their work on Zoom. 

The group welcomes anyone interested in inequality, stratification, and related themes such as social mobility and marginalization.

Coordinator: Kristian Karlson

The Micro-Sociology Group shares an interest in studying how and why behavioral and interactional processes unfold in concrete here-and-now situations. We adopt a broad and inclusive understanding of the micro-sociological field, encompassing discussions that range from offline to online encounters, from mundane aspects of everyday life to deviant activities, from constructivist to more realist branches of micro-sociology, and from micro-level dynamics to their connections with meso and macro-level dimensions of society.

The group works with a variety of formats, including reading and discussing core texts, providing feedback on colleagues’ ongoing research, and hands-on workshops and training sessions in analyzing micro-detailed data.

Coordinators: Jakob Demant and Lasse Suonperä Liebst

The Qualitative Club focuses on qualitative methods and the development of qualitative research. Each semester we meet to reflect on our use of qualitative methods and work on a specific methodological issue in a half-day workshop format. The club differs from theory- or theme-based groups by emphasizing a more extended workshop format that is open to researchers from the entire department as well as outside the department.

Moreover, the workshops focus both on sharing cutting-edge methodological developments and key journal articles, and on doing methods through the exchange of practical approaches.

New developments and methodological issues

We strive to keep up with emerging debates inqualitative research by sharing and summarizing key insights from cutting-edge papers and journals and/or by inviting one or more keynote speakers who offer short presentations, followed by discussions/group work. The format is participatory and includes roundtable discussions/group work.

Data lab

Hands-on sessions where multiple participants show and discuss concrete techniques such as coding, digital observations, interviewing, ethics, or open-source tools – “tricks of the trade”. Sessions can also be analytical, where participants bring anonymized data excerpts and jointly analyze. This is also an opportunity for young scholars to get feedback on methodological issues they are struggling with.

Coordinators: Nana Wesley Hansen and Louise Høyer Bom

The QuantClub is designed to provide feedback to ongoing quantitative research, and it is somewhat unique in that it serves not only researchers within the Department of Sociology at KU but also the broader sociological research community in and around Copenhagen. As such, every session has a hybrid format with in-person and Zoom options to make it easier for people to join the meeting. Each session involves a brief 10–15-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

The group was originally created to provide early career researchers with an opportunity to present their work in a lowstakes environment and it continues to prioritize presentation slots for PHD students and postdocs in an effort to live up to this mission.

Coordinator: Andrew Christopher Herman

The Social Theory Group provides a forum for collective exploration of key texts in social theory. We meet every third Wednesday to discuss a selected reading (approximately 20 pages) , circulated in advance. Each session concludes with choosing the next text, with a particular emphasis on suggestions from early-career colleagues. In addition to textbased discussions, the group may occasionally feature presentations by members or invited guest speakers.

Coordinators: Mikael Carleheden and Christian Borch

The Sociology of Discrimination Research Group provides a forum for scholars working on discrimination, the disadvantaging of individuals or groups based on ascribed characteristics such as gender, sexuality, religion, or ethno-racial background. This entails theoretical work, for example on the definition of discrimination, the drivers of discriminatory behaviour, or the functioning of entrenched systems of discrimination.

The group also discusses research designs to monitor discrimination, test hypotheses about the mechanisms driving it, or the consequences of experiencing discrimination. The group's goal is to foster intellectual exchange scholars working on discrimination and provide feedback on their work-inprogress.

Coordinator: Merlin Schaeffer

In this group, we read and review existing sociological literature on responsible AI (Fall 2025). The aim is to discuss how ‘a human in the loop’ can contribute to responsible AI and how we need to reconceptualize existing theory of representation and democracy in order to comprehend the development of responsible AI or custodian AI. During Spring 2026 we aim to review the literature in a more systematic way and start co-authoring a review paper on responsible AI in a sociological perspective.

Coordinator: Anna Ilsøe

Sociology of work is a well-established discipline within sociology contributing to our understanding of themes like patterns of social stratification, gender inequality, organizational structure and culture, management, trade unions and human resources, precarious forms of work, worker identity, unpaid domestic labour, ethnic and racial differentiation, and many other subjects.

The aim of this group is to follow the current development in sociology of work and link it to established traditions in the literature in ways that can inform the sociology of work research at the Department of Sociology. 

The group is a reading group focused on reading both texts giving an overview of the state-of-the-art, new sociology of work articles in the top sociology journals (like American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology) and the most highly cited articles in the top sub-disciplinary journals (like WES and W&O). Participants will read texts before each meeting, and meetings will consist of discussion of the texts with a focus on the methods used, the theory developed and how this new research relates to and could inspire our own research. Such discussions can also lead to development of new research ideas and projects with the group, thereby potentially transforming the group from a reading group to a forum for research development.

Coordinator: Jens Arnholtz

The welfare state has been pivotal in shaping modern societies, in the Nordic countries as well across much of the Western world. Yet contemporary welfare states face profound challenges - from neoliberal restructuring, demographic change, and migration to labour market transformation, climate transitions, and the growing fiscal pressures of defence spending - all of which may challenge thevery foundations of social solidarity on which welfare systems were built, leading to a renegotiation of the social contract underlying welfare provision and further redefinition of the balance between collective responsibility and individual obligation. 

The Welfare State Research Group welcomes discussions on these issues across the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. For example, discussions may address themes such as the social and economic sustainability to welfare states and the various threats they face; the welfare state as a social and political project; the design of welfare systems; and the dynamics of citizen–state interactions. Other key areas of interest include the reconfiguration of the welfare–work nexus under conditions of labour market transformation, structural tensions and institutional contradictions within welfare regimes, mismatches between policy rationalities and citizens’ lived experiences – such as exclusion from welfare rights or the misalignment of economic and social needs – as well as questions of redistribution within the welfare state and the crowding out of social investment in areas like education, health, and care.

While the focus of the Research Group may develop in new directions over time, it currently starts from a concern with the resilience and fragility of contemporary welfare states and issues of disruption of the welfare state and its implications for society as a whole and for its members. However, the Welfare State Research Group welcomes the ideas of both existing and new members and is open to shaping its discussions accordingly.

Coordinator: Silvia Girardi

The purpose of the writing club is to create a shared space for writing, where we inspire each other and sharpen our skills in one important aspect of our jobs: writing. We work on whatever is on our desks: Grant proposals, reviewer responses, feedback, or articles.

Coordinator: Lærke Høgenhaven