Katherine Kappa

Current research

Primary areas of research

• social interaction
• collaborations
• (organised) cultural encounters
• diversity

Current research

PhD dissertation title: Emergence in a transient social configuration: How strangers establish practices for working together within international development

Supervisor: Janus Mortensen

Grant: The Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities

Project affiliation: Transient Multilingual Communities

Collaborations among individuals who do not have the same sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds have become that much more common in this globalized world. The different resources and ideas about acceptable norms of behavior that people bring with them into different professional, but also informal, situations often pose interactional challenges as well as can prove pivotal for the success of a collaboration.

My PhD research is a linguistic ethnography of a 6-day collaboration between a Nordic solidarity organisation and a civil society organisation in Swaziland. My interest is in the interactional establishment of a shared body of knowledge between these participants who have no shared professional history. 

Teaching

• English as a lingua franca
• Academic writing in English

Fields of interest

Social interaction, change, collaborations, diversity, organised cultural encounters, power.

CV

You can see my full CV on LinkedIn.

PhD Fellow, University of Copenhagen, 2016-

MA in Cultural Encounters & English, Roskilde University, 2016

BA in Communication & English, Roskilde University, 2013