Thomas Randrup Pedersen

Primary fields of research

Regions: Europe (Britain ¤ Denmark ¤ Ireland ¤ Northern Ireland) ¤ South Asia (Afghanistan)

Themes: Being and becoming ¤ civil-military entanglements ¤ contemporary soldiering and counterinsurgency war ¤ dwelling and occupation ¤ ethics and moralities ¤ identity and violence ¤ man and machine ¤ nationalism and civil religion ¤ transformations and transgressions ¤ violently divided societies ¤ visual research

Current research

PhD project (working title): What Doesn’t Kill You: An Anthropological Exploration of Denmark’s New Warrior Generation.

The project scrutinises how Danish soldiers, through military training and war-zone deployment, are (trans)formed in part as professional practitioners and in part as human beings. The project sheds light in particular upon how Danish troops, in talkings and in doings, associate such (trans)formations with notions of ‘strength’ and ‘enrichment’. That is, rather than elaborating one-sidedly on the human costs of war-zone deployment, the purpose of the project is to illuminate how twentieth-first century soldiering seemingly involves the risk of a price to pay that is somehow intimately connected with the chance of a prize to win, and, how, by implication, this ‘gambling’ affects Danish soldiers and their civil-military entanglements, be that at home or on the front.

The project is based on ethnographic fieldwork inside Danish combat units before, during and after deployment (to Afghanistan). The project constitutes one of three subprojects within the collaborative research project Soldier and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. The project is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities and is scheduled to run from September 2012 to August 2015. The project is supervised by Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.

Teaching

Political Anthropology, fall 2014/spring 2015, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.

Civil-military Relations in War and Peace: Anthropological Perspectives, fall 2013, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.

CV

Education

2009: MSc in Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2002: E.MA in Human Rights and Democratisation, Interdepartmental Centre on Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples, University of Padua

Employment record

2012: Research Assistant, Soldier and Nation, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University

2011: Research Assistant, Spectres of Hatred, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen

2010-11: Research Assistant, The Denmark of War, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2003: Research Assistant, Impact Assessment in Rehabilitation of Torture Survivors, Research Department, International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT)

Research networks

2015(-): The Anthropology of Contemporary Civil-Military Entanglements Network

2014(-): Cross Field: Military Anthropology

2014(-): Network in Peace and Conflict Studies

2013(-): PACSA – Peace and Conflict Studies in Anthropology

2013(-): Conflict, Power and Politics

2012(-): Soldier and Society

Committee work

2013-2015: Member of the Department Council, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2012-2015: Deputy member of the Cooperation Committee, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen