Comparative Culture Studies (CCCS)

CCCS has as its raison d’être to strengthen the department’s interregional and cross-cultural outlook by facilitating analyses of society and culture in a comparative and global perspective.

CCCS advances ethnographical fieldwork at particular locales, while research and teaching always addresses and engages broader theoretical and thematic interests.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on particular locales, CCCS advances comparative and global perspectives across the department’s broad regional and geographic scope and does so uniquely in both research and in teaching electives. Our focus on putting state of the art research in conversation with teaching brings vibrancy to the research center.

Head of cluster

A main ambition of CCCS is from ethnographical fieldwork to contribute with critical, generous, and curious edge to international research on the themes of migration, materiality, religion, cultural analysis, media, storytelling and historicity.

Over the years, CCCS has attracted major grants from The Independent Research Council Denmark, The Strategic Research Council, the Velux Foundation, the Novo Nordic Foundation, the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), and the European Research Council (ERC). CCCS continuously strive to attract and nurture young and upcoming scholars.

Research

CCCS has as its goal to use the analytical potential there exist in the variaties and similarities in the ways humans organize themselves socially and create meaning in their cultural worlds. The core area of CCCS is accordingly the study of culture and society in a comparative and global perspective.

The regions that we have ethnographic expertise in numbers India, Ukraine, and Central Asia, as well as Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Syria.

From the basis of long-term ethnographical fieldwork our research to contributes to international debates on the themes of migration, materiality, religion, cultural analysis, media, storytelling and historicity.

Teaching

A central component of CCCS is our teaching. Our staff is specialized in teaching electives on both BA and MA level. All courses offered at CCCS are based on our staff having conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork themselves and these key insights are used as critical points of departure in our teaching.

CCCS offers courses in:

  • Ethnography and qualitative methods
  • Classical theories of culture and society
  • Cultural analysis
  • History, myth and narration
  • Migration, politics, and social change
  • Internship

For electives at CCCS, see: Electives in Comparative Culture Studies. 

CCCS centre ethos

At CCCS, we strive to create the best possible working environment by underscoring the value of critical, curious, and generous engagement. We believe that research is a collaborative enterprise, where we always need to expand the perimeters of our conversations, research topics, partners, and networks.

At CCCS, this impacts on the priority we give to connect our research to our teaching. We strive to engage with real-world problems and explore these in light of comparative, ethnographic research agendas. The impetus is to facilitate new understandings and make new connections, where both such real-world problems as well as our theoretical understanding may grow and cross-fertilize each other.

As part of our ethos we strive to setup seminars, workshops, and guest lectures, which bring students, junior and senior scholars together, and also stays attuned to new opportunities for collaboration between academia, stakeholders and practitioners.

Publications

CCCS contributes to state of the art conversations in ethnography, anthropology and cultural analysis and has over the last few years put significant publications out.

2024

Nina Grønlykke Mollerup, Meri Kytö and Niamh Ní Bhroin (2024) Sensory Media Anthropology

2023

Holst, Birgitte & Charlotte Al-Khalili, eds. (2023): Displaced Conflict. Special section of Conflict and Society 9 (1)

Marsden, Magnus and Vera Skvirskaja 2023 Stadt und Transnationalität in Zentralasien. Neuer und Alter Kosmopolitismus als Medium regionaler und globaler Volksdiplomatie (City and Transnationality in Central Asia. New and Old Cosmopolitanism as a Medium of Regional and Global People's Diplomacy), Zentralasien-Analysen/Central Asia Analyses, 139. DOI: 10.31205/ZA.157.01.

Skvirskaja, Vera 2023 The Black Sea ‘Moments’ and ‘Coexistence on the Move’ in Transit. In A Sea of Transience. Poetics, Politics and Aesthetics along the Black Sea Coast. Khalvashi, T. & Frederiksen, M. D. (eds.). New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Introduction: Layers of Spatial Rupture among Syrians in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Syria
Al-Khalili, C. & Holst, Birgitte Stampe, 2023, In: Conflict and Society: Advances in Research. 9, 1

Family Matters in Conflict: Displacement and the Formulation of Politics among Syrians in Lebanon and Turkey
Holst, Birgitte Stampe, 2023, In: Conflict and Society: Advances in Research. 9, 1

2022

Bandak, A. (2022) Exemplary Life: Modelling Sainhood in Christian Syria. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Bandak, A. & Paul Anderson, eds. (2022) Urgency and Imminence: The Politics of the Very Near Future, special issue of Social Anthropology vol.30(4).

Bandak, Andreas and Simon Stjernholm (2022) Limits, Genealogies, and Openings. Introductory Remarks on Engaging Religion, Religion and Society vol.13(1)

Bandak, A. & Simon Stjernholm, eds. (in press, 2022) Engaging Religion, special issue of Religion and Society vol.13.

Holst, Birgitte Stampe On the Inside: Shatila Camp as a Space of Respite for Syrian Refugees, Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 35, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 1311–1326, 

Puri, S. S. (2022) Beyond the Bazar. Interconnecting Indian Markets. Journal of
Cultural Economy. E-publication ahead of print.

2021

Bandak, A., H. Henkel, C. Anbert & K. Schyberg, eds. Bøn | Tidsskriftet Antropologi Nr. 84 (2021).

Bandak, A., ed. (2021) The Social Life of Prayer: Anthropological Engagements with Christian Practice. New York: Routledge.

Bandak, A. & S. Coleman, eds. (2021) Different Repetitions: Anthropological Engagements with Figures of Return, Recurrence and Redundancy. New York: Routledge.

Crone, Christine (forthcoming), “Re-narrating the Past, Producing the Present and Unlocking the Future: Haris al-Quds, a TV-dramatization of ‘Post-war’ Syria”, Middle East Critique.

Puri, S. S. (2021) Gambling on the Indian Monsoon. Geohumanities 7(1), 73-130.

Puri, S. S. (2021). Waiting for Accelerations. Speculation on Guar Beans in the Indian Desert. History and Anthropology 32 (1), 18-31.

16 Sept. 2026, 19:00-21:00

Copenhagen Conversations with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Didier Fassin

Together with the National Museum of Denmark ToRS is organising the conversation series Copenhagen Conversations. Next iteration will be with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University, and Didier Fassin, École des hautes études en sciences sociale.


12 Apr. 2026, 16:00-18:00

Copenhagen Conversations with Lea Ypi and Lisa Wedeen

Together with the National Museum of Denmark, associate professor Andreas Bandak has launched the conversation series Copenhagen Conversations – this time with Lea Ypi and Lisa Wedeen.


10 Apr. 2026, 13:30-15:00

The cruel optimism of the welfare state and its bordering practices

Guest lecture by Synnøve Bendixsen, professor in Social Anthropology at University of Bergen.


11 Dec. 2025, 15:00-16:30

Zionism is Racism from the Standpoint of its Victims

Guest Lecture by Professor Max Weiss (Princeton University).


17 Sept. 2025, 19:00-21:00

Copenhagen Conversations

Together with the National Museum of Denmark, associate professor Andreas Bandak has launched the conversation series Copenhagen Conversations - this time with Jane Bennett and Tim Ingold.


11 Sept. 2025, 14:00-15:30

Timed Death and Q&A w/ Omar Al Farouq

Syrian Doc Days screening.


11 June 2025, 10:00-16:00

Thoughts and lines: Ethnographic drawing, graphic novels and analytical potentials

EASA Sensory Media Network workshop.


1 Apr. 2025, 13:30-15:00

Israeli Visual Politics and Digital Archives in a Time of Genocide

Lecture with Rebecca L. Stein (Duke University).


1 Apr. 2025, 10:30-12:00

Israeli visual politics

Closed workshop with Rebecca L. Stein (Duke University).


19 Mar. 2025, 10:00-15:30

Workshop on Digital Methods & Ethics in Open Source Investigation

Workshop on 19 March 2025 with Al Jaloud (PAX Memoria) and Jeff Deutch (Pax Memoria/Centre for Internet and Human Rights).


21 Nov. 2024, 14:30-16:00

Ancestors or property? Rights to the image and the continued enslavement through archives

Talk with Tamara Lanier (joining online).


12 Sept. - 14 Sept. 2024

Perpetrator images as documentary, evidentiary, and affective

Two-day workshop.


14 May - 17 May 2024

Syrian Images Beyond the Archive

The research project Archiving the Future: Recollections of Syria in War and Peace and the Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh hope to foster a conversation beyond traditional research avenues that engages the Danish public in discussions on topics such as loss, exile, and accountability in a Syrian context.


5 Dec. 2023, 14:00-15:30

Revolutions aesthetic: A cultural history of Ba'thist Syria

Guest Lecture by Max Weiss.


4 Dec. 2023, 10:00-15:00

‘Afterlife’ workshop

Considering the afterlife of constellations of places, people and things can reveal much about politics, aspirations, and well-being in this life.


30 Oct. 2023, 19:00-20:30

Copenhagen Conversations – On Time

Talk with anthropologist Joel Robbins, Cambridge, and historian Francois Hartog, EHESS, Paris.


1 June 2023, 14:00-15:30

Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, Language, and Patriarchy in Preconflict Aleppo

Guest lecture with Paul Anderson, University of Cambridge