Faculty of Humanities

Freedom of Movement and Brain Drain:  A Moral DebateThe free cross-border movement of people, when it occurs, is in many respects a great social achievement and a great individual opportunity. Free movement generally produces large individual earnings boosts, and it can be a major contributor to reducing individual and global poverty. But it also contains mechanisms whereby typically richer destination countries appear to exploit the typically poorer origin countries who have invested in the human capital of the migrants. How to think about this hidden cost of free movement and the normative implications of brain drain? Essex University political theorist Paul Bou-Habib will sketch the issues based on his forthcoming OUP book Brain Drain: A Moral Assessment. DIAS Chair Pieter Vanhuysse will then chair a roundtable discussion with three political theorists: Paul Bou-Habib, Lars Tønder (SDU, Politics), and Lasse Nielsen (SDU, Humanities). Paul Bou-Habib is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. His research interests are in the history of political philosophy and contemporary political philosophy. He has written articles on climate change, demography and politics. He is currently writing a book entitled The Brain Drain: A Moral Assessment, which explores the extent to which skilled emigrants and the host states they relocate to owe duties to people in their home states. This Wild Wednesday is organized by DIAS Chair Pieter Vanhuysse.

There is an increasing demand for critical metals and rare earth elements for production of electronics, technological advancements and the green transition. This has intensified international competition for known terrestrial resources and renewed interest inmining mineral resources on the deep seabed, including polymetallic nodules, seafloor massive sulfides and cobal-rich crusts. However, potential exploitation of these resources raises complex environmental, legal and geopolitical questions.This session will feature three presentations addressing the geological and biological context of deep-sea mineral resources, current scientific understanding of environmental impacts, and the legal and governance challenges associated with potential mining activities. The three 15 min presentations will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with the audience.   Karl Attard, University of Southern Denmark, DIAS, DK - The perspectives of deep-sea mining Bryan O’Malley, Eckerd College, Florida, USA (online) - Deep-Sea Mining Impacts and Recovery: Immediate, Annual, and Decadal Responses of Benthic Ecosystems Ole Larsen, Danish Hydraulic Institute, DK - Environmental impact assessment and governance challenges in deep-sea mining  Q&A and discussion facilitated by Ronnie (15-20 min)

We look at human capital as one of the quiet engines behind the rise of capitalism. Capitalism did not grow solely from markets or technology, but from societies that found ways to build, organise, and reward skill. We explore how historians and economists measure human capital across time, how literacy, schooling, training, and mobility reshaped labour markets, and how these long-run changes underpinned the shift to modern capitalist economies. By placing Denmark alongside other European cases, we will trace how different human-capital regimes contributed to divergent paths of development. Denmark’s blend of early mass education, civic culture, and later vocational and tertiary expansion offers a revealing window into how capitalism takes root, adapts, and endures. Keynotes and Panel Debate: The Educational Engine of Capitalism? DIAS Seminar Room https://clients.mapsindoors.com/sdu/573f26e4bc1f571b08094312/details/e425d304749e408282ae100e13:00-13:05       Welcome, Paul Sharp, DIAS/SDU13:05-13:35       Francesco Cinnirella, University of Bergamo, “Education, Technological Progress, and the Industrial Revolution”13:35-14:05       Gregory Clark, DIAS/SDU, “The Causal Effect of Education in Industrial Revolution England 1754-1889”14:05-14:35       Patrick Wallis, LSE, “Human capital and occupational skills in development”14:35-15:00       Panel discussion with Cinnirella, Clark & Wallis

The inability to spend beyond one's means -- the need to live within one's budget -- is economics' most fundamental law. It applies to entire economies as well as their household and government sectors. Official debt is presumed to signal government budget violations. But official debt measures only those obligations governments choose to label 'official'. Moreover, this labeling choice has no basis in economic science, whose equations don't direct their description.Thus, official debt is a matter of linguistics, not economics. Any country's past, present, and future fiscal policy can be relabeled to produce any past, present, and future values of official debt. In short, government debt is no better grounded in reality than the emperor's new clothes. If official debt is a number in search of a concept, how should we assess a country's fiscal sustainability? Economics' answer is the fiscal gap -- the imbalance in the government's intertemporal budget. The US fiscal gap now exceeds 7 percent of annual GDP.Closing the gap requires either raising all taxes by 26 percent or cutting all non-interest spending by 23 percent -- on an immediate and permanent basis. Such adjustments are politically infeasible. What can work is radical reform of healthcare, Social Security, taxes, and welfare.

Want to know what is going on behind the scenes at IMADA?Come and join us for 2 x 20 min. inspiring talks while you enjoy a free “casual after-work” beer with your fellow student, colleague or teacher.This time Postdoc Serhii Petrovychi (Topic: From Classroom to Living Lab: Rethinking STEM Learning through Sustainability Projects) and Associate Professor Fabian Haiden (Topic: Counting Problems: from Billiards to Quantum States) will each spend 20 minutes each telling you about their current research.

The Russian offensive against Ukraine that began in February 2022 signaled the end of a three-decade-long period of great-power peace and the beginning of an era marked by a new Cold War or even resurrecting the possibility of a hot war. China’s goal of achieving global hegemony in the coming decades, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), asymmetric technological superiority, and the militarization of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, is generating conflict, though of a different kind than that seen during the Cold War. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a crusade against the international economic and political order by imposing very high tariffs on friends and foes alike in the hope of obtaining primacy. All the great powers are seeking “spheres of influence,” undercutting norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity. How do resurgent great-power conflicts affect peace and peaceful change in regions such as Europe, Asia, and the Middle East? What new tools do we need to explain patterns of regional order and the impact of systemic rivalries on these orders and vice versa? BioT.V. Paul is Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He served as the President of International Studies Association (ISA) for 2016-17. He is the Founding Director of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC) and a Distinguished Scholar at Asia-Pacific Foundation, Canada. Paul is the author or editor of 24 books, co-editor of 6 special journal issues, and author of over 90 scholarly articles/book chapters in the fields of International Relations, Peace & Peaceful Change, International Security, and South Asia. He is the author of the books: The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi (Oxford University Press, 2024); Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era (Yale University Press, 2018); The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2013); Globalization and the National Security State (with N. Ripsman, Oxford University Press, 2010); The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009); India in the World Order: Searching for Major Power Status (with B.R. Nayar Cambridge University Press, 2002); Power versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); and Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (Cambridge University Press, 1994).  He is the lead editor of the Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2021). Paul currently serves as the editor of the Georgetown University Press book series: South Asia in World Affairs. The several awards he has received include: the inaugural Kim Dae-jung Award by the International Political Science Association (IPSA), 2025 (named after former South Korean President and Nobel Laureate for Peace); the 2024 International Studies Association (ISA)-Canada Distinguished Scholar Award and the 2025 ISA-International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. For more, see: www.tvpaul.com

What if communication were not just something humans do, but a process through which all kinds of beings—molecules, machines, institutions, emotions, organisms, laws, and people—come to express themselves and make a difference? Drawing on my forthcoming book, “Thinking the World Communicatively: An Exploration of the More or Less,” this talk introduces a way of approaching reality that transcends the traditional boundaries between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I propose that to think communicatively is to examine how relations allow phenomena to manifest themselves more or less in the world. Communication, in this broad sense, encompasses electromagnetic radiation warming our skin, neurons firing, procedures shaping institutional conduct, technologies guiding attention, and people coordinating with one another. Instead of reducing the world to discourse or matter, this communicative ontology highlights how beings both act and “pass through” others. It offers scientists, scholars, and students an anti-reductionist framework for understanding truth, objectivity, materiality, agency, and power across domains, from social interaction to quantum mechanics.BiographyFrançois Cooren (PhD, Université de Montréal, 1996) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Université de Montréal, Canada. His research focuses on organizational communication, language and social interaction, as well as communication theory. He is the Past President of the International Communication Association (ICA, 2010–2011), the Past President of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA, 2012–2021), and former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Communication Theory (2005–2008). He was elected ICA Fellow in 2013, NCA (National Communication Association) Distinguished Scholar in 2017, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2024. He published 16 books (four as an author or co-author and twelve as an editor or co-editor) and authored close to 100 peer-reviewed articles and more than 60 book chapters. He is one of the founding members of what is now known as the Montreal School of Organizational Communication, a primary branch of the Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO) approach.

Modern capitalism is often associated with faceless institutional investors and dispersed ownership, but globally family ownership is, by far, the most common form of ownership. But what is “family capitalism”, and how are family businesses and their varieties best studied and understood? Program: Jeppe Nevers (SDU): IntroductionMorten Bennedsen (Copenhagen): The state of economic research on family businessesAndrew Popp (CBS): Family capitalism in business historyKristoffer Jensen (Grundfos): The use of history in family businessesLouise Skyggebjerg & Anders Ravn Sørensen (CBS): Grønbech – a family-owned business through 200 yearsPanel (chair: Paul Sharp)

About the talk:Our ability to shape materials at the nanoscale opens new possibilities for, among other things, rapid diagnostics and smart medication. I will give examples from our research that encompass both new discoveries and startup stories.In the treatment of leukemia and sepsis, there is a need for therapeutic monitoring of drug concentrations in patients’ blood. Silicon structures at the nanometer scale can have surprising optical properties. For example, they can enhance the so-called Raman scattering more than a million times. This effect can be used to perform very sensitive measurements of small molecules in a complex blood sample.Our vision is that in the future we can ‘swallow our doctor’. Ingestible capsules can be made smart so that they can eventually measure, take samples, and perform local repairs/medication in the stomach and intestines. Can this be done without also having to swallow a battery, and how do you take a sample from the intestines?About the speaker:Anja Boisen is head of section and professor at the Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark. Her research group focuses on the development and application of nano-sensors, energy harvesting in the body, and ingestible devices for sensing, sampling, and delivery. Anja is a cofounder of several companies and is, among others, a member of the board of the Leo Foundation, the Danish Academy of the Technical Sciences, and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. She has been awarded the largest research prize in Denmark, the Villum Kann Rasmussen Award, and the Order of Dannebrog by Her Majesty the Queen of Denmark.

Abstract: Since the second World War, we have entered the era of ‘Big Science’. Research is now often conducted at a scale well beyond of what one individual, or even one research lab can manage. Such large experiments tend to require financial support from one or more government agencies over extended periods of time—often even several decades. Because of this increase in costs, scientists have had to change how they decide what experiments to pursue, since only a small number of large-scale experiments will be funded at any given time, and what experiments are pursued can determine the future of scientific research. In this talk, I want to give a start at investigating what makes an experiment more worthy to pursue compared to other experiments, especially in the era of Big Science. Short Bio: My primary interests lie in history and philosophy of cosmology and astrophysics, and general philosophy of science. I received my PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020, before joining the philosophy department at Stockholm University. In 2025, I received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for a project on collective decision-making on future large-scale experiments in cosmology and astrophysics. My Cambridge Element, Philosophy of Cosmology and Astrophysics, was published in 2025.

Experts worry that support and tolerance for political violence and violent extremist actors is on the rise in the United States.  Is this true?  If so, what might explain why more Americans view political violence to be acceptable? Finally, what can be done to stem the tide of support for political violence in the U.S. and perhaps elsewhere.  In this lecture I present some of my findings over several years of public opinion research on political violence in the United StatesJames A. Piazza is a Liberal Arts professor of Political Science whose research focuses on terrorism, political violence, and violent extremism in the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from New York University, an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. in Political Science from Loyola University Chicago. Piazza’s work examines how democratic processes, demographic change, and extremist ideologies shape patterns of political violence. His research has been published in leading journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Security Studies, and Political Research Quarterly, and he is widely recognized for his comparative studies of left‑wing, right‑wing, and Islamist extremism.