The Faculty Administration

In this talk I will examine how communities mobilize to resist urban development and how these dynamics shape the future of cities. I’ll discuss the factors that drive opposition to change, such as housing costs, community identity, and the perceived impacts on local character. By understanding these motivations, we can gain insights into the persistent challenges urban planners and policymakers face in building cities that balance progress with preservation.About Martin Vinæs LarsenMartin Vinæs Larsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University.  His research focuses on understanding the politics of housing and local government. Martin was recently awarded a Semper Ardens: Accelerate Grant from the Carlsberg Foundation and a starting grant from the European Research Council to pursue this research. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics and the British Journal of Political Science. VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

Despite the temporal distance, Italy and Germany have presently begun to recognize their ethical “implication” (Rothberg 2019) into their crimes of colonialism. The revival of these vital but marginalized memories challenges the core of these countries’ national identities contradicting the singularity of the Holocaust in Germany and the amnesia and embellishment of colonialism prevailing in Italy. This seminar explores the idea that German and Italian authors of postcolonial fiction and memory activists are two types of “memory entrepreneurs” (Pollak 1993), who by different means make Germany’s and Italy’s colonial crimes “memorable” (Rigney 2021) in the public sphere.In the seminar, leading experts of postcolonial literature and memory activists will present key authors of German and Italian postcolonial literature and memory activism focussing on the “Colonialism Remembrance Concept for the city of Berlin” that contests problematic urban spaces. Ultimately, the seminar will open a discussion about possible approaches to transnational and interdisciplinary research into colonialism.Sign up and programme: event.sdu.dk/colonialliteratureEveryone is welcome! For questions please contact Jessica Ortner jort@sdu.dk.

The brain relies on a diverse group of cells called GABAergic interneurons to maintain balance and regulate communication between neurons. These specialized cells play a crucial role in brain function, and when they don’t work properly, they have been linked to epilepsy and cognitive deficits in many neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.Despite their importance, we are only beginning to understand how these cells develop, connect, and adapt. In this talk, I will share insights from our research on how interneurons form, how their numbers are controlled, and how they integrate into brain circuits to support healthy function.About Oscar MarínOscar Marín is a Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders and the Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London. He graduated in Biology and obtained a PhD in Neuroscience from Universidad Complutense in Madrid (Spain), followed by postdoctoral training at UCSF (USA). He was a group leader at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante (Spain) before joining King’s in 2014. In 2005, he was selected as one of the founding members of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council, where he served until 2010. He is a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Oscar is known for his discoveries concerning the development of the cerebral cortex, with special reference to the development of inhibitory interneurons. His discoveries have provided a novel conceptual paradigm that illuminates current research on the origin of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. He serves on several editorial and advisory boards and has received multiple prizes, including the Rey Jaime I Award for Basic Research (2011), Prix Roger de Spoelberch (2014), the Cajal Medal from the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences (2017), the ECNP Neuropsychopharmacology Award (2023), and the FENS-EJN Award (2024).VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

Militaries increasingly utilise AI technologies (AIT) for decision support and combat operations. These developments point in the direction of a potential comprehensive integration of AIT into military decision-making processes. This makes it likely for such processes to be characterised by many situations of human-machine interaction, often described by militaries as human-machine teaming. Practices of human-machine interaction have the potential to profoundly alter the quality of human agency, understood as the ability to make choices and act, in warfare. Specifically, these practices shape forms of distributed agency in between humans and AIT. Current (Western) military thinking underestimates the comprehensive significance of human-AIT interaction patterns – and how these shape human decision-making spaces and the exercise of human agency.Such thinking takes human personnel and AIT as distinct, fundamentally complementary entities. In other words, human-AIT teaming allows militaries to benefit from the ‘best of both worlds’. But making decisions with AIT shapes and affects human decision-making spaces in both intentional and non-intentional ways. It follows that instances of human-AIT interaction can be associated with advantageous but also adverse consequences for the exercise of human agency. Distributed agency therefore needs to be recognised as raising foundational operational, ethical-normative, and legal challenges.About Ingvild BodeIngvild Bode is Professor of International Politics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). She is also Director of the Center for War Studies at SDU. Ingvild is the Principal Investigator of two large externally funded research projects: the AutoNorms project (funded by the European Research Council) investigating how practices related to autonomous weapon systems change international norms, and the HuMach project (funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark) that examines how interacting with AI technologies changes the exercise of human agency in warfare. Ingvild is an expert member of the Global Commission on Responsible AI in the Military Domain (GC REAIM). Previously, Ingvild served as Chair of the IEEE Research Group on Issues of AI and Autonomy for Defense Systems. Ingvild’s research focuses on processes of normative and policy change, especially with regard to the use of force and AI governance. Her work has been published with the European Journal of International Relations, Ethics and Information Technology, Review of International Studies, Global Studies Quarterly, and other journals. Ingvild’s most recent book entitled Autonomous Weapons and International Norms (co-authored with Hendrik Huelss) was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022. VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

There is increasing evidence that most scientific research does not meet standards of reproducibility and transparency. Concurrently, there are many efforts to improve the reproducibility, transparency, and eventually the credibility and usefulness of scientific evidence. Peer review is a central mechanism for vetting, correcting, and improving science. However, it has met with a broadening range of challenges, as 7 million papers are published every year, publication systems are over-commercialized, and reviewers are overfatigued. Many scholars argue that research assessment in general, if done properly for individuals and institutions, can be a major tool for enhancing research design, conduct, and outcomes. A central quest is whether proper incentives are provided and reinforced. Many ideas are proposed for changing peer review and research assessment, but few of them have solid evidence.About John P.A. IoannidisJohn P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc was born in New York City and raised in Athens, Greece. He trained at Athens College, University of Athens (medicine and DSc in biopathology), Harvard and Tufts (internal medicine, infectious diseases), and then held positions at NIH, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Harvard, Imperial College, and University of Ioannina. He moved to Stanford in 2010 where he is Professor of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Heath, and (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science. He launched the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) in 2013. He has served as President of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology and of the Association of American Physicians, as editorial board member of many leading journals and as Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. He has been elected to many honorific academies and has received 6 honorary doctoral degrees and many awards. He is the author of ten literary books, three of them shortlisted for best book of the year Anagnostis awards in Greece. His work aims to improve research methods and practices and to enhance approaches to integrating information and generating reliable evidence. VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

The democratic triumphalism of the 1990s has given way to a sense that democracy is in crisis – whether because it’s been hijacked by woke metropolitan elites, or because it’s being assailed by populist masses. In this context it’s arguably unhelpful to proceed from the premise that the meaning of democracy had been established, but is now failing because of bad actors (which is not to say that there aren’t bad actors around). To free our imaginations to find new ways forward, we should start by recognising that the meanings of democracy have always been contested, that predominant meanings have changed over time (and varied over space), and that democratic projects have often run into difficulties and had to be rethought. In this lecture I will draw on the findings of a long-running historical research project, ‘Re-imagining democracy’, which looks at the circumstances in which the ancient concept of democracy was ‘re-imagined’ for modern circumstances, from the era of the American and French revolutions. The project spans Europe and both Americas, focussing on a century in which the fortunes of the word were especially changeable and varied. I will try to give a flavour of how and why its meanings and associations varied and changed.About Joanna Innes Joanna Innes is Professor (emeritus) of Modern History at the University of Oxford. She was educated in Britain and the United States, and first employed at Oxford in 1982. Her early research focussed on social policy-making in England, often in a larger European context, initially focussing especially on punishment and poverty. She is now working on the emergence of new topics on the British parliamentary agenda in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including health, education and working conditions. Her work focusses especially on policy-making processes, in a period in which the British government largely left the initiative to groups outside Parliament. The effect was that policy-making was fairly participatory, and the subject of public debate. Some of this work is collected in her volume Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Britain 1688-1800 (2009). For the past twenty years she has also collaborated with Mark Philp on an international project, Re-imagining Democracy (www.re-imaginingdemocracy.com ). This explores how the ancient concept of democracy was adapted to conceptualise modern problems and opportunities. The project has given rise to three collections of essays (2013, 2018, 2023 – details on the website).  A fourth and final volume, focussing on ‘central and northern Europe’ (including Nordic countries) is currently in train.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.