In my research, I am interested in children’s communities across school and leisure contexts, with a particular focus on how the interplay between institutional conditions, children’s local cultures, their collective and individual forms of agency, and the emotional processes associated with these, shapes children’s possibilities to thrive.

In November 2025, I completed my PhD dissertation on cultures of care in schools, entitled Cultivating Cultures of Care within Communities of Children – Towards a Caring Alternative to Neoliberal Rationalities in Western Education. In this dissertation, I explore the conceptual, pedagogical and developmental potentials of recognising schoolchildren’s care for one another as a pedagogical aim in its own right. However, developing pedagogical practices in schools with this form of care as the normative aim presupposes a critical distancing from the neoliberal rationalities, ideals and governing principles that continue to shape education systems in Western capitalist societies. Based on a 15-month practice research collaboration with a schoolteacher and 21 children from the same Year 2 class, the dissertation presents what such a care-oriented pedagogy may look like within the context of the Danish public school system. Theoretically, the dissertation draws on different critical and sociocultural branches of psychology, including German-Scandinavian Critical Psychology, the Transformative Activist Stance and Cultural Psychology.

I am currently employed as a postdoc in the project INSPiRE: Interrupting Spirals of Vulnerability – Reconfiguring Collaboration Between PPR, School, and Family. In this project, I contribute to examining how collaboration between Educational Psychological Counselling (PPR), schools and families can be strengthened by integrating support for children experiencing difficulties with broader community-oriented initiatives and school development.