Postdoctoral position: Diversifying Embodiment in Education: Overcoming Inequity in Embodied Learning in Danish Vocational Education and Beyond

Postdoctoral position: Diversifying Embodiment in Education: Overcoming Inequity in Embodied Learning in Danish Vocational Education and Beyond

The Danish School of Education (DPU) at the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, invites applications for a postdoctoral position within the research project Diversifying Embodiment in Education: Overcoming Inequity in Embodied Learning in Danish Vocational Education and Beyond, funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark.

This is a full-time (37 hours per week), fixed-term (24 months) postdoctoral position, starting on 1 January 2027 and ending on 31 December 2028. The position is based within the Department of Education Studies at DPU’s campus in Emdrup, although the successful applicant should expect some travel activity between the department’s sites in Aarhus and Copenhagen.

The Danish School of Education is committed to diversity and encourages all qualified applicants to apply, regardless of their personal background. Given the project’s empirical focus on educational settings in Denmark, applicants must be sufficiently proficient in the Danish language to conduct fieldwork and actively participate in these settings.

Research Context

The postdoctoral research will form part of the broader research project Diversifying Embodiment in Education: Overcoming Inequity in Embodied Learning in Danish Vocational Education and Beyond. The project addresses a key issue in contemporary education: how educational practices cultivate, recognise, and value certain bodies and sensory experiences in learning contexts while marginalising others, and how these processes contribute to educational inequities.

Combining perspectives from educational studies, anthropology, embodiment studies, and critical disability studies, the project examines how different bodies and sensoria (i.e., culturally shaped ways of sensing and engaging with the world) are formed and valued through the corporeal, social, and material interactions that shape embodied learning. Danish vocational education and training (VET) serves as the empirical case. Within VET, students move between classrooms, workshops, and workplaces as apprentices, developing skills through interactions with teachers, peers, colleagues, technologies, tools, and materials. The project’s methodology draws on ethnographic and sensory approaches to examine the corporeal, social, and material dynamics that shape embodied learning across four vocational programmes (to be selected in collaboration with the postdoctoral researcher).

The project comprises three subprojects. The postdoctoral researcher will collaborate with the Principal Investigator on one of these subprojects, examining interactions among students, teachers, and nonhuman actors within the four selected vocational programmes. In addition, the postdoctoral researcher will lead a second subproject focused on interactions among apprentices, workplace instructors, and nonhuman actors in workplace settings. Based on approximately three months of ethnographic fieldwork in workplaces associated with the four selected vocational programmes, this subproject will explore how instructors introduce new apprentices to embodied practices and perceptions of their future profession, and how they evaluate apprentices’ attempts to engage with these practices and perceptions. Particular attention will be paid to the role of nonhuman actors, such as materials, tools, assistive devices, and instructions, and to how apprentices and instructors interact with and through them.

The position offers a unique opportunity to contribute to emerging international debates on embodiment, diversity, and educational inequality, and to advancing innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of embodied learning.

Further information

Applicants are encouraged to contact project manager Maia Ebsen (Maie@edu.au.dk) for further

Read about the Department of Education Studies here.

Deadline 13. okt. 23:59 2026

Read the full text and apply online

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