Research
Conflicted spaces. From the global to the local, the American world is a memory war: a perpetual struggle over histories, legacies, destinies, and futures.
With a PhD in International Relations and Intellectual History, I have spent more than two decades exploring the mythologies and technologies, that compete to shape American wars, laws, lives, and landscapes.
Early on: American liberalisms, expansionisms, versions of democracy, and visions of science, citizenship, or critique: Book
Later: American conservatisms, anti-liberalisms, and techno-futurist visions of local self-governance and global world order: Book
In my current work, I am increasingly drawn to the politics of place; to the local sites and contexts, where American power is enacted and contested.
The Ends of the American World
Three geographies are of particular interest to me.
- California and the American West
- Greenland and the Arctic
- Near and outer Space
In these three connected sites, I explore:
The Ends of the American World; the visions and ambitions, that drive its actors and infrastructures forward. I also explore the myriad ways in which the rest of our world mirrors, absorbs, or co-produce these.
The Edges of the American world; the frontiers, expansions, inventions, constructions, and extractions that take place at its periphery, and cause conflict at its borders.
The Endings of the American world; the crises of its landscapes and communities and limits or dilemmas tied to its power and progress.
California Dreaming / Burning / Leaving
California has become the power centre of our world: while its technologies undergird us, its dreams and entertain-products shape us. At the same time, California is in crises: not just homelessness, a housing crisis, and exploding economic inequalities, but megadrought, wildfires, and a shortage of water, now eats away at its trust in state institutions.
Based on numerous field trips and research stays, I both write, teach, and talk, on how the crisis of ecology and the fragmentation of democracy into local micro-communities and utopias interlink in California.
Arctic Astropolitics
The Arctic is a future Astropolitical arena. With its ice, its minerals, and its ideal access to the skies, it is about to become both launch site, data storer, technological experimentarium, and ideological battleground, in a new race for space.
I am interested in the cosmic ambitions of Silicon Valley and in why much of that industry now views Greenland and the Arctic as a technological frontier, freedom zone, and experimentarium.
I am also interested in the policies, strategies, and imaginaries of Denmark and Europe. Arctic spaceports, ground stations, data servers, or minerals, as a route to both military dominance, digital sovereignty, and a profitable, space-based, green transition.
Above all, I am interested in the myriad geopolitical and ideological clashes that surrounds it all: In the local contexts, impacted landscapes, and empowered indigenous groups, which are crucial parts of the new Astropolitics too.
Artemis or Aurora?
What are the frameworks, that should be guiding our gaze at the stars? The race for space, and the questions or conflicts it gives rise to, are about mythology, not just technology.
Is space an industrial zone? An orbital economy? A new military frontier? A destiny, a colony, and coming home of humans? Or is it a sacred zone, a place of origins, and home of Gods? A gift, and Global Commons, where rocks have rights, and stars and skies belong to all, even those who have not yet been born?
I teach and talk about the legal and ethical debates, that are now being had around the rules and regulation of satellites, moon mining, space junk, geo-engineering, and dark sky pollution. Above all though, I do field work and contribute to dialogues, at the Arctic sites and spaceports, where competing cosmologies now clash in practice.
Far Right Visions of World Order
From 2017-2022, and with generous support from the Danish Velux Foundation, I led a transnational research project on the rise, roots, and ambitions, of the new global Right at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS): World of the Right - DIIS
The project unpacked the historical lineages, contemporary alliances, and shared imaginaries, between ethno-identitarians, radical conservatives, and far right Christian nationalist in the US, Europe, Israel and Russia:
Read my report (with Minda Holm)
It also explored the revival of a techno-fascist fascination with technology as vitality, supremacy, masculinity and survival, that spun novel links between Trump and Tech, autocrats and oligarks, Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley.
While the original project was completed in 2022, culminating in the book Geopolitical Amnesia and the Crisis of Liberal Memory, key findings frame my gaze and angles still. In particular, it frames my understanding of the imaginaries and drives, which now push much of Silicon Valley towards polar masculinities, frozen frontiers, and cosmic colonies.
On the wall. One of the most lasting themes in my research, has been the role and power of the public sphere in mass democracy. In a digital, mediatized world, some of the most crucial contestations take place not in boardrooms or parliaments, but in battles over wrong and right, blame and shame, that go from local to global in a click. The CEOs of California, like the companies and governments of Europe, ignore the lifeworlds of the local at their peril.
