My name is Sarah Bro Trasmundi, and I am a Professor at the University of Southern Denmark working at the intersection of cognitive ethnography, social anthropology, and ecological approaches to human perception and cognition.
My research asks a deceptively simple question: How do people learn to perceive what matters in the environments in which they live and act? Increasingly, I explore this question through long-term ethnographic research in Arctic communities, particularly in Northwest Greenland and Northern Scandinavia.
My current fieldwork in Uummannaq, focuses on expertise related to sea ice and on what happens when an environment that people have known intimately for generations begins to change. Experienced hunters, fishers and other local residents perceive differences in ice, snow, weather and movement that are largely invisible to an outsider. But climate change is altering some of the regularities on which this expertise has historically relied. I am interested in how people notice these changes, recalibrate their perception and practices, share observations with others, and develop new ways of acting under increasingly uncertain conditions.
Methodologically, I work with cognitive ethnography, combining long-term engagement in the field with video, interviews, observations and detailed analysis of naturally occurring activity. I am especially interested in knowledge that cannot easily be separated from bodies, places, materials, language and social relationships.
What fascinates me about Arctic research is precisely this close relationship between cognition and environment. Sea ice, for instance, is not simply a backdrop to human life. In places such as Uummannaq, it can be a route, meeting place, hunting and fishing ground, and material condition for maintaining relationships across the fjord. Understanding what happens when the ice changes therefore also means understanding changes in perception, expertise, social life and possibilities for action.
My broader ambition is to contribute to a science of human expertise that takes seriously the environments in which knowledge develops; and the people whose lives and experience make that knowledge possible.
Contact: sarbro@sdu.dk
Affiliation: Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark https://event.sdu.dk/sarahbrotrasmundi
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.dk/citations?hl=da&user=tXi4NfgAAAAJ&view_op=list_works
University profile: https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/da/persons/sarbro/
Some publications:
Steffensen, S.V. and Trasmundi, S. B. (In press). Languaging ice ecolinguistics, cognitive ecology, and the perception of climate change in the Arctic. In the special issue: “Ecolinguistics”. Journal of World Languages.
Trasmundi, S. B. (2026) Action in perception? When perception and action slip out of alignment in Arctic environments. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (open access) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-026-10190-y
Baggs, E., Trasmundi, S. B., and Steffensen, S.V. (2026) Perceptual psychology and climate action: three theoretical challenges. (pre-print version available) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399635344_Perceptual_psychology_and_climate_action_three_theoretical_challenges
