Sarah Bro Trasmundi will be giving her professorial inaugural lecture at the University of Southern Denmark on October 23rd, 2026 at the university’s Odense campus and it’s open to attendees. Registration deadline is October 20th.
Learn more here: https://event.sdu.dk/sarahbrotrasmundi
Topic: Cracks & Snow: Cognitive Ethnography in a Changing World
What can we learn about human thinking from moments when the ordinary no longer quite works? In this inaugural lecture, Sarah Bro Trasmundi traces a journey through cognitive ethnography; from studies of interaction, breakdown, imagination and changing practices to her current ethnographic work in Arctic and Subarctic environments.
Across these different settings runs a common fascination with the cracks: moments of tension, uncertainty and change in which normally unnoticed relations between perception, action, language, other people and the environment become visible.
Through encounters and collaborations with people living and working with changing ice, snow, animals, people, and landscapes, the lecture turns to a larger question: How do we develop expertise and act when the world we know begins to change in new ways? Combining cognitive ethnography with ecological thinking, it explores cognition not simply as something happening inside individuals, but as something we do with one another and with the worlds we inhabit.
The lecture is also an invitation to think about ethnography itself: as a way of being present, noticing, collaborating, and learning to think with the land and its people.
