The 1^st of August 2020 Aja Smith joins the research project Embodying Academia with Line Dalsgård as PI.

Aja’s research has revolved around multispecies anthropology, professional training and personal development, contemporary spirituality and methodology, and has mainly been based in Denmark. At AU she will form part of the AUFF NOVA funded project Embodying Academia, in a research group comprised of Joe Dumit, Kathleen Stewart, Andreas Roepstorff, Donna Hurford and with Line Dalsgård as PI. During the Autumn 2020 she shall be based at IMC, and in the Spring 2021 at the Anthropology Department.

The project Embodying Academia moves from the premise that intellectual creativity draws on underexplored kinesthetic and affective dexterities that can be recognized, trained and refined through alternative learning methodologies and in communities of practice. As such the project sets out to 1) explore existing bodily practices which anthropologist engage when in the field and during analysis and 2) to experiment with alternative methodologies for unlocking the creative and intellectual potential held in these bodies. Aja shall both conduct fieldwork and be involved in the experiments, as facilitator and researcher, where she shall draw on her experience working with horse-assisted learning approaches and meditation practices.

Aja joins AU from a post.doc. position at the University of Southern Denmark where she also obtained her Ph.D. in 2017. Her Ph.D. explored the phenomena of horse assisted leadership training, and she has since studied and been trained in mindfulness, meditation and spiritual practices in Denmark as post.doc. on the project Optimization: the self as a laboratory, funded by the Danish Research Council.Before coming to SDU, Aja taught at respectively Monash University and Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and at the Department of Anthropology, Copenhagen University where she had also earned her BA and MA. Aja has worked as a chief researcher on two research projects pertaining to the role of interdisciplinarity at the Faculty of Arts at Monash University and has experience working as a junior researcher at two different international market research agencies. 

Profile (SDU)

Profile (AU)