DIAS welcomes six visiting junior fellows in Applied Phenomenology

The fellows have academic backgrounds spanning philosophy, sport science, cognitive science, psychology, and sociology and will be visiting from six different countries: Australia, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom. During their one-month stay in May and June 2024, they will network with potential supervisors and collaborators across SDU; meet with research support staff across the faculties of humanities, health, and business and social science; and share their research with each other and the wider SDU community.

Among the six fellows, two received DIAS-MoCS fellowships to work jointly with researchers in the unit of Movement, Culture and Society at the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics.

Get in touch

If you are interested in meeting with any of the junior fellows, please reach out to them directly via email.

For general information about the recruitment program, please contact Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy and Fellow of Health Science.

Bio and research plan for the visiting junior fellows

Enara García (enareando@gmail.com) completed her PhD in Philosophy with the thesis, Participatory sense-making in psychotherapy, at the University of the Basque Country, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Granada, Spain. Her research focuses primarily on embodied cognition theories and mental health, with an emphasis on enactive approaches to psychotherapy. During her junior fellowship at SDU, she will develop a project on therapeutic atmospheres as part of a broader exploration of the relationship between health and the environment. The aim will be to examine how affective atmospheres perceived in clinical settings impact processes of psychotherapeutic change.

Thomas Netland  (thomas.netland@uia.no) holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Agder (UiA) in Kristiansand, Norway. His research has focused primarily on issues concerning the relation between phenomenological philosophy, cognitive science, and biology, mainly within the framework of enactive and embodied cognition. During his junior fellowship at SDU, he will develop a project that explores the potential of an interdisciplinary enactive-phenomenological approach to intoxication and addiction, contributing to foundational discussions in the philosophy and sciences of mind as well as clinical practice.

Sara Kim Hjortborg (sara-kim.hjortborg@mq.edu.au)holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where she now works as a postdoctoral researcher. Her research connects cognitive ecological theory to the areas of sports and martial arts. In her current research, she is investigating bodily practice in combat sports with a chief focus on coaching, skill learning, and female participation. During her junior fellowship at SDU, she will develop a project on women’s athletic experience of participating in combat sports. The project aims to uncover foundational phenomenological concepts of female embodiment in traditionally male-dominated sports to draw out nuances of what it is like to be a female sporting body.

Christopher Poppe (christopher.poppe@charite.de) completed his PhD in Biomedical Ethics at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Charité Berlin. As a clinical psychologist and medical ethicist, his interests are in the integration of phenomenological methods and empirical ethics of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and its side effects. Additionally, he has an interest in the ethics of psychedelic interventions at the end of life. During his junior fellowship at SDU, he will develop a project on phenomenological aspects of the subjective experience during psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which contribute to vulnerability of participants. Overall, he hopes this research will contribute to harm reduction of psychedelic treatments.

Ainhoa Suárez Gómez  (ainhoasuarezgomez@gmail.com)completed her PhD in Philosophy, as well as a Master's in Critical Theory and Contemporary Philosophy, at the University of Kingston in London. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she conducts research at the intersection of philosophy, neuroscience, and dance. During her junior fellowship at SDU, she will develop a project on applied phenomenological research on dance. Specifically, she aims to integrate various qualitative research methodologies using dancers’ and audiences’ experiences to contribute to current interdisciplinary studies on kinesthetic empathy.

Sebastian Raza-Mejia (slr75@cam.ac.uk) holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. His thesis proposes a framework to investigate how crises transform – for better or for worse – culture and institutions, as well as practical, biographical, and historical self-understanding. During his junior fellowship at SDU, he will develop a project that explores the genealogies of phenomenology in sociology beyond phenomenological sociology, as they have developed implicitly in economic sociology, political sociology, decolonial sociology, and cultural sociology.