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EMBodied EDucation (EMBED)

About the research unit

In the last four decades, we have been witnessing a turn in cognitive science, social sciences, and the humanities toward understanding learning, feeling and cognizing processes in general as situational embedded, embodied activities. For short: The turn toward enacted, embodied cognition. The EMBED unit harbors research focused on various aspects of embodiment with implications for education, learning and pedagogy.

Focus:

  • Embodied and enacted approaches to mind and learning, including radical enactivism
  • The phenomenological (embodied) tradition: impacts on pedagogy
  • Pragmatism (neo- and classical) transformations of educational thinking

Work:

Discussions, presentations of papers and ideas at our (virtual) meetings every 5-6 weeks. Collaborations on publications and conference presentations. We collectively presented at ECER in Yerevan 2022 and at the INPE conference at AU/DPU in Copenhagen 2022: https://conferences.au.dk/inpe2022. A summer university course ‘Enacting Education’ was offered at AU., and a Ph.D. course 'Embodied Education - 4Es cognition and emotion in education, pedagogy and didactics' (with Prof. Shaun Gallagher, Memphis University) took place autumn 2022. Cooperation on applications for research funding. 

The First International Conference on Embodied Education, hosted by AU/DPU and organized by EMBED, was held in Copenhagen 2024. The second one also takes place in Copenhagen, June 8-11 2026: https://conferences.au.dk/embodied-education-2026 CFP October 1st.

Participants

Name Job title Email Phone Building
Frølund, Sune Associate Professor Emeritus/Emerita sufr@edu.au.dk +4541589668 232
Funder, Anna Christine Daa Research Fellow anf@edu.au.dk A, 205a
Kauffmann, Oliver Associate Professor kauffmann@edu.au.dk +4593508040 A, 207b
Knudsen, Lars Emmerik Damgaard Associate Professor lada@edu.au.dk +4530226763 A, 307b
Winther-Lindqvist, Ditte Alexandra Professor diwi@edu.au.dk +4530139323 B, 243b
  • Camila Leporace, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • Dag Munk Lindemann, UCL University College, Denmark
  • Denis Francesconi, University of Vienna, Austria
  • Farida Youssef, The Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Egypt
  • Henri Pettersson, University of Oulu, Finland
  • Matthew CrippenPusan National University, South Korea & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
  • Ralph Ings Bannell, The Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Menno van Calcar, Erasmus University, the Netherlands
  • Tibor Solymosi, Susquehanna University, USA
  • Veli-Mikko Kauppi, University of Oulu, Finland
  • Surya Pasupuleti, University of Lapland (visiting scholar)