Marianne Hedegaard

2020 PhD, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen

2018 Research exchange, University College London (UCL), Department of Anthropology

2016-2020 Ph.d.-fellow, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

2016 Research assistant, National Institute of Public Health

2015 Junior consultant at Gemeinschaft, an anthropological consulting firm

2015 Cand.scient.anth, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2012 BA Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

2011 Student exchange, Université Paris-Diderot, Paris

My PhD-dissertation Mindful Work. An Ethography of Mindfulness and the Sociality of Feeling in Danish Workplaces investigates the relationship between mental health, work-life, wellbeing and emotionality focusing on the influx of mindfulness interventions in contemporary Danish work life. My work is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in two companies focusing on how employees pursue mindfulness and the implications of such pursuits when carried out as part of bettering not only individual mental states but also corporate economies. 

With my project, I wish to contribute to current discussions on work life, mental health, subjectivity and affective labor. The main questions guiding my research are 1) How does a person ‘become mindful’? (Which social and embodied practices are involved in the enactment of the mindful person and the cultivation of 'good' emotions? What kind of subject is imagined in this process?) 2) What happens when the pursuit of mindfulness enters a corporate economy? (How are different values (economic, moral, social) entangled in and ascribed to mindfulness?)

The PhD was done as part of the international research project Buddhism, Business and Believers (BBB) founded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (FKK) and the Carlsberg Foundation. The BBB-project attends to the relationship between economy and religion with a particular focus on contemporary relations between business and Buddhism, and the way in which Buddhism mediates distinctions between virtue and value, spirituality and materiality, gifts and commodities. 

My earlier research includes long term fieldwork on embodied therapeutics in Rishikesh, India, studying yoga practices and ethical becoming among international tourists. 

• Culture and Social Analysis (masters programme Cross-Cultural Studies) 
• Cultural Translation (masters programme Cross-Cultural Studies)
• Qualitative methods and research-based teaching
• Organizational anthropology

• Therapeutic culture, contemplative practices, mindfulness, yoga, affect and emotionality, work life, Denmark, India, anthropology of the body, medical anthropology