Justine Grøn­bæk Pors

I study trans­form­a­tions of wel­fare so­ci­ety in­clud­ing re­forms and changes to pub­lic policy. How do new policy trends cre­ate new con­di­tions of pub­lic man­age­ment and or­gan­ising? How do new re­forms change the roles of and re­la­tion­ships between politi­cians, pub­lic ser­vants, wel­fare pro­fes­sion­als and cit­izens?

With a point of de­par­ture in the his­tory of edu­ca­tion and in con­tem­por­ary edu­ca­tion­al or­gan­isa­tions and prac­tices, I ex­plore ques­tions about edu­ca­tion­al work, edu­ca­tion­al pur­poses, and the form­a­tion of young people’s as­pir­a­tions.

I am in­ter­ested in how pasts and fu­tures mat­ter and hold agency in the present. Through the­or­et­ic­al and em­pir­ic­al stud­ies, I have de­veloped a non-lin­ear the­ory of time, what I call in­her­ited time. This links ques­tions about time to ques­tions about polit­ics and eth­ics of work and or­gan­iz­ing.

Biod­iversity loss has be­come a con­cern in pub­lic gov­ernance and wild nature is in­creas­ingly con­sidered an im­port­ant as­pect of a healthy wel­fare so­ci­ety. I study the chal­lenges, con­flicts, and ne­go­ti­ations of hu­man-nature re­la­tion­ships in na­tion­al policy and loc­al im­ple­ment­a­tion.

I strive to de­vel­op new meth­od­o­lo­gies apt to cap­ture those things that are of­ten left out of qual­it­at­ive ana­lys­is such as af­fect, si­lence, ab­sence, and ghosts. Spe­cific­ally, in my work on haunt­ing and or­gan­iz­a­tion­al ghosts, I have de­veloped af­fect­ive meth­od­o­lo­gies and a haunto­lo­gic­al ap­proach to his­tory and his­tory-writ­ing.