Kathrine Vitus

Focusing on children’s and young people’s everyday life and social conditions in various political, welfare-institutional, and local contexts, she investigates social dynamics of subjectification and identification, inclusion and exclusion, affect and emotions, pleasure and desire, power and resistance; and how these dynamics unfold in the intersection between gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and social class.

Specific projects have addressed subjective experiences and consequences of Danish immigration and integration policy frameworks among asylum-seeking children and their families during their waiting period, newly arrived refugee adolescents transitioning to adulthood, and municipal and volunteer frontline professionals who implement these policies and handle the consequences. Other projects have explored school children´s and college students’ experiences with and practices of health, well-being, and pleasure in everyday life; minority ethnic youths’ experiences with social exclusion and their fantasies about and strategies for self-creation and resistance; and the politically, discursively and institutionally framed welfare-professional approaches in social work with various groups of vulnerable youth, including approaches focussing on cross-sectional co-creation, user participation, and relational work.

Kathrine applies qualitative ethnographic, participatory, and creative methods, including fieldwork, interviews and focus group interviews, collective memory work, and participant-produced photographs and videos.

Kathrine Vitus obtained her PhD in 2005 at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. From 2005-2014, she was a researcher and senior researcher at SFI, from 2014-2016 an associate professor at the Danish Research Centre for Migration, Ethnicity and Health at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, and from 2016-2023 an associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University, Campus Copenhagen. Since 2019, Kathrine has been a member of Independent Research Fund Denmark, Social Sciences Council (FSE), and from 2024 as Chairperson of the council.