In summer 2023, we welcome Professor Mitchell Dean as Mercator Fellow of the Research Unit on Voluntariness. The political sociologist will support the projects of the research unit from April to July 2023 as a renowned expert in the field of governmentality studies.
The Australian scholar earned his Phd at the University of New South Wales in Sidney and his international career took him to Denmark via professorships in sociology at Macquarie University (Sydney) and the University of Newcastle. As Professor of Public Governance, he has been teaching and researching at Copenhagen Business School since 2012, where he has been head of the Department of Business Humanities and Law since 2019. He locates his research at the intersection of political sociology and social theory.
Mitchell is particularly interested in how forms of government of societies are related to concepts of power, sovereignty, and practices of truth production in social and political thinking – also with a focus on their historical ramifications, which are crucial for a critical view of the past and present. We are very honored that Mitchell joins our group as Mercator Fellow and supports our conceptual work on voluntariness, which is fundamentally guided by governmentality as our key perspective. In particular we would like to explore with him further the entanglements of voluntariness and power within our subprojects and are looking forward to inspiring talks and workshops with Mitchell in Erfurt, Jena and Oldenburg!
