Over the course of nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with pregnant women and new mothers, she will seek to understand how Greenlandic women navigate the values, practices, dilemmas and possibilities of motherhood. She will also explore how the encounter with different experiences and perspectives can influence and shape research methodologies and theories.

“I’m interested in how motherhood is not a purely individual experience, but also a way of being in the world – and in how this might nuance our understanding of what knowledge is,” Mette Mørup Schlütter says.

Her research builds on Inuit knowledge systems that recognize that human experiences are often ambiguous, deeply personal and not always possible to articulate in words.

“By challenging research methods that foreground verbalisation and interpretation, I want to explore how the experiences of Greenlandic mothers are also expressed through silence and nonverbal forms of communication,” she explains.

Financial support for the project comes from a DKK 2,875,565 grant from Independent Research Fund Denmark under the instrument DKK International postdoc, which provides support for the international mobility of early-career researchers and the development of their research skills.

Contact

Postdoc Mette Mørup Schlütter
Aarhus University, Department of Public Health
Phone: +45 6116 3152
Mail: memosc@ph.au.dk