Against All Odds?

Deadline for call for papers is 15 May 2025 - 12:00.

Please fill out the pdf below and send it to Emma Tvilling on tnh403@jur.ku.dk.

Download the call for papers pdf here.

Register for the conference.

The deadline for registration is 1 August 2025 - 12:00.

Below you will find our recommendation for accommodation in the vicinity of the Faculty of Law.

We strongly encourage you to book your accommodation as soon as possible, as there will be a large outdoor concert at Amager, and availability may become limited.

Unfortunately, it has not been possible for us to establish a discount scheme for accommodation.

Bryggen Guldsmeden

Bryggen Guldsmeden blends the luxurious Nordic designs with Balinese-inspired interiors, emphasizing sustainability and comfort. This hotel is placed a 10-minute walk from the Faculty of Law, and Islands Brygge metro station. 

Book Bryggen Guldsmeden.

Scandic Kødbyen

Scandic Kødbyen is a modern hotel in Copenhagen's vibrant Meatpacking district, offering sleek Scandinavian design and a lively atmosphere close to trendy restaurants and bars. It takes around 20 minutes with public transportation to the Faculty of Law.

Book Scandic Kødbyen.

CABINN

CABINN is a budget-friendly hotel in central Copenhagen and Amager, offering functional rooms with easy access to public transportation. They have 2 hotels near the Faculty of Law. Option 1, CABINN City, is placed in the city center, near Tivoli Gardens and a 20-minute walk from the Faculty of Law. Option 2, CABINN Metro is placed near the airport and a 15-minute metro ride from the Faculty of Law.

Book CABINN. 

Theme: Curatorial insights from the research behind the exhibition 'Against all Odds - Historical Women and New Algorithms' at the National Gallery of Denmark.

 I will explore how the exhibition highlighted the nomadic movements and image formation of Nordic women artists around 1900 through an innovative fusion of historical reinscribing and new technology. Additionally, I will discuss how generative technologies can be used or leveraged for reactivate historical narratives and create new ones - and in this way demonstrate how technology, critical thinking and art can merge or intersect in a tribute to pioneers of the past.

Bio: Emilie Boe Bierlich holds a PhD in Art History  and is an experienced Doctoral Researcher with a strong background in the museum industry, having worked as both a curator and researcher. Her work focuses on museum archives, artificial intelligence, and collective memory. Bierlich currently holds the position of Head at the Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Research Center.

Hanne Petersen

Theme: Women/Gender & Law - Past, Present, Futures?

Bio: Hanne Petersen (born 1951) participated in the first ’Kvindejuristmøde’ (Meeting for women lawyers) in 1975 as a law student. Since then she has got an old-fashioned doctoral degree in law in 1991, spent a year at the EUI 1993-94, been a professor of jurisprudence and sociology of law at Ilisimatusarfik 1995-99, and an externally financed professor of Greenlandic sociology of law at UCPH and Ilisimatusarfik from 2001-2006, and finally  professor of legal cultures from 2009-2022. She has worked with and written on labour law, women’s law, jurisprudence, legal pluralism and legal culture, indigenous law, law and religion and Chinese legal culture. She has written on a number of ‘law and’ topics (love, music, religion, beauty, health, justice).

Anne Hellum

Theme: Women/Gender & Law - Past, Present, Futures?

Bio:Anne Hellum (born 1952) participated in the first “Kvindejuristmøde” as a student in 1975. She was part of the group of female lecturers and students at the Faculty of law in Oslo that in 1974 started the organization Free Legal Advice for women and Women’s law as a legal discipline in 1975. She has, since 1987 led the Department of Public and International Law’s cooperation with women’s law scholars at the Southern and Eastern African Regional Center in Women’s Law (SEARCWL) and is today engaged in cooperation with University of Nairobi’s regional African master and PhD program “Women. Children and Nature Rights in Environmental Governance”. Her doctoral thesis Women’s Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in Africa was published in 1998 in the North-South Legal Publication Series. She became professor at the Department of Public and International law Oslo in 2000 and leader of the Institute of Women’s Law, Children’s Law, Equality and Anti-discrimination law. She has, in that capacity been involved in arranging a number of Nordic meetings in the field of women, gender and law. She has, on the basis of a number of research projects, published widely and built courses in equality and anti-discrimination law, international women’s law, legal anthropology and law and development . To change the way in which law is understood and taught, particularly the need to integrate women-, gender, equality and feminist perspectives in law curricula in Nordic and Southern and Eastern African universities has been one of her main concerns.

Theme: Inequalities revisited. Moving with, in and beyond the law.

Bio: Susanne Baer is Professor of Public Law and Gender Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin, Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School and currently a Centennnial Professor at LSE London. She received honorary doctorates from the universities of Michigan in 2014, Hasselt and Lucerne in 2018, and Linz in 2025, and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Academy. From 2011 to 2023, she served as Justice of the Federal Constitutional Court. In its First Senate. Until 2011, she taught regularly at CEU Budapest and Linz, then in Toronto. At Humboldt University, she was Vice President, Spokesperson of the Center for Gender Studies, Dean of Studies at the Faculty of Law, founded the Law & Society Institute Berlin as well as the Humboldt Law Clinic on Fundamental and Human Rights. Over time, she has been involved in initiatives against domestic violence and discrimination, actively serves in the national Foundation Forum Recht and works on comparative constitutional law, anti-discrimination law and critical/socio-legal studies.

Publications include Rechtssoziologie (NOMOS 5th ed. 2023); Comparative Constitutionalism (with Dorsen, Sajo, Rosenfeld, Mancini; West 4th ed. 2021); “Der Bürger” im Verwaltungsrecht zwischen Obrigkeit und aktivierendem Staat” (Mohr Siebeck 2006), Würde oder Gleichheit? (NOMOS 1995). More at https://www.rewi.hu-berlin.de/de/lf/ls/bae/profdrbaer

Theme: Poverty in the Nordics

Bio: Ida Gundersby Rognlien is Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Law at the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on poverty in Nordic welfare societies. She teaches welfare law and non-discrimination law. Rognlien earned her PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 2020 with a dissertation Fattigdom – Diskriminering – Relasjoner. Grunnleggende forsørgelsesrettslige problemer, on poverty, discrimination, relations and fundamental questions of support in the Nordic welfare societies. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen in the Legislating Corona: Proportionality, Non-Discrimination and Transparency project, and later at the University of Oslo in the Prisonhealth: Prisoner Health in Healthy Prisons project. Rognlien is a board member of the free legal aid clinic Legal Counselling for Women (JURK) in Oslo. Previously, she worked in free legal aid and was licensed to practice law in 2016, specializing in criminal law, welfare law, and human rights.

Theme: Nordic gender and law as the unfinished

Many international colleagues assume, perhaps too lightly, that there is a causal link between the Nordic welfare state and the strength of feminist positions in our societies, that upholding social justice and welfare also automatically advances gender issues. This may only be partially true.

While the social-democratic flavour of the Nordic welfare state is certainly able to foster such perspectives in law and in politics, it would be somewhat naive to think that this was all that was needed. In my presentation, I argue that even in the seemingly progressive Nordic countries, these positions have also been constantly under attack. The protection of these positions has been made easier by a vibrant socio-legal tradition that has always contextualised Nordic law socially and politically. As an example, I refer to Norwegian sociologist of law Thomas Mathiesen’s idea of politics as ’the unfinished’ to show how the constant avoidance of closure succeeds in keeping a political agenda like feminist law alive and continuously adapting to take on new threats. I conclude by showing how Mathiesen’s idea of the unfinished resonates with American feminist Bonnie Honig’s agonistic legal politics.

Bio: Panu Minkkinen is Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Helsinki, Finland. His chair also covered socio-legal studies and law and gender studies both of which previously had designated academic leaders at Faculty level. Panu served two terms from 2018 to 2022 on the Steering Committee of the University’s multidisciplinary Doctoral Programme in Gender, Culture and Society (SKY). He has published broadly in the areas of legal and political theory, law and the humanities, and on socio-legal themes such as ethnography. For more information, see https://www.panuminkkinen.eu/

Theme: The constitutional reform agendas of the far right/populist right and intra-group equality.  

Bio: Leila Brännström is a professor of legal theory at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her research interests are focused on the intersection of political and legal theory, legal history, and constitutional and human rights law. In her previous work she has among other things examined feminist and anti-colonial ambitions in Sweden’s foreign policy from the 1950s onward, the development of legal responses to ethnoracial inequality after WWII in Sweden and in Continental Europe and the effects of transnational constitutional discourses and human rights law on domestic juridical traditions of thought.