Rune Larsen (PhD) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. His current research interests revolve around social and political transformation, emerging spiritualities and human-nature entanglements in contemporary Southern Africa, with a specific focus on the countries of Namibia and Eswatini. Additionally, he is currently developing a project idea exploring human-fungi entanglements across the Southern African region.

His ethnographic research experience started during his MA thesis fieldwork (2016) in what was then known as the Kingdom of Swaziland (now Eswatini). Here, he explored the everyday realities and social positionings of pro-democratic activists, who navigated the world with a stigma of being members of a proscribed political party, labelled as a terrorist movement.

From here, he commenced on his PhD research (2018-22), which focused on the everyday politics of young adults in Namibia’s capital city, Windhoek. During this research he explored how these young adults actively contribute to social and political transformations, as they navigate the intersections between Arts, Politics and Spirituality in the shadow of apartheid. This project formed part of the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa (ANTHUSIA) research consortium, which was financed through the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program https://anthusia.eu/.

After his PhD, Rune worked as a postdoctoral researcher and facilitator at Copenhagen University’s Sustainability Science Center, where he co-facilitated a large-scale online interdisciplinary congress on global sustainable transformation, named the Transformation Labs, financed by the Novo Nordic Foundation.

Beyond his academic research, Rune has trained delegates from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has likewise engaged in public research dissemination and lecturing in non-academic environments on socio-cultural dynamics in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa.

Contact:

Office hours: by appointment via email

Educational background

• BA in European Ethnology (2015), University of Copenhagen

• MA in African Studies (2017), University of Copenhagen

• Joint-PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology (2022), KU Leuven and Aarhus University

List of publications and academic outputs

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Larsen, Rune, and Amanda Møller Rasmussen. 2025. Form, Formats, and Forms of Informed Consent: Bringing European GDPR forms to fieldwork in Namibia and Djibouti. Nordic Journal of African Studies. Vol. 34. No. 2.

• Rasmussen, Amanda Møller, Rune Larsen and Stig Jensen. 2025. Negotiating Consent in African Studies: A Case for Customised Consent. Nordic Journal of African Studies. Vol. 34. No. 2.

• Jessen, Nina T., Katherine Richardson and Rune Larsen. 2024. Transforming research to better support societal transition to a sustainable trajectory. Global Sustainability. doi: 10.1017/sus.2024.37

• Larsen, Rune and Steven Van Wolputte. 2022. “An officer and an activist: Futuring, precarity and life after exile in Namibia”, Anthropology Today, 38: 23-25.

• Larsen, Rune and Stig Jensen. 2020. “The imagined Africa of the West: a critical perspective on Western imaginations of Africa”, in Review of African Political Economy, 47:164, 324-334.

Book Chapters:

• Larsen, Rune, and Gabriel Augustus. 2020. “Urban land and life in Namibia's informal settlements”, in “Neither here nor there”: Indigeneity, marginalisation and land rights in post-independence Namibia edited by Willem Odendaal and Wolfgang Werner, 69-94. Windhoek: Land, Environment and Development Project - the Legal Assistance Centre

Editorial tasks:

• • Transformation Labs. 2024. ”Transformation Labs: Ideas for fast-tracking research into societal transformation.”, ISBN: 978-87-90655-40-2 University of Copenhagen, Denmark. (edited by Rune Larsen and Lise Kjølbye)

• • NJAS Special Issue: Negotiating Consent in African Studies Vol 34, No 2 (2025) (edited by Amanda Møller Rasmussen, Rune Larsen and Stig Jensen)

Online publications and blogs:

• Larsen, Rune. 2019. “The youth in this country are all just looking for this Jesus figure to come and lead the way… They are all just looking for that political superhero…”, in Quote and photo from the field, ANTHUSIA

• Larsen, Rune, and Stig Jensen. 2020. “Forskere: Vestens forestillinger om Afrika er hykleriske fantasier”, Videnskab.dk, ForskerZonen

Film:

• Larsen, Rune and Ndemufayo Kaxuxwena. 2019. A ka-young one, Windhoek, Namibia: Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, Denmark (available on YouTube)