Heather Anne Swanson

Heather Anne Swanson, Professor at the School of Culture and Society, wants to include perspectives from the humanities and social sciences in the green transition.

She collaborates with businesses and civil society to develop sustainability projects that go beyond technological solutions.

PORTRAIT

"When we change our understanding of the problem, we open the door to new solutions"

As a child, Heather Swanson witnessed environmental change first-hand.

Today, she leads a new innovation project that aims to give the humanities a key role in the green transition.

Pure profile

Learn more about Heather Swanson's research, publications and academic activities on her Pure profile.

View Pure profile

School of Culture and Society

Heather Swanson is Professor at School of Culture and Society - Department of Anthropology

Learn more about the department here

DSI projects

The innovation project(s) that formed the basis for the appointment to the Distinguished Senior Innovator programme.

Green Innovation: Activiting the power of the humanities for sustainability

Swanson’s core DSI project is to bring the insights of the environmental humanities, a relatively new field, beyond its current academic contexts.

There is widespread recognition that the green transition requires social transformation alongside tech innovation, and as a result, there’s growing interest in how research from the social sciences and humanities might help. The project aims to build a larger portfolio of examples of how humanities research and researchers can participate in mission-driven sustainability initiatives.

The project aims to bring attention to the distinct and essential insights that the humanities can bring to such work, for example:

how historical perspectives can open new visions for present action.
how research on conflicts and debates can help stakeholders to bridge differences.
how attention to aesthetics help us to design greener cities.
how research on other world regions can help us to build much-needed transnational alliances.

Can Food Forests Increase Participation, Agency and Biodiversity?

Researchers from Aarhus University aim to demonstrate how perspectives from the humanities can contribute to the green transition. They will test a new approach to involving and empowering citizens by making democratic sustainability a central part of afforestation initiatives.

The project will establish two food forests – multi-layered forest ecosystems that produce food – through participatory workshops. The aim is to strengthen people's agency by activating local knowledge and combining it with expert knowledge. The two case studies will be carried out in collaboration with partners from Klimatorium, Himmelbjerggaarden and Lemvig Vand.

The project will develop a new approach to measuring agency – people's ability to influence the green transition – and use it to evaluate the two case studies in a new way.

A key element of the project is to assess environmental as well as social and cultural change. Biodiversity monitoring will therefore be integrated into food forest activities centred on strengthening agency, allowing the project to compare the results with more conventional approaches to afforestation.

The project is supported by the VELUX FOUNDATION.

Sustainable Interdisciplinarity

To craft green transition actions that are at once effective and democratic, we need to develop social innovations together with technological innovations. To address this challenge, DSI Heather Anne Swanson and Juniour Innovator Daniel Kardyb have launched a joint initiative to foster interdisciplinary links across the Arts and Tech Faculties at AU, with a special focus on how to best integrate humanities insights into sustainability-oriented projects.

At the same time, the project aims to connect interdisciplinary researchers at AU to Kitchen’s resources for impact and innovation.

The project will use a research-based approach to these efforts in research – surveying existing scholarship and conducting interviews and observations.

The goal is to test out new strategies for fostering collaboration, while working with others at AU to institutionally embed programs that support the interdisciplinarity that undergirds meaning transformations.

Food House Oikos

Food House Oikos is an AU Experimentarium for food-forward approaches to ecology, wellbeing and transition.

Humanity is faced with tremendous challenges in that we need to produce sustainable, healthy, nutritious and affordable food for consumers, whilst vastly reducing the stresses we are causing to our planetary resources. Less food waste, malnutrition and overnutrition, more transparent value chains, and increased sustainability of the food system need to be addressed with innovative, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative research.

With funding from the Aarhus University Research Foundation’s Nova program, Heather Anne Swanson and her colleagues Derek Byrne and Susanne Højlund are launching a cross-faculty “lighthouse” platform for transdisciplinary food-linked research. Their aim is to prototype a new organisational model for stakeholder-engaged research that can shape our future food systems by giving focus to the synergies at the intersection of sustainability, wellbeing and democracy.

The food house will be a space for collective and democratic engagement – with the aim of fostering new research questions and agendas for food research in a transparent and participatory manner. As part of this work, they will also be bringing their new ideas to the “Gastronomy in Transition” conference that takes place at Aarhus University in the autumn 2026.

DSI activities

Outreach initiatives aimed at inspiring more researchers to explore innovation and entrepreneurship.

Innovation at Arts

In collaboration with Distinguished Senior Innovator Christian Dindler, Heather Swanson is working to explore and expand opportunities for research-based innovation at the Faculty of Arts.

This is achieved through a range of initiatives designed to provide individual researchers and research groups with the knowledge, resources and infrastructure they need to pursue innovation emerging from their research, including:

Workshops and meetings for research programmes, where researchers meet with Kitchen to explore resources, opportunities and pathways for research-based innovation.
Tailored programmes for individual researchers who want to explore the innovation potential of their research.
Courses for early-career and senior researchers who want to strengthen their capabilities in collaborating with external partners, business development and entrepreneurship.
Representation in internal and external forums to promote the Faculty of Arts' work with research-based innovation.

[Translate to English:] Heather Anne Swanson, professor og Distinguished Senior Innovator med grafisk facilitator Mie Nørgaard til workshoppen 'Articulating Arts Innovation'

Workshop: Articulating Arts Innovation

In autumn 2025, Heather Swanson organised the Articulating Arts Innovation workshop at the School of Culture and Society. The workshop aimed to start a conversation that could lead to a broader and more inclusive understanding of innovation at the Faculty of Arts.

A graphic facilitator captured the participants' key points in a visual overview, which will serve as a tool for further developing a vision for innovation in the humanities.

PhD Course: Research-Based Innovation at Arts (under design)

The purpose of the course is to introduce Arts PhD students to innovation in theory and practice and help them identify innovation opportunities in Arts research. The ambition is to introduce such topics and techniques early in the participants’ careers to help them identify innovation opportunities in their research and to promote an innovation culture across Arts.

Heather Anne Swanson - Distinguished Senior Innovator at Aarhus University