Keynote Speakers

William A. Callahan is professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in 2020-21 he is Taiwan Fellow at National Taiwan University. Callahan’s most recent book is Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2020). His other work includes China: The Pessoptimist Nation (OUP, 2010) and the documentary film “Great Walls” (2020), which asks why we hate Trump’s wall and love the Great Wall of China (https://sensiblepolitics.net/great-walls-journeys-from-ideology-to-experience). 

Camilla T. N. Sørensen is Associate Professor at the Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defense College (RDDC), Copenhagen. She conducts research and teaching within four main areas: 1) China as a great power/Chinese foreign and security policy, 2) East Asian security, 3) Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark in an Arctic of growing geostrategic importance, and 4) Danish foreign and security policy confronting a world order in flux – with several overlaps between them. She has lived in China for shorter and longer periods over the past 20 years – most recently in the years 2010-2014, where she was a visiting researcher at the School of International Studies at Peking University with the postdoc project “What kind of world power will China be? Answers from the Chinese debate.” She has published extensively on East Asian security, Chinese foreign and security policy and in recent years on Arctic politics and security with a focus on the implications of growing Chinese presence and activities in the region, and she frequently appears and is quoted in Danish and international media on these topics.

Mette Halskov Hansen is professor in China studies at the University of Oslo. Her research since the late 1980s has largely been based on anthropological fieldwork in rural areas of China. She has studied ethnic relations and internal colonization, education, individualization and - since 2010 and to be continued -  the human/social impacts of environmental degradation and climate change. She directed the interdisciplinary research project about human dimensions of air pollution in China, Airborne, and this year she has, together with colleagues in India, China and Norway started up Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Vision with Global Promise . Most recent books include Educating the Chinese Individual: Life in a Rural Boarding School (Univ. of Washington Press 2015) and (co-authored with Anna Ahlers and Rune Svarverud) The Great Smog of China: A Short Event History of Air Pollution (AAS 2020).